Schools Chief Says Union Rules Lead Him to Create Unneeded Jobs

Sorry for the deluge of emails today -- catching up on some reading...

 

1) Kudos to Klein for holding firm on contract negotiations with the principals' union.  Hopefully, the absurdity of paying unwanted assistant principals $5 million per year to sit around and do nothing will highlight the need to change the contract such that unwanted asst. principals not only can't force their way into schools but also can -- I hope you're sitting down! -- actually have to find another career!

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Schools Chief Says Union Rules Lead Him to Create Unneeded Jobs

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Published: August 31, 2006

www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/nyregion/31schools.html

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said yesterday that he would create unnecessary jobs at full pay for 44 assistant principals who have not found regular assignments despite numerous vacancies, rather than allow them to bump less senior assistant principals from their posts.

In his weekly memo to New York City’s principals, Mr. Klein complained yesterday that the labor contract with the union representing principals and assistant principals was forcing him to create the unneeded jobs. He cited what he considered problematic seniority provisions in their contract as a reason that his hands were tied. He also said the provisions were a major reason the city had failed to reach a contract with the union.

Yesterday's LA Times editorial shows the flaws of the bill:

Once the legislation goes into effect, after all, the new superintendent will have numerous masters under the muddled power-sharing agreement the mayor negotiated with teachers unions. Under the legislation, Villaraigosa — assuming he has the backing of most of the other L.A. Unified mayors — has the power to veto the board's choice of superintendent.

But no, alas, the mayor can't fire the person outright — not under the flawed plan he himself put forth.

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The Superintendent Tug-of-War

L.A.'s mayor and school board should put aside vitriol and compromise on a candidate.

August 30, 2006, LA Times editorial

www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-mayor30aug30,0,934759.story

MAYOR ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA was feeling so confident Monday that he threatened to fire someone who hasn't even been hired. Worse, he couldn't fire that person even if he wanted to. The person is the next superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, and Villaraigosa's threat, later recanted, offers an early lesson about the weaknesses of his plan to assume some responsibility for the city's schools.

The bill giving Villaraigosa a say in how the school district is run is sailing through the Legislature, and the governor is expected to sign it. But even if the bill survives the inevitable legal challenges, it doesn't give Villaraigosa the power to fire anybody.

Here's the LA Times's editorial board's latest take on the bill that just passed:

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Will a Bad Schools Bill Get Worse?

Last-minute Sacramento tweaks to mayoral takeover could remove the good parts and keep all the bad.

LA Times editorial, August 28, 2006

www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-sacto28aug28,0,7568026.story

SUPPORTERS OF MAYOR Antonio Villaraigosa's flawed attempt to acquire a say in how Los Angeles schools are run tend to give one of two reasons. Either they're afraid of displeasing the politically powerful mayor and the Legislature's Democratic leadership or, though the bill falls far short of full mayoral control, supporters say it at least gives Villaraigosa a foot in the door.

Nothing can be done about the first argument except to exhort politicians to grow some backbone, which is a hardy perennial for editorial pages. As for the something-is-better-than-nothing claim, the problem with this something is that the mayor's bill, once his union allies were done editing it, blurs responsibility and muddles decision-making powers.

We've been through all that before. The more immediate problem with AB 1381 — as it heads toward probable passage and then an almost guaranteed legal challenge — is that its backers might never see the mayor run a cluster of schools or get to pick the superintendent. But they could be stuck in any event with the more regressive parts of the legislation that have nothing to do with mayoral involvement.

Thoughts on LA mayoral control legislation

I got this email today, which seemed like good news for much-needed mayoral control of the LA school system (the 2nd largest in the country and a total mess):

Governor Schwarzenegger Applauds Legislature for Approving Measure to Boost LAUSD Accountability to Students and Parents

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today issued the following statement following the Assembly approval of AB 1381 by Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez:

"The students of LAUSD are winners thanks to the Legislature's actions today.  Mayor Villaraigosa stepped up with bold leadership to help our children achieve their dreams. 

"This proposal challenges the status quo and makes the mayor accountable to the LAUSD students and their parents.  While there are many great schools, principals and teachers in LAUSD, I cannot accept the fact that too many schools are failing our students, as evidenced by the high school dropout rate.

"I ask the Legislature to immediately send this bill to my desk so that I can sign this measure to give all LAUSD students the quality education they deserve to succeed."

But when I checked in with a friend of mine who's close to what's going on, he said:

The brief story is that this would have been great news a year ago when there was a mayoral control bill that was strong on control and accountability.  Instead, the bill that passed this week was a deal with the unions, small neighboring cities and anyone else that needed to be greased.  A victory for Mayor Villaraigosa and really nobody else.  There was some support for it within the LA charter community, but more based on the political rather than policy dynamics.

The LA Times editorial board has been spot on with this issue for the past 14 months or so.  Pushed it when it was good, attacked it when it went sour.

Tweaking of 'No Child' Seen

And kudos to Spellings for firmly supporting NCLB.  This is a great rebuttal to a lot of the whining that's going on:

for people who say, 'Wah, wah, we can't have spelling bees because we have to focus on math and reading' -- let's measure the spelling," she said.

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Tweaking of 'No Child' Seen
Education Chief Urges Bigger Role for States in Initiative

By Lois Romano
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 31, 2006; A04

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/30/AR2006083002914.html

As schools nationwide open for business, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings took the opportunity yesterday to compare the centerpiece of the administration's education policy to soap.

"I like to talk about No Child Left Behind as Ivory soap. It's 99.9 percent pure," Spellings told reporters over coffee. "There's not much needed in the way of changes. . . . As much grist as there was for the mill five years ago on various fronts . . . we've come a long way in a short time in a big system affecting 50 million kids."

In a casual meeting at the agency, and with no particular agenda, Spellings said she believes NCLB -- a law that requires annual student assessments -- simply needs tweaking, and she emphasized that it is time to take it to the next level of development. Critics have long complained that the compliance requirements for NCLB puts too much stress on state resources and educators, many of whom say they must teach to the test at the expense of other learning.

More foolishness from California on bilingual education, which has proved to be an utter disaster for WAY too many of the students trapped in it:

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Forgetting the Bilingual Lesson

LA Times editorial, August 29, 2006

www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-bilingual29aug29,0,152105.story

State legislators want to put ESL kids in a corner with different textbooks, and are willing to punish Board of Education members who don't want to revisit the bad old days.

