Last Monday, Massachusetts announced that 82% of its class of 2003 passed the state's English test and 75% passed the math test. On Wednesday, Achieve, Inc. released an evaluation of the state's standards and tests. The verdict: top marks for the Bay State for developing and implementing high-quality standards and tests that are well aligned with each other.  Achieve, a bipartisan nonprofit founded by governors and CEOs to promote school reform, also praised Massachusetts for providing much accessible information to the public about the tests and results, including releasing each year's test questions after the test is taken.  As a USA Today editorial pointed out, the state using the nation's highest-regarded test is reaping some of the most impressive gains. This should reassure states whose tests are being greeted with student protests and governors nervous about pending federal test mandates. For more see "Schools Sharpen Testing," USA Today, October 17, 2001 (article may be purchased at http://www.usatoday.com). The Achieve report, Measuring Up: A Report on Education Standards and Assessments for Massachusetts, is available online at http://www.achieve.org/achieve.nsf/Mass_pub.html.

The charter-school idea is now ten years old. Which is to say, it's completed the "elementary" grades and is ready for "middle school" - and the onrushing storms of adolescence. It's a hopeful but precarious time. And some worrisome issues lie ahead.

Meanwhile, expansion continues. The Center for Education Reform reports several hundred new charters this fall. There'd be more but for "caps" in many state charter laws. Enrollments also keep rising, though less rapidly than before. A handful of cities now have 15-20% of their kids in charters. There is evidence - mostly anecdotal - that this competition is prodding a number of school systems to become more customer conscious. Sometimes it triggers more dramatic policy shifts.

Yet some of the wind is going out of the charter sails. While one might expect that to happen to any maturing reform idea, we must also ask whether the diminished breeze results from a troublesome combination of leaderlessness, bureaucratization, enmity, penury and exhaustion. The question, going forward, is whether the charter movement and its allies can rise to these challenges and find some fresh breezes for their sails.

Six issues are particularly worrying.

First, we see little national or state-level leadership on this front. As I noted in last week's Education Gadfly, charters got dissed at the big IBM-sponsored education summit of corporate chieftains and governors. The Bush administration rarely mentions them and evidently doesn't view them as an important part of its reform strategy. (The Education Department recently announced that the directorship of its charter school office will remain a "career" job; not a good sign.) Congress is mostly silent, too, more apt to regard charter schools as another insatiable "categorical" program to be funded - or an unwanted knot in the ESEA accountability string - than as a bold approach to education reform. In the states, few governors tarry long on this subject. When they turn to it at all,  they admit to frustration over statutory caps and "bad apples" in the charter barrel.

Second, the bad-apple problem is not large but is easily exploited by critics and enemies - who seldom note that conventional public (and private) schooling has more than its share of rotten fruit and that this goes largely undetected and unfixed. (In the charter world, at least, people are still capable of outrage over a bad school!)  Most states have at least a few charters that never should have been allowed to start, and a few more that cannot sustain the pace.  What to do about them? Many states (and other sponsors) are responding in just the wrong way: instead of pulling the plug on these hapless schools and replacing them with better ones (or, say, asking a good one to assume management of a bad one), they're slowing down the whole charter enterprise and putting bureaucrats instead of innovators in charge of the program. Because the foremost goal of bureaucrats is always to fend off future problems, the red tape piles up and the procedural requirements multiply.

Third, even without today's added red tape, it was hard to start a charter school. Gathering the requisite talent to meet a charter's many leadership needs is a tough challenge. That charter schools get, on average, just 80% of the funding of regular public schools makes for extremely tight budgets. Most difficult is finding a suitable place in which to put one's school - and the absence of decent access to capital or facilities. (While I have high hopes for "virtual" charter schools, today most kids still need a building to spend their days in.) Only a few states have nibbled at this bullet.

