CER charter school study

Today's press release from The Center for Education Reform.  I had no idea charters are now serving 4% of America's public schoolchildren:

In the last year alone, charter schools have grown by over 13 percent and now account for a full four percent of all of the nation's public schools.

Some nice data too:

The recent government report dubbed "the Nation's Report Card" offers first time comparative data about charter achievement growth between 2003 and 2005. Charter school fourth graders gained 4 points in reading compared to stagnant results among conventional public school students. In Washington, DC, where fully 26 percent of students are enrolled in charter schools, charter students outperformed conventional students in both reading and math. Charter students in the nation's capital had a 13-point increase over the 2003 test in math with an additional four percent of all students achieving proficiency. Other state data reveals similar gains, including in states with the strongest laws, among them Arizona, the District of Columbia, Delaware, and California.

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CHARTER SCHOOLS EXPERIENCING EXPLOSIVE GROWTH IN THE UNITED STATES, NEW STUDY FINDS

 

Washington, D.C. –  The growth and popularity of charter schools in America is exploding, according to a new study released today by The Center for Education Reform (CER). In the last year alone, charter schools have grown by over 13 percent and now account for a full four percent of all of the nation's public schools.

 

"It is no surprise that we are seeing a phenomenal rate of growth for charter schools. We know that charter schools are producing superior results for our children," said CER President Jeanne Allen. "We fully expect to see this type of unprecedented growth continue in the future throughout America's public school systems."

 

The recent government report dubbed "the Nation's Report Card" offers first time comparative data about charter achievement growth between 2003 and 2005. Charter school fourth graders gained 4 points in reading compared to stagnant results among conventional public school students. In Washington, DC, where fully 26 percent of students are enrolled in charter schools, charter students outperformed conventional students in both reading and math. Charter students in the nation's capital had a 13-point increase over the 2003 test in math with an additional four percent of all students achieving proficiency. Other state data reveals similar gains, including in states with the strongest laws, among them Arizona, the District of Columbia, Delaware, and California.

"The current evidence points overwhelmingly to superior results in educating our children," said Allen. "They simply perform better in math and reading in charter schools, according to the weight of the data."

Because of increasing evidence of success, the number of charter schools has continued to grow. CER's latest report documents 3,625 charter schools serving approximately 1,076,964 students in 41 states.

The annual assessment by CER — the only comprehensive research of its kind —includes data regarding the number of charter schools closed since they first were started in 1992. The national closure rate, defined as the percentage of charters ever opened that have since closed for cause due to management, funding, academic or district-related issues, is 11 percent, up slightly since the last report was issued in April 2004.

Finally, additional public opinion data reveals strong support for the concept of charters, while demonstrating a comparatively low level of knowledge as to what a charter school is. In data released by The Center for Education Reform in cooperation with the polling company™ inc./WomenTrend, the following findings are illustrative:

• On average, only twenty percent of Americans correctly identify charter schools as public schools.
• Americans support the creation of charter schools by more than a five to one margin.
• Single moms are 7 points more likely than parents generally and respondents overall to support charters (85 percent compared to 78 percent).
• Not-Yet-Moms (women between 28 and 45 who are not now but fully intend to be mothers within the next five years) are most intensely supportive.
• Charter schools enjoy tri-partisan support: Republicans (87 percent), Democrats (74 percent), especially Democratic women (77 percent), and Independents (70 percent) would all green light community efforts to create these "new public schools."

"Increasing the public's knowledge of the structure and mission of charters is tantamount to increasing the public's support for these new public schools," says the polling company™, inc. president and recognized author Kellyanne Conway. "The data demonstrate that to know charters is to like charters."

"Charter school communities around the country report unprecedented interest and this new information tells us why," added Allen.

The Center for Education Reform will make available all of the data concerning the nation's 3,625 charter schools on-line on Wednesday, November 9. That data will be updated regularly and allow subscribers to access the latest data in real time. Meanwhile, link below to more comprehensive data on the latest charter school figures, additional achievement results and polling research.

• National Charter School Data at a Glance, including total operating schools and enrollment state-by-state.
• Charter Schools in Operation by Year Opened
• Grade Levels Served by Charter schools
• Research Fact Sheet I: Charter Schools By-the-Numbers
• Research Fact Sheet II: Polling the Public - Americans Need an Education on Charter Schools; Support Grows with Knowledge

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Mayor Runs on Schools, but Verdict Is Still Out

From the front page of today's NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/27/nyregion/metrocampaigns/27schools.html

 

2% of our nation's children are in NYC public schools, so it's pretty important how the system is doing.  I generally give Bloomberg good marks for caring, mostly trying to do the right thing, and acting with urgency.  Given the enormity of the problem, I'm willing to forgive some execution mistakes -- I'd rather have speed than perfection.