 

CALIFORNIA WAS SUPPOSED TO have learned a sad but important lesson from its years of experimenting with bilingual education: When you isolate a group of largely poor, minority students and give them different instruction from what other students receive, they tend to get a dumbed-down, second-rate education.

Unfortunately, that lesson hasn't fully sunk in. Nor has the idea that playground politics and retribution are not in the best interests of schoolchildren.

Voucher Plan Will Help Public Education

The article below about how a privately funded voucher program targeted at one failing elementary school triggered rapid, major changes reminds me of the debate in the school reform movement between those in the following two camps:

 

1) Those that focus on creating alternatives to (and competition for) the existing system, in the form of charter schools and/or vouchers.  Many of these people disparage efforts to reform the current system as futile and/or unnecessary (arguing that competition, by itself, will bring about change), and

 

2) Those that focus on reforming the existing system.  Many of these people disparage efforts to create alternatives as a distraction and/or too small-scale to make a difference.

 

This debate drives me nuts because we need to do BOTH! 

 

As much as I'd like to see well-designed voucher programs become more widespread, I'm not optimistic that this will happen anytime soon at a scale that would be meaningful in the context of 55 MILLION public schoolchildren.  The trends are favorable, but this will be a LOOOOONG road.

 

The same is true for charter schools.  Creating and growing a high-quality charter school is the single most difficult entrepreneurial challenge I can think of.  Given the extraordinary challenges -- lack of adequate funding, finding facilities, etc. -- it's remarkable how many charter schools have been created -- and how many are doing so well.  But while charter schools are growing rapidly, take a look at the map below -- charters have more than 2% market share in only four states plus Washington DC, so this too will be a long road.

 

This being said, creating competition is critical for two reasons:

 

1) Alternative schools like KIPP are laboratories of innovation.  They try many more experiments than regular public schools -- for example, can you imagine ANY public school requiring, as KIPP does, that every teacher have a cell phone and students are told to call anytime, 24/7, if they need help on homework (or anything else)?  These schools also show what is possible -- what low-income, minority kids can achieve with high expectations, good teachers, etc.  I forget who said "The actual proves the possible", but it's critically important.

 

2) Alternative schools create competition, which creates pressure for change.  Even small-scale competition can have a major impact, and I'm having trouble thinking of more than a few rare examples of meaningful public school change in the absense of competition.  The article below is a great case study, and there are countless others.

 

Every person in the private sector I've ever spoken with instantly gets the importance of competition, but those in the worlds of government, nonprofits, education and academia, I've found that people don't get this as quickly and instinctively, so we have to collect data and document countless case studies to win everyone over to this argument.

 

Lastly, in the article below, I love this rebuttal!

The most prominent critic of the governor's voucher plan proposal, Connecticut Education Association president Rosemary Coyle, has asked "Why would we want to divert public dollars to private schools that are not accountable to Connecticut's citizens?" The answer is very simple: to make the state's worst performing public schools accountable to Connecticut's citizens.

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Voucher Plan Will Help Public Education

by Lewis M. Andrews, Ph.D.

http://www.yankeeinstitute.org/main/article.php?article_id=21

Governor Rowland has proposed an education reform plan that offers 500 private school vouchers, worth $4,000 each, to children in the state's worst performing schools. The best way to understand why it makes so much sense to target Connecticut's failing schools with some form of school choice is to look across the border to Albany, New York.

In 1996, Virginia Manheimer, a wealthy philanthropist, wanted to see just how powerful vouchers could be in improving the quality of education, especially for the poor and minorities.

More on charters

My email two days ago about the financial pressure charter schools create and some of my ideas for compromise led three of my readers to share what's going on in their states:

a) In CT, the money doesn’t go with the child so the urban schools actually gain by charter school creation.S

 

b) That's more or less what happens in MA.  In Year 1 they lose 0% (full reimbursement), in Year 2 they lose 40% (60% reimbursement), in Year 3 they lose 60%.  Then that's it - full amount. 

 

c) There are similar proposals in NY.

In addition, I have another thought on what I wrote two days ago:

...when a charter school opens and draws students away, the revenue leaves the local public schools, but the costs don't go down at all since not enough students leave to warrant hiring one fewer teacher, for example.  ...with 22,000 fewer students to educate, the District can hire far fewer teachers and cut certain other costs, but the reality is that many costs are fixed or somewhat fixed and to the extent that a school loses only a handful of students (as appears to be the case in New Hampshire typically), there are virtually no savings at all.

When I wrote this, I was thinking of a static system, in which a school loses students overall when some choose to leave and attend a charter school.  But this is often not the case since school enrollment in this country is GROWING, as this NYT article, "In Schools Across U.S., the Melting Pot Overflows" (www.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/education/27education.html), that I sent around the other day makes clear:

Some 55 million youngsters are enrolling for classes in the nation’s schools this fall, making this the largest group of students in America’s history and, in ethnic terms, the most dazzlingly diverse since waves of European immigrants washed through the public schools a century ago.

Millions of baby boomers and foreign-born parents are enrolling their children, sending a demographic bulge through the schools that is driving a surge in classroom construction.

Charter schools are taking significant market share in only a handful cities like Washington DC -- I recall that they're less than 2% of NYC students, for example -- so in many cases I suspect, the students that are leaving to attend charter schools are quickly replaced by other students and there's no financial hit at all to a school.  In fact, charters may improve the situation by alleviating overcrowding.

Jewish humor

A friend sent me this very old Jewish joke:

There is a big controversy on the Jewish view of when life begins. In Jewish tradition, the fetus is not considered viable until it graduates from medical school.

Folks, we need A LOT more of this attitude in this country!

HOMEWORK HOOEY

Another good article rebutting the utter nonsense that American children suffer from too much homework.  The overwhelming EVIDENCE (vs. anecdotes) is that precisely the opposite is true.  A nice plug for KIPP too:

The real problem with both books is that nowhere in their litanies of "so-and-so said" is voice given to schools that value homework as a key to academic success. The KIPP Academies, for example, a nation-wide network of charter schools, require not only longer days and school years (students get only two weeks off in the summer), but also give between two and three hours of homework each night.

And KIPP's record of success speaks for itself. Last year, for example, 100 percent of KIPP's Gaston, N.C., eighth-grade class received above-grade-level scores in reading and math; 79 percent of all KIPP alumni nationwide go on to college, and KIPP Washington, D.C., is the highest performing middle school in the nation's capital. And these are not anomalies.

