In his new book, “The Parent Revolution,” school choice advocate Corey DeAngelis explains the notable plummet in the public’s trust of public education, especially in the past five years. By his telling, school choice is the answer to all that ails us. But he’s likely overselling its healing powers.
Listen to the media, and you’ll be told that the parents’ movement is a manufactured culture war designed to dismantle public education, score cheap political points, or rake in easy money for provocateurs. Read National School Boards Association memoranda or listen to Attorney General Merrick Garland, and you’ll be told that parents’ actions at school board meetings verge on terroristic.
Quite the contrary. Many schools have fallen into disrepute because they engaged in policies and practices that tarnished their reputations. And the public has grown dissatisfied with American education because the results of the system are unsatisfactory. If a restaurant served rotten food, would we blame the customer for their anger and revulsion?
Any time parental or public dissatisfaction gets brought up, rebuttals point to an oft-cited statistic drawn from annual Kappan/Gallup surveys: Trust in public education may be low, but parents still rank their own local school highly. I myself used to read these data optimistically, but it’s unclear how much these surveys really tell us. School districts are great propaganda machines, after all. Regular emailers and press releases boast about all the good things happening, school events create warm and fuzzy feelings, and inflated grades foster a false sense of security (“It’s not my kid!”).
What’s more, there’s potential for motivated reasoning. Parents want to believe that a kid’s school is pretty good because, if not, they’d have to do something painful about it—move across town or fork out private school tuition, for example. There’d be too much cognitive dissonance to both admit public school failures and keep children there, and it’s easier to tell yourself a white lie.
Ultimately, any education reform advocate must reckon with the fact that satisfaction with public education generally is the lowest it’s been since Gallup started polling on it.
In his new book, The Parent Revolution, school choice advocate Corey DeAngelis unrolls a saga that he believes explains the notable plummet in trust of public education that’s worsened in the past five years.
As you might assume, it began with pandemic-era school closures. It’s easy to forget the excesses and corruptions exposed during debates over school openings. A teachers union official defended closures while vacating in the tropics. The Chicago Teachers Union released a cringe-inducing interpretive dance video in protest of school openings and later blamed the push for reopening on “sexism, racism, and misogyny.” A school attempted to expel a young boy who had a BB gun in the background during a video call. United Teachers Los Angeles demanded socialized healthcare, defunded police departments, and pressed for a moratorium on charter schools before it would consider teaching in-person again. And countless ludicrous exhibitionist protests cropped up in cities across the country with teachers carting around open caskets.
Amidst such silliness, there was ample evidence that schools were in fact safe to open. Months into the pandemic, it was clear that they weren’t Covid super-spreaders. European countries read the evidence early on and reopened while American school children faced shuttered school doors and continued online learning. Meanwhile, closures enacted an academic and mental health crisis among teenagers.
But such goofy examples overlook an even deeper and more important corruption. The CDC drew guidance from the American Federation of Teachers that went into its school opening guidelines, mixing politics and lobbyists with the so-called “science.” Studies found that union power correlated to the length and severity of school closures, not viral spread. Throughout the pandemic, bureaucrats and advocates actively conspired against the interests of families and students.
As one bright spot throughout all this, parents discovered a few levers through which they could exert power over and control of schools. In January 2021, instead of developing plans to open schools, San Francisco’s school board wasted meeting time on renaming schools, replacing controversial titles like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. Parents mounted a campaign to recall board members, and elsewhere, parents sued districts to reopen. These were first spurts and starts of a parent’s revolt.
But there was much more to follow. After schools reopened, story after story about politicized curricula hit the headlines: mock political rallies with fifth graders, lessons that deny basic biology for kindergarteners, and policies that keep life-altering decisions from parental oversight. Soon parent organizations formed with the intent of mounting public pressure and political campaigns to counter union influence. In small-turnout elections, unions can flood the polls, but a parent constituency could shift the balance—at least in theory.
Ultimately, as a history of the parent’s movement, The Parent Revolution is a welcome and constructive contribution. Where the media exonerates school officials and slanders parents, DeAngelis tells the truth of pandemic closures and culture battles over schools. It’s an honest telling that’s doubly welcome in the face of counter media revisionism.
In the second half of his book, DeAngelis turns to potential solutions and corrections. And while I remain a proponent of school choice, he oversells that prescription. A few Tylenol might help the headache, but that doesn’t justify swallowing a bottle-full.
DeAngelis deftly surveys much of the relevant research: “Out of seventeen random-assignments studies, eleven find statistically significant positive effects and three find negative impacts.” What’s more, of the twenty-nine studies that investigate the effect of choice on traditional public schools, twenty-six find that school choice improves them. In other words, competition is better for everyone, even students not in the choice program. And school choice benefits non-academic outcomes as well: civic knowledge and engagement, crime rates, and political tolerance, for example. What’s not to love?
