Across the country, in Atlanta, Camden, Indianapolis and at least ten other cities, more schools are operating under a kind of partnership school model: a “third way” governance strategy that breaks through district-charter divides. Some education leaders, like Fordham Institute president Mike Petrilli, think this approach should be avoided at all costs. But others, myself included, see it as a potentially promising way to turn around struggling schools or increase the number of quality school options in a neighborhood.

Partnership schools might be thought of as the next stage in district-charter collaboration or a key component in implementing a portfolio management strategy. With a few mature exceptions, most of these arrangements are relatively new. The theory behind what their role is and how well it delivers is largely untested, and student outcomes have not been expressly studied. A new CRPE brief offers a lay of the land on this promising approach and outlines questions that policymakers and researchers should consider as more of these partnerships grow.

Partnership schools, like charter schools, enjoy more freedom than a traditional district-run school. But partnership schools are legally distinct from charter schools. In some cases, districts can open them through contracts. In other cases, specific state laws allow the district to open and run schools with a more local context than they could as a charter school authorizer. Most partnership schools are operated by a local charter network, or incubated alongside charter schools, but rather than seeking authorization, they enter into contracts with districts and become special district schools.

How are partnership schools different from district and charter schools? Broadly speaking, partnership schools have less flexibility than charter schools, but more autonomy than a typical district-run school. The image below is one way to think about two main areas of school flexibility: the ability to hire or replace teachers and the ability to recruit students from a wide geography. School leaders have opinions about both. Charter schools tend to have the most flexibility over both of those dimensions while district-run traditional schools tend to have the least flexibility. Magnet schools, which are district-run, typically are not tied to attendance zones but have the same teacher talent policies as other district schools. Various partnership models can score high in one dimension while being low in the other: Renaissance schools in Camden have more talent flexibility than traditional district schools, but still mostly serve students in a set neighborhood, while Innovation Network schools in Indianapolis have some talent and enrollment flexibility.

Of course, there are many other attributes, policies, services, and other areas of autonomy that go into running a school. When partnership schools are created, the contractual agreement typically defines these autonomies, but gives more leeway to both the district and the partnership school to define the parameters than a charter agreement would: for example, more flexibility around enrollment.

Partnership arrangements require work to set up and maintain. Charter operators need the contracts to strike the right balance, making sure schools keep enough autonomy to maintain a distinctive approach to instruction and guarding against their freedoms being gradually eroded by district policy. And districts need to apply the right incentives and “teeth” to make sure that the operators who seek partnerships are “committed to the community,” as one charter leader involved in a partnership school said, “and not just to the perks of enrollment zones.”

On the plus side, partnership schools can help solve charters’ growing need for school facilities and provide a firm answer to the charge that some students will be left behind. They can provide districts with new options for families that need them while empowering principals, teachers, and families in ways that the traditional district structure cannot. And partnership schools may provide a financial benefit to districts worried about enrollment loss: The students remain enrolled in the district, with at least some revenues remaining available to district leaders.

Lastly, partnership schools could lead to innovation in instructional models and the emergence of more diverse school options than under a strictly charter or district model. While more study is needed, students, families, and neighborhoods could experience meaningful and long-lasting benefits.

Christine Campbell is a senior research analyst and policy director at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington Bothell.

The views expressed herein represent the opinions of the author and not necessarily the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

How do we become famous? And can gifted students, or math and science whiz kids ever attain fame? What do Selena Gomez, Shawn Mendes, and Emma Watson have that young, gifted students do not? Their work is appreciated, or more so, adored by their community. Their fans motivate them to do more, to make more music, to star in more movies. It is hard to imagine budding scientists experiencing anywhere near the same level of acceptance, awareness, or inspiration from their peers. I obviously believe that they should—why shouldn’t they? They could save millions of lives, cure diseases, and solve the world’s most significant problems.

Yet, most people would laugh at this next statement: Young science nerds need to be as famous as athletes, singers, and YouTubers.

Why is this absurd? Because people get more excited watching sports games, having their hearts beat until the last second of the match. They become engrossed watching crazy people doing hilarious things. Yet reading a long research paper with scientific jargon, even if it discusses the cure to cancer, is quite boring for most.

The problem is not that scientists should be getting millions of Twitter followers or appearing on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. The problem is that these young researchers are not getting recognized, appreciated, or even motivated by their local high schools. The problem is that we as a society are typecasting these students at a young age. We force them into a pathway and if they veer from it, we give up on them…and they quit. The problem is that they are not respected by the scientific society, the community that is supposed to help these rising stars. Young scientists do not have even an inch of spotlight in their own communities.

Personally, I have experienced this lack of recognition and respect. During the first few years when I decided to pursue a career in the sciences, I obviously knew that it would be an impossible dream to reach the order of magnitude of fame that celebrities enjoy. But I still wanted to be the Selena Gomez of science.

Believe it or not, I somehow thought it was going to happen easily. I honestly did not see why tiny breakthroughs in the creases of the scientific world for an audience of gray-haired standard bearers in peer-reviewed publications didn’t earn me my own fan club.

Yet I couldn’t even have guessed the lack of available opportunities and resources. It was astounding and personally disappointing. There was no outlet to pursue my passions in the public middle or high school, so I met with the administrators to convey the importance of encouraging students in the sciences. But, I was immediately met with hesitation. They provided sympathy, but were unwilling to take action. To most, what I asked was absurd. They essentially believed I wanted to topple the stereotypical high school social hierarchy, where athletics preceded academics for access to resources.

Seeing that I would not be able to pursue my passions in school, I tried building a compact lab in my basement to perform independent experiments and learn by doing. I also began reaching out to people beyond the school. I contacted companies, research institutions, and other areas where I could continue to foster my growing curiosity in science.

However, even in the broader scientific realm, there was not much of an effort to support aspiring student scientists, and my inbox was swarmed with automatic reply messages and comforting rejections.

