The Education Gadfly Weekly

Minnesota passed the nation’s first charter school law in 1991, nearly twenty-five years ago. And it’s been fifteen years since we published Charter Schools in Action, which described this educational innovation as a promising path to stronger student achievement and an engine “to recreate the democratic underpinnings of public education and rejoin schools to a vigorous civil society.”

Since 1991, forty-three states and the District of Columbia have allowed for the existence and operation of these independent public schools of choice. Today, some 6,700 of them serve nearly three million students, almost 6 percent of U.S. public school enrollment. They are the fastest-growing school choice option in the country and already educate more than half as many children as attend private schools, which have been around for ages. They are, in fact, as close to a “disruptive innovation” as American K–12 education has ever seen. They have created a new market and an alternative delivery system that affords long-neglected families access to potentially higher-quality schools than they find within the traditional district structure.

Yet for all its promise, impressive growth, and visibility in the public square, the charter movement has ample room to improve. The first quarter-century of chartering has taught us much about what should happen in the second. It’s slightly embarrassing to acknowledge, with the benefit of hindsight, that putting a charter sign on a school building actually reveals surprisingly little—mostly just that it’s a “school of choice” with some freedom to be different.

Early advocates, ourselves included, were naïve about a few things. Here are five of them, a list that can easily be expanded.

First, not enough attention was paid to authorizing, governance, and quality control. We’ve focused on quantity rather than quality, assuming that a barely regulated marketplace would provide more assurance of school quality than it has in reality.

Second, we did not demand sufficient funding (or facilities). And while we welcomed the infusions of capital and entrepreneurialism that have accompanied private sector participation in the charter venture, we didn’t take seriously enough the risk of profiteering.

Third, we didn’t insist on sufficient school autonomy—nailed into place, not just vaguely promised. The result has been a large number of charter schools still fighting for operational, financial, and governance freedoms.

Fourth, the laudable impulse to concentrate first on poor minority kids trapped in abysmal inner-city schools contributed to an unfortunate perception of charters as merely schools for impoverished urban dwellers. There’s a certain uniformity across much of today’s charter world, and (save perhaps for virtual schools) not enough real innovating.

Fifth, the R&D quality of charters has eroded, along with the vision of the late Albert Shanker that charters would emerge as teacher-created, teacher-run schools.

And those are just observations in retrospect. Looking ahead, we can glimpse at least as many fresh challenges and unresolved questions. With the charter sector’s emergence as a durable—and in some places sizable—element of American public education, all sorts of new issues have come into focus. For example:

• As charters come to instruct large numbers of a given city’s children, who is responsible for the “education safety net” by which every kid has access to some school that can satisfactorily address her educational needs?
• What about the challenges of pupil discipline and the related question of whether charters must retain every youngster they admit, regardless of behavior or academic performance?
• Must every charter school be expected to accommodate the singular challenges of every child, no matter how difficult or esoteric?
• What about encouraging more charters to serve populations other than disadvantaged city dwellers: middle class kids, gifted children, just girls or just boys, children of military personnel, etc.?
• Why not select students—rather than conduct random lotteries—for some schools (perhaps gifted kids, Mandarin learners, or future violinists)?
• What about charters that want to deviate from state academic standards in order to focus on particular specialties, including some that opt to concentrate on high-quality career and technical education rather than academic preparation for college?

None of this is easy, and it isn’t helped by the continuing pushback against charters from many quarters. Yet charter promoters have sometimes also been naïve—and occasionally self-interested. And as we have noted, many of today’s challenges could not have been anticipated. In such circumstances, there’s no shame in acknowledging imperfection and incompleteness. Indeed, it would be shameful not to encourage recalibration and further experimentation.

Can the charter movement retain sufficient nimbleness and audacity, or will it ossify into a conventional interest group like so many other reforms?

Here are some reasons for hope:

• This movement is still basically bipartisan, a rarity in today’s polarized policy world.
• Most charters are free of unions and, in some cases, free from state licensure of principals and teachers, creating the necessary space for experimentation in staffing.
• There’s huge unmet demand for charters, both from kids and families wanting to choose and from people and organizations wanting to start schools.
• We already have some fantastic proof points about the ability of great schools to alter the life prospects of poor kids.
• Some “chains” of charters have managed to demonstrate sustained and widespread quality while also illustrating the concept of virtual school systems.

This is not the first time—and it won’t be the last—that a grand policy initiative has encountered bumps and yielded mixed results. When so many thousands of complex institutions are spread across so many thousands of jurisdictions, the challenges of politics, resources, talent, and implementation are profound. When what’s being changed contains as many ingrained practices, hidebound regulatory regimes, and vested interests as American public schooling, these trials are even greater.

