The Education Gadfly Weekly

Like the November results of NAEP’s national math and reading report cards, the latest results of the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) are unlikely to inspire many pats on the back. The TUDA, which measures student achievement in twenty-one large urban districts (that volunteer to take the exam), presents a complicated picture of urban student achievement. The nation as a whole made modest gains in fourth- and eighth-grade math and in eighth-grade reading over the last two years; but among the eighteen TUDA districts with test results in 2009 and 2011, only six showed statistically significant improvement in fourth-grade math. Eight posted significant gains in that subject at the eighth-grade level. Worse still, no districts made significant gains in fourth-grade reading, and only one—Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC—improved in eighth-grade reading. Still, these stats are more encouraging if we look at score gains since TUDA’s inception: Since then, many of the participating districts have made large gains in math and reading achievement. In math, nine of the ten original districts saw their fourth graders improve between 2003 and 2011, while thirteen of fourteen posted gains for eighth graders. (Cleveland failed to post any significant improvements in either category.) In reading, all six original districts saw gains among their fourth-grade readers from 2002 to 2011, and four of them have also seen their eighth-grade readers improve. What’s more, beyond the twenty-one TUDA districts, large cities as a whole have made greater strides than the nation across the last decade, though large gaps in performance remain. The TUDA data can be cut many ways (and should be—the online data tool allows users to disaggregate data across multiple subgroups), but the gist of the story remains: Large urban districts have made great strides over the last decade, but still have far to go. What will we do to maintain their upward trajectory?

National Center for Education Statistics, Trial Urban District Assessment 2011 (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, 2011).

Despite its reputation, the charter field isn’t a wholly anti-union stronghold. In fact, 12 percent of charter schools now have bargaining agreements. (Conversion charters are much more likely to be unionized [44 percent] than startups [9 percent].) In this new CRPE report, Mitch Price analyzes the union contracts of nine of the nation’s 604 unionized charters and compares them to their local district contracts. He finds that, on average, charters’ union contracts are more flexible when it comes to length of day and year, grievance processes, and layoff criteria—but still far too rigid. (Using our own Leadership Limbo criteria, Price gives charter contracts a C-plus score, compared to the C-minus score given to district schools.) While union contracts in the charter sector are relatively flexible—more tailored to individual school needs (and thus less likely to stifle the missions of these schools)—Price argues that we are only seeing their beta versions. It remains to be seen whether these contracts, when renegotiated, will serve as examples of reasonable labor relations practices or will instead grow more restrictive.

Mitch Price, Are Charter School Unions Worth the Bargain? (Center for Reinventing Public Education, Seattle, WA, November 2011).

This latest from the Department of Education—the first national analysis of school-level funding—confirms what countless smaller studies have implied: Schools with higher proportions of poor students often receive less funding than lower-poverty schools in the same district. In fact, more than 40 percent of Title I schools had lower per-pupil personnel expenditures than non-Title I schools in their districts. This finding holds across multiple measures of expenditures, from teacher salaries to non-personnel resources—and despite the feds’ efforts at ensuring “comparability.” For those scratching their heads as to how this could possibly be so—doesn’t Title I’s “comparability provision” mandate that districts spend about the same for all schools?—here’s the skinny: Schools can prove comparability without figuring in teacher salaries. Per Title I rules, the number of staff must be comparable, not how much they’re paid. Thing is, low socio-economic status schools often have newer, cheaper teachers. This is an onion of an issue—with onerous layers of salary structure, staff placement, and control of funds—and there’s no easy solution. (Even the policy brief that ED released with this report agrees.) But one thing’s for certain: Uncle Sam can’t set this right. States, it’s time to step up.

Ruth Heuer and Stephanie Stullich, Comparability of State and Local Expenditures Among Schools Within Districts: A Report From the Study of School-Level Expenditures (U.S. Department of Education, 2011).

Special guest appearance! Terry Ryan flies in from the Buckeye State to talk with Mike about charter incubators (using our new report as backdrop), the striking similarity between the EU and the Common Core, and D.C.’s school-choice initiatives. Amber dances the TUDA and Chris believes in Santa Claus.

Since 2005, Fordham has been working in Ohio to recruit high-quality charter schools to neighborhoods badly in need of better schools. During our six-plus years of effort we have managed to recruit just two high-performing models to Columbus (KIPP and a Building Excellent Schools venture). Tougher still, we have been unable to recruit any to our home town of Dayton. We know first-hand just how hard it is to help recruit and launch great schools, especially to a Rust Belt state like Ohio. It is for this reason that we are excited about the work of organizations across the country to accelerate the growth of great new schools through a strategic process called charter incubation. 

