1. In case you missed it, researchers from CREDO released their latest report on charter school performance in Ohio, supported with funding from Fordham. It is something of a dry affair, if you ask me, as was the event here in Columbus which was set to herald its release. But many of Ohio’s intrepid education journalists found the proper news within to excite themselves and, hopefully, their readers too. You can check out coverage in the Plain Dealer… (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 2/19/19) …Gongwer news… (Gongwer Ohio, 2/19/19) …and the Dispatch so far. (Columbus Dispatch, 2/19/19)

2. Speaking of charters, a rare strike of charter school teachers took place yesterday in, you guessed it, Cleveland, the only place in Ohio (so far) where some charters have been unionized. The stated issue: there are not enough teachers in the school to properly handle the work load. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 2/18/19) 
3. In other news, while Mike DeWine may be new in the governor’s chair, he is an O.G. when it comes to the L.C. – local control. Hence the reason everyone was very excited to hear him go on the record as willing to look at Ohio’s HB 70 and the changes wrought to districts by the revamped academic distress paradigm it put in place. He’s already “got some people working on this,” he said, and that they are “working with some legislators on this”. The reaction among Elyria’s ink-stained wretches is as you might expect. (Elyria Chronicle, 2/20/19)

4. As if you didn’t know, this whole academic distress business has created some weirdness in the districts operating under the aegis of a new style Academic Distress Commission. In Lorain, the city somehow thinks that they are obligated to intervene legally in the ongoing dispute. If I may just read the minds of Lorainian taxpayers for a moment: “Ummm…. What now?” (Northern Ohio Morning Journal, 2/19/19) Additionally, the teachers union decided to ask membership whether they had no confidence in the district CEO. (No, I don’t know that that is how the question was asked. Just guessing.) The unsurprising result made news in nearby Elyria. Honestly, the only surprise here is how few teachers seemed to have responded, however the question was asked. I assumed answering would be mandatory. (Elyria Chronicle, 2/20/19)

5. Finally today: How are things going in those districts who are on the cusp of an academic distress declaration…and everything that (for the moment, but check back later in the legislative term) goes along with it? Well, in Dayton things still sound pretty dismal overall. But it seems very clearly not the district’s fault anymore. If the board and administration do say so themselves. But it is hard (for me at least) to hear their message over all the ironic statements. (Dayton Daily News, 2/19/19)
   

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When I visit classrooms with the principals I coach in urban, suburban, and private schools, it’s obvious how hard most teachers are working, how much care they put into setting up their classrooms, and how much gumption it takes to work with young people six hours a day. I see lots of effective teaching—practices that one might rate as level 3 or 4 on a four-point rating scale—and very little that’s horrible, or level 1. But I do see a fair amount of mediocre, level 2 practices—for example, teachers giving out low-rigor, fill-in-the-blanks worksheets, calling only on students who raise their hands, or failing to answer kids’ unspoken question, “Why are we learning this?”

Human behavior naturally falls on a bell-shaped curve, so every school will have some variance in classroom performance. But that inevitably produces inequitable results. Effective practices are especially beneficial to students who walk into school with any kind of disadvantage, and these same students are disproportionately harmed by mediocre and ineffective practices—kids who don’t raise their hands when the teacher asks, “Any questions?”; who haven’t yet learned how to work around their disabilities; who are dealing with a family breakup or other trauma; who are openly defiant or sit in sullen silence.

Truly bad teaching obviously needs to be addressed immediately, but so do mediocre practices, which all too often fly under the radar, and are also not okay. Lesson by lesson, day by day, month by month, denying these kids quality instruction widens the achievement gap and robs them of the American dream.

We know what doesn’t improve sub-optimal classroom practices: school leaders making once-a-year announced-in-advance observations with copious documentation; superficial “walk-throughs” to fill out checklists; interrupting teachers midstream to show how a lesson should be taught; using student survey data as a high-stakes cudgel; mounting cameras in classrooms; and worst of all, using student test scores and value-added data to judge teachers’ performance—a practice that is now thoroughly discredited. We shouldn’t be surprised that these and other practices driven by distrust and compliance have never shown up in the research on effective schools. That dog hasn’t barked.

