The Education Gadfly Weekly

Across the nation, charter schools continue to expand. Over the past five years, their enrollment has grown by 70 percent, so that approximately 2.7 million youngsters now attend these schools of choice—over 5 percent of the total number enrolled in public schools. Dozens of cities educate more than one in five of their public school students in charter schools.

This is a hugely positive development—provided, of course, that those schools are delivering a high-quality education.

Whether you think the current “mixed economy” of district and charter schools should be an all-charter system (as in New Orleans) or a dual model (as in Washington D.C.), for the foreseeable future, most cities are likely to continue with a blend of these two sectors.

Can they peacefully coexist? Can they do better than that? Can they actually collaborate in the service of students, families and the public interest?

To answer these questions, we at the Fordham Institute teamed up with Public Impact to publish a new report, Is Détente Possible? We examined five cities that had among the best conditions for district-charter collaboration: Boston, Cleveland, Denver, Houston, and Washington, D.C.

Boston, for instance, boasts some of the highest-performing charters in the land. All sixteen charter operators there participate in an alliance that communicates directly with the Boston Public Schools.

Cleveland, also home to several high-performing charters, promotes buy-in between the sectors with an attitude of “We’re in this together.” The Cleveland Municipal School District includes in its accountability rating the performance of the charter schools it authorizes.

Denver, which benefits from a string of pro-reform superintendents and school board members, has taken seriously its work as a Gates compact site since 2010. Several local and national philanthropies have supported its charter sector as well as the district itself.

Houston is the birthplace of two of the charter sector’s rock stars (KIPP and Yes Prep), and the market share of its charters grew within the boundaries of the Houston Independent School District for much of the last decade.

Finally, Washington, D.C., hosts a quality-conscious charter authorizer and has been led by mayors who view district-charter collaboration as a promising vehicle to improve student outcomes in the nation’s capital.

After scouring available data and interviewing local policy leaders and insiders, the Public Impact team emerged with a simple conclusion: District-charter engagement is unique to each city. These relationships are so distinct that the authors settled on the metaphor of foreign policy to characterize each case. So, for instance, the District of Columbia is the “superpower summit” where two sectors of similar size and influence are compelled to work together while jealously guarding their own interests. Houston is a lesson in “isolationism” as each sector mostly pursues its own course (so much so that we omitted it from full discussion in the report). And Boston, whose charter restriction functions like a protective tariff, is analogized to a protectionist state (Massachusetts caps the number of students in the state’s lowest-performing districts who can attend charters to no more than 18 percent).

In the end, we found that the sectors now communicate with one another better than in the past, and some even share instructional strategies. Still, collaboration in all five sites is limited and often fragile.

That’s somewhat disappointing, but not surprising (institutions, after all, nearly always pursue their own interests). Nor does it mean that efforts to boost communication, share best practices, and lower the cost of providing services aren't worth trying. Think of it again in terms of foreign policy: Even superficial interactions (like student exchange programs) can ease tensions and keep the pot from boiling over. Peaceful co-existence is surely better than the alternative.

But nobody should expect either sector to cede much territory to the other anytime soon. 

Low-income strivers—impoverished families who work hard to climb the ladder to the middle class—may be the most underserved population in America today.

In few realms is that more evident than in education reform. For twenty years, national policies have focused largely on the lowest-performing students, often to the detriment of their higher-achieving, low-income peers. Many cities—including Chicago, Philadelphia, and Syracuse—have recently made a goal of reducing the number of school suspensions and other tough-love approaches to school discipline, with little concern for the impact on the kids who come to school ready to follow the rules. These efforts have received vocal support from the Department of Education. Policymakers and educators say they that are doing this in the name of equity. But when everyone in a school is harmed by some students' unruly behavior, it’s a strange notion of fairness.

Imagine that we wanted to prioritize the needs of low-income students who demonstrated a willingness to work hard and the aptitude to achieve at high levels—the kids with the best shot to use a solid education to put poverty behind them. What might we do?

