The Education Gadfly Weekly

[[{"fid":"114812","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default"},"type":"media","link_text":null,"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-default"}}]]

Last Friday, in a 6-3 decision, the Washington State Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the state’s voter-approved charter school law, threatening the future of nine new schools with more than 1,200 students.

The ruling was not based on the merits of the law (one of the strongest in the country on accountability). Nor was it based on the words of the state constitution. Instead, the majority cut off all funding from charter schools (the specifics on when and how to be determined by a lower court) by relying on an obscure 1909 judicial interpretation of the words “common schools.” These words are found in the state constitution, but aren’t defined. The majority held that under this century-old definition, the charter school law did not subject those schools to enough “local control,” and therefore is unconstitutional.

The holding hinged on this idea of control—despite the fact that these charters are subject to more accountability than the state’s traditional public schools. Parents choose whether their children will attend. Charters performing in the bottom quartile of all public schools must be closed if they continue to fail. And local school boards are free to sponsor charters. (In fact, Spokane Public Schools has sponsored two already.)

The decision holds legal implications that likely go beyond charter schools. As the dissenting opinion pointed out, this ruling likely also applies to state-run programs like tribal schools and Running Start, a popular program that allows high school students to take community college courses. The court also sent a strong message of deference to district decision making, despite the movement to push responsibility for school accountability to states.

To charter advocates, this all appeared to be politically motived. The announcement was handed down on the Friday afternoon before Labor Day, a week after most of the schools had started. The court declined to suggest remedies that would satisfy voter intent, even though the dissenting judges thought there were viable ones. And most of the judges accepted campaign contributions from the Washington Education Association, the state’s biggest teachers’ union—and also the plaintiff.

A more generous interpretation of this ruling is that the court was simply constrained by an antiquated notion of fairness that was defined more than a century ago. In 1909 Washington State, fairness was synonymous with sameness (thus “common schools”). And this was defined by local elections (thus “local control”).

These dearly held ideals aren’t working today, especially for our most vulnerable kids. School board elections, like all elections, favor the politically powerful and well-funded. Iron-clad seniority and tenure rights codified in state laws and collective bargaining agreements make it nearly impossible for boards to remove ineffective teachers. High-quality educators migrate to more advantaged schools, which come equipped with parent support and strong leadership; meanwhile, low-income kids are stuck with “displaced” teachers that no other school wants. Combined with the challenges of high-poverty, these dynamics create schools with toxic cultures and ever-descending outcomes for students.

My own kids attended a school like this in South Seattle. There were some great teachers, but many more mediocre ones. One of my son’s teachers struggled to do simple subtraction. Kindergarten and first-grade teachers regularly yelled at their students. We finally moved to ensure that our kids would be academically challenged and in a positive school environment. The great teachers we knew at that South Seattle school have since moved elsewhere, as have nearly all of the families that could afford to change neighborhoods or pay for private schools. It’s sad. The remaining students have simply been left behind.

Of course, one of the great ironies in Friday’s ruling is that charter schools were created in large part to address these very injustices. By giving these schools true control over their programs, staff, and curricula, and by opening them to all families, authors of the charter school law resurrected the true American vision of public schooling: equal access to great instruction and accountability for results.

With its ruling, the court has locked Washington State into a defunct, hundred-year-old notion of public schooling that makes it impossible for the citizens or the legislature to experiment with more flexible and effective ways of educating the state’s children. Equal treatment without choices and without true accountability may have made sense in Soviet Russia, but it doesn’t hold water in America.

Ultimately, the court has prioritized institutional control over outcomes. It’s a decision that flies in the face of voter intent and is out of step with the rest of country, where courts have consistently upheld charter schools as a normal part of the fabric of public schooling.

We need to stop romanticizing an obsolete version of “local control.” Community members ought to have input in area schools and hold them accountable. But checks are also needed to protect poor and minority students from the neglect of the powerful. These families need better options—which are what these charter schools provided. If we insist on clinging to these arcane, injudicious definitions, kids will pay the price who can least afford it.

As many have forcefully opined, this decision should be reconsidered by the court (a motion to reconsider is likely). Barring that, the legislature could pass a new charter that doesn’t use the term “common schools,” or pass a constitutional amendment. If lawmakers have any decency, this will happen quickly. That’s the only way to make sure that students and their families don’t have to endure any more needless chaos.

Robin J. Lake has studied public charter schools and urban school system reforms since 1993. She is the director the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education and an affiliate faculty member at UW Bothell’s College of Arts and Sciences. She is also a Seattle Public Schools parent.

