All Aboard the Charters? The State of a Movement

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / October 4, 2006

Charter schools have taught us much. Since Minnesota enacted America's first charter law in 1991, 39 states have followed suit and eager school reformers have created some 4,000 of these independent public schools. About 3,600 are still operating today, enrolling approximately a million kids, 2 percent of all U.S. elementary and secondary pupils. More than a dozen cities--including Detroit, Cleveland, and Milwaukee--now have charter sectors that serve at least one in every six children. These numbers rise annually--and would balloon if the market were able to operate freely, unconstrained by legislative compromises, funding and facilities shortfalls, and local pushback from the school establishment and its political allies.

The first lesson is that the demand for alternative school options for children is intense--and plenty of people and organizations are eager to meet it wherever policy and politics allow them to. In Dayton, Ohio, today, more than a quarter of all kids attend charter schools; in New Orleans (a special case, to be sure) it's seven out of ten children. Many schools across the nation have waiting lists.

Lesson Two: Though critics warned that charters would "cream" the best-parented, ablest, and most fortunate youngsters, actual enrollments are dominated by poor and minority kids, ex-dropouts and others with huge education deficits unmet by regular school systems--most often the urban school systems whose residents most urgently need decent alternatives.

Lesson Three: Whereas boosters and advocates, myself included, once

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All Aboard the Charters? The State of a Movement

Politicians Ignore Education Funding Realities

Terry Ryan , Quentin Suffren / October 4, 2006

Recent campaign rhetoric and debate exchanges about education funding between gubernatorial candidates Ken Blackwell and Ted Strickland have been disingenuous at best. Neither candidate has raised the most critical issue affecting school funding for whoever next sits in the governor's chair: the growing fiscal crisis facing Ohio's education system caused by rapidly rising healthcare and pension costs.

No one knows for certain how much has been promised to Ohio's educators and other active school employees in the form of pensions and retiree health care benefits. (This will change in coming years as Ohio, like all states, will have to comply with new Government Accounting Standards Board rules requiring public agencies to disclose future retirement burdens.) But promises made through the State Teachers Retirement System and the School Employees Retirement System provide a glimpse of what's to come. According to the National Association of State Retirement Administrators (NASRA) report for fiscal year 2005 (see here), Ohio faces over $20 billion in unfunded liabilities for state teacher pension plans alone. That's about $62,500 in promised pension benefits per active participant in the state's teacher and non-teaching staff retirement systems. Only the states of California (at $24 billion) and Illinois (at $23 billion) face a more significant unfunded liability burden.

This will come as little surprise to companies in the private sector, which have been coping with rising pension and healthcare costs for the better part of a decade. In Ohio, we've

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Politicians Ignore Education Funding Realities

Using Data in the Central Office and the Classroom to Improve Student Achievement

Jennifer DeBoer / October 4, 2006

Think performance statistics and longitudinal databases are just pillow talk for policy wonks? Don't tell the Data Quality Campaign (DQC), a national educational collaborative promoting better data collection and data-driven practices. DQC recently held its quarterly issue meeting in Washington DC, and the topic was the use of data from the central office to the classroom level, and how it can improve the quality of student learning.

Ohio's new longitudinal data system was one of the meeting's featured attractions. Amy Andres, chief information officer for the Ohio Department of Education demonstrated Data Driven Decisions for Academic Achievement, or D3A2 as the system is called. As a clearinghouse for smaller databases, D3A2 offers Ohio's educators one-stop shopping for student test scores, model lesson plans, and host of other educational resources. A later version of the system will incorporate the state's "value-added" assessment model, which will track individual student performance over time (beginning in 2007-08).

The benefits of such databases were illustrated by two veteran users of high-powered systems.

Edwin S. Hedgepeth of the Knox County School System in Tennessee discussed how transparent data reporting has created healthy competition among the district's schools. Tennessee has been using a value-added assessment model for several years to track individual student performance over time. Knox County's system can even illustrate the effects of particular teachers on student learning.

Holly Fisackerly, principal of Hambrick Middle School in Houston, stressed the importance of creating ownership of school data systems. Her

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Using Data in the Central Office and the Classroom to Improve Student Achievement

Leading for Learning

October 4, 2006

In 2005-06, 8,446 schools and 1,624 districts nationwide failed to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) as required under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Many states are scrambling to improve student achievement before districts and schools face state and federal sanctions (Columbus Public Schools alone has 45 schools in this predicament). As this report shows, reform initiatives run the gamut--from creating "how-to" manuals for school improvement to hiring for-profit school reform specialists.

Two of Ohio's neighbors, Pennsylvania and Kentucky, have dispatched teams of consultants to provide district leaders the skills they need to turn around failing schools. The teams, typically comprised of former school leaders and educators with experience raising student achievement, evaluate district weaknesses and then teach district leaders how to implement necessary reforms. Pennsylvania's "distinguished educators" may stay in a district for up to two years. "It's like having four or five consiglieres," said Thomas Chapman, superintendent of Pennsylvania's troubled Reading district. The district has used the team to help institute data-informed instruction and an ambitious restructuring plan. And Superintendent B. Michael Caudill in Madison County, Kentucky insists his "voluntary assistance team" has helped him gain a "laser-like" focus on academics.

Yet the jury is still out on the efficacy of these costly programs. The only verifiable success among the report's case studies was found in New Mexico, which is using the Baldrige model to improve some its most troubled schools. Named after former secretary of commerce Malcolm

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Leading for Learning

Call for Presentations

October 4, 2006

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools welcomes proposals for presentations during the 2007 National Charter Schools Conference. The conference will be held April 24 - 27 in Albuquerque, New Mexico and will celebrate the 15^th anniversary of the opening of the first charter school. Proposals are being sought from practitioners and experts alike--especially emerging charter leaders. Topics should conform to the conference's four broad strands: quality, capacity, policy, and advocacy. The deadline for proposal submissions is October 16. Detailed guidelines and proposal forms are available at the conference web site here.

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Call for Presentations