First, we would put in place “universal screening” tests to look for gifted students in elementary schools. We would ask all schools, including those with a high percentage of poor students, to identify at least 10 percent of their students for special programs, then offer those kids the opportunity to spend part of their day going deeper into the curriculum with their high-achieving peers. A recent study by David Card of the University of California, Berkeley and Laura Giuliano of the University of Miami demonstrated that this sort of approach is particularly effective for high-achieving, low-income students.

By middle school, we would embrace tracking so that poor, bright students would have access to the same challenging courses that affluent high-achievers regularly enjoy. These courses are essential if young people are going to get on a trajectory for success in high school and college.

Finally, we would ensure that schools were safe and orderly places to be—balancing the educational needs of disruptive students with the equally important needs of their rule-abiding peers.

Here’s the sad truth: In most cities, we do very few of these things. This is in large part because many progressives are convinced that any sort of tracking is classist and racist; that it amounts to giving up on certain kids. (Even as they work to ban the practice, political leaders in the poorest neighborhoods are ironically asking for more schools for the gifted and talented.) Most accountability systems still work on getting low-performing students up to basic proficiency in reading and math, rather than pushing schools to help all students get as far as they can.

Meanwhile, discipline “reforms” are focused overwhelmingly on reducing punishments, with almost zero attention paid to the potential downside for learning in the classroom. As common sense—and solid research—tells us, that downside is real. A study by Public Agenda found that 85 percent of teachers and 73 percent of parents felt the “school experience of most students suffers at the expense of a few chronic offenders.” Research published by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that when disruptive students from New Orleans landed in Houston schools after Katrina, they “increased native absenteeism and disciplinary problems.”

Frustrated that the traditional public schools aren’t willing to prioritize their children’s needs, many low-income strivers have turned to high-quality charter schools instead. But now those are under attack, too. Both the PBS Newshour and the New York Times have recently presented highly critical coverage of Success Academies, charter schools in New York City that have shown excellent results in improving student performance. The reports focused on the academies' suspending students aggressively and pushing out chronic disrupters. There were similar controversies over the relatively high rates of suspensions and expulsions at charters in Chicago and Washington in recent years.  

The casual observer might wonder: What’s wrong with that approach? Why not ensure that schools are safe places to be? If the Success Academies and schools like them didn’t exist, many of those hard-working, high-achieving students would be in chaotic, low-performing public schools. Don’t their needs count?

Our public schools are intended to help all students achieve their potential. By all means, we need to find ways to better serve students facing behavioral challenges, who are often dealing with difficult situations at home. (Specialized alternative schools are often the best option.) Trying to boost the performance of the lowest-achieving kids is simply the right thing to do; kids who grow up illiterate or innumerate have little hope for success in life.

But the bulk of the attention can’t go just to the toughest cases. Poor children who are ready to study, learn, and follow the rules deserve the resources and opportunities to flourish. If the public school system is unwilling or unable to provide them, then charter schools should be allowed and encouraged to do so—even if that means cracking down on the students who ruin it for the rest.

Editor’s note: A slightly different version of this article originally ran on Bloomberg View.

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• Getting teenagers to think ahead is basically impossible—just try to persuade your favorite adolescent to file his college applications before the night they’re due, or to quit doing donuts in the school parking lot before he gets a free trip to the ER. So we should be immensely encouraged by the fact that 1.4 million high school students took college courses for credit in 2014–2015. To promote this development, the Department of Education has helpfully pledged to offer some $20 million in Pell grants for low-income students to enroll in college courses while still attending high school. Dual enrollment programs like these are probably the best possible use of Pell grants; right now, as Fordham’s own Checker Finn has observed, such funds are too often used to subsidize remedial education in college for kids who didn’t learn everything they needed to in the thirteen years of K–12. Isn’t it smarter to pay for academically gifted sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to take college courses early, rather than picking up the bill for undereducated college freshmen to finally learn the stuff they were supposed to be taught in high school?
• Nevada’s move this year to establish $5,000 education savings accounts has certainly caused a stir. (You might remember a certain education think tank having a lot to say about it a few months back.) Reformers would—and should—always cheer the broadening of school options for families, but the idea of using public funds to underwrite private school tuition needs to be sold carefully to the public. The young initiative got a taste of bad press last week, when the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that most of the 3,100 ESA applications came from ZIP codes with incomes among the top 40 percent in the state. That includes ninety-nine applications just from the tony, master-planned Summerlin community, as opposed to just nine from students in Nevada’s poorest neighborhoods. In part, this is a necessary risk of establishing new public benefits: If they’re made available only to those who need them most, they’ll never attract a big enough constituency to keep going when times are tight. But before we wheel out the tumbrils and take back ESAs for the proletariat, some patience is in order. The program needs time to be rolled out, both for outreach to low-income families and for a meaningful expansion of private school seats into urban areas. Let’s wait a while before rendering a verdict on the earliest of early adopters.

