The Education Gadfly Weekly

In early May, a coalition of stakeholders from business, philanthropy, and education organizations in Cincinnati announced a bold new public-private partnership called Accelerate Great Schools (AGS). The nonprofit organization is modeled after a similar program in Indianapolis known as the Mind Trust. In Indy, the Mind Trust is accomplishing some pretty remarkable things, including attracting established reform organizations and charter operators with proven records, and funding fellowships for talented people with ideas that have the potential to transform education. But what makes Cincinnati the right place to implement such a daring venture, and what exactly is AGS trying to accomplish?

Part of the reason why Accelerate Great Schools is coming together in Cincinnati—and has a chance to be successful—is because education in the Queen City has a lot going for it already. The school district, Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS), has implemented community learning centers (CLCs). CLCs are schools that offer more than academics. They also provide health services such as eye centers, dental clinics, and mental health counseling; after-school programs and tutoring; parent and family engagement programs; early career and college access services; mentoring; and arts and recreational programming for students, families, and the entire community. (The jury is still out about whether Cincinnati’s CLCs will be as effective as organizations like the Harlem Children’s Zone). At the same time, CPS has also instituted a high-schools-of-choice model, which allows every student to choose his or her high school rather than being assigned one based on home address. This opens up a set of customized options for students and families. The community has also been a strong partner in improving the city’s schools. The Strive Partnership is a group of over three hundred leaders from education, businesses, communities, and nonprofits who have banded together to accomplish a common set of goals that includes improving kindergarten readiness, fourth-grade reading and math scores, graduation rates, and college completion. In addition, overall results have historically been better in Cincinnati than in the rest of the Big Eight districts. Cincinnati Public Schools’ 2013–14 state report card shows the highest performance index score of any of the Big Eight districts—a grade of C, compared to other districts’ Ds and Fs. (For the report cards of the other Big Eight urban districts, see here). 

While there is much to be proud of, the rest of the district’s report card is dotted with Fs (with the exception of a C in the K–3 literacy component) and demonstrates that much work remains to be done. The district’s four-year graduation rate is just above 73 percent. AGS estimates that of the approximately fifty thousand students in Cincinnati Public Schools’ geographical territory, only 5,500 (about 15 percent) are in high-quality seats. They estimate that an additional 39 percent are in medium-quality seats, which leaves the remaining percentage—almost half of all students—in low-quality seats. In his report Poised for Progress: Analysis of Ohio's School Report Cards 2013–14, my colleague Aaron Churchill estimates that around 17 percent of Cincinnati’s public school students (district and charter) attended a high-quality school in 2013–14.

Unfortunately, charters in Cincinnati perform just as poorly as CPS district schools. For instance, Aaron finds that over half of Cincinnati’s charter students attend an overall low-quality school—the highest percentage for Big Eight charter sectors. A recent CREDO report also offers data on Cincinnati charters: On average, Cincinnati charter students lose fourteen days of learning in math over the course of a school year when compared to traditional public school students and are on par with traditional public school students in reading. In other words, Cincinnati’s traditional and charter schools could use some help. And overall, while Cincinnati’s existing reforms appear to be a massive step in the right direction, thousands of students are still lacking access to high-quality seats.

Enter the accelerator. The Cincinnati Enquirer recently examined Accelerate Great Schools’s resemblance to the Mind Trust. The Enquirer published more information in subsequent articles, responses from supporters and critics cropped up, and a CEO was named.  And yet there’s still relatively little information about what exactly Accelerate Great Schools is and how it will work. Here’s what we do know:

Who

AGS is a coalition of stakeholders that includes the Cincinnati Business Committee, the Cincinnati Regional Business Committee, the Farmer Family Foundation, the Haile U.S. Bank Foundation, the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, educational leaders from Cincinnati’s district and charter schools, and the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. Together, these organizations have created a nonprofit that aims to pursue broad educational excellence. AGS recently named Patrick Herrel as CEO. Herrel was previously the vice president of recruitment and selection at the Mind Trust and was named to Forbes’s 30 Under 30: Education list in 2012. 

What

AGS has a three-part philosophy. First, it will focus on a school’s performance, not its operator. Second, it will embrace and support all successful schools whether they are district, charter, or Catholic. Third, it will focus on the development and expansion of schools and models that deliver outstanding results.  Despite being labeled as “three parts,” these qualities mostly boil down to sector agnosticism that aims to fund, advocate for, and support high-quality schools as a way of creating more high-quality seats.

