1. This piece about a group of high-performing charter schools pushing for a higher level of state funding is leading the Bites for today because the research and analysis of our own Aaron Churchill is quoted throughout. But even if it weren’t for that, this opening paragraph is pretty eye-catching too: “Charter schools in Ohio have long wanted more money from the state, but a history of well-publicized scandals, mismanagement and poor report card grades have made it hard to justify giving them any more tax dollars.” Whose assessment is being expressed there exactly? (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 3/3/19)

2. The Alexander Local Schools in Athens County have long wanted more money from local voters, but a history of poor academic performance and other factors have clearly made it hard for those voters to justify giving them any more tax dollars. Hmmm… That sounds familiar. The district has failed at the ballot box five times in less than three years. A sixth ask is on the ballot this May, and despite over 1,600 words dedicated to trying to make the case for both their rising success without any new money (the academic portion glossed over in a paragraph; half the piece about medical services and cafeteria changes) and for their “desperation” for repatriation of staffers after “cutting to the bone”, I don’t think they have made their case very well at all. “We suffer in the janitorial department” is, in my assessment, not a compelling get out the vote message. We’ll see in May if anyone else agrees. (Athens News, 3/3/19)

3. The first ever strike of charter school teachers in Ohio ended Friday. Everyone interviewed for this piece seems very happy over the process and the result. No one from the school management could be reached for comment. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 3/1/19)

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New paper on charter school facilities financing sources

The National Charter School Resource Center (NCSRC), in partnership with the Colorado League of Charter Schools and Momentum Strategies & Research, recently released a paper that explores the potential for charter schools to access facilities financing through programs like Qualified Opportunity Zones and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development programs. The NCSRC states that, “Increased awareness of these programs may help charter schools obtain financing for a facility, resulting in continued growth of the charter sector and additional high-quality seats for students across the country.”

Charter school leaders of color convene in Washington, D.C.

Earlier this week, charter school leaders of color traveled to Washington, D.C. for the fourth year in a row to meet with members of Congress. Many view this convening as an important opportunity for community leaders of color to explain why they have chosen to lead charters (in some of America’s most challenged areas) and advocate for charter school expansion funds. You can find more coverage in the 74. 

What forms can charter schools take?

Education Week published a helpful field guide on Tuesday that digs into the complex differences between different forms of charter schools and the possible strengths and weaknesses of the approaches. Specifically, they discuss charter school management options, authorizing, and funding.  

Legislative updates

On Wednesday in the Senate Education Committee, Senator Kunze offered testimony on Senate Bill 34 (bill analysis), legislation that would revise the law regarding background check policies for public and nonchartered public schools. In addition, the Ohio Department of Education offered testimony to the committee on the Draft Science, Social Studies, and Financial Literacy Model Curriculum. You can find Senator Kunze’s testimony and the Draft Model Curricula on the Senate Education Committee’s website.

Upcoming events

The School Performance Institute is hosting their next workshop in Columbus on March 28 and registration is still open for the National Charter Schools Conference, which will be held from June 30-July 3 in Las Vegas.

1. This national hit job on Ohio’s academic distress paradigm contains no mention of years of failure, kids, grades, learning, or families. (Forbes, 2/28/19) Editors in Toledo also apparently do not care about children’s academic achievement. Especially when it comes to school report cards and, by extension, Ohio’s academic distress paradigm. (Toledo Blade, 3/1/19) Clearly the folks in Lima City Schools have not gotten the widely-circulated memo that they are not supposed to care about such things. This piece indicates that district leaders are “working on making progress in improving their grades on the state report card” (love that layer of verbal insulation in that sentence) in order to avoid a declaration of academic distress…and all that goes along with it. (Lima News, 2/27/19)

2. Speaking of verbal insulation – from actual actions, actual success, and actual consequences – there was a lot of it on display earlier this week in Dayton. State Supe Paolo DeMaria came for a visit, telling the assembled educators that change is scary, risky, and hard (with an exclamation point!). Such kitty-poster platitudes are also a form of insulation, becoming so much meritless hot air when you realize that the “change” which is “scary and risky” is actually improving measurable academic outcomes for kids. Hang in there, kitty! (Dayton Daily News, 2/27/19) And speaking of the Ohio Department of Education, meet the new nerd on the block. Here’s the dude who will be in charge of rolling out the state’s new strategic plan for education. The soon-to-be-former district supe starts on April 1, probably without a trace of irony. (Geauga Maple Leaf, 2/27/19)