[[{"fid":"114814","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default"},"type":"media","link_text":null,"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-default"}}]]

Between 2010 and 2012, more than forty states adopted the Common Core standards in reading and math, setting dramatically higher expectations for students in our elementary and secondary schools. Now comes a critical milestone in this effort. In the coming weeks, parents in most states will receive for the first time their children’s scores on new tests aligned to the standards. The news is expected to be sobering, and it may come as a shock for many. Parents shouldn’t shoot the messenger.

It is important to remember why so many states started down this path in the first place. Under federal law, every state must test children each year in grades 3–8 to ensure they are making progress. That’s a good idea. Parents deserve to know if their kids are learning, and taxpayers are entitled to know if the money we spend on schools is being used wisely.

But it is left to states to define what it means to be “proficient” in math and reading. Unfortunately, most states have historically set a very low bar (often called “juking the stats”). The result was a comforting illusion that most of our children were on track to succeed in college, carve out satisfying careers, and stand on their own two feet.

To put it plainly, it was a lie. Most states set absurdly low academic standards before the Common Core, and their tests were even worse. In some cases, children could even randomly guess the answers and be all but guaranteed to pass. Imagine being told year after year that you’re doing just fine—only to find out, when you apply for college or a job, that you’re simply not as prepared as you need to be.

Such experiences were not isolated cases. Every year, about 20 percent of incoming students at four-year colleges and half of those at community colleges must take “remedial” courses when they arrive on campus. The vast majority of those students will leave without a degree, or any other kind of credential. That’s a lousy way to start life.

The most important step to fixing this problem is to stop lying to ourselves and ensure that our children are ready for the next grade (and, when they turn eighteen, for college or work). Several national studies, including analyses of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), show that just 38–40 percent of high school graduates leave our education system at the “college-prepared” level in reading and math. Considering that almost 20 percent of our children don’t even make it to graduation day, this means that maybe one-third of our kids nationally are getting to that college-ready mark. (Not coincidentally, about a third of young people today complete a four-year college degree.)

The Common Core should help to boost college readiness and completion by significantly raising expectations, starting in kindergarten. But we shouldn’t be surprised if, in the early goings, we find that just a third of elementary or middle school students are on track for college. In fact, that’s what we should expect.

This is a painful shift from the Lake Wobegon days, when all children were above average. States that used to claim that 80 or 90 percent of their students were “proficient” will now start to admit that one-third or less are on track for college and career. No doubt, the truth will hurt.

So what does this mean for parents, especially those that learn that their kids aren’t currently headed for success (and even though their kids have been getting good grades and glowing reports from their teachers)?

Let’s be honest: For the parents of older students especially, this will be tough medicine to take. No one likes to hear bad news, but without an accurate diagnosis, you can’t get well. Talk to your children’s teachers as soon as possible and make a game plan for getting them extra help at home and at school.

Some tough questions might also be in order for your schools or school boards: Are their standards for grading too easy? What are they doing to help teachers understand and implement the new standards? Are they up to the task of getting your kids—and your neighbors’ kids—up to the new, higher expectations? Local communities are still in charge of setting curricula, designing teacher training, and pulling all of the other levers that might help them lift kids to these higher expectations. Standards provide sunshine, nothing more. We must demand local action to set things right.

Finally, parents should resist the siren song of those who want to use this moment of truth to attack the Common Core or associated tests. They may not be perfect, but these tools are finally giving parents, educators, and taxpayers an honest assessment of how our students are doing—a standard that promises to end the lies and statistical games. Virtually all kids aspire to go to college and prepare for a satisfying career. Now, at last, we’ll know if they’re on track to do so.

This column first appeared in USA Today.