Homework works for kids. Just as a musician can't learn an instrument by only attending class, and an athlete can't master a sport by watching others play the game, students can't master math, reading and history without extensive practice.

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HOMEWORK HOOEY

By MARTIN A. DAVIS JR.

August 27, 2006 -- THE HOMEWORK MYTH

By Alfie Kohn

De Capo Press, 256 pages, $24

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/books/homework_hooey_postopbooks_martin_a__davis_jr_.htm

THE CASE AGAINST HOMEWORK: HOW HOMEWORK IS HURTING OUR CHILDREN AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT

By Sarah Bennett & Nancy Kalish

Crown, 304 pages, $24.95

A.A. MILNE had it right: The greatest joy of childhood is the free dom to do nothing. But one can't do nothing forever, as Christopher Robin reminded Pooh in the last of Milne's classic children's stories.

"I'm not going to do nothing no more," Christopher Robin said.

"Never again?" asked Pooh.

"Well, not so much. They don't let you."

"They" are the adults, whose world Christopher Robin is about to enter, presumably as a student. But some adults believe - at least in the realm of homework - that nothing is exactly what children should be doing.

That's Alfie Kohn's solution. Author of "The Homework Myth" and prosecutor of all that smacks of excellence in the American classroom, he claims that the evidence that homework has a positive affect on academic achievement is "dubious." Worse, it's harming kids' emotional development by working them into the ground after the school bell rings.

Teachers rise to the top

This article describes some summer teacher-training programs that sound wonderful.  I wonder if any have been evaluated to see if the students taught by the teachers who attend these programs do better afterward? 

 

The sad reality is that the great majority of teacher training goes on at a horribly broken system of ed schools, which studies have shown add ZERO value in terms of producing teachers that can drive higher levels of student achievement.  Thus, given its huge cost in time and money, the system as a whole SUBTRACTS value to society -- how truly pathetic!

Many districts require summer courses and workshops to get their share of the nation's 3 million teachers up to speed. Teachers these days also study sea turtle habitats in Costa Rica, evolution in the Galapagos, geology in Wyoming, physics at Los Alamos, N.M., and the history of the Wright Brothers in Dayton, Ohio, among others specialties.

While public money is limited, teachers tap into hundreds of public-private partnerships that, in many cases, take them far from home for once-in-a-lifetime training experiences.

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Teachers rise to the top Updated 8/30/2006 10:01 AM ET http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-08-29-teachers-cover_x.htm

By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Somewhere between curriculum committees, writing conferences and presentations to principals about computerized blackboards, Bridget Kay Call found a few hours this summer to rise up and fly. An airplane ride simulating a near-zero-gravity environment was the icing on summer's cake for the high school English, speech and theater teacher from Matewan, W. Va., one of nearly 90 state Teachers of the Year who spent a week here swapping ideas at a special workshop courtesy of Northrop Grumman and other sponsors. The experience of weightlessness left Call speechless — and able to sympathize with students who struggle to describe the world around them. "The speech teacher is speechless, and that's not quite like me," she says. Though the flight was unusual — the first just for teachers — the teachers are not. Like most educators these days, they often spend summers working to fulfill new state and federal requirements.

Charter compromises

I had an interesting conversation with a Democratic state legislator from New Hampshire two evenings ago.  He was complaining about the dozen charter schools in the state, saying that the public schools are already underfunded (which they are: they only get a measly $3,900/student/year) and when a charter school opens and draws students away, the revenue leaves the local public schools, but the costs don't go down at all since not enough students leave to warrant hiring one fewer teacher, for example.  He said he'd support charter schools if they were funded separately, such that the regular public schools weren't adversely impacted.

 

This isn't a new point of view, obviously.  It's a widespread concern -- for example, consider this paragraph from the article below on DC charter schools:

As charters have proliferated, the number of students attending traditional schools has plummeted from 80,000 a decade ago to 58,000 last school year. Because tax dollars follow the student, charters now claim at least $140 million a year that might otherwise flow to neighborhood schools. That has led traditional schools to cut programs, lay off teachers and, for the first time in nearly a decade, close.

Of course, with 22,000 fewer students to educate, the District can hire far fewer teachers and cut certain other costs, but the reality is that many costs are fixed or somewhat fixed and to the extent that a school loses only a handful of students (as appears to be the case in New Hampshire typically), there are virtually no savings at all.

 

I share this story because it's important for those of us who champion charter schools to understand exactly what motivates those who don't support our cause.  Too often I think we dismiss them as lackeys for the teachers' unions who don't care about the children or don't understand the value of competition and choice.  This is sometimes true, to be sure, but often they are thoughtful, caring people who want what's best for all children and have a legitimate concern about already underfunded public schools being put in even more of a financial pinch.

 

There aren't any easy answers here -- to some extent, I WANT regular public schools to feel some financial pain, as this can spur efforts to improve to keep parents/children from defecting the charter schools -- but I think there are some compromises we should be willing to make.  Here are some ideas:

 

a) Perhaps a regular public school wouldn't lose any funding for the first 10 students who left, but then started to lose a certain amount per student thereafter; and/or

 

b) Perhaps the school would only lose, say, 50% of the fully funded per pupil amount when a student left; and/or

 

c) Perhaps the school wouldn't lose any funding during the first year a student left, but then lost, say, 25% the 2nd year, 50% the third year, 75% the 4th year and the full amount thereafter.

 

Of course, all of these plans require additional funding, which can make it harder to get charter legislation passed -- as I said, there are no easy answers.

Stupid in America; Calling Their Bluff

The AWESOME 20/20 piece, Stupid in America, is being shown again on ABC at 10pm this Friday (you can also watch it anytime at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfRUMmTs0ZA).  You know this has to be a great piece of work based on the hysterical reaction of the teachers' unions, as described by Stossel in the article below.

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Calling Their Bluff

BY JOHN STOSSEL - JFS Productions Inc.
April 6, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/30552

Last month, 500 angry schoolteachers assembled outside my office. The United Federation of Teachers was furious that "Stupid in America," a "20/20" show I did on education, suggested that some union teachers were lazy. They shouted that I didn't understand how difficult teaching was, and chanted, "Shame on you!"

Randi Weingarten, head of New York City's union, took the microphone and hollered, "Just teach for a week!" She said I could select from many schools. "We got high schools, we got elementary schools, we got junior high schools!"

I accepted. I even said I'd let the union pick the school. I thought I'd learn more about how difficult teaching is. Above all, it was a chance to get our cameras into schools - something the N.Y. bureaucracy had forbidden - so we could show you what was really going on.