Fourth, charter enemies are relentless and inventive. Their favorite strategies today are (a) to keep caps tight on grounds that "this experiment hasn't proven itself"; (b) to persuade regulators and legislators, in the name of creating a "level playing field" (or "ensuring accountability" or "preventing further problems") that charters must be subject to ever more of the same requirements as regular public schools (e.g. teacher certification); and (c) to file lawsuits challenging the (state) constitutionality of charter schools as not being truly "public" schools. (In Ohio, for example, both teachers unions are plaintiffs in such suits, joined by nearly every other element of the public school establishment - and they're using the litigation process to harass schools, scare parents and worry teachers.)

Fifth, the charter movement has not been smart enough about "accountability," perhaps because it's divided on the subject. We find libertarians insistent that the marketplace is a sufficient accountability tool and that, so long as people want to attend a school, that school is a success. We find dyed-in-the-wool public educators easily swayed by the "level playing field" argument, even when that leads to enough red tape to strangle innovation. We find people who on principle resist state standards and tests - mainly for the same neo-progressivist reasons that other educators resist them. And we find few who have forcefully insisted on value-added measures of the sort that are most apt to show what good these schools are doing their students.

Sixth and finally, the charter movement cannot quite decide whether it is a "trade association" that's obliged to defend the interests of every school that wears the charter label, or an education reform movement responsible to the public for ensuring that only good schools carry that label.

Maybe "movement" is the wrong word. We're talking, after all, about a grass-roots effort that takes many forms and has many different champions, including people with little else in common.  Maybe nebulousness, pluralism and leaderlessness are inherent characteristics of such an enterprise. But we need better than that if charter schools are to have a vibrant second decade. They still hold immense promise. For example, the National Journal's Jonathan Rauch recently profiled Nueva Esperanza Academy, a charter school serving Philadelphia's Latino community, one of as many as fifty such schools being developed by the National Council of La Raza. It's bringing low-income high school dropouts back into education. The school's name means "New Hope." That's how many charter advocates see their movement. But hope alone won't get it through another ten years.

"Charter Schools: A New Hope for America's Latinos," by Jonathan Rauch, National Journal, September 28, 2001.

If you're interested in applying for the Department of Education's Charter Schools Program director job, click here.

A new front has opened up in the battle over the SAT, and the combatants are profiled in a long (14 page) article in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education. The new critics of the SAT don't argue that it's biased; they're upset that it's not based on the school curriculum. Using what is essentially an IQ test for college admission creates incentives for students to learn gimmicks to ace the test, they argue. If colleges instead used curriculum-based tests for admission purposes, students would have new reason to pay attention to their high school courses and a clear idea of what standards they must meet.  Such tests could also be used to identify areas where schools need to improve instruction.  Several groups mentioned in the article are studying whether today's state assessments could replace the SAT in college admissions and some of the groups are helping states design better tests. Some of the challenges they're wrestling with include a fear that college admissions directors will face logistical nightmares trying to make sense of scores from 50 different state tests and a concern that developing fair questions and ensuring security for tests used for college admissions purposes will be costly for states. For more see "The SAT's Greatest Test," by Ben Gose and Jeffrey Selingo, The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 26, 2001. (available only to subscribers)

Parents in two states finally have the information they need to evaluate their school systems, thanks to the analytical skills of Standard & Poor's and the willingness of Gov. John Engler and ex-Gov. Tom Ridge to open their books.  The School Evaluation Services (SES) division of S&P has posted comprehensive online reports about each school district in Michigan and Pennsylvania, charting some 1500 education and financial variables under six broad headings (including student results, the learning environment (class size and staffing), spending, and demographics).  The reports describe each district's strengths and weaknesses and compare it to state averages and peer districts (so you can see that high-spending Colonial School District (PA) is achieving only modest results, for instance, or that Ann Arbor (MI) has an "achievement gap" more than three times the state average).  "SES is beginning to change the balance of power in America's public-school systems," writes Pete du Pont of The Wall Street Journal; for the first time, a nonpartisan company with no connection to the education establishment has undertaken an objective analysis of school systems. To see for yourself, surf to www.ses.standardandpoors.com or read "Class Consciousness," by Pete du Pont, The Wall Street Journal, October 17, 2001 (available only to subscribers) or "In a Financial Analysis, Philadelphia Schools Fare Poorly," by Dale Mezzacappa, The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 5, 2001 (available for a fee at http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/home/).

