The Romney education plan: Replacing federal overreach on accountability with federal overreach on school choice

Michael J. Petrilli / May 23, 2012

Governor Mitt Romney’s long-awaited education address happened on Wednesday, but the most telling news broke Tuesday, when we learned that Margaret Spellings is no longer one of his education advisors. She quit on principle, I assume, because Romney decided to turn the page on No Child Left Behind. As his campaign’s education “talking points” read, “Governor Romney’s plan reforms [NCLB] by emphasizing transparency and responsibility for results. Rather than federally-mandated school interventions, states would have incentives to create straightforward public report cards that evaluate each school on its contribution to student learning.” (Read his thirty-four-page education policy white paper here.)

Gov. Romney wants to make Title I and IDEA dollars portable—a worthy idea, just make it voluntary. Photo by Austin Hufford

Today, there’s not a single Republican in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, or running for president willing to defend federal accountability mandates. The GOP conversation has shifted to transparency, in line with what we’ve called Reform Realism. What a difference a decade makes.

The thrust of Romney’s speech, however, wasn’t his fresh view of accountability, but a major proposal on school choice. Romney wants to make Title I and IDEA dollars portable—a form of

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The Romney education plan: Replacing federal overreach on accountability with federal overreach on school choice

Tax-credit scholarships need a critical, not hostile, eye

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / May 22, 2012

It’s hard to get past the New York Times’s animus toward anything “private” or profit-seeking in the realm of K-12 education, particularly when investigative reporter Stephanie Saul applies her own biased and acidic pen to the topic. And Tuesday’s interminable “expose” of state-level tax-credit scholarship programs certainly deepens one’s impression that the writer (and, presumably, her editors) is in love with anything that smacks of “public dollars” or “public schools” and at war with anything that might be seen as diverting even a penny from state coffers into the hands of parents to educate their kids at schools of their choice. Never mind whether the public schools they are exiting are good or bad, nor whether the dollars being spent by those schools are well targeted on high-quality instruction or frittered away on over-generous benefits for underemployed custodians and their retired pals.

Tax-credit scholarship programs must be well designed and monitored or more "exposes" over how dollars are distributed will follow. Photo by Images Money.

Having gotten that out of the way, it’s also worth learning that while some of these state programs (especially Florida’s) are models of sound policy, efficient administration, and careful targeting of available resources, some others appear to be burdened by

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Tax-credit scholarships need a critical, not hostile, eye

A race to fix education governance?

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / May 22, 2012

Much will swiftly be written about Arne Duncan's brand-new Race to the Top competition for school districts (and, interestingly, for charter schools and consortia of schools), and it's premature to say much on the basis of early press accounts. But Alyson Klein's invaluable Ed Week blog flags one fascinating tidbit that suggests a welcome new Education Department focus on the failings of today's school-governance arrangements:

Will the NSBA and AASA react angrily to this goring of their own members' oxen?

Just to be eligible, districts by the 2014-15 school year will have to promise to implement evaluation systems that take student outcomes into account—not just for teacher and principal performance, but for district superintendents and school boards. That's a big departure from the state-level Race to the Top competitions, which just looked at educators who actually work in schools, not district-level leaders. [Emphasis added]

How very refreshing, even exhilarating, to see the inclusion of superintendents and boards in a results-based accountability system, rather than the customary focus only on schools and their principals and teachers (and sometimes the kids themselves). Will the NSBA and AASA react angrily to this goring of their own members' oxen? Or will they—as they should—welcome this logical and potentially powerful widening of the theory and practice of accountability?

“Rules Proposed for District Race to Top Contest,” Alyson Klein, Politics K-12 blog, May 22, 2012.

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A race to fix education governance?

Progress has a price

May 24, 2012

Faced with the need to cut staff, but prevented by last-in, first-out requirements from axing the lousiest educators, Newark is looking to follow NYC’s lead and pay its way out of the problem by buying out low-performing teachers with its Mark Zuckerberg-donated cash. While Facebook’s flop may limit the plan’s reach, it’s encouraging to see a district so committed to having a quality teaching force that it’s willing to spend to bypass the absurdity of LIFO.

While it may not be Texas, the Common Core gained a new adherent this week when schools serving Department of Defense families announced they adopted the standards. While implementation remains a challenge everywhere, 87,000 students from military families living in a dozen countries, from Germany to Japan, will now be taught to rigorous standards, a development worth saluting.

Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson proposed a thoughtful tweak to his school-reform plan this week, shifting the accountability focus from startup charter schools to authorizers. The mayor’s move demonstrated that compromise and progress are possible, a lesson that state lawmakers should learn as the bill remains stalled in the legislature.