 

This sums it up:

"To not have stability in the system, to start all over would be terrible," said Eva S. Moskowitz, the chairwoman of the City Council Education Committee and a persistent critic of the mayor's policies who nonetheless endorsed him.

Even critics admit that Mr. Bloomberg has had an impact on the schools that his recent predecessors at City Hall could hardly have envisioned. He and his chancellor, Joel I. Klein, have left virtually no part of the system untouched.

They dismantled the central bureaucracy and the 32 local school districts. They sold 110 Livingston Street and moved the headquarters to the Tweed Courthouse behind City Hall, allowing officials to trot back and forth.

They adopted uniform reading and math programs for most schools, imposed strict promotion rules tied to test scores in third, fifth and seventh grades, created an enhanced summer school and Saturday tutoring sessions for failing students.

They hired more than 1,000 parent coordinators and gave each one a cellphone. They opened more than 150 small high schools to replace the unruly behemoths that were failing at an alarming level with four-year graduation rates as low as 23 percent.

They assigned literacy and math coaches to train teachers in most schools. They welcomed charter-school operators, opening about two dozen of the privately operated, publicly financed schools. They created a principal-training academy financed by $75 million in private donations, and they began major projects for special-education students and non-English speakers. And, moving so rapidly, school officials admit, they made mistakes at every turn.

The discipline process broke down, allowing violent students to return to class unpunished and prompting a remarkable mea culpa from the mayor. The new small schools worsened crowding in big schools and brought fights over space and resources.

The special-education system, long dysfunctional, became even more chaotic and confusing. At one point, dozens of sites used by dropouts to prepare for equivalency degrees were closed without notice, leaving students already at risk with nowhere to turn.

"This," Ms. Moskowitz said, "was the gang that couldn't shoot straight."

Giuliani Guide Is Bloomberg Gadfly

Though I don't agree with everything they write, I think the Manhattan Institute has been a great thing for this city -- and our country.

In part, the changing fortunes of the Manhattan Institute reflect tectonic shifts in New York's political landscape. The city of the 1980's and early 90's - dangerous, racially polarized and widely considered ungovernable - has evolved into a somewhat kinder, gentler place. Public intellectuals thrive on solving problems, and New York has fewer troubles than it once did.

But the change also mirrors the sharply divergent political styles of Mr. Giuliani and his successor. Though Mr. Bloomberg, a fellow Republican, has in some ways advanced Mr. Giuliani's crusades, lowering crime rates and trying to rein in the schools bureaucracy, he has been far less receptive to the institute.

(http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/nyregion/metrocampaigns/25manhattan.html)

Obama speech

Sen. Barack Obama gave a speech on education at the Center for American Progress yesterday (see transcript and video at http://www.americanprogress.org/site/apps/nl/content3.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=593305&ct=1519467).  It wasn't perfect (frankly, the perfect speech in my book would probably be political suicide for any politician), but it was very good because:

a) He didn't dismiss NCLB, as so many Dems do.  He's in the mend-it-don't-end-it camp: "The shortcomings of NCLB shouldn’t end the conversation, however. They should be the start of a conversation about how we can do better."

 

b) He nailed this:

From the moment our children step into a classroom, new evidence shows that the single most important factor in determining their achievement today is not the color of their skin or where they come from; it’s not who their parents are or how much money they have.

It’s who their teacher is. It’s the person who will brave some of the most difficult schools, the most challenging children, and accept the most meager compensation simply to give someone else the chance to succeed.

One study shows that two groups of students who started third grade at about the same level of math achievement finished fifth grade at vastly different levels. The group with the effective teacher saw their scores rise by nearly 25%. The group with the ineffective teacher actually saw their scores drop by 25%.

But even though we know how much teaching matters, in too many places we’ve abandoned our teachers, sending them into some of the most impoverished, underperforming schools with little experience or pay; little preparation or support. After a few years of experience, most will leave to pick wealthier, less challenging schools.