The Center for Research on Educational Options (CREDO) at Stanford University released findings last week from a first-of-its-kind study assessing the impact of online charter schools in seventeen states (including Ohio) and Washington, D.C. The news is dismal—for “virtual” charters nationally; for advocates like Fordham, who argue for e-schools’ rightful place in the school choice landscape but are weary of their quality problems; and most of all, for the students losing dozens (in some cases hundreds) of days of learning by opting into a virtual environment.

CREDO found that virtual charter school students nationally (those enrolled in a public, full-time online school) learned the equivalent of seventy-two fewer days in reading and 180 days in math compared with the traditional public school students to whom they were matched. That’s essentially an entire school year gone to waste in math and almost half a year gone in reading.

It is also striking that—unlike CREDO’s national charter studies, which discovered that many states’ charter school sectors handily outperform traditional public schools—in no state did online charter students outperform their traditional peers in both subjects. Two states’ online charters outpaced traditional public schools in reading; none did in math.

Why are CREDO’s findings on student learning in virtual charters so spectacularly bad across the board? Researchers analyzed the extent to which the poor performance they observed might be due to “the charter nature of the online schools rather than the online nature.” They found that it was indeed a result of the “online aspect of the schools.”

It’s common to hear defenders of these schools say that the type of student choosing to leave a traditional public school is already losing ground academically, perhaps due to unique barriers that make them fundamentally different from their traditional (and even brick-and-mortar charter) peers. If that is true, and if these fundamental differences are unaccounted for in CREDO’s “virtual twin” matching method, their results could skew in favor of traditional public schools.

E-schools also have high rates of student mobility, a point that CREDO acknowledges: “Mobility rates of students matter because high mobility can be correlated with lower academic growth as well as higher likelihood of dropping out.” The researchers also note that “if it were true that students arrive at online schools with academic deficits created by high mobility, we would expect to find online students experienced higher mobility before switching to the online school than the comparison students.” However, they found similar rates of pre-online school mobility among virtual students (9 percent) and the comparison students in the study (8 percent), placing “doubt on the argument that higher pre-online mobility creates widespread, systematic academic deficits” among those opting into virtual charters.

These rationales—that virtual charters underperform because of their uniquely disadvantaged students and high mobility rates—are insufficient to explain the magnitude and consistency of virtual schools’ poor performance.

In sum, CREDO’s latest findings add to the pile of evidence that should elicit grave concern about the quality of online schooling. Across America, the 200,000 students attending two hundred virtual charter schools simply are not learning enough. And proponents of school choice are increasingly hard-pressed to defend virtual charters—some of which are run by organizations purported to make extraordinary profits—when their learning gains fall so far below brick-and-mortar charter schools, let alone their traditional public school counterparts.

It’s true that a significant percentage of virtual charter students are disadvantaged—both in ways we can measure (poverty status, race, special educational status, etc.) and possibly in ways uncaptured by CREDO’s study. Students might attend an online school as a temporary solution during a family member’s cancer treatment, as a way to avoid gang conflict, or to learn during non-standard hours so as to support families of their own. But until there is a close study of the population that chooses online charters, it remains unclear whether these kinds of scenarios are representative of the overall virtual school population. The unique challenges facing some virtual students must never serve as a justification for their schools’ inability to educate them well. Students fleeing traditional public schools deserve better than a repackaged form of low expectations. CREDO’s findings ought to inspire policy makers and choice advocates to double down on efforts to bolster virtual school quality and ensure that the students who attend them—if they are already disadvantaged—don’t fall further into the cracks.