But it won't happen.

Like most of our dealings with the union, nothing was easy. It took weeks of phone calls to make any sort of progress. I suspect this will not surprise public-school parents.

The Future of D.C. Public Schools

A nice mention of KIPP Key Academy in this article about DC's charter schools:

More than 70 percent of D.C. charter students are from low-income homes, compared with about 60 percent of students in traditional D.C. schools. And hidden behind the averages are individual charters that range from excellent to incompetent.

One middle school, the KIPP DC: KEY Academy in Southeast, has the highest test scores of any middle school in the city and has recorded some of the largest gains in achievement by low-income students in the nation.

It's AMAZING that they've grown to 25% of all DC students -- and the trend isn't slowing down anytime soon...

 

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The Future of D.C. Public Schools: Traditional or Charter Education?

By Lori Montgomery and Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 22, 2006; A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/21/AR2006082101758_pf.html

Ten years after Congress imposed charter schools on a reluctant city, the District has emerged as one of the nation's most important laboratories for school choice and one of the first to confront a central tenet of free-market theory: Will traditional public schools improve with competition? Or will charters take over?

Both sides agree that the District is approaching a critical juncture. With public confidence in the schools at an all-time low, more than 17,000 public school students -- nearly one in four -- have rejected the traditional system in favor of 51 independently run, publicly funded charter schools. That share is one of the largest in the nation and is expected to rise when six more charter schools open their doors this fall.

As charters have proliferated, the number of students attending traditional schools has plummeted from 80,000 a decade ago to 58,000 last school year. Because tax dollars follow the student, charters now claim at least $140 million a year that might otherwise flow to neighborhood schools. That has led traditional schools to cut programs, lay off teachers and, for the first time in nearly a decade, close.

Powerful forces in the national debate are watching closely to see whether D.C. schools can win those students back.

The Broad Foundation and U.S. Fund for UNICEF Announce $2.45 Million to Fund New KIPP Public Charter Schools in New Orleans

Great news for KIPP -- and, more importantly, the children of New Orleans!

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The Broad Foundation and U.S. Fund for UNICEF Announce $2.45 Million to Fund New KIPP Public Charter Schools in New Orleans

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20060828005625&newsLang=en

 

NEW ORLEANS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 28, 2006--A year after Hurricane Katrina, The Broad Foundation and the U.S. Fund for UNICEF announced today a total of $2.45 million to fund two current and three planned KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) public charter schools in New Orleans. Based on a model that has improved achievement for students across 16 states and last year raised student achievement for New Orleans evacuees on average more than two grade levels in reading and math, the five KIPP New Orleans schools aim to eventually serve more than 2,400 students.

The Broad Foundation (pronounced "brode") announced it will provide $2 million to fund KIPP's two new, open-enrollment public charter schools, as well as KIPP's expansion over the next four years of three additional planned schools. The first new KIPP school, KIPP Believe College Prep, is scheduled to begin serving students as soon as Tuesday, Aug. 29.

At Top Public School, Rising Stars Dodge Falling Ceiling Tiles

From the front page of today's WSJ, an article about how the physical plant of many schools is falling down.

 

Many readers will conclude that the problem is that we're not spending enough on our schools, but the data shows that we're spending more and more -- it's just not being spent wisely or well!

 

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At Top Public School, Rising Stars Dodge Falling Ceiling Tiles

Mildew, Bugs and Masonry
Bedevil Thomas Jefferson;
Water Wrecks a Computer

By DIYA GULLAPALLI
August 28, 2006; Page A1

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115672841445646981.html

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology routinely reports among the nation's highest average SAT results and number of National Merit Scholarship finalists. Ronald Reagan and Al Gore have addressed its students, and educators from overseas often tour the school in search of inspiration.

But recently, what's made the biggest impression isn't the school's supercomputer or its quantum physics lab -- it's the moldy ceilings. And the bug infestations. And the fact that the school's young whizzes have been repeatedly threatened by falling ceiling panels, light fixtures and pieces of steel air ducts.

Stealth Students Test Tolerance of the Affluent

The lengths to which some parents will go to get their kids into better schools really speaks to how awful some schools are and how desperately some parents just want a good education for their children.

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Stealth Students Test Tolerance of the Affluent

Published: August 26, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/26/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/27ctcol.html

GREENWICH

SAD to say, but suburban schools also have a problem with illegal immigrants, only theirs are pint-size and most are American citizens.

Take Greenwich. Students from bordering communities like Port Chester, N.Y., and Stamford, Conn., keep striving to land seats in Greenwich classrooms. Who can blame them? Just as Mexicans sneak into California because that’s where the better jobs are, students sneak into Greenwich because that’s where the better schools are.

Greenwich, one of America’s wealthiest towns, has not yet surrounded itself with a chain-link fence and National Guard troops. But it has its own version of a border patrol. A private eye, the kind who might be expected to snoop around motels, has been hired to check out tips of juvenile border crossings. Tattletale parents will report that they’ve spied a student crossing the Mill Street bridge from Port Chester or spotted another being dropped off by a car with New York license plates. The gumshoe, camera in hand, might shadow the third grader to his home.

Charter School Nonsense

Good to see the WSJ editorial page quickly rebutting the nonsense that appeared on the NYT's editorial page yesterday.  The WSJ correctly points out that the study is flawed in many ways and that "The only way to measure school effectiveness is through longitudinal studies that compare the same students over time."  I then expected the editorial to say something like this (from my earlier emails):

Bryan Hassel of Public Impact has looked at 44 such studies that include both snapshot and longitudinal perspectives. Of the 18 snapshot studies, 12 found that charters did worse than non-charters, and 6 found that charters did the same or better. Of the 26 change studies, 16 found that charters did better than non-charters, 6 found roughly comparable results between charters and non-charters, and 4 found that charters did worse. Of the 16 positive change studies, the most common theme was that charter students start out behind and catch up and surpass non-charter students over time.

Unfortunately, however, the WSJ instead makes the same mistake as the study, using snapshot data to defend charter schools:

Studies in California, New York, Massachusetts, Florida and elsewhere have repeatedly shown charter school students outperforming their counterparts in traditional public schools -- sometimes dramatically. In Michigan in 2004, 46% of black eighth-graders in charter schools passed the state math assessment test, compared with just 21% of black eighth-graders statewide.