Despite these setbacks, I did not give up easily on the idea. In seventh grade, I created a science organization in my district for middle schoolers; I called it the Springhouse Science Team. We ultimately decided to compete in the Science Olympiad, and fortunately, we became a national winning team of student scientists.

Yet none of our accomplishments got an inch of space in the newspaper. I remember trying to control my frustration as I saw the football team’s win locally made the papers while our seventeenth place finish nationally was overlooked. So, I fought—I fought for my teammates, for the recognition they deserved in that windowless room where we practiced.

But I too finally realized the ridiculousness of the situation. I was attempting to make science quizzes compete with bone-crushing tackles. Which would you rather see? The answer’s obvious. Like I mentioned previously, it is not possible to endow nerdy, young scientists with the same popularity as football players.

Thus, I again saw sympathy in the eyes of those I spoke with. But what I did not see was any budget. Several of my team members quit. They were tired of working so hard and not getting enough reward. We were not going to even get a room in our school for our team. Therefore, I witnessed the collapse of my own creation.

Why is this lack of recognition so important though? Why should we care? So what that they don’t get noticed? They’ll go to a good university, get some research awards, and maybe even win the Nobel Prize in the near future with their work. Why does it matter that we need to give them attention now, at such a young age?

Well, put simply, there is a high probability that they will quit trying, in secondary school, due to lack of attention and negligence for their efforts. According to McKinley Reports, 25 percent of gifted people (in sciences and math) are underachievers. They quit trying because nothing they do leads to any measurable success or satisfaction.

Even further, between 18 and 25 percent of these talented students drop out of school. Unrecognized gifted students can get bored, or frustrated.

Yet, if you continue to read this study, you’ll see that 80 percent of teachers believe that “our advanced students need special attention—they are the future leaders of this country, and their talents will enable us to compete in a global economy.” Why aren’t we listening to these teachers?

All these statistics point to one conclusion—if they are not acknowledged now (like young YouTubers or popular school athletes), they may decide to give up. Their work will never continue, effectively taking away one more person in the effort to treat heart attacks, fight cancer, and prevent more deaths.

So, I needed to figure out a way to get my friends—my peers—put on the map. Since the internet had to be part of the solution, I started building a site in a frenzy, perhaps what led to the name: ScienceBuzz.com.

ScienceBuzz is a voluntary nonprofit academic-networking site dedicated to providing students a platform to showcase their talents and scientific work to thousands of other users and industry professionals. Students can publish their research, collaborate with peers around the world, communicate with experienced scientists, and have a one-stop site for all resources and opportunities related to science.

In this manner, all students, no matter their background and without such cutthroat selectivity as those science fairs, have the opportunity to collaborate with and be recognized and encouraged by the global scientific community. They have the ability to gain visibility within their own high school and become as treasured and appreciated as the school’s athletes.

I personally networked with professors, scientists, press agencies, institutions, and biopharma companies. I gave people fan pages and prepared elevator talks for how the site would make people at least ‘internet-famous’ like gamers or the guys who created the Peanut Butter Jelly Time video.

I’ve always felt that recognition for intellectual accomplishments, support from peers you respect, and an intense commitment to doing what you believe is right, are essential for motivating young scientists. We need a collective desire for fairness in the world. I built ScienceBuzz.com to complete this mission for us science-dreamers. And soon, it was filled with seasoned scientists and high school students alike.

Within months, ScienceBuzz.com turned into a miniaturized version of the scientific world. Yet now, this society was filled with both scientists and high school students alike. Students now do not rely on a competitive nature to experience that feeling of satisfaction, as they needed to for science competitions. The recognition and fame is brought to their doorsteps. ScienceBuzz and I have introduced a collaborative spirit into the minds of these students, a quality which I have always valued.

My motto in promoting ScienceBuzz.com is ‘We’re Not Famous…Yet.’ I have knocked on doors of several corporations, eventually garnering support from the likes of the National Institutes of Health, Genentech, Amgen, Janssen Biotech, and the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS). They now all understand the urgency of the problem and how much this solution is needed. Students are now able to be visible locally and globally from California to Brazil to Thailand.

As Dr. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project and the National Institutes of Health, told me during one of my pitches, “student scientists are as important to our society as any other adult or celebrity.”

Hundreds of users have reviewed the site, saying that it finally makes them feel as if they are important and respected in the work they do. Yet, our work is not even close to being finished.

ScienceBuzz.com, I hope, has been a step in the right direction. But we need more people, more involvement, and more help to solve this pressing problem.

Roy Ghosh, Parkland High School Class of 2018, is a researcher with NIH, NICHD. Ghosh built the academic networking site ScienceBuzz for middle and high school students interested in science, where they can publish their scientific work, build profiles, and communicate with peers and scientists.

The views expressed herein represent the opinions of the author and not necessarily the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

In last week’s blog, I pointed out that, when the first PISA results were released in 2001, students in Germany and the United States both performed at about the average for all countries in the survey, but Germany reacted with what came to be known as “PISA Shock” and the U.S. shrugged. In the years that have gone by since then, Germany has risen sharply in the rankings, while the U.S. remains in the middle, having improved not at all. The Germans, I said, leaped into action while we continued to sleepwalk through history.

That blog elicited two very interesting responses, one from Checker Finn and the other from Mike Petrilli, that I want to discuss in this blog.

This from Checker: “Our ‘PISA shock’ was A Nation at Risk, and the U.S. has been struggling/stumbling/fumbling/striving to fix its schools ever since. PISA may be…one form of education shock…but it’s not the only kind there is.”

And this from Mike: “…I don't think it's fair to argue that we’ve been sleepwalking since 2000. No Child Left Behind, circa 2002, was a very big deal. Perhaps it was wrong-headed, but it was a major shift in national policy. And it had its desired effect—boosting the performance of our lowest performing kids. The question, vis-à-vis Germany, is why we were satisfied with making a play for “equity” while they wanted a push for excellence—at all achievement levels, all income groups, etc. And, of course, Common Core was an attempt to go big and broad as well. And there was Race to the Top. So, my sense is that policymakers from 2000-2015 were willing to take action. Perhaps the actions were the wrong ones. But sleepwalking they were not.”