But most of this research investigated voucher programs targeted at low-income families. That the benefits of such policies would translate to universal ESAs isn’t clear. Perhaps research will vindicate universal private choice—and I’ll be the first to make a mea culpa if it does—but as we’ve learned from decades of testing and accountability, it’s possible to oversell a worthy policy remedy and then watch as political backlash dismantles it.
When it comes to combating “woke-ism” and progressive capture of American schools, I’m quite skeptical of school choice. If charter school networks, educators’ professional organizations, curriculum companies, teacher prep programs, credentialing and accrediting institutions, leading publications, and all of the other mediating institutions in American education share the same progressive worldview, as appears to me to be the case, I can’t see how allowing families choice will combat such institutional capture. School choice may be necessary, but it’s far from sufficient.
Amid all of DeAngelis’s data, the most moving argument for school choice comes in its opening pages, where he recounts a story from his own life: walking up blood-spattered steps in his public middle school, where violence and fights were the norm. His life trajectory changed when he got accepted into a magnet high school and encountered for the first time a rigorous education surrounded by academically-minded peers. School choice saved him from chaos and propelled him to success. This was and still is the most convincing case for school choice, each individual child who deserves something better.
In his book, DeAngelis shows that the lion’s share of American students deserves something better—something better than political interests holding them back, something better than political indoctrination, something better than academic mediocrity. The parent’s movement could, should, and very well may help to establish the institutions, staff the school boards, and win the elections necessary to achieve that “something better.”
As we observe another National Charter School Week, one fact is clear: Families are voting with their feet for charter schools. Charter enrollment has increased by almost 14 percent since 2019, the last full school year before pandemic school closures. Meanwhile, district public schools have lost around 1.2 million students since the pandemic, with thirty-seven states and two-thirds of districts suffering declines. Families are choosing charters because of their educational successes and because they are sources of community renewal.
Charter school facts
As regular Flypaper readers are aware, charter schools are taxpayer-funded, independent public schools of choice for both families and educators that are accountable for the results of student learning. The movement to create them began in 1991 when Minnesota passed the first charter law. Today, forty-six such laws have enabled the creation of 8,000 schools and campuses enrolling 3.7 million students, around 7.5 percent of all public school students, according to the Data Dashboard of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. They employ around 251,000 teachers. Almost three-fifths of charters are urban, with a quarter in the suburbs and 17 percent in rural and small-town America.
According to the Data Dashboard, charter schools have consistently enrolled proportionately more students of color and children from low-income families than traditional district schools. Currently, seven of ten (70.7 percent) charter pupils are children of color compared to slightly more than half (53.8 percent) of district students, with six of ten charter students receiving free and reduced-price lunch compared to half (50.3 percent) in district schools. Hispanic students are the fastest-growing charter student group.
As educational institutions, the focus is on teaching and learning and accountability for results. Much ink has been spilled on their academic successes and failures. A report from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes that spans the school years from 2014–15 to 2018–19 provides a useful summary of these findings:
Building communities and social capital
Along with being educational institutions, charter schools function as mediating institutions in their communities that build social capital.
Charter schools are wellsprings of civic renewal and community rebirth. If Alexis de Tocqueville were to revisit America today, he would surely say that charter schools are vibrant illustrations of Americans’ enduring appetite to create new voluntary organizations to meet human needs and build communities. They serve as mediating institutions, a middle path between the impersonal agencies of government and the private affairs of individuals and families. They reinvigorate the local civic community since they interact with the people, places, and institutions where they operate.
Charter schools are also opportunities for educators to create voluntary professional communities based on shared values, goals, and instructional approaches. Teachers and principals who choose to work in the charter sector have the autonomy to choose who else works in their school, rather than having a school district bureaucracy assign an educator to the school.
Charter schools also build what sociologist James Coleman called social capital, which he saw “…as a resource for action [that includes] obligations and expectations, information channels, and social norms.” A charter school’s social capital arises out of the relationships that exist among people: the children who attend it and the adults involved with it, including parents, the educators who staff it, and the community members who support it. A school lacking social capital is not likely to be a productive learning environment nor much of a community asset.
Charters create new forms of association. While some charters are neighborhood schools in the old-fashioned sense, others transcend particular neighborhoods or geographic places. They may be organized by curricular philosophies like Montessori or classical education or by place-based geographic approaches like charters located in parent workplaces. There are also networks of charter schools or charter management organizations that cross district and state boundaries and are organized around a common mission and instructional design, like Achievement First Charter Schools, Basis Charter Schools, or High Tech High Charter Schools.
Charter schools display elements that sociologist Robert Nisbet thought essential to community association, including a high degree of personal intimacy, social cohesion, and moral commitment. As he wrote in The Quest for Community, “Community is the product of people working together on problems, of autonomous and collective fulfillment or internal objectives, and of the experience of living under codes of authority which have been set in large degrees by the persons involved.” That’s what happens in charter schools.