We've heard a lot about the dire shortage of math and science teachers that has forced educators trained in other disciplines to teach those subjects "out of field."  But we've heard much less about shortages in field of history. Why?  Because poorly educated principals and ed school types often see history as the easiest subject to teach, "since it involves no math or grammar," as one principal put it.  So easy, in fact, that some schools routinely assign their weakest instructors to cover history classes.  Gregory Kent Stanley, a high school teacher in Georgia with a graduate degree in history, describes his route from ed school classes on "the film projector, laminating machine and bulletin board" to the classroom (recounting numerous slights to the study of history he encountered from the education establishment) in the autumn issue of Pi Lambda Theta's educational HORIZONS.  "Faith Without Works? Twenty-five Years of Undervaluing Content Area Knowledge," by Gregory Kent Stanley, educational HORIZONS, Fall 2001.

According to E. D. Hirsch, the best research on how people learn suggests that students need broad general knowledge as well as an ability to learn before they can acquire a deeper understanding of any discipline.  The literature professor, author of Cultural Literacy, and developer of the rigorous Core Knowledge curriculum thus cautions us to avoid the "sloganized polarity between deep understanding and the rote learning of mere facts" that often characterizes education debates.  Rather, he explains, one cannot exist without the other.  Schools should teach an array of subjects for broad, general knowledge, and a moderate number of specific examples in depth as part of a sequenced curriculum that students at each level must master before moving on to the next.  But not just any subjects will do; those selected ought to have "the greatest potential for developing general competence and narrowing the test-score gap among student populations," Hirsch argues. For more see "Seeking Breadth and Depth in the Curriculum," by E. D. Hirsch Jr., Educational Leadership, October 2001.  (not available online)

Dan D. Goldhaber, from Selected Papers in School Finance 2000-01, National Center for Education Statistics, August 2001

As part of the National Center for Education Statistics' Selected Papers in School Finance 2000-01 series, edited by William Fowler, Urban Institute economist Dan D. Goldhaber has written a very interesting essay examining teacher pay over time. Mostly what he demonstrates is how complicated this topic is, how difficult to select and apply the right "deflator" and to be certain what to compare teacher pay with. It's also daunting to decide which measure of teacher compensation to use. For example, does one look at beginning pay, average pay, top-of-the-scale pay? With or without benefits included? Done on an annual basis, a monthly basis, a weekly basis or an hourly basis? These are non-trivial analytic questions with major effects on the conclusions that one reaches. Also of concern is the extent to which teacher salary data, including that reported by government agencies, is in fact gathered by the teacher unions. Perhaps the most important policy implication of Goldhaber's analysis is the urgency of decoupling teacher pay from fixed salary schedules and instead varying it along several dimensions. On balance, he believes, school systems face three main options: (a) to radically increase teacher salaries across the board, at immense costs and by rates of increase that exceed anything in recent history; (b) to "differentiate salaries by teacher skills"; or (c) to " risk losing technical proficient individuals to other occupations." Present evidence indicates a de facto opting for the third of those possibilities. Goldhaber clearly doesn't think that's very wise. He doesn't think the first option is realistic. And he makes a pretty good case for the second one. To order the entire volume in which the Goldhaber paper appears (its number is NCES 2001378), write to U.S. Department of Education, ED Pubs, PO Box 1398, Jessup, MD 20794-1398 or phone 1-877-4ED-Pubs. To download a PDF version of the Goldhaber chapter, surf to http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/2001378_2.pdf.

