March 2012 Archives

California charter schools currently do not have to provide free or reduced-price lunches to disadvantaged students. But some lawmakers are seeking to change that.

Legislation moving through the California State Capitol would subject charters to the same requirements that traditional public schools currently face for providing at least one "nutritionally adequate" meal per day.

The state authorizes traditional public schools to provide meals with funds coming to them through a variety of federal or state programs, the legislation explains. Those include the federal School Breakfast Program, the federal National School Lunch Program, and the state's meal program. Those meals can also be offered at the expense of school districts or county office of education.

The measure to increase the requirements on charters is sponsored by state Rep. Mike Eng, a Democrat from the Los Angeles area.

"As the number of charter schools continues to grow across California, so do the number of low-income charter school pupils who may not have access to the free or reduced-price meals that they are eligible for and offered in a traditional public school," the legislation states. "School meals play an essential role in supporting the academic achievement and overall well-being of all pupils, particularly low-income pupils who may not have access to a nutritionally adequate
meal otherwise."

The California Charter Schools Association opposes the bill. Charters face serious obstacles in providing meal programs, a spokeswoman for the association, Vicky Waters, said in an e-mail, including cost and not having adequate facilities to provide those services.

Many districts do not provide charters with the level of facilities they're supposed to under state law, the association contends. (Districts' obligations to charters have emerged as a major source of contention in California.) As a result, Waters said, many charters do not have kitchens, and do not have the resources to either install a commercial-grade kitchen or to move into a facility that has one.

The legislation, she said, wrongly assumes "that some charter schools do not provide a meal to low-income children simply because they choose not to."

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Lawmakers in Tennessee are taking on charter school regulation—but not the kind of school regulation we usually see debated in statehouses.

A Republican-sponsored bill would limit the number of individuals working on temporary visas for foreign workers that charter schools can hire, at 3.5 percent of the total staff.

The measure would specifically forbid charter schools from being authorized if they relied on non-immigrant foreign workers receiving H1B or J1 visas to fill staff positions above the aforementioned cap. It would also bar charters from trying to circumvent the limit by affiliating with colleges or universities that by federal law are exempt from the visa program's annual caps.

In addition, the legislation would not allow charters if those schools' sponsors or governing bodies are "controlled by foreign nationals." The language on that point seems relatively broad. The bill says an authorizer may not approve the charter if:

"The sponsor or governing body of the proposed charter school is controlled by foreign nationals or any of the sponsor or governing board members are affiliated with, have been previously affiliated with, employed by or are otherwise connected to another charter school or schools in the United States or its territories that are or have been controlled by foreign nationals."

The measure emerges about a year after Tennessee was the site of a high-profile, cable-talk-show ready debate over Sharia law, which some lawmakers set out to ban in the state. Sharia is Islamic law, and it influences the customs and religious practices of followers of the faith.

The shadow of the Sharia debate has led some to question whether the measure is aimed at restricting hiring at Islamic-themed charter schools, in particular.

An article in the Tennessean explores those complaints. But backers of the bill say their primary concern is ensuring that U.S.-born workers are first in line for job openings at charters. (While Republicans control Tennessee's legislature, the newspaper also reports that some Democratic state lawmakers are backing similiar legislation on foreign workers in charter schools.)

[UPDATE: (11:45 a.m.) The Tennessee Charter Schools Association opposes the legislation, which it regards as unnecessary and standing in the way of charters hiring talented employees, said the organization's executive director, Matt Throckmorton.

As it now stands, the association says it knows of just six teachers in the state, out of a total of about 500 working in charter schools, who have been hired through the foreign-worker visas. Throckmorton believes all of those teachers are employed at the same school.

The overwhelmingly majority of the 52 charters approved or in operation in Tennessee are relatively small, he noted. That means that hiring a single teacher on a foreign worker visa could push them over the 3.5-percent threshold, Throckmorton said.

He said he charter school advocates should be focusing on improving their quality, not questions over the immigration status of their employees.

"The language itself is fraught with pitfalls," he said. "There's a much larger picture here we don't want to engage in at all. We want to stick to education reform."]

We'll sell where the debate takes the bill in the weeks ahead.