Speaking of seats, Accelerate Great Schools’s main goal is to almost quadruple the current number of high-quality seats. While the organization estimates that there are currently about 5,500, the goal is to have ten thousand by 2020 and twenty thousand by 2025.

How

In order to grow the number of high-quality seats, AGS has a few priorities. In particular, it aims to use its resources to recruit and grow high-performing school operators; strengthen teacher and principal talent pipelines through recruitment, training, and retention efforts; advocate for education policy improvements; and organize community support for education reform. Resources include a $25 million, five-year fund. AGS, at least for the moment, has announced plans to break the funding down into three spending categories:

• $15 million to support the growth of high-performing schools
• $5 million to support human capital investments that emphasize attracting, training, and retaining high-quality teachers and principals
• $5 million toward operational costs

To be clear, AGS doesn’t intend to take the place of the many great reforms that are already happening in the Queen City—nor should it. Instead, the accelerator will serve as a needed addition to current projects—an extra way to ensure that the number of high-quality seats in Cincinnati is growing every year. The commitment shown in creating the accelerator is exactly what’s needed if AGS is going to hit its ambitious and transformative goal of creating a total of twenty thousand high-quality seats in the Queen City. 

Even though measures to improve charter school quality are currently stalled in the Ohio General Assembly, Fordham remains dedicated to our work as an advocate for high-quality school choice in Ohio. Toward that end, and in partnership with our colleagues at the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) and National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), we recently filed a brief in support of the Ohio Department of Education (ODE)’s efforts to close two low-performing schools in the Cleveland area.

The case, Governing Authority et al v. Ohio Department of Education, is ultimately about whether a sponsor (also known as an authorizer) has the authority to close a charter school that has failed to meet contractual performance standards.

The schools at issue, Cleveland Community School and Villaview School, were sponsored by the Portage County Educational Service Center. Last April, ODE revoked Portage’s sponsorship authority for attempting to circumvent the law and mislead parents and students. ODE, in accordance with state law, then assumed sponsorship of the schools and evaluated the schools’ performance against the performance standards detailed in the schools’ sponsorship contracts with ODE.

ODE, in its role as the new sponsor, found in its performance evaluation that the schools had historically been weak academically and failed to meet student performance requirements. The evaluation also turned up failures to correct deficiencies related to special education and potential governance issues. Taken together, ODE deemed these shortcomings sufficient to merit suspension of the schools, which in practice meant that they would close.

The schools subsequently fought the decision in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas court, asking for injunctive relief to stay open.

As has been recognized nationally, Ohio’s charter schools have a quality problem. In our brief, NACSA, NAPCS, and Fordham argued that part of the work of a sponsor is safeguarding the interests of students and families—and indeed, the public interest—when a school is not performing. The Ohio experience has demonstrated quite clearly that the charter system only works if sponsors are able to hold schools accountable, including suspending and closing them when necessary.

In its July 27 decision denying the schools’ request for an injunction, the court noted that the schools continually failed to deliver promised student outcomes. The court acknowledged the impact of closure on the schools, but stated, “[I]t is hard to see how transitioning students, whose educational needs have gone unmet at the Cleveland Community Schools, to better performing schools will result in irreparable harm.”

Well said.

A recent study from the Education Trust called Funding Gaps 2015 illuminates the per-student funding disparities between affluent and poor districts. Findings show that, on average, more state and local tax dollars find their way to wealthier districts. For many, this overall trend is hardly surprising, but perhaps more interesting is where the trend is actually being reversed.

Authors Natasha Ushomirsky and David Williams examined the Census Bureau’s finance data, specifically focusing on each state’s state and local funding (excluding federal dollars). Nationally, the report concluded that districts with the highest poverty receive about 10 percent less in state and local funding (or about $1,200 less per student) than the wealthiest districts. Seventeen states, however, defied the national trend: Their highest-poverty districts receive at least 5 percent more than the lowest-poverty districts. According to the Education Trust’s analysis, Ohio was the national leader, boasting 22 percent more funding for its highest-poverty districts.

But when the authors accounted for the estimated 40 percent more funding needed to educate students in the highest-poverty districts—an estimate pulled from the Title I formula—the gap widens. When this is accounted for, the highest-poverty districts receive about $2,200 (or 18 percent) less per student than low-poverty districts; only four states, including Ohio, provide at least 5 percent more funding to the highest-poverty districts.