comzeal/iStock/Thinkstock

• With the Washington State Supreme Court’s ruling against the constitutionality of charter schools and a sudden teachers’ strike breaking out in Seattle, education observers across the country would be justified in wondering whether anyone will actually be starting school this month in the Evergreen State. The court’s decision, which hurls the future of nine freshly opened schools into immediate uncertainty, has been greeted with more drama thus far (no surprise, since its legal rationale has been deemed quixotic, and its consequences will certainly be disruptive to the 1,200 students who may now have to seek schooling elsewhere). But dumping labor unrest atop this catastrophe will make matters inconceivably worse. Leaders in all three branches of the state’s government simply must come together to resolve this double crisis.
• We’ve all got portmanteaus that we despise. For the Gadfly’s money, “telephone” worked perfectly well without being combined with “marketing.” But the New York Times has introduced a new mashup that may be as promising to students as it is painful to the ear: “teacherpreneur.” Using online tools like Youtube and TeachersPayTeachers.com, skilled instructors have been able to develop markets for their unique lesson plans and materials—and make pots of well-deserved income in the process. According to representatives from the company that runs TeachersPayTeachers, roughly three hundred teachers have made over $100,000 by providing high-quality materials to fellow educators across the country. As the demand for excellent, Common Core-aligned curricula grows, so will the number of (ugh) teacherpreneurs looking to upend the top-down market run by textbook companies. Kids get better lessons, teachers get rich—not such a bad outcome.
• Teacher quality is a sine qua non of reform success: We can extend more choice to students and families, set higher standards across the board, and work to get minority and low-income kids ready for kindergarten; but if they’re not being taught by capable, confident professionals, classroom work is always going to lag. The indispensable Dan Willingham has some great suggestions this week for how to boost the preparedness of the eager graduates about to enter the classroom. First, we need to test teacher candidates more rigorously before they receive certification—and this testing should focus on core subject matter like math and English, not airy child development theory. Second, we need to better classify the stuff that instructors absolutely need to know to do their jobs better. “A list like this could be used as the guiding framework not only to evaluate whether a teacher is well trained,” he explains, “but also whether he or she should be certified to teach and whether a training program should be accredited.”
• What do you call a recently released convict with three job offers—including one with a starting salary of $50,000? A miracle, sure. But more specifically, he’s a beneficiary of career and technical education. NPR has a brief, startling look at a program to teach critical and sought-after skills like welding in the Georgia prison system. Graduates, including men whose criminal histories would normally lock them out of the job market, are being welcomed with open arms by manufacturers who can’t find candidates with similar skills elsewhere. As one source from the Washington, D.C.-based Manufacturing Institute lamented, “We made the decision that all kids should go to college and as a result you saw the elimination of a lot of the technical programs at the high school level." It’s great that businesses are filling jobs and men on the margins of society are getting a second chance. But if we made this kind of pathway available to low-income students earlier, maybe they wouldn’t end up accessing it from jail cells.

A new study in the Journal of School Choice explores whether charter schools open in “high-demand” areas of New York City. In particular, the authors ask whether they situate themselves in high-density areas with lots of children, near schools with low academic performance, or in neighborhoods where parental satisfaction is low.

The study examines fifty-six new elementary charter schools that opened between 2009 and 2013, along with 571 traditional elementary schools. Data sources include parental satisfaction survey data from the New York City Department of Education (with 2008 as the base year for the traditional public schools), school proficiency rates on math (because math scores are more school-dependent than reading scores), and Census data on poverty and population.

The analysts compare parents’ dissatisfaction with their children’s current schools (relative to the number of charter openings in the area) and that area’s poverty rate. They find pockets of parental dissatisfaction scattered throughout southwest Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens. Yet charter schools didn’t open in these areas. They tended to locate instead in clusters around central Brooklyn and along a stretch in western Manhattan, where parent satisfaction varied but was generally moderate or high.

Next, they detect a modest but imperfect relationship between community poverty and charter locations. A majority of new charters opened in communities with at least 20 percent of residents living in poverty. Yet twenty-one of the fifty-six new charters located in areas with less than 20 percent poverty, and other really poor areas have no charters at all.

The strongest correlation observed by the authors was between weak math proficiency rates and charter openings. Forty-nine of the new charters opened in locations close to low-performing traditional schools.

Finally, it was found that many charters sprouted up in comparatively sparsely populated areas. Conversely, there were no charters at all in many dense areas.

Of course, charter school locations can also be influenced by many factors that the analysts don’t examine, such as the cost and availability of real estate in a city, the politics of school authorization, the influence of a city’s charter school cap, and the overall quality of a given charter. Nevertheless, the fact that low parental satisfaction with neighborhood schools appears not to inform charter school location is good to know. The more charter advocates know, the better.

SOURCE: Andrew Saultz, Dan Fitzpatrick, and Rebecca Jacobsen, "Exploring the Supply Side: Factors Related to Charter School Openings in NYC," Journal of School Choice: International Research and Reform, vol. 9 no. 3 (August 2015).

“Programmatic series of studies”—that’s how one of my psychology professors described research on learning and memory around twenty years ago. Do a study, tweak it, try again. Persist.

I was reminded of that while reading this new volume by Tony Bryk and colleagues. After thirty years of constant reform and little improvement, it’s clear that there’s a fundamental flaw in how the education field goes about effecting change. Quick fixes, sweeping transformations, and mandates aren’t working. Ongoing professional development isn’t working either.