Writing in the New York Post last week, Peter Murphy of the New York Charter Schools Association said a state report issued this summer found that "in 2005, a majority of charter schools had a higher percentage of students passing the state exams in English language arts and mathematics at the elementary and middle school levels" than did their respective school districts.

This is a minor quibble, however.  Most importantly, its conclusion is exactly right:

All charters aren't successful, but the bad ones tend to close in due course, which is a good thing and more than can be said for failing traditional public schools. As for the rest, they are providing a fast-growing option for underprivileged children. This irks unions, school boards and others with a vested interest in a public school monopoly that's failing to educate millions of kids.

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Charter School Nonsense
WSJ editorial, August 28, 2006; Page A12

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115671778245846773.html

The Bush administration's desire to enlighten parents and taxpayers about alternatives to failing public schools is admirable. But it'll have to do better than the misleading report issued last week by the federal Department of Education, which purports to show that charter schools trail traditional public schools in student achievement.

The study used 2003 test-score data from the National Assessment for Education Progress (NAEP) to determine that fourth-graders attending regular public schools scored 4.2 points higher in reading, and 4.7 points higher in math, than their counterparts in charter schools, which are also public schools but operate independently and without many of the union and bureaucratic rules. The study claims to have taken family income into consideration, and that's important because a large number of charter schools cater to mostly low-income students.

But the use of federal-lunch program participation as a poverty indicator is problematic and likely skewed the results. According to the Center for Education Reform, a school choice advocacy group, as many as 1-in-4 charters nationwide would qualify for free- and reduced-lunch programs but don't take advantage of them. Cost and bureaucratic red tape are two primary reasons.

For example, to participate in a federal lunch program, a school must hire certified food service workers. Many charters operating on tight budgets choose to use parents or volunteers in the cafeteria and steer their limited resources into the classroom. By relying on a flawed proxy for poverty, the government's methodology penalizes this sort of efficiency.

Bill Clinton Was Right

Following up on my email last week about the analogy between welfare reform and school reform, this is a very interesting article -- and not just because someone from the Heritage Foundation praises Bill Clinton! -- tracing the history of how Clinton laid the groundwork for welfare reform years earlier by communicating "a values message, an economic message and a policy message all in one."  We in the school reform movement need to do the same!

 

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Bill Clinton Was Right
He Saw the Roots of America's Welfare Problem

By Robert Rector
Special to washingtonpost.com's Think Tank Town
Wednesday, August 23, 2006; 12:00 AM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/22/AR2006082200741.html

As a conservative analyst who spent much of the 1990s working against most of Bill Clinton's agenda -- including even some aspects of his welfare reform proposals -- it pains me to say this.

Bill Clinton was right.

He deserves more credit for the passage of welfare reform than most conservatives probably care to admit.

No, Clinton didn't play a major role in shaping the policy details of the landmark 1996 act. But he understood something about policymaking that many conservative strategists and policy wonks could stand to re-learn: It isn't enough to get the technical details of a policy right. Words and symbols matter, too.

Indeed, thanks in large part to his effective use of words and symbols that challenged liberal orthodoxy on issues surrounding the poor, Bill Clinton not only helped "end welfare as we know it," but he helped end welfare as we know it before anyone even knew it.

To fully understand Clinton's role in the passage of this landmark legislation, one must go back to the early days of the 1992 presidential campaign when Clinton first began trying out his welfare themes. According to New York Times reporter Jason DeParle, Clinton regarded his welfare message as the "all-purpose elixir" of his campaign for the presidency.

Anecdotes on Education From Jackson Hole

Another interesting blurb from the WSJ:

Anecdotes on Education From Jackson Hole

It’s long been accepted that emerging Asian economies owe much of their success to an emphasis on education, but a few anecdotes aired at Jackson Hole underlined the point. Arminio Frago, a former governor of Brazil’s central bank who now runs a hedge fund, noted that Brazil and South Korea once had the same per-capita gross domestic product. Now, South Korea’s is over twice that of Brazil’s. By way of explanation, he noted that the average Korean has 13 years of school, while in Brazil the figure is six years, and the education is not very high quality. Rakesh Mohan, deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India, noted that Tokyo has 113 universities; Beijing has 59. – Greg Ip

In Schools Across U.S., the Melting Pot Overflows

School enrollements are booming, which is putting tremendous strain on the system.

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In Schools Across U.S., the Melting Pot Overflows

By SAM DILLON

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/education/27education.html

STERLING, Va., Aug. 25 — Some 55 million youngsters are enrolling for classes in the nation’s schools this fall, making this the largest group of students in America’s history and, in ethnic terms, the most dazzlingly diverse since waves of European immigrants washed through the public schools a century ago.

Millions of baby boomers and foreign-born parents are enrolling their children, sending a demographic bulge through the schools that is driving a surge in classroom construction.

It is also causing thousands of districts to hire additional qualified teachers at a time when the Bush administration is trying to increase teacher qualifications across the board. Many school systems have begun recruiting overseas for instructors in hard-to-staff subjects like special education and advanced math.

Exploding the Charter School Myth

This NYT editorial is so depressing.  The NYT editorial page had actually shown some signs of progress and appeared to be doing more than just mouthing the "reforms" proposed by the forces of the status quo -- and then they come out with this stink bomb.  I wonder if anyone on the NYT editorial board has EVER, even once, visited a charter school.  It is impossible for me to believe that anyone who's set foot in a KIPP (or Amistad or Uncommon Schools, etc.) could write such rubbish.  Here is my critique of this editorial:

 

1) The first half of it blindly repeats the results of the recent study, without acknowledging the flaws that make it worthless for judging charter schools -- other than to tell us what we already know, which is that charter schools serve a much more disadvantaged student population, for which they should be applauded!  Well down in the editorial, there's a faint stab at evenhandedness ("Charter school advocates denounced the new federal study even before it was released and took issue with its methodology, which is not perfect."), but it fails to mention that the "study" covered a mere 5% of charter schools, failed to adequately adjust for students' disadvantages and didn't track progress over time.

 

2) This is a very clever line: "The evidence so far shows that charter schools are not inherently superior to the traditional public schools they often seek to supplant — and that they are sometimes worse."  Regarding the last part of this sentence, it is irrefutable that SOME charter schools are worse than SOME public schools -- but so what?  One could just as easily have written that public schools are "sometimes worse" than charter schools.