Stubborn particulars that unite
Charter schools are sometimes faulted for dividing communities rather than uniting them. And lately there’s been more political division around charters, though for years their support was a bipartisan political effort. Still, that hasn’t entirely disappeared. Witness the recent effort in Colorado by a bipartisan political coalition that included Democratic Governor Jared Polis to defeat a measure to make major changes that would restrict some of the freedoms that that state’s charter schools possess.
The charter model presents a vision of public education that sees K–12 schools differently than the centralized, bureaucratic view inherent in the district arrangement. The charter model emphasizes a decentralized array of self-governing, results-oriented schools run by all sorts of different providers, like educators, parents, and nonprofit community organizations.
Charter schools are “not the collectivism of organized government action from above…[but] the collectivism of voluntary groups action from below,” to borrow from the well-known management consultant Peter Drucker in his book The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition. They are at the intersection of civil society and public education.
“Charter schooling has been arguably the most influential school reform efforts of the past several decades,” conclude the authors of a 2023 report published in the Journal of Public Economics. While this is true, it’s also true that not every charter has lived up to its promise or been a source of civic renewal in communities. Many have been closed for not serving their students, families, or communities. As we observe National Charter School Week, all this is worth recalling and recommitting ourselves to creating more high-quality independent public schools of choice that are accountable for results.
I’ve made no secret of my fervent belief that curriculum is the overlooked lever in education reform. Replacing the slapdash, incoherent, and under-nourishing mélange of materials to which the typical U.S. student is exposed with a more rigorous and thoughtfully sequenced student experience holds promise unmatched by the “structural” reforms favored by policymakers. Over the years, I’ve also crossed swords occasionally with fellow curriculum advocates who labor under the misconception (or allow others to do so) that simply adopting high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) is a magic bullet, or who obsess over minor points of orthodoxy between programs. The larger battle to be fought and won is making curriculum—virtually any decent curriculum—central to school improvement efforts.
In fact, I’ve lately struck from my vocabulary the phrase “curriculum adoption” in favor of curriculum purchases. The word “adoption” implies a much higher bar than just forking out taxpayer dollars for a new program and calling it a day. It’s a serious and sustained effort shared within and between grades to implement curriculum rigorously and with fidelity. Such efforts remain the exception, not the rule. Thus, I’m pleased to recommend a new case study published by Rivet Education, a curriculum-focused consulting group, which lays out the steps needed to turn a curriculum purchase into an adoption process worthy of its name, and that moves the needle on student outcomes.
In 2018, teachers and leaders in Wisconsin’s Mount Horeb Area School District made the decision to adopt a new math curriculum called “Bridges in Mathematics” and produced by The Math Learning Center. Students in this small town in southern Wisconsin were doing reasonably well on state math tests, but teachers had noticed that they “struggled when given more challenging math work” including problems that required them to conceptualize, explain their thinking, or apply math to real-world situations. Mount Horeb embarked on a multi-year “journey” to fully implement Bridges. This involved multiple phases, which Rivet categorizes as “exploration; program installation; initial implementation; consistent implementation; and innovation and sustainability.”
In the “exploration” phase, district officials and (mostly math) teachers “established a vision for effective and equitable instruction, reviewing and evaluating curriculum.” They reviewed high-quality math curricula, weighing the strengths and weaknesses of a number of programs, each ultimately selecting the curriculum that best aligned with the district’s priorities. Next, professional learning providers were recruited (presumably with Rivet’s input and guidance) to educate teachers on mathematical practices, assessing student work, and the role HQIM plays in student learning.
It’s the “program installation” phase that warrants the most attention and contrasts most vividly with what I suspect is the standard experience with curriculum “adoption,” wherein teachers unbox the materials, do a “walk-through” of the new program, and sit for a day or two of professional development led by a district staffer who attended a “train the trainer” workshop at a budget hotel conference room the previous spring. If they get any ongoing professional development after that, it’s minimal. I could have pulled a muscle in my neck nodding at a quote in the case study from Latricia Johnson, a math coach who worked on Mount Horeb’s implementation. “One-and-done, workshop-based professional learning doesn’t work,” she said. “Teachers need a mix of observations, lesson studies, modeling, and [professional learning communities] for a successful professional learning plan.” Hear, hear.
Yet even that elides what is almost certainly the main impediment to successful, sustained curriculum implementation: internal resistance. As my AEI colleague Rick Hess never tires of pointing out, it’s easy to get people do something, but it’s hard to get them to do it well. It’s even harder when teachers are comfortable with what they’ve been doing for years and reluctant to change practice. I wanted to know more about how Mount Horeb built teacher buy-in—not just compliance—without which even excellent curriculum tends to underperform.
Rivet’s case study pairs nicely (or contrasts vividly) with a recent article by Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay, which paints a concerning picture of the field’s relationship with curriculum. At the recent annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, William Zahner, a math professor at San Diego State, presented a survey of more than 1,000 math teachers. “A surprising number of math teachers,” he reported, “particularly at the high school level simply said we don’t use the district of school-provided materials, or they claimed they didn’t have any.”
