Lessons offered by New Covenant's closure

 

Tom Carroll does a nice job capturing some important lessons from the failure of Albany's New Covenant Charter School (plus, yet more evidence about the accountability of charter schools).

The decision to close the New Covenant Charter School next month is understandably heartbreaking for parents who entrusted their children to the school with the hope for a safer, higher-quality school setting for their sons and daughters. But, as difficult as this decision must have been for the school's board of directors, it was the right one.

To learn the correct lessons from New Covenant's closure, one must correctly analyze what mistakes were made:

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Lessons offered by New Covenant's closure   By THOMAS W. CARROLL First published: Sunday, May 27, 2007 http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=592677&category=OPINION&newsdate=5/27/2007   The decision to close the New Covenant Charter School next month is understandably heartbreaking for parents who entrusted their children to the school with the hope for a safer, higher-quality school setting for their sons and daughters. But, as difficult as this decision must have been for the school's board of directors, it was the right one. To learn the correct lessons from New Covenant's closure, one must correctly analyze what mistakes were made: Mistake No. 1: Rushing New Covenant's opening. A quality school cannot be created in a mad rush. Yet that's exactly how New Covenant was conceived. Shortly after the charter-school law was adopted in December 1998, Gov. George Pataki put out the word that he wanted some charter schools to open in the fall of 1999. Aaron Dare, then a young man in a rush, saw an opportunity to create a badly needed school for the children of Arbor Hill. As Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings cautioned at the time, Dare should have slowed down. Mistake No. 2: Expanding the school too much and too quickly. New Covenant decided to start with about 500 students, and grow to 900 -- setting in motion a chain of events from which it never recovered. Because the school was too big from the outset, it was not able to create a positive culture focused on high academic and behavioral expectations. Mistake No. 3: Building a large school facility. With a large enrollment, New Covenant needed a large facility, which Edison Schools, its for-profit management partner at the time, dutifully built. Since then, the New Covenant board has attempted repeatedly to shrink the size of the school. But once it accepted Edison's offer to build a 900-student facility, it was obligated legally to make a debt-service payment of about $1.2 million annually. The school simply could not afford to pay that bill unless it maintained a student enrollment of about 700 or more. Mistake No. 4: Ceding control of key academic decisions to the teachers union. To have any chance of success, a school -- especially a school in crisis -- needs to retain the management flexibility to do whatever it takes to help students succeed, including shaping and reshaping the curriculum, faculty and schedule as needed. Once New York State United Teachers unionized the faculty at New Covenant, the board allowed the union to enshrine work rules in the contract, reduce the school year and cut the length of the school day. Mistake No. 5: Failure of oversight. While the school was making a series of profound mistakes, it was the role of its chartering entity -- the State University of New York board of trustees -- to step in. SUNY's Charter Schools Institute put the school on probation, demanded data and reports, and eliminated the seventh and eighth grades. But when the "big decision" came up -- to renew or not renew New Covenant's charter, the SUNY trustees blinked by giving a full five-year renewal instead of a probationary extension or a nonrenewal. This was one of SUNY's few mistakes on chartering decisions. New Covenant is closing because the accumulation of mistakes ultimately resulted in too many parents voting with their feet, making the school no longer financially viable. Like many Albany middle-class families before them, New Covenant's largely economically disadvantaged parents are "trading up." This trading up is possible because the state has approved eight other charter schools in Albany. These schools, learning from the mistakes of New Covenant, each took at least a year or two of planning time before opening, started out with just a single grade or two, and have grown gradually. Each of these schools is nonprofit and embraces small-school settings, longer school days, longer school years, high academic and behavioral expectations, and school uniforms. There is a lesson here for the Albany school district, too, which continues to keep open schools that have long track records of failure. For example, Philip Livingston middle school, arguably the consistently worst district school in Albany, remains open despite closure recommendations from two successive superintendents. When this all is over, hopefully each of New Covenant's students will end up in a better charter school or district school. That would be good and deserved for these children. We adults, however, need to remember the valuable lessons to be learned from New Covenant's profound mistakes. Thomas W. Carroll is president of the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability and chairman of the Brighter Choice Foundation and the Brighter Choice Charter Schools.

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On Reading, Charters Outperform

By ELIZABETH GREEN
Staff Reporter of the Sun
May 29, 2007

http://www.nysun.com/article/55344

The most recent round of reading tests show students attending charter schools in the city outperforming other public schools on reading tests.

Sixty-one percent of charter school students in the city who took the test met state standards, compared to 51% of students citywide. Charters' performance also seems to be improving at a brisker pace, with the number of students meeting standards rising five points from 56% last year. City schools overall reported a gain of one-tenth of one percentage point.

The city's 58 charter schools operate outside some of the public system's constraints, and Mayor Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, have worked to increase the number of charter schools in the city. In New York, only a small portion of students attend charter schools, but legislation signed by Governor Spitzer this April increased the number of charter schools allowed in the state to 200 from 100.

Of the 58 city charter schools, 42 this year had students take the state's English Language Arts exam, which is given to third- through eighth-graders, the New York State Charter Association's policy director, Peter Murphy, said. The tests were given in January and reported by the city and state departments of education last week.

Mr. Murphy hailed the figures as evidence of the schools' advantages, including their freedom to do things like extend the class day and their obligation to raise test scores or face consequences. When poor performance led Reisenbach Charter School in Harlem to lose its charter three years ago, the act "sent a shiver through the rest of the charter school community," he said.

His group's own study found that three-quarters of state charter schools outperformed their districts, a comparison designed to control for regional differences.

A professor of education at Columbia Teachers College who studies charter schools, Jeffrey Henig, cautioned not to draw conclusions from the ten-point difference disclosed in the Sun's analysis. "Doing simple comparisons across one point in time is dangerous and misleading," Mr. Henig said. A fair assessment would chart each student's individual test score gains over time, he said, and would also control for outside factors like poverty, disabilities, and parental involvement.

Mr. Henig said charter schools could get an artificial boost, since they tend to serve more elementary school students, whose test scores tend to be higher. Indeed, city charter schools this year served more elementary than middle school students.

But older students in charter schools performed better than older students in traditional public schools. More than half of charter school eighth graders, 54%, met state reading standards, compared to just 42% citywide. And while less than 50% of sixth- and seventh-graders met standards citywide, in charter schools, 58% of seventh-graders and 61% of sixth-graders did.

A cofounder of the pro-charter group Democrats for Education Reform, Charles Ledley, suggested charter schools should be judged by the performance of their oldest students, who have been in the schools longer. At the Leadership Village Academy in Manhattan, for instance, only 50% of entering fifth-graders this year met reading standards. But 79% of sixth-graders did — a number that towers over the rest of the District 4's showing, 35%. Few other charter schools, however, showed trends that dramatic.

Mr. Henig also pointed to the problem of selection bias. New York City charter schools have the same portion of low-income students as the rest of the city, 74%, more black students — 66% compared to 33% — and fewer Latinos, a department of education spokeswoman, Melody Meyer, said. But Mr. Henig said research shows teachers sometimes shuttle a disproportionate number of troubled or ambitious students into charters. "The question is, how do you sort that out?" he said. "You need better data."

Neither New York City nor New York State publish data on individual student gains.