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A new paper argues in favor of "fiscal federalism," a world in which the federal government would encourage and incentivize school choice in states and districts, while scaling back Washington's role in education in many other areas.

The paper, titled "Let the Dollars Follow the Child" and published in Education Next, represents the views of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education at the Hoover Institution, which by its description advocates for choice, accountability, and transparency in schools. It's written by Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, the former director of the Institute of Education Sciences, the main research arm of the U.S. Department of Education.

As it now stands, federal policymakers seem to be focused on pursuing one of two options, Whitehurst explains: 1) continuing to promote "top-down accountability," in the style of No Child Left Behind; or 2) devolving much more power to states and districts, which in the task force's view would amount to returning to the "status quo of the mid-1990s."

The alternative proposed by the task force envisions using the power of the federal government strategically to promote and encourage choice—and to fulfill other duties, such as ensuring the provision of services and funding to the neediest populations, enforcing civil rights laws, and delivering high-quality information about student performance and other areas.

States should be allowed to opt out of No Child Left Behind, Head Start, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in exchange for creating marketplaces of "informed choice and competition," the paper argues, as long as they provided the above-mentioned protections. Not all states would want to head down this path, and they wouldn't be requred to do so; they could stick with the current approach provided by those laws, Whitehurst says. But states would ultimately decide which route they wanted to pursue, and the option that proved most effective, and the most popular among the public, would prevail, state-by-state, he predicts.

The federal government's potential to promote effective school choice is described this way:

"The simple feature of eliminating a default school assignment by the school district—thus requiring every parent to engage in school choice—eliminates socioeconomic differences in the likelihood that parents will shop for schools. Further, if parents could exercise school choice through Web-based portals that highlight the important variables of school performance, socioeconomic differences in knowledge could be muted. Here, again, the federal government has a role to play, for example, by funding open competitions for designers and implementers of school-choice portals.

Market-based competition cannot prevail in public education unless the consumers of public education can choose where to be schooled. We propose that as a condition of the receipt of federal funds to support the education of individual students, schools be required to participate in an open-enrollment process conducted by a state-sanctioned authority. Such a process would maximize the matches between school and student preferences. Unified open-enrollment systems that encompass as many choices as possible from the regular public, charter, private, and virtual school universes are essential to the expansion of choice and competition in K-12 education. These systems have to be designed so that all schools have the same time frame for applications and admission decisions, and so that they cannot be gamed by either schools or applying families."

Hard to imagine that congressional lawmakers will be drafting No Child Left Behind reauthorization proposals along these lines anytime soon. But NCLB already includes measures designed to promote public school choice—which many choice advocates say are toothless. Could trace elements of the Koret Task Force's ideas make their way into federal law, or are they confined to the world of think tanks and academia?

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The most effective charter school management organizations place a heavy emphasis on coaching teachers—particularly novices—but their approaches to providing that guidance are often quite different.

That's one of the findings included in a recent study released by the Center on Reinventing Public Education and Mathematica Policy Research, part of a four-year project to gauge which CMO practices have the biggest impact in raising student achievement.

The authors of the study have found that the highest-achieving CMOs place a heavy focus on the coaching of educators, along with setting high expectations for student behavior. (See my colleague Jaclyn Zubrycki's post last week on the report.)

But it's also worth nothing that the four CMOs whose coaching strategies are profiled—Aspire Public Schools, KIPP DC, Uncommon Schools, and YES Prep Public Schools—offer different types of coaching, with different levels of intensity, directed by different administrators and educators within the school.

YES Prep uses specialized coaching staff for new educators. KIPP DC has some full-time coaches, but also expects school principals to act as primary coaches. Meanwhile, Uncommon Schools designates some of its teachers to devote a portion of their time to coaching, the authors say.

The charter operators provide "highly individualized support designed to address the unique needs of each teacher, whether new or experienced, struggling or thriving," the study explains. "Coaching supports for instruction or classroom management can include more frequent observations, highly structured feedback, or review of lesson plans."

Like many CMOs, the four operators profiled tend to draw a lot of rookie teachers from alternative training programs, like Teach for America. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the four CMOs place a heavy emphasis on nurturing classroom management skills among new educators.