Only it’s not surprising. We’ve known for a long time that nearly every teacher creates, customizes, or “curates” their own lesson plans and materials (hello, Teachers Pay Teachers!). A little of this is appropriate and beneficial but too much results in lost coherence. There’s also good evidence to suggest that teachers simply aren’t very good judges of rigor when they venture into the “curriculum bazaar.” The main screen they employ is more often than not “student engagement.”
Truth be told, the Mount Horeb “case study” is also a marketing exercise. Rivet is a consulting outfit founded by veterans of the Louisiana Department of Education who helped engineer that state’s ground-breaking curriculum and instructional reforms under then–state chief John White. They work with state and school district leaders to scale the adoption and implementation of HQIM. Nevertheless, the effort they highlight in Wisconsin is a good model for districts that seek to take curriculum seriously or wonder why their “adoptions” disappoint or fail to stick. It’s required reading for state officials, school board members, and district and building leaders who are convinced that HQIM is an essential component of student success. It paints a compelling picture of what it would look like if we took curriculum seriously as a school improvement strategy.
In an effort to avoid prescriptive top-down mandates, the school accountability provisions in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) allow states flexibility in determining what measures they’ll use to assess school quality, how much “weight” they carry, and over what time periods they’re calculated. A recent descriptive study uses data from North Carolina to demonstrate how policymakers’ decisions can influence school ratings and, ultimately, the list of schools identified for improvement under ESSA. (States must identify their most troubled schools but have considerable flexibility in what to do about them.).
Analysts Erica Harbatkin (Florida State University) and Betsy Wolf (U.S. Department of Education) draw on eight years of administrative data from the Tar Heel State—including roughly 1,900 public schools. They develop three ESSA-compliant school quality metrics, all of which include proficiency rates, student growth, high-school graduation rates, English learner proficiency, and chronic absenteeism rates. The first four elements are required by ESSA, and the last is the most popular of the flexible “fifth indicators” that states select for themselves. The metrics vary based on weighting and the number of data points included (one to three years). For each of the three metrics, analysts simulate school ratings overall, as well as which schools would end up in the bottom 5 percent that require “comprehensive support and improvement” (CSI) as required by ESSA.
In Goldilocks lingo, the analysts undertook to identify the too-hot and too-cold tradeoffs arising from the various simulations. Their key “temperature” gauges are stability and equity. “Stability” addresses consistency, meaning whether there is volatility (unpredictable changes) at different points in the distribution. “Equity” examines whether school ratings are systematically and disproportionately lower for schools serving disadvantaged student groups—the idea being that metrics that weigh proficiency too heavily could “further marginalize” schools with students in need. Thus, analysts calculate whether the share of schools within three equal groups—defined as the 25 percent of schools with the largest share of low-income and Black students, the middle 50 percent, and the 25 percent with the smallest share of these student subgroups—would total 5 percent in each because “a perfectly equitable accountability system would identify exactly 5 percent of CSI schools in each of the quantiles.” The extent to which a given group deviates from that 5 percent threshold represents their measure of inequity (arguable as it is).
The three simulations are as follows:
They also change the number of years of data to see how that affects their measures of interest. They toggle between a single year of data (which is what most states do, although they don’t have to under ESSA), a three-year weighted mean where the current year is weighted most heavily, and two other scenarios where they use one year of data for each of three years but alter how they classify the lowest performing schools (meaning the schools appear in three consecutive years or appear in two of three consecutive years).
Looking at stability first, they find that weighting proficiency more heavily than growth produces more stable year-to-year ratings. This is because proficiency rates are strongly correlated with student characteristics. Not surprisingly, ratings based on three years of data are three to four times more stable than those based on a single year. They also find that the “three of three rule”—meaning classifying schools for intervention that fall in the lowest performing group for three consecutive years—produces the most stable list. However, and this is important, using three years of data versus one more than offsets the loss of stability one gets when shifting from a high proficiency to a high growth index model. In other words, there’s a lot of volatility in scores when a state that once weighed proficiency heavily in its accountability system decides to weight growth heavily instead, but this volatility is taken care of (and then some) if a state uses three years of rolling data.
As for their measure of equity, the higher-proficiency index was the most inequitable and the higher-growth index the least inequitable. Specifically, under the higher-proficiency index, 75 percent of students in the lowest-rated 20 percent of schools were low-income, compared with just 39 percent in the top-rated 20 percent of schools. Under the higher-growth index, the comparable figures were 65 percent of students compared with 47 percent. Likewise, when they aggregate data into the three quantiles above, none of the simulations identify exactly 5 percent as needing CSI services, but the proficiency measure disproportionately identifies schools in the bottom that are the most disadvantaged.
Still, the bottom line for Harbatkin and Wolf is that using three years of data is imperative for consistency no matter which you weight more heavily—proficiency or growth—given that each has tradeoffs.
