The Secrets of Charter School Success

[proud2BlibKansan]

Excellent piece from Ed Week

First a little on the history of charters:

The charter idea was born in 1988, when two men—unknown to one another—converged on the idea. One was an education professor in Massachusetts named Ray Budde. The other was Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers. Both saw charter schools as a sort of R&D program to help public education. Neither saw charters as competition for public schools. They thought that the lessons learned from charters would help to solve difficult problems of curriculum and instruction, while shedding light on issues of organization and student motivation.

As we both know, the founders' vision has been replaced by a totally different conception of charters. Now they are the leading edge of an effort to replace public schools and to oust teachers' unions. Knowledgeable insiders have told me that more than 90 percent—possibly 98 percent—of the nation's 5,000 charters do not have unions. Most are staffed by young teachers who work 50-60 hours a week and burn out after a few years.

And how well are charters educating our kids?

Last spring, CREDO released a national study showing that only 17 percent of charter schools had better results than traditional public schools; 83 percent of charters produced gains that were no different or significantly worse. This study sent shock waves through the charter school world.

But now Raymond has produced a study of NYC charters that presents a far brighter picture than her national study. In contrast to Hoxby's NYC study, which seemed to suggest that any charter school was superior to any public school, Raymond's study is positive, but nuanced. She matched students in charter schools with students in traditional public schools by gender, grade, race/ethnicity, free-reduced price lunch status (a proxy for poverty), prior year test score, grade repeater, special-education status, and English-language learner. Raymond found that 51 percent of NYC charters produced significant gains in math, but only 29 percent did so in reading.

And why do the charters in NYC get the results they get:

Charters in NYC may get better results than charters nationally because many or most have rich sponsors, hedge-fund managers or philanthropists with deep pockets who donate millions of dollars to their schools, enabling them to have smaller classes and more resources than the local public schools. (Tom Toch noted in an article in the December/January Kappan that the SEED charter school in Washington, D.C., which has been hailed as a national model, spends $35,000 per student yearly.)

Another important factor in the success of New York City's charters is that Chancellor Joel Klein has placed 70 of the city's 99 charters in public school space, subsidizing the charters' facilities, utilities, transportation, custodial services, food services, and whatever else is provided to the regular public school. This policy has ignited angry battles between the parents of charter school students and those at public schools that lose their computer room, their art room, their dance room, and classroom space to the favored charters. Parents and teachers in New York City public schools grumble about "academic apartheid" and "separate but equal" when they see the care and attention showered on charters located inside public schools that have long been neglected.

Who are charter schools educating? Who are they leaving behind?

Then, too, most charters in New York City have lotteries for admission. The least informed parents never apply for a lottery, so the lottery acts as a screening mechanism. (Hoxby eliminated this factor by comparing students who won the lottery with students who lost it.) Thus, charters enroll few homeless students; there are some 50,000 homeless students in New York City's public schools, but only about 100 are enrolled in charters. When charters admit special education students, they tend to be those with the mildest disabilities because charters are not equipped to meet the needs of those with extreme disabilities.In addition, charters are able to "counsel out" students who are "not a good fit," who then return to the traditional public schools.

The United Federation of Teachers of New York City reported that charters serve less than 4 percent of English-language learners, compared with a citywide average of 14 percent; that less than 10 percent of charter students require special education, compared with a citywide average of 16 percent; that charters enroll fewer Hispanic or immigrant students than the regular public schools; and that while they have the same proportion of students receiving "free and reduced-price lunch," they have about 10 percentage points fewer of students eligible for free lunch (that is, the poorest students). The gaps are even larger when charter schools are compared with their neighborhood public schools, rather than citywide averages.

[gratuitous]

1. More money spent per pupil = better educated students

What a discovery!

Also, when a school can forsake its mandate to serve the public - all of the public - it can concentrate these deeper resources on better and more motivated students. And they learn better. You could knock me over with a feather. Why hasn't anyone thought of any of this before? I mean, besides those overpaid teachers, useless administrators, practically every parent who's ever sent a kid to school and any school board member with a similar experience. It's the secret of the ages!

[proud2BlibKansan]

4. LOL

[JackRiddler]

6. Sounds like the experiment has produced a usable result.

Spend more money, have smaller classes - dare I say raise teacher pay?!

Education, unlike the foreign affairs we seem to think can be solved by war, IS a problem that you COULD throw money at to good effect.

Go here:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html?hp

Click on "Hide Mandatory Spending"

That tells you all you need to know about priorities.

[gratuitous]

7. No, that can't be right

I've heard that the only problems solved by throwing money at them are military weapons systems and Big Finance difficulties. In fact, for those problems, it's best to pre-emptively throw money at them, which will head off some, but definitely not all, problems. When a problem arises, naturally, you throw more money at it.

For schools, it's always best to see if starving them of money will do the trick. If you absolutely must provide schools with money, it's best to give them about one-fourth less than what they say is the absolute minimum they need. Then have a parade of older people line up to complain about how much they think is being spent on schools (a number more recognizable to a defense budget analyst than any school anywhere).