Where it has worked well, the charter school movement has worked so well that it amply deserves to be sustained and perfected. Where it hasn’t, wise policymakers have and should push back against its tendency to turn into a self-interested protector of mediocrity. Millions of children’s futures—and billions of tax dollars—are at stake.

“Doing more for less” was a mantra for school reformers four or five years ago, when school funding across the country hit its nadir. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute frequently argued in favor of using the economic crisis to do things differently. (See here, here, and here.) Much pain has accompanied the recent tough times. But there are school districts and educators across the county that have managed to turn crisis into opportunity, many of whom I’ve met in my work (with Fordham until 2012, and more recently with Bluum and ROCI in Idaho).

Reynoldsburg, Ohio, offers a good example. The city is about ten miles east of Columbus and serves about seven thousand students. Its school district’s annual budget took a 10 percent hit from 2008 to 2011, while it simultaneously saw a 10 percent increase in economically disadvantaged students (who currently make up about half of all the district’s students). Reynoldsburg also eliminated about 20 percent of its staff between October 2008 and October 2009 (see here for details).

Fast forward to this month: The Wall Street Journal reports that Reynoldsburg is in the midst of an overhaul defined by “a personalized learning model combining computer-based and in-person instruction that the district says has held down costs, sustained above-average test scores and put students in greater control of their learning.” The district is not only doing more with less—it is doing better. The four-year graduation rate has climbed from 83 percent in 2010 to about 93 percent in 2013.

In southeast Georgia, the community of Dublin provides another illustration. Its schools sustained a double economic blow in recent decades. The textile industry that had long sustained the community was ravaged by NAFTA, and the district suffered when Georgia saw per-student spending decline by almost 15 percent from 2008 to 2014. Eight in ten students in Dublin City Schools are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch.

In response, the Dublin district made painful cuts, but it also embraced a change to state law that allows a portfolio approach to school governance. Georgia’s charter system builds on twenty-five years of the American charter school experience. The Dublin effort is showing its worth academically, and it offers important insights for districts seeking to improve their schools by embracing the charter bargain of greater freedom and flexibility in return for results.

Superintendent Chuck Ledbetter told me during a visit that “the charter system has given us the flexibility from rules that allow us to do more for kids.” Specifically, it “allows us to pilot new ideas.” He tells his building leaders “to break rules with integrity in order to deliver for kids.” The principal of Dublin’s Saxon Heights Elementary, John Strickland, argued that the district charter status allowed a “culture shift. It triggered a change in mindset. We don’t have to do things here because of the system. We do things because we think it works for the kids.”

But the charter district is not just about choice; it is also about accountability. It requires the district and its schools to work out their goals, how they define success, and how adults will be held accountable for delivering results. It provides transparency, as the goals and academic targets for the district and schools must be shared with the state. Most importantly, the district has seen declines in referrals for discipline issues, improvements in its academic performance, and gains in its high school graduation rate.

Beyond Textbooks (BT) in Arizona is a child of the economic crisis. When district funding was cut significantly in Vail, Arizona (the state saw per-student spending drop 17 percent from 2008 to 2014), Superintendent Calvin Baker and his team looked for ways to find “revenue sources for working through our financial crisis.” The district’s director of technology suggested creating an online system that included lesson plans and calendars for when certain concepts should be taught. It also featured a means for teachers to share materials online, breaking down barriers of time and place.

This was the genesis of BT, which in seven years has grown from a district-based solution into an online curriculum accessible through a wiki that allows over ten thousand teachers in more than one hundred districts and charters across three states (Arizona, Wyoming, and Idaho) to share their best lesson plans, ideas, and instructional resources. Participating school districts and charter schools have seen their spending on textbooks drop from an average of $55 per student to almost $0. For Vail, with an enrollment of twelve thousand students, this comes to an annual savings of around $650,000—and an additional $1.5 million that the district receives in fees from partner schools. These resources are plowed back into the work of the district and into BT.

Benson, Arizona Superintendent Micah Mortensen—Vail’s early partner in BT—told me, “There is no doubt in my mind that BT helps kids get to a higher level, and it helps close achievement gaps because it helps teachers work smarter.” Benson Primary School was the top-ranked elementary school in Arizona in 2014 and a U.S. Department of Education National Blue Ribbon School.