So Checker argues, in effect, that A Nation at Risk was as much of a shock to our system as PISA was to the German system and Mike argues that No Child Left Behind, the Common Core, and Race to the Top were as consequential as anything the Germans did. And Mike goes on to point out that, while average student performance in the United States has not improved since 1983, a substantial part of the gap in performance between our average students and our disadvantaged students was closed, which may not be as much progress as we would like but would not justify my claim that we were sleepwalking through history.

On Checker’s point, it is certainly true that “PISA Shock” is not the only way to galvanize a national education system into action. I did not say it was. What I said was that we have been sleepwalking through history since then. I will get to the reasons I think we’ve been sleepwalking in a moment. What I want to say to Checker’s point is that A Nation at Risk sowed the seeds of the ineffectual national reform program that followed, whereas the PISA report provided just the fuel the Germans needed to turn their system around.

There is an elegiac ring to A Nation at Risk. It describes a fatal slide in the rigor of the American school curriculum, grading, university admission requirements and course requirements. It dwells on a supposed dramatic slide in SAT scores. In a section on American teachers that could be written today, it complains that our schools are sourcing too many of their teachers from the bottom quarter of high school graduates, pay very poorly, offer unacceptable working conditions to teachers, allow many teachers to teach subjects they have no expertise in, fail to demand teachers know their subjects and suffer from unending teacher shortages, especially in mathematics and the sciences. One is left with the sense that this is all the fault not of public policy, but of the professional educators who run and staff our schools. It is a litany of decline.

We know now that the data say otherwise. A fine paper written by Dan Koretz when he was at the Congressional Budget Office acknowledges declines in average standardized test scores in the 60s and 70s but points to an upturn in those scores after that and to substantial improvements made by disadvantaged students during the period when A Nation at Risk said the country’s schools were going to hell in a handbasket. Most of the gains for disadvantaged students were made in the lower grades, which is where the federal funds for disadvantaged youth were concentrated. The data from the high school level NAEP surveys tell us that the reading and mathematics performance of our high school students hardly varied at all for decades following the creation of NAEP in 1964. But, whether you look at the elementary schools or the secondary schools, there had been no massive decline in performance of the kind portrayed in A Nation at Risk. The entire premise of the report was false.

You might say, well, what’s the difference? Maybe the claims of decline had little if any basis in fact, but the nation got the kick in the pants it needed anyway. But one of the biggest mistakes one can make in public policy as in your own health care is to get the diagnosis wrong. We now know that there was indeed a giant problem with the performance of American education. But it was not a decline in average test scores. It was, in fact, that the dynamics of the global economy were changing dramatically, creating a world in which all students in the high-wage countries would have to be highly educated to keep their heads above water—and the United States was doing little or nothing to meet that challenge, while other nations were beginning to do exactly that.

If the educational challenge the country faced was a decline from some standard of provision formerly reached, then the answer is obvious: restore the policies and practices formerly in place. But if the challenge is to provide to everyone the kind of education formerly provided only to the elite, then the response has to be to create a whole new system of provision that can deliver on that promise. Germany set out to do the latter. We did not.

But the problem goes deeper than that. A Nation at Risk not only described a failure that did not exist, its ringing language about “...a rising tide of mediocrity…” and its statement that “if an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war” implied that the nation’s professional educators were responsible for a precipitous decline in the performance of our schools, thereby laying the ground for what would later become a wholesale attack on the country’s teachers and reform strategies focused on the premise that the way to raise student achievement was to hold teachers accountable for their students’ performance on standardized tests.

There was no such language in the PISA report, nor were there any prescriptions of the kind found in A Nation at Risk. The first PISA survey just presented data comparing the performance of high school students in the participating countries. But it also connected that performance data to a wealth of background data of a kind that NAEP does not provide, helping policy makers and practitioners make links between policy, practice, and student outcomes. That is, it not only provided accurate data on the “symptoms” of the patient, but it also provided plenty of data that would help the doctor make an accurate diagnosis of the nature of the “disease.”

Yes, correlation is not cause. But the kind of correlations that the PISA data make possible closes off a lot of rabbit holes. The comparative method makes it possible to weigh the consequences of organizing education systems in different ways. The authors of A Nation at Risk could not do that. In fact, they were not even able to compare the consequences of the differences in policies among American states, because American states were resisting proposals to use data to compare student performance among themselves and had no interest in comparing their performance to other countries.

Yes, as Checker said, A Nation at Risk was, in its own way, as much of a shock to the United States as the first PISA report was to Germany. But that is where the comparison ends. The PISA report led the Germans to focus, as Mike points out, on raising student performance across the board. Because it provided a lot of clues as to what the countries with the highest performance and the most equity were actually doing, the Germans could use the data to take a range of actions designed to greatly improve both equity and student achievement.

We did nothing of the kind. Why? Mike points out that, while the countries that now outperform us on the PISA surveys were determined to raise student performance across the board, the United States concentrated on equity, on closing the gap between the average performers and those on the bottom. That is true. The Gallup surveys and others like them have shown for years that most Americans think their schools are doing well, that it is only the schools serving poor and minority students—mostly the inner-city schools—that really need reform. OECD research shows that American students are generally happier with their school performance than students in countries where student performance is much higher. Our expectations—both adults and students—appear to be much lower in this country.

So, one of the most important reasons that we did not decide to go for across the board improvement in student performance is because, all the evidence notwithstanding, we thought, and still think, that we are in general doing fine.  It is not our schools that need reform, it is their schools that need reform.