3. But seriously, Dr. Stewart. Can they? (Columbus Dispatch, 2/28/19)

4. While not as well-capitalized as LeBron James, the GAR Foundation in Akron does OK for itself. The foundation announced this week it will donate $1.2 million to provide out-of-school experiences for PreK to fifth grade students in Akron City Schools. Some examples are provided. Later in the piece, academic testing literally gets in the way of some of those activities. (Akron Beacon Journal, 2/28/19) In suburban Akron, there’s a big technology upgrade is underway in Coventry Local Schools (because of the demands of state testing, of course). But more riveting here, I think, is the coverage of the elementary school play. The off-again, on-again drama is worthy of the stage all by itself if you ask me. (South Side Leader, Akron, 2/28/19)

5. Finally this week: St. Mary Catholic School in Elyria, after a last-minute enrollment boost, got a reprieve from closure. (Elyria Chronicle, 3/1/19) Massillon Digital Academy, after losing its cash cow status for the district sponsoring it, did not. Ironically, district officials assured the e-school students that its doors were open for MDA students. (IndieOnline, Massillon, 2/27/19)

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Prominent Democrats running for president or considering mounting a bid are already finding themselves pressured to atone for their records on education. Senator Cory Booker is the most notable among them, though others like Senator Michael Bennet would likely face similar scrutiny should he decide to enter the fray.

We’re still a year out from the primaries, let alone the general election, but education could feature more prominently in 2020 than in past presidential contests due to the rolling teacher strikes that have made headlines since last year. And thanks in large part to the education establishment, being associated with reform, much less encouraging it, is anathema in the Democratic horse race. But if Bennet jumps in, neither he, Booker, nor any other candidate should apologize for or run away from their reform credentials.

Consider the cards Booker and Bennet were dealt. Newark, New Jersey, was once called “The Worst American City,” and its schools were the classic example of well-funded failure. Something had to be done, and Booker was willing to buck party doctrine to address the challenge. Eighteen hundred miles to the west, Bennet also confronted vehement opposition, with a local Denver pastor calling him and his allies “latter-day representatives of the Ku Klux Klan.” The irony was not lost upon Bennet that the way to avoid charges of racism was to continue to neglect bad schools for low-income and minority students.

Both Booker and Bennet set the wheels in motion for sustained—albeit unfinished—progress, and yet they would face criticism from within their own party for actually trying to solve one of the nation’s most intractable problems. It seems no good deed goes unpunished with education reform’s loyal opposition, who have implied they will accept nothing less than a mea culpa for apostasy. Indeed, the scales between the Democratic Party’s labor and civil rights wings have tipped decidedly towards the former since the halcyon days when President Obama caused them considerable irritation.

For better or for worse, education reform is now a litmus test of sorts, and the Democratic field is all too eager to prove their mettle by signaling their allegiance to the forces of resistance and repeal. This sharp turn against education reform isn’t new; we saw the same shift during the last presidential election too, though the intensity has markedly increased since then.

Never mind that our education system continues to struggle with large swaths of the population, especially those who are too often marginalized by society. Or that in spite of its low profile in presidential elections, educational improvement is a prerequisite to addressing the national strife accelerated by civic and media illiteracy. No, “Damn the torpedoes,” say party apparatchiks, as sacrifices are necessary at the altar of ideological purity.

Perhaps none of this is surprising, but 2020 Democrats—instead of viewing Booker or Bennet’s record on education as a liability—should welcome them as a differentiator that further diversifies their field. Was Booker supposed to be copacetic with decades of failing schools in Newark? Would Denver have been better off if Bennet had turned a blind eye to the district’s glaring achievement gaps?

While there is clearly a divide on education within the Democratic Party, these differences should be secondary to the grand prize of educational equity, excellence, and opportunity. Putting the records of their candidates under scrutiny is fair game in the nomination process, but the blind partisanship on education could rival the carnage of misrule afflicting the other side of the aisle if they’re not too careful. Moreover, previous support of education reform—or any other policy for that matter—doesn’t guarantee what a person does if elected president.

