Charter Funding Deep Freeze

March 14, 2007

In the debate over Indiana’s K-12 education funding, House Democrats are seeking a freeze on funding for charter schools. The result would be “de facto moratorium” on any new charters, insisted Dan Roy, Indianapolis’s director of charter schools. The proposed measure would also affect existing schools (many with long wait-lists) by denying additional funds for charters in the coming years. Metropolitan High School in Indianapolis would see its funding drop by 45 percent in 2008-09 alone. Indeed, if the measure is passed, many of the 36 charters might eventually be forced to close--as charters in the Hoosier State must also pay for transportation and construction costs out of their state per-pupil allotments. The fate of the legislation (and Indiana’s charters) now resides in the state Senate, which will consider it and other education funding issues in the coming days. With Ohio’s budget debate in the offing, charters in the Buckeye State should take heed: starving a program is often easier than publicly killing it. Too bad students and parents would ultimately pay the price.

“An Educational Setback,” Editorial, The Indianapolis Star, March 11, 2007.

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Charter Funding Deep Freeze

Rock or Hard Place?

Terry Ryan / March 14, 2007

Those who care about the education of Ohio’s neediest children are stuck between two vexed options--the proverbial rock or hard place. The first are traditional district schools with decades of evidence--low test scores, high drop-out rates--of how poorly they meet many children’s needs. Yet fixing them is incredibly hard because they are set in their ways, rule bound, bureaucratic and union-whipped.

Option two are entrepreneurial-style charter schools, some of which are excellent, but some of which are appalling--as illustrated by the ongoing saga of the Harte-Crossroads Schools implosion in Columbus (see here) and other much-publicized scandals and meltdowns in other cities. Charters are hard to fix, too. Ironically, they’ve become an interest group in their own right and some of the self-policing, self-correcting mechanisms that are part of the theory don’t work so well in practice.

Despite their troubles, however, Ohio’s charter schools can legitimately take credit for two significant public achievements since the first of them opened in 1998. First, they have provided a lifeline to thousands of youngsters, many of whom are poor and minority, otherwise stuck in failing district schools without other acceptable alternatives. The education haven--I didn’t say heaven--of charter schools currently appeals to over 76,000 students statewide, a bit more than three percent of the state’s public school students.

Ohio’s 300+ charters offer a range of programs, some of which were unimaginable ten years ago. On-line “e-schools,” for example, now serve over

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Rock or Hard Place?

The Salad Days Are Over

Kristina Phillips-Schwartz , Quentin Suffren / March 14, 2007

Spring Fever at the Leg’

Representative Thom Collier (R-Mount Vernon) is persistent, to say the least. He’s back again this session with HB 66--the contents of which were originally introduced “back when I had hair [see here],” mused Rep. Collier. The bill would replace the required number of days schools must meet with a set number of hours and would give districts more flexibility to set schedules and avoid “calamity days” for bad weather. Critics contend that some districts might take advantage of this flexibility by forcing children into 12-hour school days or reducing the number of school days altogether--one reason former Governor Taft vetoed the measure last year. We’ve already noted that any move from days to hours should result in expanded opportunities for increased student learning time, not simply greater convenience for districts (see here).

Senator Randy Gardner (R-Bowling Green) also has his eye on school days. His bill (SB 89) would largely strip away local control of school year schedules by preventing Ohio schools from beginning before Labor Day. Never mind that other states like Massachusetts are extending the school year to increase student achievement--and finding success in doing so (see here). Let’s hope Sen. Gardner’s colleagues can break this bout of spring (or summer) fever before any students lose valuable learning time.

Other bills to watch include HB 27 that seeks to water

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The Salad Days Are Over

Mistaken (and Expensive) Assumptions

Quentin Suffren / March 14, 2007

If a recent University of Washington study is to be believed, reforming Ohio’s education system could cost from $1.2 to $2.4 billion more annually--a 16 to 31 percent increase in state P-12 education spending. And that’s just the state’s share (47 percent of current funding). “Education Policy and Finance for Ohio: Investments to Improve Student Performance” (still in draft form here), produced by researchers from the university’s Human Services Policy Center (HSPC), was presented to policymakers, legislators and committee members last week (see here). No doubt the price tag sent shivers down more than a few spines.

The eye-popping figures stem largely from four different scenarios aimed at changing the form of Ohio’s education system, as well as two troubling (and depressingly familiar) assumptions: 1) that more money will produce greater student performance, and 2) that Ohio’s current funding is being efficiently administered and spent.

Among other measures, the study calls for higher teacher pay (a $30,000 per year base salary and four percent annual raises); smaller student to teacher ratios (25:1 on average for middle and high schools, and even lower for elementary and low-income students); an extended school year or year-round schooling for low-income students; and expanded early learning opportunities--including voluntary all-day kindergarten and a beefed-up Early Learning Initiative (ELI) program. Fully implemented, these scenarios could increase average statewide per-pupil costs from $9,300 to over $12,000.

None of these measures is without its

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Mistaken (and Expensive) Assumptions

Achieving with Data

Quentin Suffren / March 14, 2007

It’s no secret that data-driven decision making figures prominently in high-performing schools. What it entails and how to implement it successfully are the subjects of this report commissioned by the New Schools Venture Fund, a venture philanthropy firm working to improve and reform public education.

Researchers studied four high-performing elementary school systems, including charter schools run by charter management organizations (CMO) Aspire Public Schools and Achievement First. All schools embraced six key strategies for using data effectively:

1. Building a firm foundation for data-driven decision making;
2. Creating a data-use culture;
3. Investing in a data management system;
4. Selecting the most useful data;
5. Building capacity for data-driven decision making within schools; and
6. Analyzing and acting on data to improve outcomes (at the student, teacher and administrator levels).

As the report notes, “Performance-driven systems rely on a systematic approach to making continuous improvements--in particular, improvements to instruction to insure that all students are learning and progressing.”

High-performing schools in the study made data-use a “non-negotiable” for staff, and used performance data to change stubborn beliefs about students’ ability to succeed. Also critical was the collection and use of multiple data types--such as “trailing” data (the results of state assessments that measure past instruction), and “leading” data (short-cycle assessment results that measure current instruction). One district used both to align student grades on report cards with results on external state

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Achieving with Data

School Safety in Urban Charter and Traditional Public Schools

Quentin Suffren / March 14, 2007

According to this new study, urban area charter schools appear to be safer than their traditional district counterparts. Using data collected by the federal Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), Christensen divided instances of reported safety issues into “threats to person and property” and “behavioral problems.” Both district and charter schools reported high levels of threats to person and property such as bullying, physical conflict, robbery or theft, and vandalism. Yet the frequency of such reports was lower across the board in charter schools. For instance, 58 percent of traditional district teachers cited bullying as happening at least once a month or more, as opposed to 46 percent of charter school teachers.

Similar trends were found among reports of serious behavioral problems like disrespect and verbal abuse of teachers, classroom disorder, and racial tensions. While 51 percent of traditional district school teachers reported instances of disrespect to teachers, that rate was 45 percent among charter school teachers. The only category in which charters saw a higher rate of behavioral issues than district schools was that of classroom disorder (25 percent for charters, as opposed to 21 percent for district schools).

The causes of traditional urban district schools' higher rates of reported safety problems are unclear, as both district and charter schools employ comparable measures to increase school safety (closed campuses, security cameras, random drug checks, etc.). One theory holds that parents are more involved in the life of schools they

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School Safety in Urban Charter and Traditional Public Schools