There is an irony here. A Nation at Risk did not tell Americans that their schools were, in general, doing fine. It said that their schools were in catastrophic decline and needed major reforms that would, in effect, return them to their former glory. And it offered a set of reforms that the authors thought would accomplish that goal. The irony is that the United States then set off to fix a problem it did not have—a broad decline in school performance—by focusing on equity—the one area in which it had made substantial progress, at least in our lower schools.

There is a further irony here. What the PISA data showed was that the goals of equity and achievement are not only not incompatible, they make very good companions. Many of the countries with top achievement are also among the nations with the highest levels of equity. Let me put a finer point on it. It turns out that systems designed to raise student performance across the board are more effective at improving equity than systems designed just to improve equity.  There are good reasons for that, but that is a subject for another blog.

And here is yet another irony. Though A Nation at Risk got the diagnosis wrong, many of its prescriptions were right on the money. I pointed out at the beginning of this blog, for example, that the report said that “…our schools are sourcing too many of their teachers from the bottom quarter of high school graduates, pay very poorly, offer unacceptable working conditions to teachers, allow many teachers to teach subjects they have no expertise in, fail to demand teachers know their subjects and suffer from unending teacher shortages, especially in mathematics and the sciences.” Yes. And it is all still true (though the “bottom quarter” was and is an exaggeration).

This is one among many examples of issues identified in the report that the top-performing countries have been working hard on and we have failed to address over the more than three decades since the report was released.  The report was right to call attention to the lax standards for course grading and course content in our high schools. But, here too, very little has changed since the report was released in 1983. The report complained that graduates were ready for neither college nor work. Yes, and yes again, thirty-four years later. That, too, is what I meant by sleepwalking through history. Would a country that is serious about addressing these issues have made so little progress on them in all this time, while one country after another zips by us?

Only one of the interventions that Mike mentioned—the Common Core—had any parallel or precedent as one of the key tools used by the world’s highest-performing education systems. And, in all of those systems, high standards of this sort are used to build instructional systems that also include well-developed curriculum frameworks that cover much more than English literacy and mathematics, detailed course syllabi and very high-quality examinations. Most of this is missing in the American formulation. But there is much more that is also missing.

Here is a little postscript on equity for you. Mike says, in effect, that this country’s responses to A Nation at Risk, while they did not do much to raise average achievement, at least improved equity. That is not so clear. The report itself did not focus on equity. As Dan Koretz pointed out, equity was on the rise before the report was released, but then plateaued. One of the responses to A Nation at Risk that Mike mentioned was No Child Left Behind. But equity, which had been improving before that legislation was passed, improved at a slower rate following passage of that legislation than it had been before it passed. It was only between the 2012 and the 2015 PISA surveys that equity resumed its upward swing in the United States. Given this history, I think it is hard to argue that equity was poor before the big policy interventions Mike cites and then improved in response to those interventions.

I wish we had in fact put together a well-designed attack on the issue of equity. But, instead, we appear to be picking out, almost at random, a few components of effective systems and expecting them to function as they would in a fully developed complete system. We pay very little attention to effective implementation planning. We lurch from one silver bullet to another with every change in administration. While report after report calls its readers’ attention to the importance of attracting capable high school graduates to teaching, sending them to good universities for deep grounding in the subjects they will teach and providing them with competitive pay and decent professional working conditions, we continue to do the opposite, lurching from teacher shortage to teacher shortage.

My point is simple. A Nation at Risk identified the wrong problem, looked in the wrong direction (the past) for solutions to the problem we actually faced and laid the groundwork for what has turned out to be a disastrous attack on the nation’s teachers. Nonetheless, the report identified some problems that were very real, like teacher quality, on which we have made no progress at all and some solutions, like the development of powerful, coherent instructional systems, which we have addressed in a piecemeal way that leaves us far short of the kind of systems our top competitors have been able to develop. We develop solutions to problems we don’t have and fail to develop solutions for the problems we do have. Most importantly, we fail to develop systemic solutions to our systemic problems. That is what I meant by sleepwalking through history.

I have, I confess, used Mike and Checker as foils to make my points. Checker speaks of this country “struggling, stumbling and fumbling” in the years following the release of A Nation at Risk. Mike laments our decision to concentrate on equity when we could have gone after both equity and quality, as our most successful competitors have done. These comments, too, get at what I meant by sleepwalking through history. The serious countries, the ones that have not been sleepwalking, are the ones that went after quality and equity and outpaced us on both. They were honest with themselves about what the data said. They put a major effort into analyzing the strategies used by the top performers. They took the time and made the effort to involve the public and the professionals in the search for a better way to do education. They built their futures on real system designs, not silver bullet solutions. They built their systems on a strong foundation of first-rate teachers and school leaders. And they put as much effort into implementation as they did into policy making and design. That is not sleepwalking.

Marc Tucker is president of the National Center on Education and the Economy.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared in a slightly different form in Education Week.

The views expressed herein represent the opinions of the author and not necessarily the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

1. Just like other online general education charter schools and even brick-and-mortar charter schools before them, dropout recovery schools in Ohio are currently being ECOTted. That is, tarred with a brush meant for the much-reviled-in-whatever-form Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow. Herewith, testimony from supporters of dropout recovery schools given before the House Speaker's Task Force on Education and Poverty last week, trying to rebuild a reputation for their school model that they probably didn’t think needed rebuilding as little as a month ago. (Gongwer Ohio, 10/13/17)
    
2. The Cleveland Transformation Alliance announced last week that the state had not concurred in its efforts to keep St. Aloysius Orphanage from opening new charter schools in Cleveland. State Supe Paolo DeMaria did load a few new requirements onto St. Al’s in the realm of communication and reporting, but that is far short of what the Alliance was asking for and some members seem quite unhappy. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 10/14/17) Speaking of Cleveland, thank heavens DeMaria was around to explain this multi-district collaborative around teaching social-emotional skills to students in Northeast Ohio. "People have always been doing it," says the supe. "We just haven't been as deliberate about it." That makes sense to me. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 10/15/17)
    