The report also dissects the source of revenue, whether state or local. This distinction is important to remember, since local funding is primarily derived from property taxes, and that tax base can vary widely from district to district. (For instance, a 1 percent property tax will yield different amounts of revenue depending on the value of a district’s taxable property.) But conceived well, state funding policies can be an equalizer by appropriating more state dollars toward districts that need it most. Some states, as the report notes, direct more aid to high-poverty districts.

That being said, some states are providing substantially more funding to their highest-poverty districts than others. For example, New Jersey provides 431 percent more state funding to its highest-poverty schools. Nine states in all, including Ohio, provide at least 100 percent more in state funding to the highest-poverty districts.  Conversely, five states—Montana, North Dakota, Utah, South Carolina, and New Mexico—provide relatively equal amounts of state funding.  

Of course, funding can be sliced and analyzed many different ways. What’s most important is that funds, no matter their source, get to the students who need it the most. Many states are getting closer by driving more state aid to high-need districts, but additional improvements to funding systems must still be made. Equitable funding does not guarantee equitable results, but it is one concrete way to begin leveling the playing field.  

SOURCE: Natasha Ushomirsky and David Williams, “Funding Gaps 2015: Too many states still spend less on educating students who need the most,” The Education Trust (March 2015)

Reporter Richard Whitmire recently discovered the Building Excellent Schools (BES) fellowship program while interviewing a number of its graduates, leaders of high-performing charter schools across the country. The program allows promising charter school leaders to learn from the best practitioners in the field, to forge vital connections, and to see firsthand the importance of a strong leadership team. Over the years, BES has imparted these skills to many educators who have gone forth to lead new charter schools with the zeal of pioneers.

We here at Fordham have seen firsthand what Whitmire describes, because Columbus, Ohio is home to BES Fellow Andrew Boy—founder and chief executive officer at the United Schools Network (USN). Since Andy completed his BES fellowship and started his first school in a tiny church in 2008, he and his team have created a network of four schools successfully serving approximately 560 students in low-income neighborhoods in Columbus.

According to USN’s 2014 Annual Report, 89 percent of seventh graders at USN’s Dana Avenue campus scored proficient or higher on the reading portion of the Ohio Achievement Assessment. That’s five percentage points higher than all Ohio public school students. Students in USN’s Main Street campus grew over four times the rate needed to score an A on the state’s value-added measure. And USN’s eighth graders outscored or matched fourteen of the sixteen Franklin County school districts on the math (96 percent proficient) and reading (94 percent proficient) state tests.

These results, and others like them across the country, are par for the course for BES fellows. The organization has built up strong leaders who have seeded successful schools across the country. Long may it continue to do so.

Finding a facility for charter schools to call home is a challenge on a number of fronts, not the least of which is finance. Some charters have been fortunate to find an unused district school building. Here in Columbus, the high-performing United Schools Network utilizes two former Columbus City Schools’ facilities. Other charters, like KIPP Columbus have built its own school from scratch (though its first home was a former district building as well). Unfortunately, these examples are the exception rather than the rule.

For many charters, operating in a traditional school building is financially infeasible. While charter schools bear the responsibility to find their own facilities, they receive only a small amount of state money for the task. Anecdotally, we know that this has forced many charters to make ends meet by residing in facilities that weren’t originally built for the specific purpose of educating children.

We wondered exactly how many charter schools use non-traditional facilities. To answer this question, we looked at the seventy-nine charter schools located in Franklin County (most are in Columbus) and then searched their addresses on the county auditor’s real estate website, which provides information including structure type and ownership (present and former).

Unfortunately, we were unable to locate information about twenty-one of the seventy-nine charters on the site. (We verified school addresses of the twenty-one schools from multiple sources but were still unable to find their facility information.) That left us with fifty-eight charters in our sample. Of those fifty-eight, we found that just fifteen (26 percent) were housed in buildings classified as a school; the other forty-three (74 percent) were classified otherwise, mostly as commercial buildings. Of the fifteen charter schools located in school-classified facilities, just six were located in buildings either currently or previously owned by a school district. Many of the schools in commercial buildings are located in former retail stores, office buildings, or in one instance, a former pharmacy.

Of course, this is a small sample, and there are hundreds of charter schools across the state. Different areas in Ohio could have different results depending on a variety of factors, including available school buildings, real estate prices, and the amount of goodwill between charters and districts. That being said, the results in Columbus suggest that many charter school students enter school each day in a building that was, at some point, not a school. Whether this has any bearing on educational outcomes for students is unclear. But it’s not implausible to think that when students attend schools specifically designed for the purpose of learning, it makes an academic difference. Parents may also be more attracted to schools that actually look and feel like a school. To be sure, building type and building quality are different factors. Some district buildings are crumbling, and some nontraditional charter facilities are exemplary. However, these instances probably don’t represent the norm.