Charter incubators are entities that intentionally build the supply of high-quality schools and charter-management organizations (CMOs) in cities or regions by recruiting, selecting, and training promising leaders, and supporting those leaders as they launch new schools. Groups leading this innovative effort include New Schools for New Orleans, the Tennessee Charter School Incubator, Get Smart Schools in Colorado, Charter School Partners in Minnesota, The Mind Trust’s Charter School Incubator in Indianapolis, and 4.0 Schools in several southeastern states.

These organizations are united in their belief that the development of great charter schools can be accelerated through these initiatives to bring in and support great leaders as they open and operate charter schools. Incubators provide an up-front quality screen for new leaders, and with intensive support on the ground, they boost the odds that new schools will succeed.

Public Impact’s crackerjack researchers Joe Ableidinger and Julie Kowal explain in their new policy brief—Better Choices: Charter Incubation as a Strategy for Improving the Charter School Sector—that incubators are an important tool to help meet the demands of parents and students for more quality schools of choice. An estimated 420,000 students linger on charter waiting lists. Hundreds of thousands more are stuck in failing schools without quality options available.

Yet, despite this demand, high-quality charters are growing too slowly. Ableidinger and Kowal cite statistics from 2011-12 that show the country’s top five CMOs—Uncommon Schools, KIPP, Aspire Public Schools, Green Dot, and Achievement First—together serve just 61,000 pupils.

How to grow better schools faster? The authors distill five main characteristics of successful charter incubators:

1. Selective screening for high-potential school leaders. Incubators focus on the recruitment and selection of top talent, restricting their services to a small group vetted for its leadership promise.
2. Strategic focus on leadership development. Incubators develop promising leaders or leadership teams through months-long rigorous fellowships and training that help them open and operate successful schools.
3. Expertise in new starts. While some charter-support organizations provide ongoing services to charter schools, incubators' primary focus is on recruiting and supporting new charter start-ups or new school leaders, including the provision of financial resources to talented leaders to develop and build new schools.
4. Public accountability. As a result of their intense, direct relationships with school leaders, incubators, their funders, and the public tend to judge their success by the performance of the schools they incubated.
5. Regional focus. Local ties help incubators provide powerful support to school leaders as they open and operate new schools. Such targeted assistance can include access to funding, introductions to other local leaders, technical expertise (e.g. financial, academic, or organizational), or direct support to encourage things like a planning year, intensive fellowship programs, and training activities.

Ableidinger and Kowal also highlight strategies that federal, state, and local policymakers can implement to launch, strengthen, and expand the work of charter incubators. The authors note, “Targeted funding and changes to key policies can help incubators thrive in their target cities or regions, boosting the supply of promising leaders who start high-performing charter schools and ensuring that these leaders are adequately supported as they open and operate their schools.”

The emerging work of charter incubators across the country is an important reform strategy that states and communities should learn more about. As Better Choices points out, the cost of incubation is far lower than the costs of other reform options and slighter still compared to the social and economic costs of continued school failure.

Better Choices: Charter Incubation as a Strategy for Improving the Charter Sector was co-commissioned by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust.

Drop some of those onerous layers, government!
Photo by Joe Shlabotnik

For years, government has plastered new regulations upon old, thickening the bureaucracy and making it ever harder to move within its confines. In Colorado, for example, new rules for day-care centers specify exactly how to execute nearly everything—including the number of block sets (two) and the number of blocks (minimum of ten) needed in each playroom. An anecdote, yes; but hyperbole or exception, no. Modern regulation, as Common Good’s Philip Howard writes in the Wall Street Journal this week, “doesn’t just control undesirable practices—it indiscriminately controls all the work of regulated entities,” arresting all human discretion, good and bad. While the gut-wrench reaction is simply to blow up the house, thick plaster and all, there’s a smarter way. Some old-fashioned inputs are important (Colorado does want to ensure that their day-care centers aren’t operating in window-less basements filled with asbestos and chipping lead paint). But, Howard argues, the majority of regulation should be outcomes-based. (Seattle is experimenting with this on the energy front now.) He’s right, as far as he goes, but may have forgotten another key quality-control metric, articulated in our recent paper on QC in digital ed: market forces. If we’re going to get quality control right, we’re going to need all three.

“Starting Over with Regulation,” by Philip K. Howard, The Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2011.

