The U.S. Open starts on Monday and the opening ceremony will have a special guest: Andre Agassi. The United States Tennis Association plans to celebrate the charitable work of his post-tennis retirement, specifically the founding of a charter school in Las Vegas, Nevada!
I'm just as outraged as Jamie about the general American populace's ignorance about charters... but I can't say I'm surprised. Take for example this survey of federal spending from the U.S. Census Bureau. Here's how they define charters:
The data in this report include only those charter schools established and administratively controlled by another government entity (e.g. universities, cities, counties, or public school systems). The data for these "public charter schools" are collected as separate, individual units, or are included with the data for their chartering government. Charter schools that do not meet Census Bureau criteria for classification as a government entity are considered "private charter schools" and are not included in this report.
In order for a charter school to be classified as a "public charter school" it must meet the same requirements as any other government. It must be an organized entity, with substantial autonomy, and government character. Typically if the schoolboard is appointed by public officials then the charter school would be classified as governmental. A few "public charter schools" are run by public universities, and municipalities. However, most charter schools are run by private nonprofitorganizations and are therefore classified as private.
HUH? No wonder everyone's confused when a freaking federal department can't even get it right. I don't know what a private charter school is, but if you see one in the wild, snap a photo and we'll submit it as a new species.
It surely doesn't help, either, that states from Massachusetts to West Virginia have invented all sorts of "charter-lite" options--schools that share almost all of the same characteristics as real charter schools except, usually, who's running them. We probably shouldn't be surprised that government officials, federal, state, or local, have an irrational phobia of delegating responsibility, but it seems that phobia causes much of the confusion. Charter schools are not run by the government--and that's the whole point--but they are still PUBLIC SCHOOLS. (Hey, U.S. Census Bureau, I'm looking at YOU.)
Here are just a few recent pieces where Fordham experts share their thoughts and insights....
Mike Petrilli, along with Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution, penned an opinion piece that ran in the NY Times this week. In it, the two men argued that high-achieving students haven't fared so well in the No Child Left Behind era. (Click here to read our 2008 report on this very topic.) They raised questions about a recent study that indicated NCLB is raising the scores of students on both ends of the academic spectrum. And they pointed to evidence such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which "found relatively little progress among our highest-achieving students (those in the top 10 percent) from 2000 to 2007, while the bottom 10 percent made phenomenal gains."
Checker Finn, meanwhile, discussed the latest SAT scores (he wasn't happy) with the Wall Street Journal. A piece he wrote on the same topic ran on Forbes.com. In it, he called the latest results "a real bummer, since, in a nutshell: "Overall scores are flat or down. Almost every subgroup is flat or down. Gaps are widening slightly by race, income and parental education." He then mentioned other assessment results, including ACT, before discussing what all of this says about education reform efforts.
And Checker shared his thoughts on the late Senator Ted Kennedy with Education Week. You can read that here.
I'm not a particularly opinionated blogger, but when I ran across this NPR article, I just had to say something. The piece is about my absolutely favorite television show when I was a small child: Reading Rainbow. I still remember the catchy theme song. I remember the illustrations and the book reviews by the kids. And I remember how very much it made me want to read.
I learned from the article that the show is ending a 26-year run. According to the piece, it's ending due to both a funding crunch and an increased focus these days on shows that teach children how to read rather than why to read. Now I'm not an expert by any means, but I believe the why is abundantly important. Yes, fundamentals are obviously essential. But after a child masters the basics, then what? How do you transform him or her from a reader to a true lover of books? There are probably several different answers to that (for one, I was blessed to have parents who read to me constantly as a youngster). But personally, I think shows like Reading Rainbow can play an important role. For me it did. It highlighted books as exciting portals to distant worlds. It made me want to race to the library and pick up a few more....
Here's an interesting piece about how the federal Race to the Top money may be impacting states. Apparently, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is making the rounds, calling for California to lift a prohibition against using student test scores to evaluate teachers. He says the ban disqualifies the state from claiming its share of the special $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund.
Terry Ryan of our Ohio offices offers a concise explanation of our Ohio 2009 Education Report Card Analysis in this video.
Ohio 2009 Education Report Card Analysis from Education Gadfly on Vimeo .
Whether the United States should embrace national standards and tests for its schools is perhaps today's hottest education issue. For guidance in addressing it, the newest Fordham report looks beyond our borders. How have other countries navigated these turbid waters? What do their systems look like? How did they get there? What can we learn from them? Expert analysts examined national standards and testing in Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, the Netherlands, Russia, Singapore and South Korea. This report presents their key takeaways.