[proud2BlibKansan]

8. +1

[sandnsea]

2. So use the R&D and apply it to your districts

Clearly one of the key elements identified in charter schools is the need for a model to "counsel out" students from public schools into charter schools designed for the disruptors.

It also seems to me that charter schools have identified that teachers need more freedom to discipline.

They also need a procedure to get rid of principals as that has also been identified as a critical component to successful schools.

Use this information to help improve the public schools, and use the charters to your advantage. That's what they are there for.

[tonysam]

3. Schools will NEVER get rid of principals

unless they are caught in bed with students.

These "supervisors" have almost ironclad job security.

[sandnsea]

5. Part of the strategy is firing principals

That is one of the failing school improvement tactics. This came right off the Dept of Ed Race to the Top info. If unions would use this info to start identifying the real problems in schools, and every parent KNOWS principals are key, we would all make a lot more progress a lot faster than this no no no stuff. Charters are doing all the things teachers have been complaining about for years. Now the trick is to figure out how to identify various improvement tactics and give teachers and parents as much power to initiate change as the Board or Administration has now.



Turnaround model: Replace the principal and rehire no more than 50 percent of the staff...
Transformation model: Replace the principal and take steps to increase teacher and school leader effectiveness...

http://obama-mamas.com/blog/?p=1172

[madrchsod]

9. duncan`s school reform in chicago has`t worked.....

some schools are under reporting the number of juniors in high school. there were other ways to gin the system to falsify improvements.

[ipaint]

10. Charter schools became a popular concept after

a report out of the reagan administration based on bogus data on SAT scores. The corrections and debunking of the SAT scores data, which were originally stated to have declined but had actually increased as a result of being properly analyzed, never saw the light of day in the general public. As a result the conclusion that public schools where failing children was cemented in the public's mind and a conservative alternative and a stepping stone to full privatization was born- charter schools.

[ipaint]

11. The Sandia report

"One section, for example, analyzed SAT scores between the late 1970s and 1990, a period when those scores slipped markedly. ("A Nation at Risk" spotlighted the decline of scores from 1963 to 1980 as dead-bang evidence of failing schools.) The Sandia report, however, broke the scores down by various subgroups, and something astonishing emerged. Nearly every subgroup -- ethnic minorities, rich kids, poor kids, middle class kids, top students, average students, low-ranked students -- held steady or improved during those years. Yet overall scores dropped. How could that be?

Simple -- statisticians call it Simpson's paradox: The average can change in one direction while all the subgroups change in the opposite direction if proportions among the subgroups are changing. Early in the period studied, only top students took the test. But during those twenty years, the pool of test takers expanded to include many lower-ranked students. Because the proportion of top students to all students was shrinking, the scores inevitably dropped. That decline signified not failure but rather progress toward what had been a national goal: extending educational opportunities to a broader range of the population.

By then, however, catastrophically failing schools had become a political necessity. George H.W. Bush campaigned to replace Reagan as president on a promise to confront the crisis. He had just called an education summit to tackle it, so there simply had to be a crisis.

The government never released the Sandia report. It went into peer review and there died a quiet death. Hardly anyone else knew it even existed until, in 1993, the Journal of Educational Research, read by only a small group of specialists, printed the report."

http://www.edutopia.org/landmark-education-report-nation-risk

Disaster Capitalism

"One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was the late Milton Friedman, grand guru of unfettered capitalism and credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hyper-mobile global economy. Ninety-three years old and in failing health, "Uncle Miltie", as he was known to his followers, found the strength to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal three months after the levees broke. "Most New Orleans schools are in ruins," Friedman observed, "as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity."

Friedman's radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans' existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions.

In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans' school system took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with most of the city's poor residents still in exile, New Orleans' public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools.

The Friedmanite American Enterprise Institute enthused that "Katrina accomplished in a day ... what Louisiana school reformers couldn't do after years of trying". Public school teachers, meanwhile, were calling Friedman's plan "an educational land grab". I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, "disaster capitalism"."

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/excerpt


For insight into Freidman's twisted philosophy regarding government and the private sector read about Friedman and Pinochet.


Charter schools where born out of conservative dogma during the reagan administration, based on lies about the very real success of our public school system which was then used as a political football to further the privatization of public programs. Combine that with regular tax cuts for the rich, less money for states and the resulting starvation of the public school system in poorer communities and you get conservative privatization garbage masquerading as "the answer" to our public school "problem". A problem created out of thin air almost 3 decades ago.

[proud2BlibKansan]

12. +++++++

Thank you.

Let's also not forget A Nation at Risk.

[omega minimo]

13. Big money being made and mishandled, well connected criminal's getting off

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Gerald-Walpin-speaks-the-inside-story-of-the-AmeriCorps-firing-48030697.html

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/11/ws_ig_walpin_fired_because_he.html


http://hoguenews.com/?p=980

[proud2BlibKansan]

14. +1