A couple months back, a friendly event at Fordham catalyzed a heated debate over the merits of narrowly focusing on the achievement gap. (Isn’t it possible that all the hullabaloo over the achievement gap detracts from the teaching of high flyers, we asked?) Still, we are not blind to the issue, nor are other conservatives. This piece from the National Review argues that, if we don’t bring up the bottom, we stand to lose trillions of dollars in economic growth by 2050. Demographic shifts (especially the surging Latino population) are mushrooming the ranks of traditionally under-performing populations. And our labor markets aren’t ready to absorb them all. As the authors observe, “The achievement gap is not new, but its impact on U.S. economic performance is growing.” We’d better start doing something about it.

“Closing the Achievement Gap,” by Reihan Salam and Tino Sanandaji, National Review, November 14, 2011.

Like the November results of NAEP’s national math and reading report cards, the latest results of the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) are unlikely to inspire many pats on the back. The TUDA, which measures student achievement in twenty-one large urban districts (that volunteer to take the exam), presents a complicated picture of urban student achievement. The nation as a whole made modest gains in fourth- and eighth-grade math and in eighth-grade reading over the last two years; but among the eighteen TUDA districts with test results in 2009 and 2011, only six showed statistically significant improvement in fourth-grade math. Eight posted significant gains in that subject at the eighth-grade level. Worse still, no districts made significant gains in fourth-grade reading, and only one—Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC—improved in eighth-grade reading. Still, these stats are more encouraging if we look at score gains since TUDA’s inception: Since then, many of the participating districts have made large gains in math and reading achievement. In math, nine of the ten original districts saw their fourth graders improve between 2003 and 2011, while thirteen of fourteen posted gains for eighth graders. (Cleveland failed to post any significant improvements in either category.) In reading, all six original districts saw gains among their fourth-grade readers from 2002 to 2011, and four of them have also seen their eighth-grade readers improve. What’s more, beyond the twenty-one TUDA districts, large cities as a whole have made greater strides than the nation across the last decade, though large gaps in performance remain. The TUDA data can be cut many ways (and should be—the online data tool allows users to disaggregate data across multiple subgroups), but the gist of the story remains: Large urban districts have made great strides over the last decade, but still have far to go. What will we do to maintain their upward trajectory?

National Center for Education Statistics, Trial Urban District Assessment 2011 (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, 2011).

Despite its reputation, the charter field isn’t a wholly anti-union stronghold. In fact, 12 percent of charter schools now have bargaining agreements. (Conversion charters are much more likely to be unionized [44 percent] than startups [9 percent].) In this new CRPE report, Mitch Price analyzes the union contracts of nine of the nation’s 604 unionized charters and compares them to their local district contracts. He finds that, on average, charters’ union contracts are more flexible when it comes to length of day and year, grievance processes, and layoff criteria—but still far too rigid. (Using our own Leadership Limbo criteria, Price gives charter contracts a C-plus score, compared to the C-minus score given to district schools.) While union contracts in the charter sector are relatively flexible—more tailored to individual school needs (and thus less likely to stifle the missions of these schools)—Price argues that we are only seeing their beta versions. It remains to be seen whether these contracts, when renegotiated, will serve as examples of reasonable labor relations practices or will instead grow more restrictive.

Mitch Price, Are Charter School Unions Worth the Bargain? (Center for Reinventing Public Education, Seattle, WA, November 2011).

This latest from the Department of Education—the first national analysis of school-level funding—confirms what countless smaller studies have implied: Schools with higher proportions of poor students often receive less funding than lower-poverty schools in the same district. In fact, more than 40 percent of Title I schools had lower per-pupil personnel expenditures than non-Title I schools in their districts. This finding holds across multiple measures of expenditures, from teacher salaries to non-personnel resources—and despite the feds’ efforts at ensuring “comparability.” For those scratching their heads as to how this could possibly be so—doesn’t Title I’s “comparability provision” mandate that districts spend about the same for all schools?—here’s the skinny: Schools can prove comparability without figuring in teacher salaries. Per Title I rules, the number of staff must be comparable, not how much they’re paid. Thing is, low socio-economic status schools often have newer, cheaper teachers. This is an onion of an issue—with onerous layers of salary structure, staff placement, and control of funds—and there’s no easy solution. (Even the policy brief that ED released with this report agrees.) But one thing’s for certain: Uncle Sam can’t set this right. States, it’s time to step up.

Ruth Heuer and Stephanie Stullich, Comparability of State and Local Expenditures Among Schools Within Districts: A Report From the Study of School-Level Expenditures (U.S. Department of Education, 2011).