Here in Ohio, the annual report card release from the Ohio Department of Education is like Christmas. We wait a long time for this morning, anticipating what kind of goodies there will be to unwrap in all of the data (and there is a lot of it).In good news, students in Ohio's "Big 8" districts (large urban cities) were just as likely to attend a school rated "A" or "B" by the state in 2008-09 as they were the year before (for the last two years, 20 percent of urban students- both charter and district - attended a school ranked Effective or Excellent). But, as Terry points out in our Special Analysis of Local Report Cards (PDF), there are still over 125,000 children in Big 8 cities who attend a school rated by the state as failing, or on the verge of it.
The good news is that according to Ohio's value-added metric, which measures the amount of growth achieved by schools and districts (in addition to absolute proficiency rates), roughly half of all schools in the Big 8 cities that serve grades four through eight exceeded expected growth in 2008-09.
As Terry is quoted on Catalyst OHIO:
"This data represents both the worst of news and the best of news. Overall, only half of the students in big urban districts are proficient in reading and math. But the good news is that in these schools, whether charter or district, students seem to be showing academic growth, which should give us hope for the future."
To access our city-by-city analyses, as well as an extended analysis by Public Impact of Ohio's urban school performance later today, see here.
Our new report, International Lessons about National Standards, authored by William Schmidt, Richard Houang, and Sharif Shakrani of Michigan State University, is out today. Of course, you'll want to read it from cover to cover...I say that because there are lots of interesting nuggets not only in the body of the report, but in the appendices, too. Appendix A, for instance, includes short profiles of each country's educational system. Here are three tidbits from there to whet your appetite for further reading:
In 2007, the country decided for the first time to test all students in grades 6, 9, and 10 with plans to release the results at the regional, district, and school levels...It seems President Lee Myung-bak was persuaded by key advisors that comparisons and competition among the regions and schools was necessary for Korea's educational and economic advancement. Still others in his administration viewed the "sunshine and shame" approach as crucial to successful exercise of school choice. Unfortunately, some are not sold on the merits of transparent and disaggregated student reports. Teachers and teachers unions, for instance, have vocalized vehement opposition, even organized demonstrations. They argue that since Korean students already do a fine job on standardized measures (such as TIMSS and PISA), they would be better served by sharpening their "creative" skills. Tighter focus on exam results, they say, will only retard such progress.The Korean government, treading lightly (at least for now), is taking a piecemeal approach to open disaggregation of test results. Results from the 2008 national assessment, in fact, were broken out by province (not school) and only results from high-performing provinces were presented. But that's not supposed to last long. School-level results (presumably for the high-, mid-, and low-performing schools) are scheduled to be publicly released in 2011.
Interestingly, all schools in the Netherlands--public and private alike--are equally funded by the government. Further, private providers are allowed to open schools that align with their religion or philosophy and have them funded by the government under the following conditions: They have a legally recognized competent authority (also referred to as the school board) to administer and manage the school; they adhere to all "state and non-state" laws about the condition of the buildings, teacher qualifications, and curriculum and secondary requirements; they do not charge mandatory tuition (though they can ask for contributions); they do not select students to attend (though they can reject students whose parents do not ascribe to the religious or philosophical orientation of the school); and the school can prove that it will attract students. Basically this means that virtually anyone can apply to open a school as long as they adhere to the national requirements and standards as well as take the national tests. Unlike in the United States, there appears to be little concern regarding using public money to fund parochial schools. In short, the Netherlands have broad parameters around what and who are considered legitimate providers of education.
In 1965, Singapore, a small city-state with an ethnically and racially diverse population of over 4 million, centralized its education system to strengthen its multiethnic and multilingual population. The most notable of these changes included the creation of universal primary education, more equal treatment of the Chinese, Tamil, Malay, and English languages, and the development of a common syllabus for all school subjects.A mid-1980s recession forced Singapore's Ministry of Education (MOE) to strategically decentralize the system once again in pursuit of greater efficiency and increased quality. In 1988, eight select "distinguished schools"??gained independent school status with increased autonomy and flexibility in hiring staff and managing fiscal and management responsibilities. Lessons learned from that experience encouraged the MOE to establish 18 "autonomous schools"??in 1994 and provide them with funds to encourage innovative programs...
Despite this decentralization, the Ministry of Education has continued to control matters related to standards, course syllabi, and assessment. In other words, since the 1980s, schools have gained more autonomy in implementing policies, but the central authorities still determine the rules of the game. But one element of Singapore's educational system that has remained centralized is its teacher training program. Since 1971, there has been one institution in charge of teacher preparation (though it's had various names). Today it is the National Institute of Education (NIE) located on the campus of the Nanyang Technological Institute (NTU).
There's lots more in the report....enjoy!
Recently, Mike Petrilli shared his thoughts on year-round school with folks at NBC. But apparently they liked Mike so much that they also posted a full 2-minute version of his interview, which you can watch below! Check out both of these great clips.....
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