- At the same time we wrapped up our Wonkathon on parental choice under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews published a column on the new law’s implications for school accountability. With authority ostensibly withdrawn from the Department of Education, he wonders which measures—particularly non-academic ones—state-level officials will use to determine whether schools and districts doing right by their students. It’s a question that we originally asked in our accountability system design competition this February, yielding novel proposals for student satisfaction questionnaires, school climate surveys, and the tracking of chronic absenteeism, among others. Mathews’s take is no less rewarding.
- Meanwhile, developments in Denver are also providing a real-time examination of issues we’ve been exploring this month in our national commentary. District officials there have unveiled a new, three-phase framework for initiating the shuttering of underperforming schools, echoing the recent debate between Fordham’s Mike Petrilli and the University of Arkansas’s Jay Greene on the utility—or futility—of relying on test data for closures. (Jay struck a deeply skeptical note on “distant authorities” using such information to overrule parental demand, while Mike was more bullish on what regulators can learn from test scores.) The Denver approach seems to exhibit both rigor and balance, using student growth data to broadly classify schools before turning to local actors like teachers and parents for a more granular view. Closure is one of the truly hot-button questions in the reform conversation, so let’s hope this method gains traction.
- Andy Boy, the founder and CEO of Columbus Collegiate Academy (CCA), had every reason to be jaded about the prospect of opening an excellent charter school in Ohio. His career in education began as a teacher at one of the state’s enormous number of failing and under-regulated charters (its founder eventually did time for fraud). But if cynicism ever set in, his results at CCA don’t show it. Students at two of the school’s campuses—both serving overwhelmingly disadvantaged populations—have vaulted over the state averages for math and reading performance. Along the way, the program has grown quickly and dramatically: from fifty-seven pupils at its 2008 inception to six hundred today. And the best part? We’re their authorizer!
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