Booker and Bennet are politicians. Their stands on education were undoubtedly a mix of context, conviction, and political expediency. Managing a city or a school district isn’t the same as leading the nation, and it should be obvious that Booker and Bennet are both smart enough to know this. Politics would be better with a little forbearance and forgiveness before jumping to conclusions on how candidates might govern.

Sadly, the calls for ideological dogmatism are not limited to education. If Vice President Biden wades back into the political waters, he’ll likely be made to answer for the crime bill he supported in the 1990s that was attempting to deal with the murder and crack cocaine epidemics. Today it’s denounced as a contributing factor to the over-incarceration of African Americans, but it was a politically mainstream move at the time that helped propel him up the ranks of the Democratic Party.

We can’t afford to be doctrinaire when there’s still so much more to do to improve our schools. The nation doesn’t need another president who is impervious to facts or arguments; it needs one who can find common cause with folks on the left, right, and center, and paint a picture of a better education system. Put Booker and Bennet under the microscope, but don’t given them a black mark for their willingness to do the hard work expected of our public servants.

Twenty-five months after Donald Trump’s inauguration, his administration has just unveiled its big school-choice initiative—yes, the cause that, during his 2016 campaign, he termed the “new civil rights issue of our time,” the very same cause that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has devoted her career to promoting.

To be fair, it isn’t actually their first such initiative. Trump’s maiden federal budget sought $1.4 billion to promote school choice, mostly within the public sector, though nothing came of it, save for continued Congressional funding of a smallish charter-school support program that antedated Trump and that up to now has enjoyed bipartisan support.

This week’s initiative, if and when enacted, has a $5 billion annual spending limit, a quarter the size of Trump’s campaign proposal—and a sum that close observers acknowledge would take years to reach. The main reason for such a gradual ramp-up is that the proposal leaves it entirely to states to design their own “Education Freedom Scholarship” programs and leaves it to private donors—individuals and corporations—to come up with the money for it. In return, the donors will qualify for federal tax credits. That means it’s not even a “federal program” in the usual sense; it isn’t run or paid for by the federal government. It’s optional for states. And it won’t appear in the federal budget, though the tax credit mechanism would somewhat reduce federal revenues. (Deficits and the national debts have not, however, loomed large on the list of things that trouble the Trump team and its current Congressional allies.)

For me, there’s much to applaud in this proposal, not just because I favor almost every form of school choice but also because the plan is so flexible, customizable, and adaptable to the contours of education needs, priorities, and politics of individual states. It encourages private people (and companies) to deploy more of their own money to make more education choices available to more kids. It’s a distant cousin of the recent move by Congress to allow some of the (private, but tax-sheltered) dollars in 529 plans, previously limited to college costs, to be deployed for K–12 school choice, the key difference being that, via 529 plans, people aid the education of their own children and grandchildren, which isn’t permissible under the EFF initiative.

It needs to be noted that eighteen states already have some sort of tax credit scholarship program and proposals to create more such—and expand those that exist—are already under discussion in a number of places. Enactment of the new DeVos plan would likely lead to somewhat faster movement on this front—though since many of the programs already operate via non-profit organizations, donations to them are typically already deductible from federal income taxes (deductions, not credits, however, and only for those who itemize).

But blue states are typically allergic to school choice, especially the private kind, so one ought not expect a big eruption of new scholarship programs in lots more states, even with the federal incentive, and even though a state’s customized version need not even go near private-school choice. (Possibilities include CTE, Advanced Placement, out-of-district public schools, summer programs—really anything in the legitimate K–12 sphere that a “scholarship” could help one obtain.)

The larger political point, however, is that while a plan such as this might have made it through the previous Congress as part of the big tax reform bill, its political prospects in the present House of Representatives are pretty sketchy. Indeed, school choice advocates are already concerned about the fate of the well-established charter-school program—limited as it is to public schools!—considering the ever-lefter leanings of growing numbers within what’s now a Democratic majority.

Even on the right, some have misgivings as to whether the feds should tiptoe further into the choice waters. The education-policy teams at both Heritage and Cato have weighed in against proposals such as DeVos’s, essentially on grounds that this is none of Washington’s business and that everything Uncle Sam touches leads in time to onerous over-regulation and more shackles than opportunities. 