SOURCE: James L. Woodworth, Ph.D., et al., “Online Charter School Study 2015,” Center for Research on Education Outcomes (October 2015).

Teachers affect student academic achievement more than any other school-based factor. As a result, states and school districts have experimented with incentive pay programs as a twofold strategy to both attract high-quality teachers and boost student performance. Evidence on the effectiveness of this tactic is mixed, but the policies can differ greatly in structure, and little is known about how the design of incentive plans might impact their effectiveness.

Enter a new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study that examines the structure of Houston’s recently implemented incentive pay system, as well as its effect on student achievement.

The researchers analyzed data from grades 3–8 from the Houston Independent School District’s (HISD) merit pay system, ASPIRE (“Accelerating Student Progress, Increasing Results and Expectations”). ASPIRE is designed as a “rank-order tournament,” which rewards top-performing math, reading, language arts, science, and social studies teachers based on their value-added scores (estimates of the effect individual teachers have on student learning over a school year). Under ASPIRE, teachers receive a $3,870 bonus if their students receive value-added scores above the fiftieth percentile; scores above the seventy-fifth percentile result in even larger bumps—up to $7,700 per teacher.

The authors initially hypothesized that teachers who are aware that they are close to the bonus threshold had stronger incentives to improve than those further away from the cut-off. Surprisingly, however, the study finds that teachers did not respond to ASPIRE’s incentives in this manner. Overwhelmingly, teachers near the award threshold one year did not see growth in student performance the following year. The only exception was for science teachers, where the observed effect was positive but extremely small.

The authors offer a few possible explanations for this curveball. First, teachers may already be “giving it their all” in the classroom and simply cannot put forth any extra effort. Or they may lack the necessary tools and knowledge to drive student achievement further. They conclude, however, that the most likely reason ASPIRE’s incentive pay failed to drive improvement in student test scores was that there is too much “noise” in value-added estimates (which can fluctuate greatly from year to year). In short, teachers did not have a basis to inform their effort decisions because they lacked a reliable measure of their ability.

From a policy standpoint, the study reveals a glaring weakness in merit pay systems. It suggests that for teacher-based incentive programs to work, they must offer sizable bonuses, be easy for teachers to understand, and be based on reliable and transparent measures of teacher ability. 

SOURCE: Margaret Brehm et al., “Achievement Effects of Individual Performance Incentives in a Teacher Merit Pay Tournament,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 21598 (September 2015).

This report, recently released by the Education Commission of the States (ECS), explores how states can better prepare students for successful careers by reviewing policies in thirteen states related to career and technical education (CTE). Specifically, its authors look at whether each state has: (1) facilitated collaboration between education and employer communities to promote CTE and close job gaps; and (2) created CTE learning opportunities and credentials that provide students with multiple pathways to gainful employment in high-skill industries.

Nine of these states do both, often by designating or creating groups responsible for providing these services. Some (such as Colorado) rely on state-level actors. Others opt for regional- and local-level institutions. Louisiana offers “Jump Start CTE programs” that are developed by “regional teams consisting of LEAs, technical and community colleges, business and industry leaders, and economic and workforce development experts.”

Ohio has taken a more interesting approach. In the Buckeye State, OhioMeansJobs disseminates workforce-demand data through the K–12 system. Schools then use this information to apprise the students of career opportunities via the Ohio Career Counselling Pilot Program.

Unfortunately, several states in the report fall short. Kentucky has no system in place for schools to collaborate with businesses in need of highly skilled workers. Nevada has yet to establish official CTE programs to provide alternative pathways to success. And New Jersey has failed to do either.

CTE programs—if implemented with rigorous standards, high-quality instruction, and collaboration with local business communities—can expand and improve a shrinking technical workforce. This report is a worthy addition to the growing literature on what steps are being taken throughout the country.

SOURCE: Jenifer Zinth, “Aligning K-12 and postsecondary career pathways with workforce needs,” Education Commission of the States (October 2015).