Ohio charter school advocates have rightly been pressing for greater facilities support. After all, it’s largely because of Ohio law that many charters are located in non-school buildings. As part of its charter “model law,” the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools lists twenty components weighted for importance, then rates each states’ charter laws by adding up the points accrued in each of those components. One of the twenty components is “Equitable Access to Public Funds and Facilities,” in which Ohio was given a lackluster eight points out of a possible sixteen in its latest edition (published October 2014).

Ohio policymakers have taken note and recently strengthened state charter facilities policy. In the most recent budget bill, the state increased per-pupil charter funding earmarked for facilities to $150 in FY 2016 and $200 in FY 2017 (funding was $100 per pupil in the previous biennium). But this almost certainly falls well short of the funds required to buy or lease facilities. As a result, charters must dig into their operational funds, enter the private debt market, seek assistance from charter operators, or seek philanthropic support to lease or construct buildings of their own.

Alternatively, district facilities represent a potentially attractive option for some charter schools. State law requires districts to offer to charters for sale or lease buildings that have gone unused for two or more years. A new policy enacted in the budget bill requires districts to offer these unused facilities first to high-quality charters (those earning an A, B, or C on performance index and an A or B for value added on the Ohio School Report Card). In addition, high-performing charter schools are eligible to apply for facility support from a newly created $25 million funding pool, with the condition that the schools provide matching funds.

These budget fixes should help solve charter schools’ facility struggles. But many will still be forced to be creative and, in some cases, make do with the space they can find. Not every school needs to be a palace, but every child deserves to learn in a space well suited for learning.

Recently, ACT disaggregated its 2014 test results and college retention rates in order to get a closer look at the college aspirations and preparation levels of ACT-takers who reported a family income of less than $36,000 (approximately 24 percent of test-takers.) Overall, 96 percent of low-income students who took the ACT reported plans to enroll in college. 33 percent of these students wanted to obtain a graduate or professional degree, 51 percent wanted to obtain a bachelor’s degree, and 13 percent wanted to obtain an associate’s degree. Despite these aspirations, however, only 11 percent of low-income students met all four of ACT’s college readiness benchmarks, which include English, reading, math, and science. Even more troubling, a whopping 50 percent of low-income students failed to meet even one benchmark.

When broken down by subject, low-income students performed best in English (45 percent met the benchmark, compared to 64 percent of all students). In the three remaining subjects, however, low-income students posted far lower numbers. 26 percent met the reading benchmark (compared to 44 percent of all students), 23 percent met the math benchmark (compared to 43 percent of all students), and 18 percent met the science benchmark (compared to 37 percent of all students). ACT breaks this data down even further, isolating benchmark attainment into categories of family income below $36,000, income between $36,000 and $60,000, income between $60,000 and $100,000, and income above $100,000. Unsurprisingly, the number of benchmarks attained rose along with family income. Students from families with incomes over $100,000 were twice as likely to meet the benchmark in nearly every subject. In other words, although more students from low-income families are taking the ACT than ever before, a “substantial and persistent” performance gap remains between low-income students and their more affluent peers.

The report also draws attention to two interesting additional findings. First, low-income students who take a “core or more” high school curriculum (four years of English and three years each of math, science, and social studies) are more likely to meet each of the four benchmarks—and be college- and career-ready—than their low-income peers who opt for a different course pattern. For example, 47 percent of low-income students who took “core or more” met the English benchmark, compared to 24 percent of low-income students who took less than the core but still met the benchmark. In math, 25 percent of “core-or-more” students met the benchmark, while a dismal 4 percent of students who took less than the core met the benchmark. Second, across all benchmark attainment levels, students with higher ACT Engage College scores in areas like academic discipline, commitment to college, and social connection are more likely to remain enrolled in college after their first year than students with lower scores in those areas. This could point to the importance of non-cognitive skills—though education stakeholders have a long way to go before they agree on the best way to teach these skills to students. Overall, though, the implications of the report are clear: If we’re going to get more low-income kids ready for success in college, our K–12 system has got to get a lot better at helping students complete a rigorous curriculum and develop non-cognitive skills.

SOURCE: “The Condition of College & Career Readiness 2014: Students from Low-Income Families,” ACT (July 2015).