Once upon a time—late 1970’s!—I stood by the side of the late Senator Daniel P. Moynihan as he and Senator Bob Packwood did their level bipartisan best to persuade their colleagues to pass a “tuition tax credit” measure that the House had already agreed to. Opposed by every part of the public education lobby as well as the Carter administration, and ultimately left dangling in the wind by the powerful Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee (Louisiana’s legendary Russell Long), we failed. A few years later, a similar initiative by President Reagan also failed to get traction in Congress.

It’s not a great track record at the federal level for any form of K–12 choice that involves private-school options—even as a thousand programs encourage (or even mandate) private options in just about every other realm of American life, including pre-school and college. It seems to me unlikely that the DeVos initiative is going to have a positive outcome on Capitol Hill, at least not this year or next. But it also seems to me to be a thoughtful, flexible, workable—and blessedly modest—initiative and I sincerely hope that it, or something like it, eventually becomes real. I’ve long been disgusted by the singular political rejectionism that ghettoizes this one expression of “privateness” and freedom in a nation that otherwise applauds, accepts, even depends on them, and generally assists them to thrive.

An article in the Times caught my eye the other day: “The Good-Enough Life.” The author, Avram Alpert, a writing teacher at Princeton, draws on the work of D.W. Winnicott, who popularized the idea of “the good-enough mother.” Alpert summarizes her thusly:

This mother is good enough not in the sense that she is adequate or average, but that she manages a difficult task: initiating the infant into a world in which he or she will feel both cared for and ready to deal with life’s endless frustrations. To fully become good enough is to grow up into a world that is itself good enough, that is as full of care and love as it is suffering and frustration.

It made me wonder if that’s the sort of school I should want for my children. (Others have wondered this too.) Not a school that is just “adequate or average,” much less mediocre, but one that, by design, helps to prepare kids for “life’s endless frustrations.”

This is hardly a hypothetical question, as my kids are getting an ample dose of frustration at their public elementary school in Montgomery County, Maryland. It’s nothing terrible; they are making solid progress academically, and I know they are safe. These are not things that all parents in America can take for granted. I know we are extremely fortunate—my friends on the left would use the word “privileged”—and that “good enough” would not be good enough for families without our advantages.

But my boys have to put up with plenty of annoyances all the same. Some are small, like their school’s new recess policy: Because playing on a muddy field is “unsafe” (figure that one out), and the black top isn’t very large, they only get to go outside every other day. Or their weekly art class, which is boring and uninspiring. But some are big, like a recent spate of near-constant disruption caused by a handful of unruly boys in one of my son’s classrooms—disruption that’s starting to take a toll on learning.

I have no doubt that if my only goal was for them to excel academically—to develop their reading, writing, and math skills; to build an understanding of the wonders of the world through history, geography, art, and science—it would be more efficient and effective to homeschool them or send them to private school. In just a few hours a day at home they could learn way more than they can at school, what with the realities of dealing with large groups of kids, differing readiness levels, and so much more. And my brief experience as a private school parent—when my boys were in preschool—indicates to me that a tuition check would earn me more responsiveness from school administrators, instead of the “talk to the hand” attitude we public school parents enjoy today. High-end private schools are a luxury good, after all.

Yet perhaps there is something valuable in my kids learning to put up with the hassles of public school, so as to be ready for the hassles of life. They are going to have to deal with stupid rules and difficult (and sometimes troubled) people in the real world. Why not now?

It reminds me of the reason the U.S. military at one time didn’t want to take kids who graduated from fulltime online schools: They hadn’t dealt with the B.S. of a traditional high school, so they weren’t sure they could deal with the B.S. of the military. Maybe sucking it up is a valuable “social and emotional” skill.

To be sure, I might be rationalizing. To find the money to send two boys to private school would require a painful change in our family’s lifestyle; likewise with becoming homeschoolers. But the truth is that we could do it if we wanted it badly enough. So I have a strong self-interest in conflating “mediocre” and “good enough.” Maybe I’m just trying to feel better about the fact that I haven’t figured out how to get my boys into a school that’s excellent.

In the end, I feel OK about our choices. It helps that while their school is often mediocre, they do get to experience flashes of excellence, thanks mostly to some fantastic teachers. Getting a taste of both greatness and daily annoyances might be the best preparation for an excellent—er, good enough—life.