We endlessly debate those tradeoffs here at Fordham, underscoring the importance of a state identifying its goals before it decides how to balance proficiency and growth. If the goal is to identify schools that aren’t meeting the bar in order to target scarce resources to them, then it’s preferable to weight proficiency more heavily. But if the goal is to identify schools that are (or aren’t!) making a palpable difference in their students’ academic lives, then it’s preferable to weight growth more heavily. Another option: Follow Texas’s example and give schools two helpings of grades—and hope that bowl is just right.
SOURCE: Erica Harbatkin and Betsy Wolf, “State accountability decisions under the Every Student Succeeds Act and the validity, stability, and equity of school ratings,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (October 2023).
In a special National Charter Schools Week Education Gadfly Show podcast, Brian Kisida, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, joins Mike and David to discuss whether charters have impeded racial integration in American schools. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber examines a new study investigating if intensive English learner programs benefit students.
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Michael Petrilli:
Welcome to the Education Gadfly Show. I'm your host Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Today, Brian Kisida, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, joins us to discuss whether charters have impeded racial integration in American schools. Then on the research minute, Amber reports on a new study investigating if intensive newcomer English programs benefit EL students. All this on the Education Gadfly show,
Hello. This is your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute here at the Education Gadfly Show and online at fordhaminstitute.org. And now please welcome our special guest for this week, Brian Kisida. Brian, welcome to the show.
Brian Kisida:
Thank you, Mike, it's really great to join you.
Michael Petrilli:
Yeah, Brian is an assistant professor at the University of Missouri Go Mizzou, and we are here to talk about charter schools and integration here on National Charter School Week. Happy Charter School week to you, Brian. I'm not sure if you celebrate or not.
Brian Kisida:
Sure. I did know it was that, but I don't those things so much.
Michael Petrilli:
And also joining us as always, and a man who celebrates National charter school week every week of the year. I dunno how you'd celebrate charter school week. Exactly. I mean, other than writing about charter schools, talking about charter schools, which we're going to do, but I don't think there's any fasting or anything like that involved, unlike some other celebrations out there. Oh my goodness. Well, Brian, we are so excited to have you on the show. We invited you here because there's a new study on charter schools and racial integration that is getting a lot of attention study by Sean Reardon and his colleague. And we know you have done some great work on this subject as well, and we are really trying to make sense of it. Let's do that on Ed reform update.
I'll say speaking personally, I think this is a super important topic and then I quickly get into the weeds of the methodology and I get so confused because of how scholars have tried to figure out how to study this issue, which is not as straightforward as it may seem. So I want to get into all of that. But first, lemme just start with this is the way the press talks about this is they use the word segregation and it's always been for a long time, the case conservatism especially, don't love that word, except when we're talking about Jim Crow kind of jore segregation. That was a particular evil saying to black children, you may not go to the school because you were black. Then there's what happens when schools are not racially integrated, maybe because of housing policies. That too, though definitely had racist history.
There's also the white flight dynamic, and now we talk about school choice in charter schools where there's this question of whether we are not having schools as integrated as maybe we could have because of the choices that parents are making. And is it fair to call that segregation, especially if we're not talking about the choices of white parents, right? We're talking about the choices maybe of black parents of Hispanic parents. I don't remember seeing in the higher ed context, for example, people talking about HBCUs in the modern era being segregated, right? People take for granted that those are some fantastic schools that some African-Americans choose to enroll in and to have a proud history. And yet if the issue is that black families are choosing charter schools and therefore the traditional public schools are not as integrated as they might've otherwise been, we call that segregation. So that is my speech. You are welcome to comment on it. If you have any comments on that though, you don't have to.
Brian Kisida:
No, I definitely do. I mean, first I think arguing against terminology is somewhat a difficult task. It's really hard to change the vocabulary that people have agreed upon. But there is the incredible nuance as you point out between the idea of what historically has been called dejure segregation versus defacto segregation. So that means segregation. That was a matter of legal barriers to entry for minority populations versus people making choices. But I don't know. I've had some instances where we've tried to use other words like stratification or isolation or different words like that. And I think that it's very hard. I think some of this is media driven. Segregation is a term that can drive a lot of headlines, but I also want to, I think maybe push back on this characterization that we don't have segregation like we did in the past. I just don't think that charter schools are the source. So I mean, just to set the stage as somebody who studies education policy, if I'm at a dinner party and somebody asks me what's the biggest problem facing education today? I think the answer is segregation or whatever term we want to use, but it's like one of these problems that nobody really knows how to address. There's been all these different ways of coming at this problem, and it seems like politically there's no good solutions out there.
Michael Petrilli:
So Brian, let's get into just the background here. So, alright, some of these studies say that whatever we call this, let's call it to racial isolation has gotten worse or at least no better in recent decades. And then there's a secondary point we're going to get to, which is that charter schools are partly to blame. So first, just the overall trend. I mean, can that possibly be true that we haven't made much progress in decades when it comes to giving kids access to integrated school environments?