The result is that some of our neediest children end up with less-experienced, poorly-paid teachers who are far more likely to be teaching subjects in which they have no training. Minority students are twice as likely to have these teachers. In Illinois, students in high-poverty schools are more than three times as likely to have them. The No Child Left Behind law, which states that all kids should have highly qualified teachers, is supposed to correct this, but so far it hasn’t, because no one’s followed through on the promise.

c) He nailed the teacher pay issue as well:

Right now, teaching is one of the only professions where no matter how well you perform at your job, you’re almost never rewarded for success. But with six-figure salaries luring away some of our most talented college graduates from some of our neediest schools, this needs to change. That’s why teachers in these Innovation Districts who are successful in improving student achievement would receive substantial pay increases, as would those who choose to teach in the most troubled schools and the highest-need subject areas, like math and science. The city of Denver is trying pay increases in partnership with the local union, and when Chattanooga, Tennessee offered similar incentives for teachers who taught in high-need schools, student reading scores went up by over 10%.

d) A little dancing here, but good to see him talking about the enormous issue of "hiring, funding and transfer policies":

Finally, we would also require Innovation Districts to work with their unions to uncover bureaucratic obstacles that leave poor kids without good teachers, including hiring, funding and transfer policies. Districts would work with unions to tackle these problems so that we can provide every child with an effective teacher.

Essay excerpt

This wisdom is from a friend who's spent MANY years in the public school reform trenches.  This is scary, as I'd always guessed that the number was maybe 10-20%:

ask any urban school leader, most educators, and even many senior union leaders and they will quickly confide in you that a significant percentage of inner city teachers (at least 33% is the conventional wisdom) are flatly not up to the job – and likely never will be regardless of how much training and structured curriculum support they are provided.

Not to repeat myself too often, but guess which kids are stuck with that 33%?!

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Excerpt from a friend's essay:

 

I begin with the well-accepted premise that “teacher effectiveness” lies at the heart of the challenge and must be the centerpiece of any successful solution.   Teaching and learning – the building blocks of student achievement gains – are completely dependent on quality instruction.   Without it, to be blunt, nothing else matters.   Additional resources, more targeted professional development, better strategies for addressing the social deficits that put many urban students behind the educational eight ball at the outset, and a more efficient central office may all be important.  In and of themselves, however, they simply cannot overcome an inadequate, unmotivated, and ineffective teaching force.  

 

It goes without saying that the teaching profession is dominated by well-intended and talented professionals who labor against sometimes overwhelming odds to achieve the best possible outcomes for their students.  While that is certainly true, ask any urban school leader, most educators, and even many senior union leaders and they will quickly confide in you that a significant percentage of inner city teachers (at least 33% is the conventional wisdom) are flatly not up to the job – and likely never will be regardless of how much training and structured curriculum support they are provided.   That admittedly impressionistic view finds support in the disproportionately low academic qualifications of the teaching force and an increasingly critical view of the nation’s colleges responsible for training them.

 

These are tough, highly charged and, without doubt, politically incorrect words.  But the stakes are too high to hide behind the usual platitudes.   Study after study shows that an elementary school child consigned to two or more years of poor teaching literally never recovers from the experience.   The consequences are far from abstract.  Poor teaching leads almost inexorably to being pushed permanently off the ladder of real educational and therefore economic opportunity.   

 

To be sure, the tragic human consequences of poor classroom instruction never stem from bad intentions and only rarely from lack of commitment on the part of the teacher.  The root causes instead are structural.  To name just a few, suburban salary differentials often cause the best and the brightest to exit the inner city as soon as they can.  Increasing economic opportunity for women in the work place has substantially eliminated the historic market aberration that drove talented women by the tens of thousands into teaching because they couldn’t command a better paying position in other sectors of the economy.   An entrenched seniority and tenure system operates to give the more experienced teachers the right to select the building in which they will work – resulting, again, in a disproportionate number of unseasoned teachers in the worst schools and severely limiting principals’ ability to put together a faculty based on a frank assessment of talent, building chemistry, and commitment to a common vision and implementation strategy.   Contractual pay schedules that guarantee salaries and raises regardless of performance are combined with a deep resistance to merit-based incentives based on student outcomes.   Extraordinarily burdensome obstacles result in remarkably few terminations of even the most consistently unsatisfying performers.  And, overlying it all, are the funding inequities that often result in a perverse allocation of dollars away from the schools with the greatest needs.

 

There is virtually no likelihood of reversing the educational crisis in more than incremental ways until such structural impediments to a consistently effective inner city teaching force are cleared away.   If we are to stop nibbling around the edges, this basic reality must be treated as the centerpiece of any reform strategy.  At the end of the day, the thing that counts the most is what actually goes on in the classroom.    It’s that elemental.  Any reform solution that fails to overcome the barriers to effective teaching and inadequate accountability for student outcomes – no matter how historically-rooted or politically untouchable those barriers may be– will fail.