These are very different events in very different parts of the country, yet they share a few things in common:

• Economic pressures stimulate innovation. In all three cases, the changes were triggered by financial crisis. Leaders in these districts took a hit, took stock of where they were, and then worked with their communities to convert pain into an opportunity to better serve students by doing things very differently.
• Open enrollment supports innovators. All three districts utilize open-enrollment policies to allow neighboring students to enroll in their schools. They believe that their academic offerings are top-notch and make them as widely available as possible. They embrace choice and competition.
• The flexibility to do things differently is a precondition for action and success. Reynoldsburg embraced choice, charters, and blended learning, which empowered building-level leaders to customize education for every child. In Georgia, the change in the charter landscape allowed the Dublin district to structure its schools differently. Technological advances allowed the Vail school district in Arizona to create an online curriculum accessible to more than ten thousand teachers across three states.
• Student achievement and advancement is the Holy Grail. All three efforts define success as increased student achievement. Dublin’s superintendent summed it up thusly: “We do whatever it takes to generate productive students.”
• Leadership matters.  None of the innovations described here would have existed were it not for the respective superintendents’ exceptional leadership. Reynoldsburg has had three consecutive reformers at the helm for over twenty years. Chuck Ledbetter in Georgia and Calvin Baker in Arizona are both seasoned educational veterans who simply get things done. These people are not only district leaders, but also highly respected community leaders. They run school systems, but they focus on the betterment of their respective communities and states. They are extraordinary problem solvers who motivate the people around them to take productive risks for the sake of the kids.

Doing more for less is no longer just a slogan—it’s become a way of life for innovative educators and districts across the country. And it’s paying dividends for children and schools.

• Teachers have been complaining about it for years: American students are just too hopelessly infatuated with Sophocles, Shakespeare, and George Eliot to buckle down and read nonfiction. Oh wait, no one ever actually complained about that. But schools are nonetheless attempting a shift in reading instruction away from fiction and toward journalism, essays, legislation, and speeches. The move is a signature feature of the Common Core State Standards, which set out to shift the classroom focus to the kinds of informational texts that students will be faced with in college and beyond. Though pairing Romeo and Juliet with articles about teen suicide may seem quixotic, the new method has its proponents. Susan Pimentel, who helped author the standards, claims that “there is enough great literary nonfiction out there that there shouldn’t be a forced fitting” between novels and newspapers. And traditionalists can take heart in the fact that eighth graders will hate reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as much as they used to hate reading Silas Marner.
• When it comes to all the really sweet gigs, high school ends up being a little like Highlander—there can be only one prom queen, one first-chair piccolo, one class treasurer, one Jordan Catalano. But this year, Dublin, Ohio’s three high schools graduated some 222 class valedictorians. That figure represents about one-fifth of the district’s seniors. This pell-mell valedictorian inflation came as the result of new eligibility criteria, first instituted a few years ago, that confer the title’s waning cachet on any student who achieves a GPA above 4.0. Dublin locals are split on their town’s new status as the pointy-head capital of the Midwest, with some predictably grumbling that the “everyone-gets-a-trophy” approach devalues genuine academic excellence. As of yet, however, commentators remain silent about what this development holds for the fate of the endangered American salutatorian.
• To the cavalcade of reform-minded superintendents who have headed for the exits over the past year, we can now add one more name: Cami Anderson, the departing Newark schools chief. Anderson’s “One Newark” reorganization initiative has often been a bone of contention, though the city’s schools have made some impressive gains during her time in office. Aspiring reformers have some reason to rejoice, though—Anderson’s most likely successor is apparently New Jersey education maven Chris Cerf, often the subject of star-struck encomiums by Fordham’s own Andy Smarick. And though they’re probably happy to collect a scalp, the former superintendent’s adversaries will now have to go without the exquisite pleasure of spontaneously hopping on buses and hounding her at sedate D.C. education conclaves. The horror!

For two decades, The New Teacher Project, now known simply as TNTP, has been providing excellent teachers to the students who need them most. Its work has ranged from partnering with school districts to supporting teacher-evaluation policies. With new CEO Daniel Weisberg now at the helm, what is the future of TNTP? What role will teacher evaluations play in education reform in the coming years?

A new National Bureau of Economic Research study examines the impact of women’s participation in the workforce on their children’s college attainment. The researchers use data from the Norway Registry, which includes information on all children born in the country between 1967 and 1993 (roughly 725,000 males and 690,000 females). They match children’s data with their parents' earnings history when the children were between birth and age seventeen (among other information).

Descriptive data show that the employment of mothers with young children has increased from 10 percent in 1967 to 65 percent in 1993, while fathers’ employment has remained fairly constant—around 93 percent.

Controlling for various family and child demographics, the analysts find that a mother’s employment has a positive impact on her daughter’s college attainment relative to the effect on her son’s. Specifically, daughters are more likely than sons to have at least a college degree by the age of twenty-five. Mothers with more female children are also more likely to be in the workplace, after controlling for the total number of children. Interestingly, fathers’ employment also has a negative effect on boys’ college attainment and a positive effect for girls.