Everybody knows that teacher quality matters hugely in education, indeed may be the single most potent variable in a classroom, school or system. Yet it’s also an exceptionally elusive and inherently contentious quality. Is a “quality” teacher simply the same thing as an “effective” teacher, with the latter typically gauged by looking at measurable student outcomes of one sort of another, preferably via a sophisticated “value added” calculation? It’s both helpful and unhelpful to judge teacher quality on the basis of student learning, even setting aside the interminable arguments over the limits of test scores, the difficulty of making reliable “growth” calculations, and the methodological and logistical challenges of associating such growth with the work of a given teacher.

It’s helpful because, yes, of course, the quality we most value in a teacher is the production of successful student learning. It’s certainly a good way to distinguish between highly effective and ineffective instructors. It’s so much better than looking at paper credentials, for example, or subjective judgments based on fleeting classroom observations. So, yes, kudos to the late Bill Sanders and those who have followed in his wake. Yet this way of identifying quality is unhelpful because it means waiting until a teacher has dealt with students over enough years to have a shot at making a defensible value-added appraisal—and withstanding the inevitable political and teachers-union yammer about how unfair this is and how it conflates correlation with causation. It gives you nothing useful to use at the front end, such as deciding who gets to become a teacher in the first place. Plus the educational carnage for those students whose teachers turn out not to have been effective.

The Holy Grail of teacher quality is some valid and defensible way of knowing ahead of time who will be effective in the classroom, i.e., whose students are likely to learn a lot.

Historically, though, we’ve had no good way to do this, so we’ve used weak proxies such as whether a prospective teacher is in the top or bottom third of their high school class, how they fare on a Praxis exam, what their ed-school grades are, and how many college-semester hours they took in the subject they’re being hired to teach.

For umpteen reasons, none of those is very satisfactory, and in places and fields where there are teacher shortages, it hasn’t mattered much, anyway, since schools haven’t been able to do much picking and choosing.

People wanting to boost teacher quality—and who doesn’t?—have often been brainwashed by unions and others who insist that if only we paid teachers more we’d get better ones, often leading (as recently in the Maryland commission I’ve been serving on) to proposals for higher starting pay and across-the-board raises. And all such proposals carry whopping price tags because nobody is able to deal with the straightforward fact that if the country didn’t employ near four million individuals as teachers, it could easily pay quite a lot more to those it did employ without adding a big tax hit.

Enter Eric Hanushek, Marc Piopiunik, and Simon Wiederhold with a very important new study. “Do smarter teachers make smarter students?” they ask—and the answer turns out to be yes, indeed they do. Employing international data from the OECD, and some very sophisticated analyses, they demonstrate “a strong relationship between teacher cognitive skills and student achievement across countries. We estimate that increasing teacher numeracy skills by one standard deviation increases student performance by nearly 15 percent of a standard deviation on the PISA math test.” Almost the same gains in student reading are associated with higher literacy skills among teachers.

It’s a long but lucid and accessible article that should be read—twice—by everyone concerned about teacher quality. Hire smarter, better-educated people as instructors and—lo and behold—the kids they instruct will learn more.

Easier said than done, you respond, and of course that’s so. The study also showed that abler teachers are harder to come by in countries where educated women have more career opportunities—and that teachers’ “wage premiums are also highly correlated with student achievement across countries.” (Wage premium refers to how well paid are a country’s teachers when compared to the pay of “other college graduates with the same gender, work experience, and literacy and numeracy skills.”)

In recent decades, the U.S. has opened many career pathways to educated women—and American teachers are paid “22 percent less than comparably experienced and skilled college graduates doing other jobs.” Those realities do not, however, point toward obvious, feasible measures to boost teacher quality. Nobody is going to reverse course on job opportunities for women. And there’s little reason—based on either this research or common sense—to suppose that a giant across-the-board boost in teacher pay would yield commensurate gains in teacher quality. As Hanushek and his co-authors write, “Increasing teacher salaries would undoubtedly expand the pool of potential teachers and help to reduce teacher turnover. Our evidence does not, however, indicate that more talented teachers would be hired out of the enlarged pool, nor does it indicate that the teachers induced to stay in the profession would be the most effective.” In short, “policymakers will need to do more than raise teacher pay across the board to ensure positive results. They must ensure that higher salaries go to more effective teachers.” Shorter still: They also gotta make some really tough distinctions and even tougher decisions.