Teaching for a better America; Bronx school inspires McConnell; School Reform's 38th Parallel; For Blacks, a Dream in Decline

1) A great Op Ed in Saturday's Boston Globe (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/10/22/teaching_for_a_better_america/) by David Gergen, who spoke at the TFA alumni summit.

The message that rang through their Washington reunion is that these young men and women have emerged from their two years of service as the vanguard of a new generation of social entrepreneurs committed to education equity and social justice. Instead of ''retiring" into affluent careers, they are trying to bang down an old system that isn't working and replace it with new one that might.

Two alumni started the KIPP Academies, charter schools that have had some of the best results of any schools in the country. Others launched Jump Start, the New Teacher Project, and New Leaders. Altogether, some 80 alumni are now serving as principals for charter schools. One alumnus who stayed on in regular public schools just won the 2005 National Teacher of the Year award, the first recipient ever from the District of Columbia. He says he would not have entered the classroom had it not been for Teach for America. These are results that both left and right can celebrate.

2) Jack McConnell, the First Minister of Scotland, visited KIPP in the Bronx yesterday (articles at http://www.theherald.co.uk/politics/49462.html and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/4373610.stm):

Mr McConnell expressed huge interest in a unique regime run by the school. As part of the Knowledge is Power Programme (KIPP), pupils, parents and teachers are asked to sign written pledges committing them to school life.
Mr McConnell said Scottish schools could learn a lot from certain aspects of the system, which pushes children aged 11 to 15 from disadvantaged areas to reach their full potential by aiming for top college and university places.
"Written agreements would certainly have a place in Scottish schools," he said. "It would engage the parents and motivate pupils more consistently. The challenge in Scotland is to create this type of commitment to the school."
The so-called contract signed by the 250 pupils, their parents and 17 teachers at the KIPP Academy in the Bronx, commits them to work to their full potential and not least, attend school from 7.30am until 5pm every day. The punishing regime clearly pays dividends. More than 86% of the pupils perform at or above average in maths and 69% in reading.
The vast majority go on to win scholarships to some of the best private high schools and colleges in New York.
Mr McConnell said the contract built a commitment that gave pupils more inspiration to participate in school life and gave the teachers confidence to make that happen.
The first minister also intends to send someone over to the school in the next few weeks to learn more about how it keeps in touch with every single pupil long after they have moved on.

3) How's this for the embodiment of irony: the leader of Scotland comes thousands of miles to KIPP to learn from a model that's obviously working, yet guess how many times in the TEN YEARS that KIPP has been right down the hall from one of the lowest-performing middle schools in the Bronx that someone, ANYONE, from that school has bothered to merely walk down the hall to try to learn and apply the lessons from what's going on only a few feet away?  NEVER! 

(See article about this: School Reform’s 38th Parallel (http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2003/09/22&ID=Ar00901):

In the South Bronx, there is a hallway. At one end, children in shirts and ties and dresses line up to shake their teacher’s hand as they enter their classroom. At the other end, noise escapes an art class. “Excuse me! Why are you running around my room?!” screams a young, blonde, frazzled-looking teacher. “Look at my niggas from the East Side!” yells a black boy, maybe 12 years old.

 

One can pace the hall, moving from quiet to bedlam and back again. I did so repeatedly on Friday, my jaw a tick away from slack. “A lot of people notice that,” a young woman said as she walked past.

 

The hallway is split between Intermediate School 151 and the Knowledge Is Power Program Academy charter school. The schools share a building on East 156th Street, across from the housing projects, but not much else.)

Nor is this unusual: I made a 2nd visit yesterday to the new KIPP Infinity school on 133rd St., which shares a building with a notoriously underperforming, dangerous school (poor Roberto Clemente, having such a school named after him) and I asked Joe Negron how often the Principal of the regular school visited him and he said, "Never."

 

Folks, we have a lot of work to do to fix this system...

 

4) Whatever your view on the widespread decline of unions in this country, it's undeniably a disaster for African-Americans, and makes our work to improve failing schools -- which are disproportionately victimizing minorities -- all the more important.

But then unions lost bargaining power and members. And while labor leaders called attention to the overall decline, few took notice that blacks were losing much more ground than whites.

In the last five years, that trend accelerated. Despite a growing economy, the number of African-Americans in unions has fallen by 14.4 percent since 2000, while white membership is down 5.4 percent.

For a while in the 1980's, one out of every four black workers was a union member; now it is closer to one in seven. This loss of better-paying jobs helps to explain why blacks are doing worse than any other group in the current recovery. Labor leaders have acknowledged the disproportionate damage to African-Americans, but they decline to make special efforts to organize blacks and offset the decrease, saying that all groups need help.

(http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/weekinreview/23uchi.html)