The charter operators also provide coaching for experienced teachers, which tends to focus on honing instructional practices and aligning them with philosophies of the CMOs in which they work. Charter operators also allow experienced teachers to become coaches, which serves as a route for professional growth.

At Uncommon Schools, teachers' strengths and weaknesses are assessed at the beginning of the year. Teachers are paired with coaches who have skills aligned with those teachers' needs; coaches arrange weekly observations of those educators; and teachers take part in summer training sessions focused on classroom management and instructional techniques.

In KIPP DC schools, principals typically visit classrooms each week for short observations, lasting between 10 and 20 minutes. That's the norm even for experienced educators. Coaches usually follow up these visits by providing comments about the techniques they saw teachers using. Struggling teachers are identified using observations, assessment data, and feedback from students and parents, and are put on improvement plans, and receive more intensive coaching.

The following chart shows the extent to which the CMOs identified as effective observe teachers in action, offer them feedback and review lesson plans, compared with other charters and traditional public schools:

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Georgia voters will decide in November on whether to approve a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow the state to create charters over the objections of local school boards.

State lawmakers this week approved legislation to place the item on the ballot, after securing the necessary two-thirds majority in each chamber. The proposal had stirred a furious round of lobbying and political manuevering at the state capitol.

Backers of the measure have argued it will create a route for establishing more educational options at the local level, and overcoming resistance from board members who are opposed to new charters. Critics say it usurps local control. The legislation includes language spelling out that while the state can devote funding for the charters it authorizes, no "deduction shall be made to any state funding which a local school system is otherwise authorized to receive" as a result of the founding of those independent schools.

The constitutional amendment, if approved, would essentially re-establish the state's ability to authorize charters, a policy that had been voided by a Georgia Supreme Court ruling last year.

See my colleague Erik Robelen's piece on that court decision, which noted that it seemed to run counter to an overall trend toward the creation of state-level commissions to authorize charter schools.

Approving the amendment would "restore the ability of the state to approve charter schools, so that the [families] who want to attend charter schools can choose them," said Tony Roberts, the president and CEO of the Georgia Charter Schools Association, which backs the amendment.

Georgia currently has about 60 independent charter schools and about 140 that are operated by districts, he said, in some cases after being converted from traditional public schools.

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If there's a single education policy that people associate with former District of Columbia schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, it's almost certainly teacher quality—meaning her support for tying educators' pay and evaluation to performance, ending seniority-based preferences, promoting alternate certification, and the like.

But where does she come down on private school vouchers, one of the most controversial, and fastest-moving, policy issues in the states these days?

I was curious about Rhee's views on this topic, because, broadly speaking, she's been a strong backer of school choice. She's called for expanding charter schools, open enrollment for students across districts, and "parent trigger" proposals, which would allow parents to vote to convert struggling schools to charters. But her views of private school choice have received a lot less attention.

Rhee's position also matters, because the education advocacy group she now leads, StudentsFirst, wants to become a major player in state education policy. Though Rhee is a Democrat, she says her group will support governors and lawmakers from either party if they share her group's agenda.

In a recent interview, Rhee told me she supports targeted voucher programs, such as those that offer taxpayer funds to low-income students in academically struggling schools. But she said she sees more expansive, "universal" vouchers as misguided.

"I don't think it makes sense to subsidize families who are already sending their kids to private schools, anyway," she said. "I'm not a voucher proponent in the way that some people would want me to be. ... This is not about choice for choice's sake."

Republican governors and lawmakers in several states, since making major gains in the 2010 election, have created or expanded programs to allow taxpayer funds to go to private-school choice. One particularly far-reaching voucher policy was adopted last year in Indiana, which approved a GOP-backed law that will provide vouchers to a broad range of families, including some from middle-income backgrounds. Some Republican-controlled states, such as Florida, have considered even more expansive voucher policies.

Offering private school vouchers to disadvantaged students in struggling schools makes sense, said Rhee, who noted that StudentsFirst's policy agenda says as much. But she said she does not favor providing vouchers to students from middle- and upper-income groups.