3. And speaking of education officials not getting their way: the Youngstown school board last week lost its court battle via appeal to stop the ongoing implementation of HB 70, the legislation which created the CEO-style Academic Distress Commission under which aegis Youngstown has operated for the last two years. Board President Brenda Kimble promises another appeal. (Youngstown Vindicator, 10/14/17)
    
4. We first talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but the conversation seems to be ongoing. As 1:1 device usage expands in school districts around the state, the “appropriateness” of tech fees charged to families is coming under scrutiny. Are they supplanting textbooks – which are provided to families without charge – or are they supplementing? Informal survey findings from central Ohio districts add more data to the discussion. (Columbus Dispatch, 10/16/17)
    
5. This is so weird. North Canton City Schools is not only happy with most of the grades they received on their report card this year, they also have plans in place right now to improve their performance in the areas revealed as less-than-stellar via those same report cards. I don’t know where this plucky, can-do response and positivity came from, but I like it. Wonder if any other schools or districts could learn something from them? (Canton Repository, 10/16/17)

I named my blog “Good School Hunting” not because I’m necessarily a big fan of the actor Matt Damon, but because I thought the Boston-based storyline of Damon’s debut movie, “Good Will Hunting,” suited a New England–based blog written by a mom who believes every kid deserves an awesome school. And I really did like that movie. 

So, sure, it was a bit disappointing to learn that one of Damon’s pet causes is opposing school choice and accountability, two issues near and dear to the heart of this former teacher, school committee member, and mother of three boys who currently attend both traditional and charter public schools.

Adding insult to injury, I quickly discovered that Damon—one of the loudest and most well known proponents of public education—sends his own children to private school. “I pay for a private education and I’m trying to get the one that most matches the public education that I had,” he told the Guardian, “but that kind of progressive education no longer exists in the public system. It’s unfair.”

Damon’s entire experience raising his four daughters has been one of wealth and privilege. He can’t easily empathize with low-income parents whose zip codes afford zero decent options and whose earnings make private school impossible. The fact that he would bemoan how “unfair” things are is laughable considering how unfair they really are for poor parents zoned to chronically underperforming schools.

In keeping with this hypocritical theme, Damon is now the narrator of a movie attacking—and lying about—school choice. It’s called “Backpack Full of Cash” and it suggests that the school choice movement is all about making money off the backs of poor kids. It makes me wonder if he has ever met some of the brilliant, dedicated charter leaders and teachers across the country doing the impossible with limited resources but boundless determination.

Hollywood trouble

Damon’s presence in the education reform debate is competing with another embarrassing storyline in which he apparently played a small role. The world is just now learning of the horrific, sexist, and even abusive behavior of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. And it turns out that Damon may have helped kill a New York Times story on the topic back in 2004. Damon denies the allegation: “For the record, I would never, ever, ever try to kill a story like that. I just wouldn’t do that. It’s not something I would do, for anybody.” He also denies having any knowledge of Weinstein’s predatory behavior:

We know this stuff goes on in the world. I did five or six movies with Harvey. I never saw this. I think a lot of actors have come out and said, everybody’s saying we all knew. That’s not true. This type of predation happens behind closed doors, and out of public view. If there was ever an event that I was at and Harvey was doing this kind of thing and I didn’t see it, then I am so deeply sorry, because I would have stopped it.

In the same aforementioned interview with The Guardian, Damon looks to the future and puts out a call to action for men to step up and be part of the hard work of changing the culture and protecting women from men like Harvey Weinstein. “We can all feel this change that’s happening, which is necessary and overdue,” he says. “Men are a huge part of that change, and we have to be vigilant and we have to help protect and call this stuff out because we have our sisters and our daughters and our mothers.”

Let’s hope it happens. But Matt Damon needs to get better at being an advocate for women. And for education. He espouses important and even good causes but lacks a deep knowledge or understanding of what is really going on.

Did he not know that, at the same time he was wearing his big bright smile with his hand on Harvey’s shoulders, that the Weinstein Company’s board was all men?

Did he forget that jokes about Harvey’s disgusting antics were getting laughs at the Oscars in 2013?

When it comes to his education activism, does he realize that what he espouses would make it impossible for other dads of four daughters to have choices like he does?

And does he understand that, while he may want a progressive education for his kids, not everybody does? Some folks want a classical education. Some want Montessori. And some want the kind of structure that “no excuses” charter schools provide in order to achieve some absolutely game-changing, gap-closing results.

Let’s fix this

I have an idea. It will be the perfect way for Matt Damon to atone for his decades of love and support for a serial sexual predator, and to also get on the right side of an important and often neglected education issue.

Most people don’t know this—but, according to the most recent data available, nearly one in ten students are victims of sexual misconduct by an authority figure in their school (teacher, principal, bus driver, coach, etc.) during their K–12 years. And far too many states do an abysmal job of keeping track of teachers who are terminated for inappropriate and abusive behavior towards students. As a result, abusive educators end up working in a school in another district or a different state, where no one knows they are a danger to children. This practice is called “passing the trash.”

So here’s your chance, Matt. Make the epidemic of sexual misconduct and abuse in our schools your next cause. Do it for all the daughters, sisters, and mothers you’ve had on your mind this week. (But don’t forget about the boys, because they are victims, too.) 

It will be good to have a celebrity of your stature speaking out on this issue. Maybe, you can narrate a movie about it. Maybe the Weinstein Company will even produce it.

Editor’s note: The author first published a version of this article on her blog, Good School Hunting. 