 

As for the first part, one could argue endlessly about which model is "inherently" better (I think the charter model has, net, more advantages, but the rubber really hits the road at the individual school level, based primarily on the school leader and teachers).  But what really matters is whether students at charter schools are PROGRESSING MORE than comparable students at regular schools.  Here, the evidence is clear: as I cited in my email last week, the significant majority of studies (more than 60%) show that charter school students ARE, in fact, progressing more and almost none (15%) show public school students progressing more:

Bryan Hassel of Public Impact has looked at 44 such studies that include both snapshot and longitudinal perspectives. Of the 18 snapshot studies, 12 found that charters did worse than non-charters, and 6 found that charters did the same or better. Of the 26 change studies, 16 found that charters did better than non-charters, 6 found roughly comparable results between charters and non-charters, and 4 found that charters did worse. Of the 16 positive change studies, the most common theme was that charter students start out behind and catch up and surpass non-charter students over time.

Is the New York Times editorial board unaware of this data or choosing not to include it?!

 

3) I don't understand this at all: "lawmakers will back away from the part of the act that offers charter schools as a cure-all."  I'm not aware of any part of NCLB that offers charter schools as a cure-all.  What I AM aware of is that NCLB says that if a public school is a chonic failure, year in and year out, that the school district must provide alternatives to the students who are being victimized by the school.  One of these options is charter schools.

 

Note a huge difference, however: unlike traditional public schools, which students are often forced to attend even when they're well-known failures, no student is ever forced to attend a charter school.  Instead, students and/or their parents can CHOOSE to attend if they find one acceptable to them.  If a charter school fails to attract students, it will rapidly shut down.  This imposes an important market discipline on charter schools -- not a perfect one (there are indeed too many lousy charter schools that manage to keep their students and remain operational), but FAR more so than regular public schools.

 

4) The editorial is sloppy in its wording.  At one point it says this: "They should instead home in on the all-important but largely neglected issue of teacher training and preparation — which trumps everything when it comes to improving student achievement."  Two sentences later, it says this: "Beyond that, Congress needs to grasp the obvious, which is that the quality of the teacher corps is more crucial to school reform than anything else."  The latter is exactly right: teacher quality trumps everything else when it comes to student achievement.  But "teacher training and preparation" are only a small part of the effort to raise teacher quality.  What about recruiting higher-caliber people into the profession?  How about closely and quantitatively tracking teacher performance so that the best (and worst) teachers can be identified?  What about reintroducing differential pay for: a) teachers in teacher shortage areas like math and special ed?; b) teachers in the toughest schools?; and c) the best teachers, defined primarily as those whose students make the most progress?  What about streamling the process for removing the worst teachers?  If "teacher training and preparation" is simply a euphemism for spending more time at ed schools, then this will not only fail to improve teacher quality, it will likely DIMINISH it!

 

5) On this point: "The original law required states to provide highly qualified teachers in core subject areas by this year. But the Education Department simply failed to enforce the rule, partly because of back-channel interference by lawmakers who talked like ardent reformers while covering up for state officials clinging to the bad old status quo."  This makes it seem like the DOE has deliberately not enforced the law, which, as best I understand it, is not the case (see recent articles I've sent out about the DOE cracking down).  The sentence should read: "The Education Department has tried to enforce the law, but with only mixed success due largely to back-channel interference by lawmakers..."

 

6) While I agree with this conclusion, "Four years later, the national teacher corps is still in a shambles. Until Congress changes that, everything else will amount to little more than tinkering at the margins.", this editorial clearly fails to connect improving the teacher corps with fundamentally changing the SYSTEM that recruits, trains, places, evaluates, motivates and hold accountable these teachers. 

 

A major lever for changing the existing system is charter schools, for two main reasons: a) they are laboratories for innovation and are doing a hugely disproportionate amount of the most exciting things in educating K-12 students, especially the most disadvantaged ones; and b) they provide an alternative for desperate parents; and c) in many cities, they provide real competition to the existing, failing system -- and there is now extensive evidence that such competition IS TRIGGERING significant reform and improvement in the regular system.

 

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Exploding the Charter School Myth

Published: August 27, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/opinion/27sun1.html

A federal study showing that fourth graders in charter schools score worse in reading and math than their public school counterparts should cause some soul-searching in Congress. Too many lawmakers seem to believe that the only thing wrong with American education is the public school system, and that converting lagging schools to charter schools would cause them to magically improve...

A Triumph of Felons and Failure

Good to see Herbert tackling these tough issues:

If white people were doing to black people what black people are doing to black people, there would be rioting from coast to coast. As Mr. Williams writes, “Something terrible has happened.”

When was it that the proud tradition of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois, Harriet Tubman and Mary McLeod Bethune, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington, Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall, gave way to glossy felon magazines and a shameful silence in the face of nationally organized stop-snitching campaigns?

In an interview, Mr. Williams said: “There are so many things that we know are indicators of a crisis within the community. When you look at the high dropout rate, especially among our boys. Or the out-of-wedlock birthrate, which is really alarming. Or the high rate of incarceration.

“When you hear boys saying it’s a ‘rite of passage’ to go to jail, or the thing that is so controversial but has been going on for a while — kids telling other kids that if they’re trying to do well in school they’re trying to ‘act better than me,’ or ‘trying to act white’ — all of these are indications of a culture of failure. These are things that undermine a child or an individual who is trying to do better for himself or herself. These are things that drag you down.”

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A Triumph of Felons and Failure

By BOB HERBERT

Published: August 24, 2006

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/08/24/opinion/24herbert.html

I was browsing at a newsstand in Manhattan recently when I came across a magazine called Felon. It was the “Stop Snitchin’ ” issue, and the first letter to the editor began: “Yo, wassup Felon!”

Another letter was from “your nigga John-Jay,” who was kind enough to write: “To my bitches, I love ya’ll.”

Later I came across a magazine called F.E.D.S., which professes to be about “convicted criminals—street thugs—music—fashion—film—etc.” The headline “Stop Snitching” was emblazoned on the cover. “Hundreds of kilos of coke,” said another headline, “over a dozen murders,” and “no one flipped.”

What we have here are symptoms of a depressing cultural illness, frequently fatal, that has spread unchecked through much of black America.

Parents and ads in Florida holding politicians accountable

It's great to see that a least a few gutless, lying politicians are being exposed and held accountable for their despicable behavior.  We in the school reform movement need to do a lot more of this!

 

Here's background on and a translation of the TV ad, courtesy of John Kirtley:

Some of you may recall the role that State Senator Alex Villalobos played in killing the Florida school choice amendment this Spring. A candidate was recruited to oppose him in the Republican primary. Villalobos is now being backed by the teachers' union.