What might work much better is a sustained, systemic commitment to improvement—and a willingness to start with a series of small pilots instead of leaping into large-scale implementation. Guided by “improvement science” pioneered in the medical field, Learning to Improve shows how education could finally stop its reform churn. As Bryk et al. write:

All activity in improvement science is disciplined by three deceptively simple questions:

  1. What specifically are we trying to accomplish?

  2. What change might we introduce and why?

  3. How will we know that a change is actually an improvement?...

A set of general principles guides the approach: (1) wherever possible, learn quickly and cheaply; (2) be minimally intrusive—some changes will fail, and we want to limit negative consequences on individuals’ time and personal lives; and (3) develop empirical evidence at every step to guide subsequent improvement cycles.

That sounds an awful lot like schools across the country engaging in a programmatic series of studies—a change that likely would result in huge improvements. Even better, the book explains how educators can form networks to grow together. Progress is much faster with pilots in multiple locations, as adaptations for each context generate ideas for further tests.

This application of improvement science seems to be the best possible path forward. But it still suffers from a (perhaps inevitable) problem—you don’t know what you don’t know. An example of this problem is sprinkled throughout the book: The Literacy Collaborative is profiled as a network of educators improving their reading instruction. I don’t doubt that their instruction is improving and student achievement is increasing. I also don’t doubt that even better results could be attained with an entirely different approach.

The Literacy Collaborative is dedicated to guided reading, which begins with the teacher selecting a leveled text. As Tim Shanahan has explained, there’s no real research base for leveled readers. The whole notion of assessing a child’s reading level and then selecting (or letting the child select) a text at that level is essentially a farce. Once children are fluent in sounding out words, their reading level primarily depends on their knowledge level, which means it varies by topic. 

Neither today nor in the future called for by Learning to Improve is there a way to guarantee that the improvement process begins with the best possible ideas. But improvement science may still be our last, best hope. The type of slow, steady progress that would result from widespread application seems to characterize the few examples we have of dramatic—and sustained—improvement, such as in Massachusetts, Finland, and Singapore:

Think of a future in which practical knowledge is growing in a disciplined fashion every day, in thousands of settings, as hundreds of thousands of educators and educational leaders continuously learn to improve. Rather than a small collection of disconnected research centers, we could have an immense networked learning community.

The book’s vision is ambitious—and far more likely to succeed than the reform churn we’ve tolerated for decades.

Lisa Hansel is the communications director for the Core Knowledge Foundation.

SOURCE: Anthony S. Bryk, Louis M. Gomez, Alicia Grunow, and Paul G. LeMahie, Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2015).

In a few months, education reformers will begin celebrating the twenty-fifth birthday of Minnesota’s groundbreaking charter school legislation, which passed in 1991 and inspired a wave of similar laws across the country. The charter movement can now vote, drink, and carry a concealed weapon. (But hey, maybe not all at once.)

The millennial era has been a time of rapid growth in the sector: Over six thousand charter schools now serve almost three million kids across the country. And all those ribbon-cutting ceremonies have given rise to a simultaneous flowering of research into the effects of charters. This meta-analysis from Columbia University’s National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education set out to comb through the existing data to identify the specific impact of “no-excuses” charters on math and reading. Offering a brisk tour through the mission and methods of no-excuses schools, it should make handy reading for a public audience that still trips over some of the details even at the quarter-century mark.

After wading into an ocean of some five thousand initial titles, the authors finally ended up weighing the results of sixty-eight relevant studies published on schools that generally fit the no-excuses model (serving urban, high-poverty populations with a mix of lofty academic expectations, tight discipline, and beefed-up instructional time and tutoring resources).

The study’s headline finding provides wondrously encouraging news for advocates of chartering and school choice: When compared with their peers enrolled in traditional public schools, students at no-excuses charter schools experience improvements in math and reading totaling .25 and .15 standard deviations respectively. (Using the same analysis, they calculate the benefits of charters that don’t follow the no-excuses formula to be a still-healthy .15 and .07 standard deviations on math and reading.)

Even better was this easy-to-miss nugget: “Our results suggest that No Excuses schools are more effective in middle and high schools. This pattern appears to differ from the broad literature which indicates that charter schools are more effective at the elementary school level.” That’s more than many educators would dare dream given the persistently flat progress of reform at the secondary level.

We might have expected some optimism after witnessing the stupefying results at world-beating charter networks like KIPP and Success Academy. But it’s still nice that high-performing charters have both passed the eye test of policy commentators and are consistently feted by researchers as well. Now the only question is how the little guys grew up so fast.

SOURCE: Albert Cheng, Collin Hitt, Brian Kisida, and Jonathan N. Mills, “’No Excuses’ Charter Schools: A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence on Student Achievement,” National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Occasional Paper No. 226 (2015).