The views expressed herein represent the opinions of the author and not necessarily the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

1. Big changes in the district became breaking news in Youngstown this morning. To wit: the district’s administration building is being emptied – with a number of departments already having relocated to vacant space within district school buildings without notice or fanfare – in order for that building to become the new home of Youngstown Early College High School. The stated reason for this change is that the popular (and successful methinks) YEC has no room to grow in its rented digs at Youngstown State. But unstated is that whatever cost the district has been incurring to rent space at YSU will go away or be greatly reduced by a move into a district-owned building AND administrators will be closer to the daily lives of their staff and students. Wow! Sounds like a great idea to me. Wonder what the objection(s) will be? In 3… 2... 1… (Youngstown Vindicator, 10/13/17)
    
2. Oops. A “systemic data compilation error” is to blame for errors in several portions of the report cards issued last month for career tech providers statewide. The changes are supposed to be minimal, but I’m sure the CTE folks are eagerly awaiting the revised data. (Columbus Dispatch, 10/13/17)
    
3. What’s the biggest concern among Cincinnati-area parents regarding their children, according to a recent survey? No, not that. No. Not that either. No. Oh, just read the piece! (Cincinnati Enquirer, 10/11/17)
    
4. Some folks in Akron now have a ready – if extreme-sounding – answer should anyone come asking about their biggest concern regarding their children: a talking drone trying to lure their children off a school playground. Yes, you read that right. I am speechless. (Akron Beacon Journal, 10/11/17) 

It’s the chicken-or-the-egg question at the heart of the education-reform wars: Can education help young people overcome poverty, or must we defeat poverty before more young people from disadvantaged circumstances can successfully learn?

You don’t have to be a sunny-side-up optimist (or even a hard-boiled pessimist) to get that the right answer to this riddle is “yes.” Yes, education can help young people overcome an impoverished childhood, and yes we need to supplement great schools with smart anti-poverty efforts, too. The best schools—public, private, and charter—do this already, identifying and seeking to furnish the out-of-school “social supports” that will help their kids and their families thrive, while preparing them academically for postsecondary learning and beyond.

A recent article by Rachel Cohen in The Atlantic, however, scrambles this narrative, claiming (in the title at least) that “Education Isn't the Key to a Good Income.” One might surmise that Cohen has found evidence of thousands of young people who grew up poor, succeeded in school and college, and still failed to find good-paying jobs. Alas, that’s not what she found at all—probably because that almost never happens. What she did find was a study by Jesse Rothstein that looked at metro areas to gauge whether the varying quality of their education systems could explain their varying success in boosting upward mobility. In other words, this was not a study of the long-term impacts of education on individual students, or even the long-term impacts of individual schools.

Therefore, the overwhelming research consensus still stands: Students who attain valuable postsecondary credentials have a much better chance of making it into the middle class and beyond. While neither Cohen nor Rothstein would necessarily disagree, it’s a point a casual reader of the Atlantic could easily miss.

Let’s refresh ourselves on the evidence on education and upward mobility, and then we’ll return to Rothstein’s study and the hash that Cohen made of its implications.

Education for upward mobility

Our schools can’t do it all, or all by themselves, but there’s still plenty of low-hanging fruit that most schools have not yet plucked—tested strategies that can help low-income and working-class kids climb the ladder to the middle class. Here are three of them.

1. Postsecondary education as a path to the workforce—and the middle class

There’s a good reason why education reformers have been obsessed with getting many more low-income students “to and through” four-year college degrees: They are the closest things we have to a guarantee of propelling poor kids into the middle class. 

So it makes sense that reformers continue to embrace strategies to prepare students for college, including the implementation of high-quality standards and aligned curriculum, “no excuses” charter schools, and the development of important “non-cognitive” skills.

But as Andrew Kelly has argued, while a college degree has a big payoff, it also comes with a low probability. Among children from the bottom third of the income distribution, Kelly estimates, just 14 percent will complete four-year degrees. Even if we could double that proportion, the great majority of poor and working class kids would still need another path to the middle class.

Thankfully, there is such a route: High-quality career and technical education, culminating in industry-recognized post-secondary credentials. But we’re going to need to rethink our approach to high school if we want many more students to be able to tread this promising path. Right now we mostly shuffle kids through so-called college preparation courses. According to the most recent data, 81 percent of high school students are taking an academic route; only 19 percent are “concentrating” in CTE (which means earning at least three credits in a single CTE program area).

All too often, then, the outcome of our current strategy—what you might call “bachelor’s degree or bust”—is that a young person drops out of college at age twenty with no post-secondary credential, no skills, and no work experience, but a heavy burden of debt. That’s a terrible way to begin adult life, and it’s even worse if the young adult aims to escape poverty.

A better approach for many young people would be to develop coherent pathways, beginning in high school, into authentic technical education options at the post-secondary level. Such efforts show great promise in better engaging students, helping them succeed academically, boosting their college-going and college completion rates, and brightening their career prospects. These arrangements not only provide access to workplaces where students can apply their skills, they also offer seamless transitions into post-secondary education, apprenticeships, and employer-provided learning opportunities. By age twenty, graduates of such programs have academic credentials, technical credentials, and work experience—and, usually, well-paying jobs.

Generic high school experiences are not preparing low-income students to thrive in either academic or technical routes after they receive their diplomas. The system shouldn’t choose a student’s path—but choices there should be.

2. Remember the strivers

The last few years have brought long-overdue attention to the needs of high-achieving, low-income students, as well as new initiatives to ensure that they have opportunities to take rigorous coursework in high school and apply to selective colleges upon graduation. This is good, since these are the low-income kids with the best chance to use higher education as a springboard to the middle class. But as welcome and important as these developments are, they must be complemented by efforts to help high-potential, low-income students much earlier in their academic careers.

As Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution argues, affluent high achievers who come into school with many advantages typically enjoy opportunities that prepare them well for college: gifted-and-talented programs, accelerated courses, and classes with high-achieving peers. Low-income high achievers, on the other hand, are often denied these opportunities. Their urban school systems don’t offer (or greatly restrict) gifted-and-talented programs; they mandate “heterogeneous” groupings of students and tell teachers to do their best meeting a panoply of diverse needs using “differentiated instruction.” Out of fealty to the principle of equity, they don’t let high achievers move faster than their peers. This even though an advanced academic track would help to reduce inequalities in opportunity between rich and poor (and suburban and urban) students who show great academic promise.