School board members, superintendents, and union leaders should demand much more of their evaluation policies and rethink their collective bargaining language, driven by these questions: How often are teachers observed each year? Are supervisory visits announced or unannounced; in other words, are visitors seeing daily classroom reality or a dog-and-pony show? How long do supervisors stay, and what are they looking for? Do they check in with students and look at what they’re working on, and afterward is there a conversation with the teacher? Is the process of documenting visits overly burdensome? Are supervisors themselves supervised and coached in a meaningful way, not only on classroom observations, but also on how well they orchestrate teacher teamwork, another key driver of instructional improvement? And what goes in a teachers’ personnel files at the end of each school year, summing up performance on all aspects of their work?

I’ve grappled with these questions over my five decades as a teacher, central office administrator, principal, leadership coach, and research reader, and I’ve concluded that there’s a far better way of supervising, coaching, and evaluating teachers. Here are the key elements:

• Short, frequent, unannounced classroom visits—at least ten a year for each teacher—replacing traditional formal observations;
• A humble, curious, low-tech approach to visits: observing carefully, looking for learning outcomes, jotting a few notes, chatting with kids using simple questions like, “What are you working on?”;
• A face-to-face conversation shortly after each visit in which the teacher can explain context, choices, and the bigger picture;
• Hearing this, a supervisor’s decision on what’s appropriate praise and one “leverage point”;
• A brief narrative summary sent afterward, perhaps approximately 1,000 characters long;
• Administrator drop-ins on teacher team meetings to monitor the all-important process of planning curriculum units and looking together at student work for insights on what’s working and what’s not; and
• The use of an evaluation rubric just three times each year: in September, the teacher self-assesses and sets two to three goals; in January, the teacher and supervisor compare scores and discuss any disagreements; at the end of the school year, this comparison/discussion process is repeated and the evaluation is finalized, signed, and put in the teacher’s file.

This approach takes about the same number of educator hours as traditional evaluations, but is vastly more authentic and effective at understanding and improving teaching and learning. (A number of other educators have developed similar approaches.)

It’s also important that teachers feel safe with frequent, unannounced visits. I’ve found that most teachers trust this system if the following are in place:

• Observers make at least monthly visits to sample the year’s instruction;
• They stay long enough to get a meaningful snapshot, which can be accomplished in as little as ten to fifteen minutes;
• They schedule visits to see the teacher in all relevant contexts—different subjects at elementary schools, different student groups at secondary schools, in the morning and afternoon, all five days of the week, all the months of the school year, and the beginning, middle, and end of lessons;
• There’s an agreement on what the observer is looking for, such as what students are supposed to be learning, and evidence that all students are learning it;
• Observers have a good eye for instruction and aren’t intrusive, which means that regular supervision of their work is essential;
• There’s a face-to-face conversation every time, during which the observer really listens;
• There are other points of contact—such as team meetings, parents, and other activities—to grasp the bigger picture of the teacher’s work;
• Teachers have input on rubric scoring;
• Fair notice is given of unsatisfactory performance; and
• All parties understand that the process is about improving teaching and learning, not about playing “gotcha.”

Principals need to be prime observers, perhaps taking on the most challenging classrooms and orchestrating the work of instructional coaches and peer observers to see high-performing teachers, where a “softer,” more collegial approach would be appropriate. The more observers there are, the better the observer-teacher ratio will be, and the more frequent visits and follow-up conversations will be. The goal is meeting the three essential needs of every front-line professional, which are, according to Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen’s Thanks for the Feedback: appreciation, continuous improvement, and knowing where they stand.