Brian Kisida:
So that narrative is a little bit dependent on which research study you look and how you measure segregation. But I would say that the broad best way to characterize that literature is that segregation for about the last 20 years has been flat or declining. And this has been shown in numerous studies with the exception of some of the less good studies that use these poor measures that don't actually take into account the fact that the United States just has an increasingly diverse population. So our schools tend to have more traditionally underserved minority populations. But once you account for that, the trends are largely flat. And that's confirmed and work that I've done and work that other people have done. Now with regards to this latest report by Owens and Rearden, they do find that segregation is increasing by looking at particular samples. So in some cases, they're looking at the hundred largest school districts, and in some cases they're looking at, I think somewhere around 500 school districts that tend to enroll large populations of black students. And they're finding an increase there. But by and large, if we look at all 15,000 school districts in the country, we don't find those trends. So that's not to say that it's not happening, it just seems that it's happening in particular places.
Michael Petrilli:
Yeah, no, that's interesting. I could imagine this is just a hypothesis that you may see maybe racial isolation increasing in the urban core districts that tend to be the big districts, but maybe decreasing in the suburbs as the suburbs become more diverse. And if you don't have bunch of those suburban districts in the sample, then you're going to miss that. And you've mentioned the diversity, I mean, way back when this was really a white black issue because the population of Hispanic and Asian kids was tiny, at least in most places. Now we've got this huge group of Hispanic kids and a growing group of Asian kids. So you're saying that some studies try to deal with that and some just do not.
Brian Kisida:
Right? I mean, not to point fingers, but I will mean the biggest headlines I tend to see come with the most sensational applies findings. And most of those have come out of the UCLA's civil rights project, which looks at something like, what's the proportion of schools that are 90% non-white or something like that, which we know is something that's increasing just because of demographic trends in the United States. And so that's not an appropriate measure to look at if we want to really understand, we have to take that into account. Owens and Rearden do use a good normalized measure, as have we in our research. And when you use that, you don't find striking increases in the aggregate, but it seems like they're finding these types of increases in particular large districts.
Michael Petrilli:
So now in your study and in the Rearden one, there are these findings around charter schools. So just help me try to understand what we're even looking at. Is it if there were some world where we didn't have a charter school movement, here's what things would look like versus the world we live in where we do have charter schools? Is that the way to think about it?
Brian Kisida:
Yeah, I mean, the research that I did with Tomas Menez and met Shingo at the Urban Institute, so we're doing a causal analysis. So we're looking at 20 years of data and we're looking when charter schools open, what the effect of that has on these measures of the population. And when we look at this in the aggregate, our basic takeaway is yes, there is an increase in segregation, but it's quite small. So in our national study, the presence of charters has created a 0.72 percentage point increase in segregation. So that's something that I think in terms of percentage points, that doesn't sound like a lot. If we sort of talk about that in terms of percent change, which is a number that can sometimes be misleading, we find that there's a 6% increase in segregation. And then if you look at Owens and Rearden finding effects that are two or three times larger than ours, and so they're expressing those in some cases as I think a 40% increase, which is based off of about a three percentage point increase. But again, that's looking at a small slice of the school districts in the country. But I guess either way that you look at it, it's somewhere between a one to three percentage point increase.
Michael Petrilli:
And do we know how much of this is driven by parents of color choosing charter schools versus white parents choosing charter schools?
Brian Kisida:
That's a really difficult question to answer because these studies are using aggregate data. So they're looking at the share of students of different ethnic backgrounds in the district. They're not tracking individual students. And this is actually kind of one of the things that makes this a difficult thing to research because we don't really know that a student's going from this public school to this charter school. We're just looking at how those compositions are changing over time. And in fact, one of the sort of things that we impact in our study is this idea of where you measure segregation at what geographic unit you use matters a lot. So if we just look at the school district as the unit of analysis similar to Owens and Rearden, we find a larger effect. Again, that's where we find the 6% increase or the 0.72 percentage point increase.
But if we increase that geographic area to include metro areas which contain numbers of school districts, the effect is smaller. And when we disaggregate that between the district effect and the within district effect, we actually find that charter schools have an integrating force because students are moving from one district that's more racially isolated to a district that's less. And in our analysis, that actually erases about half of the effect that we see in terms of charter school segregation. So the geography matters, and of course, I think if we were doing this just as a school district exercise, it wouldn't matter to look at school districts because that is the appropriate unit of analysis when it comes to charter schools. The point is that students can travel across district lines. The vast majority of segregation in the United States is between districts, not within districts. The basic, and this is kind of what I was getting at when I was trying to hold onto the idea that there is a such thing still as deju segregation, legal segregation, and it is actually school attendance boundaries and school district lines, because those are legal barriers to integration that you're not allowed to cross unless you go to a charter school or you break the law, or in some places where there may be interdistrict choice.
Michael Petrilli:
David, I'm sorry, I have not let you in here. What's on your mind?