These issues tend to come to a head in middle school. If traditional public schools fail to provide a safe, orderly, academically enriching environment for young adolescents to prepare for college preparatory high schools or high-quality career and technical options, then we should encourage the development of charter schools, magnet schools, and other choice strategies that do.

3. Teach the “Success Sequence”

Several years ago, Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution made a startling yet commonsense discovery: Even young people with just a high school diploma can make it into the middle class if they work full-time and delay parenthood until they are at least twenty-one and married. Ninety-eight percent of the people who followed those norms aren’t poor; the vast majority are in the middle class. They termed these three steps—graduate from high school, work full-time, and delay parenthood until marriage—the “success sequence.”

It raises the question: Is there anything schools could do to promote the success sequence, and especially the last component—delaying parenting until marriage, or at least until young people are ready for the challenges of starting a family?

We’ve already discussed the role that well-designed technical education programs can play in getting young people ready for post-secondary education and work. Such education also appears to have a positive impact on the success sequence itself. A sophisticated evaluation by MDRC found that young men who had graduated from a “career academy”—a high quality form of CTE—were 33 percent more likely to be married and living with their spouses than selected peers in a control group. They were also significantly likelier to have custody of their children.

Schools can also help their students develop the character skills needed to think long-term and stay out of trouble. The time-honored way to do this is with religion. A 2012 study by David Figlio and Jens Ludwig found that Catholic high school students were less likely to participate in risky behaviors, including teen sexual activity. They speculated that Catholic schools put the fear of God into their students. Religious instruction, they reported, “could affect students’ ‘tastes’ for misbehavior, or increase the perceived costs of misbehavior by defining a number of activities as sins that have eternal consequences.” And there was also the role of positive peer pressure—by “exposing them to more pro-social peer groups,” particularly by selecting out or expelling students more likely to engage in risky behaviors.

There’s another way that schools can help students develop important character strengths and avoid pregnancy: provide an excellent suite of extracurricular offerings. This might be one secret to Catholic schools’ success. In their 2012 paper, Figlio and Ludwig report that students in Catholic schools “spend more time on homework and extracurricular activities than those in public schools....Private schools may thus reduce delinquency if only because of an ‘incapacitation effect’—teens who are doing homework or running track are not out looking for trouble.”

Extracurricular activities, including athletics, appear to be important for public school students too. As June Kronholz reported in Education Next, studies have long found that disadvantaged students who participate in such activities are less likely to drop out, use tobacco or alcohol, or get pregnant; they are also more likely to score well on tests, enroll in college, and complete college.

The Atlantic’s misleading article

Let’s return to Cohen’s article in The Atlantic. How can she write that “education isn’t the key to a good income” when reams of research show that it still is?

What’s essential to understand is that Cohen and Rothstein are writing about metro areas, not about kids. The question they are looking at is whether the quality of a given area’s schools is related to greater upward mobility for its poorest citizens. That’s a worthwhile question, but it’s rather beside the point for individual students and their teachers, or for individual schools like those in the KIPP network that are trying to achieve breakthrough results. It shouldn’t dissuade them from buying into the common sense idea that poor children will, in general, be much better off if they attain more skills and meaningful postsecondary credentials than if they don’t.

I also have a concern about the original Raj Chetty et al. work that Rothstein’s study builds on. Namely, it doesn’t control for cost-of-living differences when looking at individuals’ mobility. (And yes, it’s true that I’m currently obsessed with cost-of-living differences.)

I suspect it’s not coincidental that several of the metro areas that look quite successful at boosting mobility—taking people from the bottom to the top income quintile based on national data—are also the ones that have become quite expensive (San Jose, Boston, New York, San Francisco). Is someone a “rags to riches” success story in those cities if they are born poor and go on to earn six figures? Probably not, given that even $100,000 doesn’t go so far in those cities. On the other hand, some of the cities that score low on Chetty’s measure, like Charlotte, Atlanta, and Raleigh, are a lot cheaper to live in. Someone making $75,000 in those locales should perhaps be considered upwardly mobile, even if they aren’t in the top income quartile nationally.

I decided to test out this hypothesis, simply plotting Chetty’s “absolute upward mobility” numbers against this cost-of-living index from the Census Bureau. Sure enough, there’s a positive relationship.

***

Cohen quotes Rothstein saying, “We can’t educate people out of this problem,” and promotes his view that two-parent families and local economic conditions matter more than schools. No doubt those are important, and also consistent with the “success sequence” findings. (Remember that one step of the success sequence is taking a full-time job, which is easier in some places than others.) But kids don’t get to choose their families; they can choose whether to get educated, and whether—as young adults—to move to areas with lots of strong career prospects. But none of that is possible without great primary and secondary schools. So to the teachers and leaders out there who are working with young people to help them climb the mountain to postsecondary education and beyond: Keep at it because that is still the best path to the middle class for the kids you care so much about.

Most American public school teachers are paid according to salary schedules that take into account their years of experience and number of degrees earned. This compensation approach has been criticized because it doesn’t anchor teacher pay to instructional effectiveness or other factors that merit consideration (e.g., specializing in harder-to-staff fields or working in high-needs schools). Instead, teacher pay depends on factors that research suggests are not closely tied to student achievement. Now a new study by Michael Hansen and Diana Quintero of the Brookings Institution takes a different look at teacher salary schedules, this time through the lens of equitable pay and patterns of school funding.

