Charter School Authorization And Growth

If you ask a charter school supporter why charter schools tend to exhibit inconsistency in their measured test-based impact, there’s a good chance they’ll talk about authorizing. That is, they will tell you that the quality of authorization laws and practices — the guidelines by which charters are granted, renewed and revoked — drives much and perhaps even most of the variation in the performance of charters relative to comparable district schools, and that strengthening these laws is the key to improving performance.

Accordingly, a recently-announced campaign by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers aims to step up the rate at which charter authorizers close “low-performing schools” and are more selective in allowing new schools to open. In addition, a recent CREDO study found (among other things) that charter middle and high schools’ performance during their first few years is more predictive of future performance than many people may have thought, thus lending support to the idea of opening and closing schools as an improvement strategy.

Below are a few quick points about the authorization issue, which lead up to a question about the relationship between selectivity and charter sector growth.

The reasonable expectation is that authorization matters, but its impact is moderate. Although there has been some research on authorizer type and related factors, there is, as yet, scant evidence as to the influence of authorization laws/practices on charter performance. In part, this is because such effects are difficult to examine empirically. However, without some kind of evidence, the “authorization theory” may seem a bit tautological: There are bad charters because authorizers allow bad charters to open, and fail to close them.

That said, the criteria and processes by which charters are granted/renewed almost certainly have a meaningful effect on performance, and this is an important area for policy research. On the other hand, it’s a big stretch to believe that these policies can explain a large share of the variation in charter effects. There’s a reasonable middle ground for speculation here: Authorization has an important but moderate impact, and, thus, improving these laws and practices is definitely worthwhile, but seems unlikely to alter radically the comparative performance landscape in the short- and medium-term (more on this below).

Strong authorization policies are a good idea regardless of the evidence. Just to be clear, even if future studies find no connection between improved authorization practices and outcomes, test-based or otherwise, it’s impossible to think of any credible argument against them. If you’re looking to open a new school (or you’re deciding whether or not to renew an existing one), there should be strong, well-defined criteria for being allowed to do so. Anything less serves nobody, regardless of their views on charter schools.

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Michelle Rhee and the unproven teacher evaluation

Via the LA Times

The debate -- and that’s putting it nicely -- over the use of standardized test scores in teacher evaluations has always confused me, because the answer seemed so simple. One of the things we ask of teachers -- but just one thing -- is to raise those scores. So they have some place in the evaluation. But how much? Easy. Get some good evidence and base the decisions on that, not on guessing. The quality of education is at stake, as well as people’s livelihoods.

Much to my surprise, at a meeting with the editorial board this week, Michelle Rhee agreed, more or less. As one of the more outspoken voices in the school-reform movement, Rhee is at least as polarizing as the topic of teacher evaluations, and her lobbying organization, Students First, takes the position that the standardized test scores of each teacher’s students should count for no less than 50% of that teacher’s rating on performance evaluations.

But asked where the evidence was to back up that or any other percentage figure, Rhee agreed quite openly that it’s lacking.

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Fordham hides from facts

UPDATE: Fordham has now published our comment on their site, for which we are grateful. See the comments to this article for their explanation.

The Fordham Foundation, one of Ohio's more vocal charter school boosters, has a post on their website defending the high number of failing charter schools. The piece is written by Aaron Churchill, someone we have observed stretching facts and the truth before (Fordham loses its bearings). Like his previous piece's error addled analysis, his latest defense of failing charter schools goes to great lengths to obfuscate hard truths using indefensible "statistical analysis".

Rather than write a post here on JTF, we tried to leave a long comment pointing out just some of the errors in the post. Fordham has decided they would rather that comment be hidden and not be published, so we are publishing it below, in response to a Fordham reader asking us to

Aaron states "The chart shows that a nearly equal number of charters reside in the state’s bottom 111 schools"

Let's just assume that is correct. What if utterly fails to recognize is that there are orders of magnitude more traditional public school buildings than charter schools - so the fact that so many charter school buildings appear in the bottom 111 should be disturbing to everyone, not glommed onto as a point of false equivalence. As an overall percentage of school buildings charter schools dominate the bottom rankings.