Increased time with sons already results in higher marginal gains in college attainment, so it makes sense that decreased time would have a higher consequence for them as well. For the daughters, the analysts reason that a working mother provides a working role model, which may increase her “expected return” from schooling. All of these data help to explain the narrowing and reversal of the educational gender gap since the 1950s—defined here as the difference in college attainment between females and males. The trend is both encouraging and troubling.

SOURCE: Xiaodong Fan, Hanming Fang, and Simen Markussen, "Mothers' Employment and Children's Educational Gender Gap," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 21183 (May 2015).

In school choice debates, the role that magnet schools can and should play often gets drowned out by arguments over charters, vouchers, ESAs, and the like. That’s a shame. Many of our best public high schools are magnets, and there have been several compelling—albeit anecdotal— analyses showing that rigorous magnet programs can be a boon for low-income kids (including, of course, a book by Chester Finn).

Since the 1970s, however, the definition of magnet schools has broadened to include any kind of specialized curriculum, from arts and languages to experiential learning and STEM. In many cases, the schools are not selective (or particularly selective). Magnet schools have been created by district administrators for purposes beyond academic rigor—most notably to promote desegregation or to offer more choices to families. The American Institute for Research’s recent study takes a look at whether magnet elementary schools are able to achieve their intended aims.

The study follows twenty-one schools that receive funds from the Department of Education’s Magnet Schools Assistance Program (MSAP) to convert into magnets. The analysts found a mixed legacy of success: The schools surveyed showed some indications of increased diversity, and “traditional magnets”—those with lower pre-conversion achievement rates—improved in English language arts performance. Yet these effects tended to be small, and many of the changes seen in transitioning schools, such as academic improvements among the population of interest, were illustrative of larger district trends.

Interestingly, most of the magnet schools were in districts that already offered ample parent choice—about 22 percent of the schools in any given district were schools of choice, and anywhere from one-fifth to one-third of students in a converting school already hailed from outside the catchment zone. To reach their goals in such a competitive marketplace, one can infer that magnet schools need to truly stand out. Magnets could take a page or two out of successful charters’ playbooks—philanthropic support of high-quality programming, for instance, or greater teacher autonomy—to set themselves apart from other schools with a specialized focus. Another thought might be for the magnets to return to their core promise of working with the most academically gifted students, a niche that lotteries prevent many charters from targeting. Either path would help magnets distinguish themselves again.

SOURCE: Julian Betts et al., “What Happens When Schools Become Magnet Schools?: A Longitudinal Study of Diversity and Achievement,” American Institutes for Research (May 2015).

This special edition of the Cowen Institute’s annual report marks the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a horrific event that devastated New Orleans and its people—yet also offered a unique opportunity to rebuild one of the poorest-performing school districts in the country. Authors Vincent Rossmeier and Patrick Sims offer a comprehensive look at the city’s progress thus far, as well as the unusual circumstances that have turned the Big Easy into a petri dish of education innovation.

The New Orleans system is unique for a number of reasons. Ninety-three percent of its public school students attend charters, making it the most decentralized education system in the country. (Detroit comes in second with 55 percent.) It relies heavily on nonprofit services, such as arts education, after-school programming, professional training, family services, and more. And while each charter management organization (CMO) operates autonomously, all schools in the Recovery School District work together to coordinate services that require economies of scale or are needed by every child in the district. These include a centralized enrollment system, city-wide transportation, standards of discipline and expulsion, and shared funding to special needs services and facility maintenance (demonstrating that commonsense policies can find a home in an education system free from DOE bureaucracy).

All this innovation has coincided with significantly improved student achievement. In 2005, 62 percent of students attended a failing school, the second-worst showing in Louisiana. But this past school year, that figure declined to 7 percent, outperforming twenty-five other districts. Graduation rates have improved from 56 percent in 2005 to 73 percent in 2014. New Orleans schools are still collectively below average on the state school performance score scale—but advancements abound.

The report’s tone is also praiseworthy, lauding the city’s accomplishments. Rossmeier and Simms' approach demonstrates their understanding of and respect for the cultural intricacies of a city that has seen its education system torn apart by both systemic injustices and mother nature.

Scott Cowen, founder and director of the Cowen Institute, believes that “the future of [New Orleans] is dependent on the quality of the public school system. If it does not thrive, this city will not thrive.” Indeed.

Going forward, education reformers should heed the lessons of the great education overhaul underway in New Orleans. This report is great place to start.

SOURCE: Vincent Rossmeier and Patrick Sims, “The State of Public Education in New Orleans: 10 Years After Hurricane Katrina,” Cowen Institute (June 2015).