David Griffith:
I'm curious to get Brian's perspective. You characterize, you started by characterizing segregation, for lack of a better word, as kind of the biggest problem in American education today. I don't know if I agree to be honest with you, but let's just go with that. I'm curious to know what you think, if anything we could do about it, right? Is there some mechanism that I haven't thought about? I know we have diversified design charters, we have weighted lotteries, we have all these things that kind of sound good in principle, and then you try them and it doesn't really seem like anything happens, at least at scale. I don't know. Is there a solution we haven't thought of?
Brian Kisida:
I don't know that there is. I mean, this is kind of, there's the famous Norman Rockwell painting, the problem we all live with, I think, and a lot of people have adopted that sort of phrase to talk about segregation in America. But I think it's better articulated as the problem we all ignore because it's this, it does kind of strike me as one of the largest hypocrisies in education policy attempts to integrate even through some sort of voluntary inter or interdistrict choice are often fought by suburban parents that don't want to open up their school to poor students or minority students, or they don't want their students to be rezoned somewhere else. And typically these tend to be parents that we would describe as left-leaning liberals who would not in agreement if we talked about the drastic issue of segregation and how important it is. But when the rubber meets the road, they're not willing to actually make the changes necessary. So it seems to be this politically impossible problem in terms of solving it that way. I do think there's other ways to address the problems that that segregation creates, but I don't know if there's much we can do to affect segregation itself through policy.
Michael Petrilli:
Well, and the history here is important. Charter schools came to life in the early 1990s. This was after a period when their big urban school districts were very much in decline, largely because of white flight and then middle class black flight disinvestment. They were kind of in this death spiral and nobody knew how to fix 'em. I mean, there were various ways of reform that weren't working. And so there was a lot of energy around doing something to start fresh and to give poor families, especially black families, a chance immediately to get something better. And so the charter school movement was born, and we quickly saw these, so-called No Excuses Schools, the kipps of the world, which basically said, look, if we are not going to bind a way to get rid of these schools with concentrated poverty and racial concentration, then we're going to figure out a way to make them work effectively.
And they did. And that seems to be a thorn in the side of some of these other folks all these years later. And look, I mean, I get it. If you really believe that the only answer is to integrate the schools, then I guess you see charter schools as a sideshow or something that is really raising questions about that strategy. But look, we know how to build charter schools, including great charter schools, including great charter schools that are high poverty and that serve all black and Hispanic kids. What you said earlier, Brian, I think is right. We don't know how to integrate our schools or at least come up with a strategy that's politically feasible.
Brian Kisida:
Well, not only that, we fight it right, not, but, so let me give you an example close to home, but this happens all over the country. So the Hazelwood School District in St. Louis executed 4,500 residency investigations over the past five years. And so they refer to this as educational larceny. So these are parents who are lying about their address to get into a better school and you go to jail.
Michael Petrilli:
Well, we will have to leave it there on that somber note, Brian Kisida at the University of Missouri, thank you so much for joining us. Do check out his study. We'll include it in the show notes. Hope you come back on the show sometime soon, Brian.
Brian Kisida:
Thank you.
Michael Petrilli:
Alright, now it's time for everyone's favorite Amber's Research Minute. Amber, welcome back to the show.
Amber Northern:
Thank you, Mike.
Michael Petrilli:
Happy National Charter Schools week.
Amber Northern:
Ah, to you too.
Michael Petrilli:
You may not know about it because I'm not sure you can really celebrate there in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Sorry about that,
Amber Northern:
Mike. You are right about that. You are right about that.
Michael Petrilli:
I know you all are trying. You're trying with those, what do you call them, those charter like schools? We
Amber Northern:
Call them lab schools, but we do not put lab schools in charters in the same sentence, Mike.
Michael Petrilli:
Oh, is that right? I'm not sure I knew that. I think I said to a reporter recently. Oh, lab schools, they're basically charter schools sort
Amber Northern:
Of. No, no, they're not. They are not between school districts and community colleges or four year universities. And we'll be putting that in Dan, do not. Do not edit that part out. Yes.
Michael Petrilli:
Sorry. Dr. Northern member of the Virginia Board of Education. Okay. Well, what you got for us on the research front,
Amber Northern:
We have a new study that examines the effect of an intensive English program on the ELA and math academic achievement of newly arrived English learners looking at tracking them for up to three years after they enter this intensive English program. So again, the program targets EL students whose initial English proficiency is deemed too low even to participate in mainstream ESL services. They offer these students services in a sheltered environment off of their main campus for a minimum of six weeks up to one year, where they're taught foundational English language and literacy skills, such as learning the alphabet, basic English vocabulary, and tech structure. Core subjects such as math and science are also taught, but to a much lesser extent as a focus is on learning the English language rather than on grade level content. Afterwards. These kids transition to mainstream ESL instruction in their neighborhood school, which is typically a combination of push in or pull out services combined with English only core content classes.