Because this system is structured in a way that avoids bureaucratic nonsense and liberates and develops the skills observers already have, administrators, instructional coaches, and peer observers will, in most cases, have the chops to do these mini-observations well. Here’s why:

• A low-tech, looking-over-kids’-shoulders approach brings out the natural curiosity in observers who’ve had classroom experience.
• A lot happens during ten-to-fifteen-minute visits, providing a number of talking points, sometimes including mediocre practices.
• Focusing on one leverage point per visit makes feedback conversations more manageable for observers.
• Teachers are less defensive in face-to-face conversations, especially if they take place in their classrooms (when students aren’t there).
• The conversations give teachers a chance to inform administrators of instructional decisions and educate them on the finer points of their curricula.
• Frequent visits give administrators multiple at-bats with each teacher, which is helpful since not every conversation will be a home run; this gives them a more complete pictures and a better chance of successfully improving classroom practices.

For educators who are new to this approach, there will be a learning curve. But the good news is that the mini-observation and feedback skills are eminently coachable by superintendents or their designees through the use of co-observations and discussions of case studies and write-ups in leadership meetings.

In my work in a wide variety of schools, I’ve found that this process brings out the best in observers, helping them continuously grow as coaches of effective instruction. The result: more good teaching in more classrooms more of the time. And that is the key to raising the next generation of well-educated Americans and closing our social-class and racial achievement gaps. 

This weekend saw the passing of Siegfried “Zig” Engelmann. He was a giant among educators and a true social justice warrior. By that, I mean that he dedicated his life to improving outcomes for the disadvantaged, not that he was some great wet lettuce who opined about emotional labor and set his critics three books to read before he would discuss anything with them.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Engelmann took part in the largest educational experiment of all time—Project Follow Through. The aim was to give disadvantaged kids the best possible start to their education. The planned U.S. government funding was cut by congress, so what was intended initially to be a large-scale intervention was stripped back to an experiment. The idea was that of “planned variation.” Different groups would develop their own programs and implement them in different centers. Outcomes from the different programs would then be compared in order to see which was the most effective.

Engelmann and his colleagues developed the Direct Instruction model. This is not to be confused with just any form of explicit teaching. The Engelmann model had unique features that drew upon a specific theory of instruction and, controversially, employed the use of scripted lessons. Apparently, scripting the lessons was never the original intention, but the first teachers involved in the programs kept going off-piste.

Direct Instruction was the clear winner of the Project Follow Through experiment. Despite being labeled by researchers as a “Basic Skills” program, it was the best performer in terms of higher order cognitive skills, such as reading comprehension and mathematical problem solving, as well as the affective domain of student self-esteem. This is despite the fact that many competitor programs were explicitly set-up to focus on cognitive and affective skills; most of these actually had a negative impact.

This evidence has been largely dismissed by the educational establishment. Because it was so big, Project Follow Through was also messy, and so you can poke holes in the methodology. You might think that this would prompt academics to setup more rigorous trials of Direct Instruction and the alternatives, but they have been strangely reluctant to do so. This means that much of the further research on the method has been conducted by Engelmann and his small group of Direct Instruction advocates centered on the University of Oregon. This then provides another line of attack for those who wish to dismiss the research.

Why is it so important to dismiss Direct Instruction? It is inconvenient to the dominant ideology of educational progressivism or, latterly, constructivism. Who cares about kids’ life chances when there is an ideology at stake.

This means that an independent school like mine will make use of Engelmann’s programs, but his work is either unknown or dismissed in the schools and kindergartens he was trying to help.

I think all of us would like to leave the world a better place than we found it. Zig Engelmann certainly achieved this, but I cannot help feeling that it could have been even better if more of us had listened.

A version of this essay was originally published on the author’s blog, Filling the Pail. The present version was edited slightly per the Fordham Institute’s style guide.