 

Attached is an ad that is now running on Spanish language TV in Miami. For those of you who don't speak Spanish, here is a translation:

 

My name is Lynette Estrada and my son Lucas has autism.

Lucas is thriving thanks to Governor Bush's school choice program. It lets Lucas attend the private school that meets his needs.

Last year, a court took away the scholarship program and I went to Tallahassee to tell our Lucas's story.

Our State Senator, Alex Villalobos, promised to help.

He gave us his word.

But then Alex Villalobos turned his back on us.  He voted against my son's scholarship program.

Alex Villalobos sends his own children to private schools.

So why does he think he can take away my son's chance?

Here's the story of the woman featured in the commercial:

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A Public School Teacher Learns The Politics of School Choice

 

By Lynette Estrada

 

 

I am a public schoolteacher who exercises school choice. I am also a citizen who learned a lesson in politics this spring, when I tried--with the help of other parents-- to save school choice programs in my home state of Florida.

 

In January the Florida Supreme Court, in a ruling I still don’t understand, declared the state’s Opportunity Scholarship Program unconstitutional. This program let students attending chronically failing public schools attend a different school—even a private one—chosen by their parents. The children in this program are 90% minority and from poor areas of the state. The court said that because the state constitution requires a system of public schools, the state can’t fund a program that would allow kids to attend anything other than a public school. This ruling came in spite of studies done by Harvard University and others showing that the program was spurring the public schools to improve.

 

Why did I care about this ruling? Some might expect me, as an employee of the public schools, to rejoice in the elimination of competition. Not so. My son Lucas attends a private school on a McKay Scholarship—another Florida program that enables parents of special education children to access taxpayers funds to help pay tuition at private schools that best meet their children’s needs. My son, who has autism, would not have made it in his assigned public school, nor in any other public school program. He is now thriving in a Miami private school.

 

The Florida Court’s ruling on Opportunity Scholarships directly threatens McKay Scholarships, which currently help 17,000 special needs children.  They are funded exactly the same way. Also at risk is a program in which companies get tax credits for funding scholarships for low income children to attend private schools. This program currently helps 15,000 children from families with an average household income of $22,000. Over 75% of these children are minorities. Because of the radical nature of the court ruling, these programs are now at risk, as are state funded pre-k and college scholarship programs.

 

Parents like myself are concerned. In February, over 4,000 of them came to the capitol to demand that the legislature place on the ballot in the Fall a referendum protecting these programs from the court. They came from as far away as Miami, which is nine hours from the capitol.

 

I came to the capitol myself, I was so concerned. I testified before a committee hearing the amendment proposal and I was stunned to hear my own state Senator, Republican Alex Villalobos from Miami, state during the hearing that he didn’t support the bill. I went to his office with three other parents and asked him why. He told us, in no uncertain terms, that he supported school choice—he was voting against the amendment because he didn’t like a requirement in the bill forcing public schools to spend 65% of their funds in the classroom. We asked him if he would vote for the amendment if the language was removed. He said he would. This clause was removed from the amendment.

 

Satisfied that my foray into the political process was successful, I returned home. Two weeks later Villalobos was the deciding vote against the bill, and it failed. Three days after this vote I led thirty parents from his district to his Miami office to demand an explanation for him breaking his word to us. I didn’t receive one from his staff and I haven’t received one yet from him. Villalobos told the press that his vote was “a vote of conscience”, and he “had been consistent all along”.  Not to me he wasn’t.

 

I was not alone in my experience. When the Senate Education Committee heard the bill, a group of over 40 parents and children drove all the way from Miami to meet with Senator Larcenia Bullard (D, Miami). These families are Haitian immigrants whose children attend Ebenezer Christian Academy in the Little Haiti section of Miami. The school has produced high school graduates (as young as age 14) who have gone on to college. The assigned public school for these families is Edison Senior High, which has a graduation rate of 28%, according to the Florida Department of Education.

 

Bullard met with these families in her office, and gave them her promise that she would vote for the amendment. In the Senate Education Committee, one the Haitian parents, Camille Merilus, who is blind, was led to the podium by his son so he could testify to the power of school choice and how it saved his child.  Bullard asked the Haitian families in the audience to stand. “These families are why I’m voting for this bill”, she said, and she did vote for the bill—that day.  But something changed after that day. Not only did Bullard vote against the amendment in a later committee, she urged other members of her party to vote against it on the Senate floor.

 

When the Haitian families heard of her change, they came all the way back to Tallahassee to try to meet with her to get an explanation. Bullard refused to see them, and then complained on the Senate floor that she felt “like a hostage in her own chamber” because of the presence of the parents. Now she knows how parents with children trapped in failing schools feel.

 

I still don’t understand why these Senators changed their votes. There seems to be a disconnect between constituents who want school choice and the legislators who represent them. I still can’t believe that they wouldn’t even allow the citizens of Florida to vote on the issue. These programs are now at great risk. All I know for sure is that someday soon, legislators will understand that all parents, not just those with enough money, want and deserve school choice. If they continue to ignore the voices of their own constituents, they may learn that lesson the hard way.

 

Lynette Estrada is a special education teacher in the Dade County public schools.

Visit to two Catholic schools

I was recently re-reading this email I sent out earlier this year and, given how many new people have joined this email list, thought it was worth resending.  I have yet to hear ANY answer -- must less a satisfactory one -- to this question:

What do I tell the mother who's trying to get a decent education for her son and keep him away from gangs, yet can only afford to live in a neighborhood in which the local public school has for decades failed to provide such an education and is rife with gangs?  What does one say to her if she says, "You're spending $10,000 each year on my child at school, yet here he is in 8th grade and he can barely read.  He hates school and is skipping classes and spending time with bad kids.  If I don't get him out of this environment soon, I'm going to lose him forever, but I can't afford to move or send him to a private school.  But if you could merely give me HALF of what you're currently spending on him, that would cover the entire tuition at Cardinal Hayes, which has been saving boys like my son for decades."

------------------------

In mid-December, I spent a morning with Peter Flanigan visiting two Catholic schools, St. Ann's grammer school (on E. 110th St. in Manhattan) and Cardinal Hayes high school, which is only a few blocks away from KIPP in the Bronx.  I was REALLY impressed with both schools.  On extremely limited budgets -- FAR less than what taxpayers are spending on public school students -- these schools are providing safety, discipline and of course learning to nearly entirely low-income minority students -- precisely the students that are being failed so badly by the existing public school system.