"When people talk about universal vouchers, first of all, I've never seen an economic model that actually made sense and laid that out in way that's sustainable," Rhee said. "I haven't seen any kind of model that makes economic sense. ... My support for vouchers is around a specific group of kids."

"There are a lot of people out there who sort of believe, the free market, let the free market reign, the market will correct itself—give every kid a backpack with their money in it and let them choose wherever they want to go," she added. "I don't believe in that model at all."

Rhee's position on voucher issues may have seemed less-than-clear in late 2010, when she served on the transition team for newly elected Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott. That advisory group ended up calling for the creation of "education savings accounts," an expansive voucher system that would allow students to use the vast majority of per-pupil funding at private schools—apparently without limits on families' income eligibility.

But Rhee, through a spokeswoman for StudentsFirst, said that while she supported the overall direction of the transition team's recommendations, she disagreed with its voucher proposal. Rhee conveyed her difference of opinion on that point to the governor, the spokeswoman said.

Some voucher advocates oppose the idea that private schools that receive public funding be held to the same testing and regulatory policies as public schools. Rhee told me she doesn't agree.

"It has to be a heavily regulated industry," she said. "I believe in accountability across the board. If you're going to be having a publicly funded voucher program, then kids have to be taking standardized tests. We have to be measuring whether kids are academically better off in this private school with this voucher than they would be going to their failing neighborhood school. If they're not, they shouldn't get the voucher. ... I'm about choice only if it results in better outcomes and opportunities for kids."

The ideal public school system, Rhee argued, will include high-quality traditional public schools and a charter sector, as well as some vouchers.

"But the vast majority of kids are going to be in a high-performing public school environment," she said, adding: "I'm a believer in public schools. I'm a public school parent. I ran a public school district."

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One of the leading criticisms of voucher programs—and charter and virtual schools for that matter—is that they undermine traditional public schools' finances by sucking away their per-pupil funding and resources.

A new paper published by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which supports public and private school choice, challenges that assertion.

Author Benjamin Scafidi attacks the question this way: If a substantial number of students left a public school district, is it realistic that the school system could cut its costs enough to account for the loss in student population, and the resulting loss of money? His argument, for both large and small districts, is yes.

In the paper, Scafidi starts with the United States' average per-pupil spending in 2008-09, which was $12,450. He estimates that 36 percent of those costs were "fixed" in the short run, while 64 percent, or $7,967 per student, were variable, or costs that can change with student enrollment.  Assuming that a school choice program redirects less money to a charter or voucher program than was going to a student's traditional school, that shift can improve the financial standing of the public school district, argues Scafidi, an associate professor of economics at Georgia College & State University, in Milledgeville.

Scafidi considers the costs of instruction, student support, instructional and staff support, food service, and some other areas to be variable in the short run. In other words, those costs can and often do fall as students leave traditional publics, even from one year to the next, enough to make up for the loss of funding that comes with the loss of students. His paper cites examples of cost-cutting measures from a couple small districts and large ones in defense of this argument.

I asked Helen Ladd, a professor of public policy and economics at Duke University, for her impressions of Scafidi's conclusions.  Ladd, who has studied school choice and  finance, said in an e-mail that the impact on school districts of student losses through choice would depend on the circumstances, but that in most cases "districts are likely to be worse off."

Among the factors that will affect whether districts end up worse off financially, she said, is the extent to which students leaving the traditional public system are relatively advantaged students, who carry low costs, or disadvantaged students , who cost districts more—as well as whether a district's overall per-pupil funding and costs are being altered by overall increases or declines in enrollment.

Ladd also raised another question that could negatively affect the finances of public schools that lose students. Some of those students may leave the traditional public schools through vouchers or for other options, and then return to the public system in the middle of the year—at which point they aren't likely to be bringing a substantial amount of their funding along with them. 

"My sense is this return of students is not a trivial issue," Ladd said.

Scafidi's paper does not factor in this exodus-and-return of students. But the author said he believes his premise holds up, for a couple reasons.

In some states, when a student leaves a public school, at least some of the money does not leave with the student that first year, he said. States vary greatly in how often they count students for the purposes of determining enrollment, and per-pupil funding. Coming up with an overall sense of trends in this area is difficult, added Scafidi, who said he's unaware of data that show whether more students transfer out or transfer into school districts during the school year. But "as long as school choice leads to a net increase in students leaving," he believes his findings are solid.