There are two ways to read this report of a first-of-its-kind arts education experiment from Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research. The first is with a measure of relief. The authors claim measurable academic, social, and emotional outcomes associated with arts education for elementary and middle school students. Bravo! The second is with a touch of vexation, perhaps sadness, or even resignation. Do we really need a randomized control trial study to justify the arts as an essential part of a well-rounded education? If a rock-bottom basic function of K–8 schooling is to expose children to the broadest range of human knowledge, discovery, and expression (that is the function, right?), then a permission slip is hardly needed to include the arts. What would we do if the results had proven no measurable outcomes? Would some argue to remove the arts from the school day?

Alas, that ship has sailed. Arts education has been in decline since the 1980s, note Daniel H. Bowen of Texas A&M, and the University of Missouri’s Brian Kisida, the present study’s coauthors. The emphasis on standardized testing in reading, math, and other core subjects since the passage of No Child Left Behind has also “coincided with notable declines” in exposure to the arts in school, they report.

Bowen and Kisida studied data and survey results from schools participating in the first two years of the Houston’s Arts Access Initiative, an ambitious program that aims to increase access to arts education, particularly for disadvantaged students, through partnerships with local artists and cultural institutions. Because the initiative was oversubscribed in its first two years, Kisida and Bowen had the opportunity to compare outcomes among students at participating schools to those who applied but were deferred—a study group comprising more than 10,000 students in forty-two schools. The results is the first ever, large-scale, randomized controlled trial study of such a program. The arts educational experiences had “remarkable impacts” on academic, social, and emotional outcomes, the duo reports. 

Compared to students in the control group, kids exposed to the various arts opportunities in the Houston study experienced “a 3.6 percentage point reduction in disciplinary infractions, an improvement of 13 percent of a standard deviation in standardized writing scores, and an increase of 8 percent of a standard deviation in their compassion for others.” Among elementary school students, arts education also enhanced school engagement, college aspirations, and empathy with others—a finding that should resonate particularly among those focused on social and emotional learning. In an essay for Brookings’s Brown Center, Kisida and Bowen note that school systems rarely collect data on arts programs. Moreover, they write that “the most promising outcomes associated with arts education learning objectives extend beyond commonly reported outcomes such as math and reading test scores.” This is encouraging news and appears to be borne out in their findings, but let’s not be too quick to assume no benefits in general literacy. Kisida and Bowen report positive effects on student writing. A linchpin argument of E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy and subsequent works is that mature language comprehension rests on a body of knowledge common among writers and readers, speakers and listeners, who are broadly fluent in their shared histories and heritages, including the arts. In a well-rounded education focused on raising readers, art should have no lesser place of privilege than history, science, or literature—it’s all part of the mental fitments that furnishes the minds and enlivens the discourse of literate Americans. This powerful literacy-based argument for arts education has been available to advocates all along, and should weigh strongly against any impulse to reduce arts education “because testing.” Nonetheless, Kisida and Bowen note that “a critical challenge for arts education has been a lack of empirical evidence that demonstrates its educational value”—a sentence that I hope was as hard to write as it is to swallow, given that they also note that an “overwhelming majority of the public agrees that the arts are a necessary part of a well-rounded education.”

There was an interview more than a decade ago with Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone, describing education funders’ demands that he demonstrate the value of arts education for his students. Canada grew exasperated noting the $700 billion spent on Wall Street bailouts in 2008. “Then somebody asks me if kids should take violin and do I have evidence?!”

Well, now you have some.

SOURCE: Daniel H. Bowen and Brian Kisida, “Investigating Causal Effects of Arts Education Experiences: Experimental Evidence from Houston’s Arts Access Initiative,” Rice University (February 2019).

One of the ways the U.S. Department of Education is supposed to facilitate student success is by awarding federally funded grants to various state and local programs, then independently assessing the performance of those grantees. Doing the latter job well will be increasingly important and challenging under the Every Student Succeeds Act, which allows for significantly more flexibility on how grantee programs can be designed and ran than under No Child Left Behind, the law’s predecessor.