Edison Schools, September 2001

Everyone wants to know if Chris Whittle's attempt to create a chain of effective schools and turn a profit at the same time is working.  Stock analysts (and shareholders) know the profit question remains unanswered, but, according to its own fourth-year annual report, Edison seems to be a doing a decent job of educating kids.  The report begins with a word from RAND, which has been engaged by Edison to do a rigorous, independent evaluation of its schools and report the findings for better or worse. Those results will not be available for two or three more years; in the meantime, RAND has reviewed Edison's own annual report and says that its statements are consistent with available data from state and testing company sources. The nation's largest for-profit public school management company - now operating 136 schools - says that it has improved student proficiency test scores by an average of six percentage points (and scores on norm-referenced tests by an average of five percentage points) every year since 1995. The report also says that 84% of Edison schools are achieving at higher levels now than when they opened. Meanwhile, the number of low-income and African-American students attending Edison schools increased between 1998 and today (from 57 to 70% and 46% to 64% respectively). Skeptics may want to see comparisons between Edison and nearby schools serving similar populations, but they will have to wait for the RAND evaluation. Edison's annual report is available at www.edisonschools.com/design/d23.html or by calling Edison at 212-419-1600.

National Center for Education Statistics, October 2001

This is a regular publication by the National Center for Education Statistics. It's 65 pages long and pretty dry but it contains interesting facts about the relatively small number of big districts that collectively educate 23% of all American public school children.  Note, though, that it's only 23%. Analysts and policymakers tend to focus so single-mindedly on big-city schools that they often neglect those attended by the other three-quarters of U.S. kids. Many of the latter - e.g. schools in Dayton, Ohio - have their full measure of education woes. Moreover, the hundred largest districts include a number of relatively posh suburban school systems such as Palm Beach (Florida), Montgomery County (Maryland) and Fairfax County (Virginia). So it's not easy to generalize about them. Still, they yield up interesting data, as much about individual districts as about the group of them. For example, while the federal share of their budget averages 9.1 percent, it varies from as little as 2.3 percent in some suburban systems to 14.5% in New Orleans (and even higher in the special cases of Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia). More remarkably, the percentage of "other staff" (people who are NOT teachers, counselors, "instructional support," library or school/district administrators) in the employ of these school districts ranges from the single digits in Chicago to some two-fifths of the entire payroll in New York, Philadelphia and several Florida districts. (The Chicago figure is bizarrely low but several other districts are below 20%.) You won't find any policy conclusions here - just data. To get a copy - its report number is NCES 2001-346 and the author is Beth Aronstamm Young - you could write to U.S. Department of Education, ED Pubs, PO Box 1398, Jessup, MD 20794-1398; you could phone 1-877-4ED-Pubs; or you could surf to http://www.nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2001346.

New Jersey Department of Education, October 2001

In accord with New Jersey's charter school law, passed in 1995 and amended in 2000, Commissioner of Education Vito A. Gagliardi, Sr. has submitted an evaluation report to the governor, legislature and state board of education.  It has two parts - the findings of KPMG auditors who visited charter schools statewide and interviewed parents, and the Commissioner's recommendations based on these findings and public hearings.  The evaluation of New Jersey's charter schools - 54 at the time of the survey, down to 50 today, serving 10,000 kids - is generally positive.  Charter parent, student and teacher satisfaction is high.  That's because "charter schools, on average, have lower class sizes, lower student-faculty ratios, lower student mobility rates, longer school days and academic years, greater instructional time, and higher faculty attendance rates than their districts of residence."  And charter students - the majority of them African-American and eligible for Title I - are making solid academic gains; in many cases the new schools are outperforming comparable district schools.  New Jersey's charter program is not without its flaws, however, such as insufficient funding and fiscal mismanagement; the Commissioner's recommendations to fix them range from the red-tape variety (requiring all potential charter heads to participate in a leadership institute) to the truly beneficial (providing greater regulatory relief and state aid for facilities).  The fastest way to learn more is to surf to http://www.state.nj.us/njded/chartsch/evaluation/.  You can also request a hard copy or CD-ROM of the report from the New Jersey Department of Education's Office of Publications and Distribution Services at 609-984-0905.