Data-driven, data-driven, data-driven. The phrase is inescapable in every aspect of teacher policy—except, it turns out, when it comes to educating educators. A new National Council on Teacher Quality study finds teacher

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Progress has a price

Heterogeneous Competitive Effects of Charter Schools in Milwaukee

Amber M. Winkler, Ph.D. / May 24, 2012

A few studies in the early-to-mid aughts examined the impact of charters on district schools. Most found that the introduction of charter competition led to few changes in district behavior. Others disagreed. This new one by Hiren Nisar (of Abt Associates) re-examines that line of inquiry—but with a twist: Using Milwaukee data, Nisar asks whether district-run charters have more or less impact on the academic performance of traditional public-school students than charters run by other authorizers. (In Milwaukee, this means the city or the local state university.) His study—which attempts to control for student self-selection and ability, school-level factors, and other choice programs (i.e., Milwaukee’s long-running voucher program)—includes roughly forty charters (twenty-three sponsored by MPS and seventeen by others) and utilizes longitudinal, student-level achievement data (for grades three through eight) from 2000-01 to 2008-09. Now to the findings: First, non-district-sponsored charter schools have significant positive impacts on district students’ math and reading achievement, but only in math is that effect statistically different from the impact of district-sponsored charters. This is common-sensical enough. Since district-sponsored schools are still part of the district, with funding that remains within district boundaries, these entities likely feel less of a threat from charter competition. Second, the impact of non-district authorized charters is more pronounced for low achievers and black students, (a finding that reiterates previous research). Nisar’s work provides needed nuance to the

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Heterogeneous Competitive Effects of Charter Schools in Milwaukee

The Importance of Being in School: A Report on Absenteeism in the Nation’s Public Schools

Daniela Fairchild / May 24, 2012

Over the past few years, much has been made of students’ “time in learning” (both more time on task while in class and more time in school each day or more days in school each year). Yet little attention has been paid to chronic absenteeism—missing more than 10 percent of a year’s school days—mainly because few states track these data. (Instead, they report average daily attendance, which can mask high levels of chronic absenteeism.) This exploratory study parses attendance data from six states (FL, GA, MD, NE, OR, and RI) and finds chronic absenteeism averaging 14 percent of students. (If this rate holds nationally, the U.S. has lots more students chronically absent—about seven million—than attend charter schools.) The report offers further data, bleak but not altogether surprising: Low-income students are most likely to miss a lot of school, as are the youngest and oldest students. High-poverty urban areas see up to a third of their students miss 10 percent of their courses each year (though the problem is seen in rural poor locations as well). But neither gender nor ethnicity appears to play a role in chronic absenteeism. Policymakers thinking through extended school days and years would be prudent to internalize this study’s message. More learning time will only be productive if the students are in class to take advantage of it.

Robert

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The Importance of Being in School: A Report on Absenteeism in the Nation’s Public Schools

Spending by the Major Charter Management Organizations: Comparing Charter School and Local Public District Financial Resources in New York, Ohio, and Texas

Chris Tessone / May 24, 2012

Reformers frequently point out that charters are underfunded. They also laud charters that post strong student-achievement scores despite their lean budgets. But is this the norm? Do charter schools ipso facto achieve great results with less funding than traditional schools? As spending data—for charters and districts alike—are generally opaque, there is no clear-cut answer. This study from the NEPC (Kevin Wellner’s pro-union shop) dug into financial data of large charter-management organizations (CMOs) in three states and found a mixed bag: A few successful charter networks spend more than district schools, thanks to aggressive fundraising. Notably, KIPP schools in New York City spend about $4,300 more per pupil than nearby district schools. But many other charters spend far less. Those in Ohio, for example, spend less across the board than district schools in the same city. These data will spur conversation, but be wary of the NEPC’s conclusions, including that the “no excuses” charter model may not be worth its cost or that these charters (and their funding streams) bring up “equity concerns” as they create schools that are overfunded compared to their district counterparts. (Never mind that a swath of charters in this study is funded far below district levels.) There’s also much missing from this forensic account. Notably, the lion’s share of charter schools do not belong to large networks like KIPP—and were left out of this report. Analyzing the revenues of these handpicked “favorites of philanthropy” does little

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Spending by the Major Charter Management Organizations: Comparing Charter School and Local Public District Financial Resources in New York, Ohio, and Texas

The Condition of Education 2012

Daniela Fairchild / May 24, 2012

As Old Farmer has his almanac and Britannica his encyclopedia, the National Center for Education Statistics has the Condition of Education. This annual report offers a comprehensive look at trends in American education, reporting longitudinal data on forty-nine discrete indicators, ranging from pre-Kindergarten enrollment to high school extra-curricular participation to post-secondary faculty make-up. Last year’s headlines related to school choice (and the mushrooming charter sector). The latest edition again shows increased public-school choice—but this time on the digital-learning front (or “distance education,” as they say at NCES). In 2009-10, over 1.3 million high schoolers—across 53 percent of districts—enrolled in a distance-ed course. (This up from 0.3 million five years prior.) Much of the report contains simple factoids, but more than a few indicators will help drive policy conversations on topics as diverse as school finance and instruction. For example, total expenditures per student rose 46 percent (in constant dollars) between 1988-89 and 2008-09, with school-debt interest spending seeing the highest percentage increase, followed by capital outlay and then employee benefits—which subsume close to 20 percent of per pupil costs. On other pages, we learn that enrollment in high school math and science courses just about doubled in the last two decades, while the number of high school pupils holding jobs has halved. This review just scratches the surface of the report: There’s much more worthwhile content within its many pages.

Source: National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of

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The Condition of Education 2012