To find out how well the department has done this, what it has done to correct any issues, and what difficulties lay ahead, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) conducted an analysis between February 2018 and January 2019. It examined documents related to grantees and ED’s assessments of them, fiscal and annual reports, and reports on management challenges from the Education Department’s Office of the Inspector General. The GAO team also interviewed officials from three other ED offices—the Institute of Education Sciences; the Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development; and Office of Primary and Secondary Education.

They analysts identified four key challenges.

First, the Education Department has persistently struggled with monitoring grantee performance and ensuring compliance with federal regulations. A GAO report in 2017 found that these duties were regularly performed inconsistently, especially between ED offices, and that key documents, such as those detailing program impacts achieved by grant funds, were missing from almost every file within the sample, leaving $21 million dollars not correctly accounted for. Fortunately, the department under Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is instituting changes meant to correct these deficiencies. It’s establishing official department-wide procedures for documenting grant records, and improving oversight and monitoring by creating its own resources and examples that state and local agencies can look to when, among other things, collecting data and measuring academic outcomes.

Second, GAO found that persistent issues with effectively and accurately collecting and reporting valid and useful data has limited the Education Department’s ability to assess grantees. The agency’s Office of the Inspector General also reported issues with federal control over state-reported data. In response to these challenges, ED has improved its data systems and offered states support in how to better collect and report their data.

A lack of financial and human capacity is the third issue the department has faced. Fortunately, on the money side, ESSA gives the Education Department authority to consolidate funding for grantee evaluation and monitoring, as well as the ability to choose which programs it evaluates, and what criteria it uses. Unfortunately, human capital is still an issue, as the agency has struggled to fill vacant positions with qualified staff. The department is currently reassessing their hiring procedures for the purpose of improving them and hiring more qualified people.

Finally, the Education Department faces multiple methodological limitations in program assessment, which include determining what constitutes a positive outcome and how to measure it, isolating impact, and quantifying long-term outcomes. Some grantees—like the Promise Neighborhoods program—have submitted data, but the agency has not established how to use this information for program evaluation. Many large-scale federal grants also have vaguely defined objectives that limit ED’s control over their specific goals and outcomes. But the agency is taking steps to fix this. For example, it has improved control over Title I grants by conducting interim measures of progress toward grantees’ long-term goals.

Though the U.S. Department of Education has made many strides in recent years to improve the way it monitors and evaluates recipients of federal grants, the flexibility of ESSA will complicate these efforts and cause new problems as time goes on. It’s a work in progress.

SOURCE: Jacqueline Nowicki et al., “K-12 Education: Challenges to Assessing Program Performance and Recent Efforts to Address Them,” U.S. Government Accountability Office (January 2019).

The long-awaited report of Maryland’s Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education—aka Kirwan Commission—was released last week. I had the honor (and sometimes pleasure) to serve on this body for the past two years as it strove with fair success to develop and recommend a coherent package of bold changes intended to transform K–12 schools in the Old Line State.

Though exceeding two hundred pages, this report is labeled “interim” because the Commission’s recommendations about how to pay for this reform package won’t be ready until late in the year, aiming for the 2020 legislative session, though the policy framework could get adopted, at least in part, during the session now underway. Not a whole lot is apt to be agreed to, however, until it’s decided how to divide the hefty price-tag between state taxpayers and the twenty-four local jurisdictions that share in the cost of public education. And we’re talking big bucks, as the fully-implemented cost of the Commission’s plan is estimated at $3.8 billion a year. That’s on top of current spending close to $14 billion, the present sources of which are about half state and half local, though the proportions vary widely by district. So it’s to be a big bump and who pays how much of it is a fractious Solomon-like challenge that still lies ahead for commissioners, followed by the Governor and General Assembly.