Of course I'm aware of the many advantages these schools have -- much less regulation, ability to select (and deselect) students, etc. -- and no doubt not all Catholic schools are as high quality as the ones I saw, but at the end of the day, here's the only thing I care about: most of these schools are achieving some degree of success (in some cases, a very high degree of success) with students who, if these schools didn't exist, would mostly be going absolutely nowhere were they in the nearby public schools.  So can someone explain to me why it's in our city's, state's and country's best interests to let these schools fail for lack of $3,000-$5,000 per student per year when we're utterly wasting $10,000-$12,000 per student per year miseducating comparable students at nearby schools?  This strikes me as the definition of madness!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know the reasons -- separation of church and state, skimming the best students from the public schools, etc. -- but I keep coming back to this question: What do I tell the mother who's trying to get a decent education for her son and keep him away from gangs, yet can only afford to live in a neighborhood in which the local public school has for decades failed to provide such an education and is rife with gangs?  What does one say to her if she says, "You're spending $10,000 each year on my child at school, yet here he is in 8th grade and he can barely read.  He hates school and is skipping classes and spending time with bad kids.  If I don't get him out of this environment soon, I'm going to lose him forever, but I can't afford to move or send him to a private school.  But if you could merely give me HALF of what you're currently spending on him, that would cover the entire tuition at Cardinal Hayes, which has been saving boys like my son for decades."

WHAT CHARTER SCHOOL RESEARCH IS, AND IS NOT, TELLING US

This is the best rebuttal I've seen of the recent foolish study that purports to show that charter schools are underperforming regular publics schools (by Nelson Smith, head of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.  In addition to the failure of the study to adequately capture charter schools' high proportion of the most disadvantaged students, I had no idea that the data the study is based on only covers FIVE PERCENT of charter schools!

Only 150 charter schools participated in the 2003 NAEP, which was about 5 percent of the charters open in the 2002-03 school year. Given the wide diversity in the types of charters that are open, it’s doubtful that a sample of 5 percent of charters nationally tells one much of anything about their performance as a sector.

In addition, Smith cites additional studies to the 20 in my slide (26 total), but the conclusion is exactly the same: students at charter schools are making much bigger gains.

Bryan Hassel of Public Impact has looked at 44 such studies that include both snapshot and longitudinal perspectives. Of the 18 snapshot studies, 12 found that charters did worse than non-charters, and 6 found that charters did the same or better. Of the 26 change studies, 16 found that charters did better than non-charters, 6 found roughly comparable results between charters and non-charters, and 4 found that charters did worse. Of the 16 positive change studies, the most common theme was that charter students start out behind and catch up and surpass non-charter students over time.

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WHAT CHARTER SCHOOL RESEARCH IS, AND IS NOT, TELLING US

Statement by Nelson Smith, president, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools

WASHINGTON, Aug. 22, 2006—The perceptions of charter schools have largely been based on “he said, she said” news reports since the movement began nearly 15 years ago. Yet if we are to truly understand the reality of how well charter schools are serving more than a million students in 40 states, it is important to understand properly what charter school research is and is not telling us.

The report released today by the National Center for Education Statistics provides the fourth analysis of the same data from 2003 National Assessment of Education Progress about the performance of 4th graders in charter and other public schools. Not only is this old news—there are similar results in the first three analyses—it is old data. The most current available data is from the 2005 NAEP, which was released last October.

In either case, both the 2003 and 2005 NAEP have limitations that can lead to misinterpretation and misunderstanding of charter school performance. Here’s why:

• NAEP was designed to illustrate the nation’s progress on student achievement; to establish nationwide historical trends in student achievement; and to see how states compare to one another. Yet chartering is a state policy innovation and therefore the national context is less important than the state context. How charters perform in a particular state is impacted by the resources, regulatory environment, and quality of authorizing in that state. That said, the recent record of state-level achievement studies is quite encouraging

• NAEP only provides a snapshot analysis for one point in time. These snapshot analyses look at the results by various demographic factors (e.g., race and ethnicity) but say nothing about the most important issue – prior student achievement. Studies of charters in three of the biggest charter states (CA, FL, and TX) show that students who attend charters tend to enter significantly behind their non-charter counterparts. A snapshot study that doesn’t take into account students’ starting points provides no sense of the school’s effect on these students.

• There is not one data set that tells all. In fact, there are dozens of studies on charter schools. Bryan Hassel of Public Impact has looked at 44 such studies that include both snapshot and longitudinal perspectives. Of the 18 snapshot studies, 12 found that charters did worse than non-charters, and 6 found that charters did the same or better. Of the 26 change studies, 16 found that charters did better than non-charters, 6 found roughly comparable results between charters and non-charters, and 4 found that charters did worse. Of the 16 positive change studies, the most common theme was that charter students start out behind and catch up and surpass non-charter students over time.

• Only 150 charter schools participated in the 2003 NAEP, which was about 5 percent of the charters open in the 2002-03 school year. Given the wide diversity in the types of charters that are open, it’s doubtful that a sample of 5 percent of charters nationally tells one much of anything about their performance as a sector.

• The major indicator used to identify low-income students is seriously flawed when applied to charter schools. Some of the findings in each of the four analyses of the 2003 NAEP focus on the performance of students who are eligible for free and reduced price lunch. (Each found little difference between charters and non-charters) However, a significant number of charter schools don’t participate in the federal free and reduced price lunch program, even though they have students who are eligible for it. This understates the number of disadvantaged students in charter schools, and skews any conclusion about their academic performance.

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools is working to grow both the number and quality of charter schools. Precisely because we support strong schools and don't excuse poor performance, we think it important to be clear and rigorous in discussing data. We do not take issue with the agencies or researchers involved in today's release – but must call attention to the fact that this is the fourth time the public has been greeted with essentially the same "news" derived from a source that is singularly ill-suited to the measurement of charter schools’ performance.

We encourage you to contact us as well as the third-party researchers below with your questions.

Brian Gill, senior social scientist, Rand Corporation, 412-683-2300 or briang@rand.org

Bryan Hassel, co-director, Public Impact, 919-967-5102 or Bryan_Hassel@publicimpact.com

Gary Miron, professor of education, Western Michigan University, 269-387-5895 or gary.miron@wmich.edu

Alliance staff:

Nelson Smith, president, 202-289-2700 or nelson@publiccharters.org

Todd Ziebarth, senior policy analyst, 303-329-4648 or todd@publicharters.org