So we've got a regression discontinuity design here. They're comparing outcomes of kids whose initial English proficiency scores on the wida, which is a ELL assessment that most folks have heard of. They fall within a small band around the eligibility cutoff for this intense program. So they therefore have, the kids have comparable initial English language skills, but they otherwise receive different types of English language development supports. So you've got these EL kids who barely missed the cutoff for the newcomer program receiving this mainstream ESL support from their district. And then you've got this intensive program, so just kids falling on the margins of the cutoff. They use individual level data on the universe of kids who were screened for EL classification in grades three through eight, 2009 to 2019. They attended public schools in a large urban district in Georgia. That district serves a county that is residents to nearly 80% of the refugees who have resettled in Georgia.
Michael Petrilli:
Oh, interesting. So you say county, so maybe not. Atlanta
Amber Northern:
Serves a county that is residents to 80% of refugees. The initial sample consists over 7,000 kids of whom they have data on WIDA scores, they've got demographics, got refugee status, and they're looking primarily at their end of grade ELA and math scores at grades three through eight. Alright, what'd they find? Small and insignificant effects in the short term, which is just a year out on students' ELA scores, however, big differences by grade levels. So eligible students in the younger grades, which is three through five, had higher ELA test scores. In the short term, it's about 0.20 to almost 0.4, 0.39 standard deviations compared to the ineligible kids. They also found suggestive evidence of similar impacts on math, but the math weren't as stable. Those math results changed based on the model they were using. On the other hand, the middle school kids saw a decline in ELA and math scores 0.21, up to 0.25 standard deviations in the short term, and now they're going to go looking long term up to three years out.
And then they find that those patterns are largely panning out in the long term. So the short term gains among the younger kids remain stable over time. So they continued to score up to 0.38 standard deviations higher in ELA. Three years after that initial program started, similar programs in math and those declines in test scores, we saw who in the middle school. So grades six through seven, those kids continued on a downward trajectory by the second year. So two years after program eligibility students in the newcomer program and the middle school grades experienced a 0.56 decline in ELA end course or grade scores compared to the control kids. So they had this big discussion on the grade of first exposure to this newcomer program is a key factor upon how these trajectories evolved. But one last thing, and I thought this was interesting, these positive persistent effects that we saw on ELA were accompanied by negative impacts on English language proficiency. So they say, okay, one explanation maybe is that what they're measuring on the English proficiency test is different than they're measuring on the ELA end of grade test because English proficiency is a lot about speaking and listening, but they're like, well, maybe that's more prone to be influenced by linguistic isolation from their English speaking peers. Because we're recall that these program kids have up to a year isolated from these core content classes in their general education classes. So that's what I've got.
Michael Petrilli:
Interesting. I guess I'm surprised though that I would think that usually in my head I'd say, well, the younger kids, we should just let them sink or swim and they'll figure it out and the older kids would need more help learning the language first and yet that's the opposite of what we found here. Right?
Amber Northern:
It is it,
Michael Petrilli:
What do you think about that, David?
David Griffith:
Yeah, I don't know. I guess I'm also thinking about the counterfactual here, right? If you just miss a year of math in middle school, I don't know, maybe it means more right than it does if you miss second grade math, whatever that is. I don't know. The sort of content stuff is more fluid at the elementary level, so maybe that's part of it. But I hear what you're saying, Mike. I mean, Amber is the sense that all these kids, I don't know that they come into elementary school or middle school with kind of similarly low English skills, at least at the start, or do we think these are different populations?
Amber Northern:
No, from what they gathered, it was very similar what they're coming in to start with. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, you think that, gosh, by the time you get middle school, maybe it's just part of, it's just too late if you don't know the language. I don't know. It's confusing.
Michael Petrilli:
And that the counterfactual wasn't just, I guess I should be careful with my sink or swim. Right? They were still getting ESL in the counterfactual,
Amber Northern:
Right? In their district. But it wasn't as intensely focused on learning the language as this was.
Michael Petrilli:
Yeah. And it wasn't as isolated as this other one
Amber Northern:
Was. Right. That's right.
Michael Petrilli:
Alright, well, hey, I'm glad we're studying this stuff. This is obviously a big issue all over the country right now as we have this wave of migrant kids coming in and many of them with very low English proficiency. So good stuff. Even if it makes us scratch our heads.
Amber Northern:
Yes. And especially, I mean the English proficiency, the speaking and listening, I thought, okay, well maybe that could be it. But that was called a head scratcher too, right? The proficiency scores went down. Anyhow, yeah, we need some more black studies, Mike.
Michael Petrilli:
We want to understand what the heck is going
Amber Northern:
On going on.
Michael Petrilli:
All right, good. Well, thank you, Amber. Good stuff. That is all the time. We've got Ford this week though, so until next week,
David Griffith:
I'm David Griffin.
Michael Petrilli:
And I'm Mike Peti at the Thomas b Fordham Institute. Signing off
Cheers
Jeers