Money, however, is by no means the whole story and today it’s not even the main story. The Commission wants Maryland to rework key elements of its public-education system to boost quality, performance, professionalism, and accountability while also doing a better job of looking after its neediest youngsters. Included therein is a key proposal to target tenth grade as the point at which most kids should be “college and career ready,” leading them into a quartet of “pathways” that include radically overhauled CTE opportunities as well as “early college” and a lot more Advanced Placement. Expertly advised by Marc Tucker’s National Center on Education and the Economy, the Commission’s goal is for Maryland’s K–12 system to rival the world’s best, thereby producing a far brighter future both for the state’s economy and for its citizenry.

But getting there endangers entire herds of sacred cows, and threatens to do so in a state where the cows have long wandered freely and munched greedily. This is a state where adult education interests—above all those of the teacher unions and local district boards and superintendents, often joined in common cause—typically swamp the interests of children and taxpayers. That’s why the reform recommendations of the state’s previous commission on school funding—known as Thornton—ended up amounting to little and why a previous education-reform commission that I served on in Maryland issued plenty of bold recommendations that ultimately came to naught.

Almost everyone on the Kirwan group voted to submit its interim report, save for two county representatives who abstained because of the lack of detail regarding how costs will be allocated. But that doesn’t mean everyone who voted for it favors everything in it. If you dig far enough in, you will encounter seventeen pages containing ten separate “individual comments” by Commissioners who seized the opportunity to spell out their misgivings and reservations. Most are “whoa, not so fast” statements on behalf of the interest groups that own sacred cows. If, as in the past, their organizational interests ultimately prevail with lawmakers, most of the worthy reforms—and accountability mechanisms—proposed by the Commission will not come to pass, and there’s a real risk that billions of additional taxpayer dollars will end up going for more of the same, as happened to Thornton. To his credit, chairman Brit Kirwan is intent on not seeing that repeated, and the report urges accountability measures designed to prevent that from happening. But of course those are the recommendations that pose the greatest threat to the cows and, accordingly, are encountering the most hostile reception.

Alongside the cow defenders, a couple of the commissioners’ individual comments rue their colleagues’ tentativeness and the report’s unwillingness to confront some tough issues and poke a few cows. My colleague David Steiner wrote one such (you’ll find it on page 165). I wrote another, which follows here:

“The Commission is pushing Maryland in a necessary and truly exciting direction with huge potential for a brighter, more prosperous, and more equitable future. That is why I voted to support the Commission’s final report. But I did so with several serious reservations and worries, beginning with the fact that every vested interest in the state will oppose changes of this magnitude, while clinging to the bits that advance their own interests. What Maryland needs is a “grand bargain” that includes changes for all, gains for all and sacrifices by all, but that’s going to be a huge challenge for policymakers. If they’re able to pull it off at the policy level, then implementation and accountability will be even greater challenges. I’m not confident that all this can get done in a state with a long history of putting adult interests ahead of those of children, parents, and taxpayers.