In terms of wage distribution, the analysts find that public school teacher pay is more equitable relative to other occupations. Using the Theil Index—a measure of equity—they find that teacher pay is more evenly distributed than for doctors or lawyers and just slightly more equitable than for nurses or social workers. This is not surprising, as salary schedules tend to fit teacher pay within a relatively narrow range; for instance, salaries for Columbus, Ohio, educators range from about $40,000 to $90,000. Within the teaching profession, the pay differences are explained mainly by experience and degrees—predictable given the design of salary schedules—and the state in which a teacher works.

This leads the analysts to examine the state-by-state variations in wage equity among teachers. They ask: Is there a correlation between states with more “regressive” funding systems—wealthier districts funded at higher levels—and less equitable teacher pay? The theory is that regressive systems might allow affluent districts to put their educators on higher pay schedules relative to poorer ones. This, in turn, would create greater pay inequity among teachers within that state. Indeed, when they crunch the numbers, the analysts uncover a modest relationship between regressive funding and less equitable teacher pay, as expected.

Not surprisingly, this analysis finds that lockstep salary schedules generally create a more even pay distribution for teachers. But that doesn’t mean it’s an evenhanded approach for all. Some teachers—especially younger ones who must wait years for more generous pay—may not view the salary schedule as particularly fair. It’s also possible that teachers in tough, high-poverty schools might not see their salaries as equitable when comparing their wages to those paid in upper middle-class suburbs. This has implications, particularly for high-poverty schools: Without the flexibility to differentiate pay, they struggle to retain quality teachers—particularly younger ones—who are apt to move to wealthier districts or out of the profession.

Above all, we should ask whether it’s fair to students and parents to award automatic pay raises—as salary schedules do—to ineffective or chronically absent teachers just the same as high-performing educators

SOURCE: Michael Hansen and Diana Quintero, “Scrutinizing equal pay for equal work among teachers,” Brookings Institution (2017).

By expanding access to options including charter schools, choice advocates hope that more students will reap the benefits of attending high-performing schools. But do all families have charter options in their area? In this study, researchers chart the Ohio landscape and seek to answer two questions: First, where are charter schools located with respect to the poverty and racial demographics of their community? Second, do low-income families have equal access to charter schools?

To answer these questions, researchers Andrew Saultz of the University of Miami and Christopher Yaluma of the Ohio State University (and a Fordham research intern this past summer) collected data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Ohio Department of Education. These data were then used to conduct analyses on the geographic locations of brick-and-mortar charters and the characteristics of their surrounding communities. For the purposes of this study, a family is said to have access to a charter school if they live within a five-mile radius of one.

Unsurprisingly for those who are familiar with Ohio, the majority of charters are located in large cities like Cleveland, Columbus, and Dayton. This is almost certainly due to Ohio law, which restricts the opening of brick-and-mortar charters to certain—mostly urban—locations served by low-performing “challenged districts.” What is surprising, though, is that charters are less likely to locate in the very highest-poverty areas of these districts. This doesn’t mean that families in the toughest urban areas lack access—they generally live within five miles of a charter school, but their kids may have to travel farther to get there. On the other hand, families in poor rural areas are less likely to have access to a brick-and-mortar charter school.

The data also show that Ohio charters currently serve regions with higher than average proportions of black students, but the same is not true for Hispanic students. City-specific analyses indicate that charters do not locate in regions with the highest concentrations of black populations. For example, charters in Columbus tend to locate on the perimeter of the city rather than within the city center where the highest concentration of the city’s black families lives. Similar patterns can be seen in Cincinnati and Dayton. Meanwhile, a higher percentage of Ohio’s Hispanic population lives in rural areas, particularly in rural northwest Ohio—a fact that explains why Hispanic students are less likely to have access to charter schools. Unfortunately, not all Buckeye students are benefitting from equal access to brick-and-mortar charter schools. Because these charters are typically located in the largest metropolitan areas, there are several regions of the state, especially rural ones, with significant levels of poverty but no charter schools. To achieve truly equal access, the authors argue that Ohio policymakers should reconsider current state law, which restricts where charter schools are permitted to open their doors. On that point, we wholeheartedly agree—Ohio needs as many high-quality schools, charter or otherwise, as possible—as do other states, who ought to heed the lessons on this study.

SOURCE: Andrew Saultz and Christopher B. Yaluma, “Equal access? Analyzing charter location relative to demographics in Ohio,” Journal of School Choice (July 2017).

1. A statistic from a Fordham study regarding charter school attendance is referenced in this piece looking at education in central Ohio over the last 25 years, including both K-12 and higher ed. Nope. Me neither. (Columbus CEO, 10/9/17)
    
2. Speaking of CEOs, here is a nice profile on the Bright New Leaders for Ohio Schools Program, a public/private partnership aimed at recruiting, training, and placing strong leaders into the state’s neediest schools. (The 74 Million, 10/11/17)
    
3. You’ll have to click the link if you want to see the whole thing, but here is the list of the top 100 public high schools in Ohio as ranked by Performance Index scores. While there are a couple of surprises in the back of the list, the top schools are fairly predictable if you know wealth distribution patterns in Ohio. However, I would draw your attention to No. 19 – The Bio-Med Science Academy STEM School in Portage County. That would be a non-district, standalone school open to all students via lottery. And, apparently, it kicks booty. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 10/11/17)
    
4. Ugh. Less than 16 months after successfully ending state-mandated fiscal watch status – a designation it labored under for nearly 13 years – Niles City Schools is back in fiscal caution. This is the status prior to fiscal watch, which Niles will re-enter if they can’t project five years of budgets deficit free. Sad. (Youngstown Vindicator, 10/10/17)
    
5. Maybe this is just like me when I mention that I attended Columbus City Schools “for years” when I was a kid; or maybe I’m just cynical. The newest math and science teacher at Paul C. Bunn Elementary in Youngstown City Schools attended Bunn “in his first few years of school”. Where he went after that is not noted. But he is being welcomed back like a hometown hero, so I suppose that’s fine. But that has yet to happen for me. I’ll just hold my breath. (Youngstown Vindicator, 10/11/17)