Do you agree?

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A recent report found that California charter schools' performance is "U-shaped—meaning there are relatively large numbers of charters clumped among the state's highest and lowest performers.

But what would it take to remove a substantial number of charters from the ranks of the stragglers?

The second annual "Portrait of the Movement," report from the California Charter Schools Association concludes that if the state were to adopt higher standards for charter renewal, it could eliminate the overrepresentation of charters from the bottom rung, and do it in seven years.

As it now stands, about 19 percent of charters in the state, or 150 out of 789, ranked within the bottom 10 percent of performance in California. Just 9 percent of non-charters fell in that category.

Charters are also overrepresented among California's top-tier schools: about 22 percent of charters rank in the top 10 percent of performance, compared with just 9 percent of non-charters. (See my previous blog item for an overview of the findings in the CCSA report, which was released last month.)

But the report also points to a strategy that the authors say would reduce the overrepresentation of charters in the bottom 10 percent—which would result in closing those that could not meet academic standards.

The CCSA recommends that charter schools be held to a number of academic criteria, based on overall performance and growth in performance over time. Those criteria also factor in the extent to which charters serve disadvantaged students, and their performance compared with schools that are similar to them demographically.

If schools that do not meet the CCSA's criteria were allowed to stay open, it would take more than two decades—until 2033—to eliminate the overrepresentation of charters in the bottom 10 percent, the organization argues.

Of course, the CCSA's criteria for judging charters are one organization's ideas. Other groups, be they advocates or critics of charters, are certain to have their own views of how charters should be evaluated.

But whatever the criteria, as it now stands, only a small number of low-performing charters are being shut down in California, the CCSA found. Of 80 reasons cited for the closure of charters over the past few years, only a small portion of them, about 5 percent, had to do with academic performance. (See chart below.) A recent report by the Center for Education Reform, a pro-charter organization, found that a higher portion of charters around the country that were closed, about 19 percent, were shut down because they weren't cutting it academically.

In California, charters were much more likely to be shut down because of lack of funding, low enrollment, or mergers or closures that were already in the works, according to the CCSA. Authorizers in California often lack "clearly actionable criteria" to deal with charters with lackluster academic records, the report says.

Without some change in the standards for how California's charters are judged, the authors say, "we would not expect the concentration of underperforming charters to diminish over time."

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I've been a reporter at Education Week for about a decade now, but with the launch of this blog I'm stepping into what is, for me, a new and exciting landscape: the world of charter schools and public and private school choice.

Longtime readers of our paper know that we've been writing about these issues for years. But given the overriding debate about charters, vouchers, and school choice in all its forms, and their prominence in today's policy discussions, we decided that they merited their own blog.

Few topics in education, of course, roil educators, elected officials, and the public like school choice. In today's oft-overheated atmosphere, choice tends to get branded as a market-based cure for saving struggling schools and re-engaging families, a private-sector-engineered scheme that will undermine traditional public schools, or some variation of those.

You could sum up the tone of a lot of choice debates by paraphrasing what a wise man once said about fried foods: They anger the blood.

My hope is that we'll offer a nuanced look at the implications of charters, vouchers, parent-trigger proposals, open-enrollment policies, the regulation of alternatives to traditional public schools, and other topics. You can help. Your comments and criticism are welcome—and, more than that, they'll be a big part of what makes this blog go.

I've already been covering the charters and choice beat and related topics for a couple weeks in the pages of Education Week. See my recent stories on the rise of parent unions, the growth and performance of nonprofit and for-profit charter operators, and questions about special-needs students' participation in voucher programs.

As some of you know, I've manned a couple of different beats during my time at Education Week. For several years, I wrote about math and science issues (the topics ranged from debates over the teaching of evolution to questions about U.S. students' international competitiveness). Most recently, I covered state policy, an area being taken over by my colleague Andrew Ujifusa, who will captain the State EdWatch blog.

So send along your ideas, observations, and opinions, and I'll set out to make this forum as interesting, relevant, and timely as possible.

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