• Children and parents should be especially troubled—as I am—by the Commission’s refusal to endorse or recommend any form of school choice, whether within and between districts, to charter schools, or to private and alternative schools. It could barely agree to recommend that a portion of the many additional dollars it is recommending should “follow” students to the schools they actually attend—and that is going to be fought bitterly by district interests. The many forces of “local control” in Maryland relentlessly insist on district-level control of everything, and are loath to devolve any real authority or resources to the building level, much less to families. It is no coincidence that, for example, Maryland has America’s worst charter law! The state’s charters beseeched the Commission to give them a pat on the back and ensure that they partake in full of all its recommendations but all that appears in the interim report is a very subtle statement that when we say “public schools” we mean all public schools. That is intended to include charters (and other non-traditional forms of public school) but few will notice.
• Taxpayers should be especially troubled—as I am—by the Commission’s reluctance to make significant financial trade-offs, taking advantage of the many improvements it’s recommending and the huge additional expenditures sought for those improvements to recoup the off-setting savings that the improvements would enable. The most obvious example is class size. The Commission is proposing a vast increase in Maryland’s corps of professional teachers, a big reduction in the number of lessons that teachers must handle each day, and additional changes to the state’s education program that will boost student achievement from the earliest years and across the board. Our consultants made clear that the “world-class” education systems we seek to emulate are able to afford those worthy improvements—with no harm to children—by placing more students in most classrooms. Maryland’s current average class size is 20.5 students. Once the Commission’s other recommendations are properly implemented, that number could easily rise to twenty-five—and the estimated savings to state/local education budgets would be approximately half a billion dollars (in year ten). That’s a trade-off that should be made—and there are many others, such as reducing the huge number of non-teaching personnel employed by the state’s public schools. I’m ashamed by the Commission’s blindness to taxpayer concerns.
• Maryland’s education governance system needs a total overhaul. The Commission hints at that by stating that, before it concludes its decade-long work, the proposed Oversight Board should make recommendations in that realm. Bravo. But a decade is a long time to wait. At present, education in Maryland is handicapped by (a) the disconnect between pre-K–12 and postsecondary education, (b) the disconnect between the providers of academic instruction and many providers of CTE experience (e.g. apprenticeships) and (c) an archaic, inequitable yet rigid “local control” structure that denies Marylanders a fair, uniform and high-quality education, that denies the state the authority to intervene in chronically failing schools and districts, that denies school leaders the authority to make essential decisions, and that denies families the right to place their children in the schools that will best serve them. If Maryland had a well-functioning governance system for pre-K–20 education, it wouldn’t need the proposed Oversight Board!”

It’s early days, still, for gauging how the Kirwan recommendations will ultimately fare—and until the Commission weighs in on funding perhaps little will happen, although a few hundred millions in the present budget are supposedly earmarked to get started on some Kirwan-inspired reforms. (Governor Hogan is tussling with legislators over how much to spend on reform and how much on bricks-and-mortar.)

As for the longer haul, legislative leaders say they want Kirwan-style reforms. Hogan talks mainly of tax cuts, not big spending increases. History, however, favors the cows. It could prove interesting.

Today, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University released a new analysis of Ohio charter school performance. The rigorous study examines state math and reading results over multiple years through 2016-17 and compares very similar students attending charter and district schools, yielding careful evidence about the impact of charters on pupil achievement. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute provided funding support for this research.

“CREDO’s independent analysis reminds us that charter school performance can’t be painted in broad brush strokes,” said Chad L. Aldis, Vice President for Policy and Advocacy at the Fordham Institute. “Black students make impressive gains—equivalent to several weeks of additional learning—when they attend charter schools. Unfortunately, online charter students continue to struggle tremendously.”

Key findings include:

1. Statewide charter performance is mixed. Combining both brick-and-mortar and online schools, charter pupils make gains similar to their district counterparts in reading and fare modestly worse in math. The statewide data, however, are dragged down by the extremely poor results of online schools, which during this period enrolled about 30 percent of all Ohio charter students.

2. Black charter students make significant gains compared to their peers attending district schools. On average, they receive the equivalent of 59 additional days of learning in reading and 24 days in math when attending charters. This result includes both brick-and-mortar and online charters, though e-schools enroll relatively few black students (just 13 percent) while brick-and-mortars serve primarily black students (60 percent).

3. Major performance differences exist between brick-and-mortar and online charters. Students of all races attending brick-and-mortar charter schools make gains in reading equivalent to 24 extra days of learning in a 180-day school year, and perform similarly to their district peers in math. However, online charter students lose significant ground in both reading and math, equivalent to losses of 46 and 136 days respectively. (The online results included data from the large and low-performing Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow which closed in January 2018.)

“In a state with massive achievement gaps, we must acknowledge the positive difference that charters are making to improve the life prospects of African-American students,” said Aldis. “As lawmakers discuss ways to ensure an excellent education for all, properly supporting quality brick-and-mortar charter schools should be high on their priority list. At the same time, they should seek better ways of spurring big improvements among the state’s online schools.”

To read this report, please visit: www.credo.stanford.edu or click here.