Let's look at another claim made by Aaron...

"The fact of the matter is that taxpayers spend less on each child in a charter school then is spent on their district peers."

That claim is contradicted by the Ohio Department of Education (link here:http://www.scribd.com/doc/117636411/ODE-Analysis-of-Per-Pupil-Cost-of-Charters-and-Publics).

"The average of total expenditure per pupil for public districts is $10,110.72.

The average expenditure per pupil for community schools is $9,064. When broken out: For e-schools it’s $7,027. For non-eschool community schools it’s $10,165.

So only when one combines the cost of the laughably cheap (and ludicrously underperforming) e-schools do Ohio's charters look inexpensive - and that's using ODE as a source.

Aaron did a good job, as all charter school boosters do, of obfuscating the facts - which is that the vast majority of Ohio's charter schools deliver a poor quality education at an inflated cost.

Let's close them down and concentrate our energy on the schools that 95% of Ohio's students go to, and maybe learn some things along the way from the few charter schools that are getting it right, instead of this constant non-debate and excuse making about the terrible charter schools we all know exist in very high numbers.

Fordham likes to hide behind their advocacy for charter school accountability and quality, but whenever they are pressed on this, they obfuscate the difficult facts and revert to defending the rotten and the failing. They may talk a good game, but in the end they are no less a charter school booster as White Hat owner, David Brennan. Mr. Churchill's post and decision to avoid a discussion on it are further proof of that.

On Teacher Evaluations, Between Myth And Fact Lies Truth

Controversial proposals for new teacher evaluation systems have generated a tremendous amount of misinformation. It has come from both “sides,” ranging from minor misunderstandings to gross inaccuracies. Ostensibly to address some of these misconceptions, the advocacy group Students First (SF) recently released a “myth/fact sheet” on evaluations.

Despite the need for oversimplification inherent in “myth/fact” sheets, the genre can be useful, especially about topics such as evaluation, about which there is much confusion. When advocacy groups produce them, however, the myths and facts sometimes take the form of “arguments we don’t like versus arguments we do like.”

This SF document falls into that trap. In fact, several of its claims are a little shocking. I would still like to discuss the sheet, not because I enjoy picking apart the work of others (I don’t), but rather because I think elements of both the “myths” and “facts” in this sheet could be recast as “dual myths” in a new sheet. That is, this document helps to illustrate how, in many of our most heated education debates, the polar opposite viewpoints that receive the most attention are often both incorrect, or at least severely overstated, and usually serve to preclude more productive, nuanced discussions.

Let’s take all four of SF’s “myth/fact” combinations in turn.

I’m almost tempted to leave this one alone. Putting aside the opinion-dressed-as-fact that “meaningful” evaluations must include “objective measures of student academic growth,” it’s fair to argue, with caution, that the value-added components of new teacher evaluations would not necessarily “penalize” teachers whose students begin the year far behind, as the models attempt to control for prior achievement (though the same may not be stated so strongly for other components, such as observations).

However, whether the models account for lower-scoring students covers only a small slice of the real issue here. Rather, as I’ve noted before, the better guiding question is whether they can to an acceptable degree account for all the factors that are outside of teachers’ control.

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Education News for 04-03-2013

State Education News

• Educators line up to tour Reynoldsburg (Columbus Dispatch)

If you’re an educator who wants to tour Reynoldsburg schools, you’re going to have to wait until fall. The district leads about two tours a week for educators from around the country and across the world, and they’re booked for months…Read more...

• Ohio’s bookkeeping improved, 2012 audit finds (Columbus Dispatch)

If not for the state’s massive Medicaid health-care program, there would be little to talk about in this year’s annual audit of Ohio’s financial records…Read more...

• Area schools named Schools of Promise (Lima News)

Many pieces go into determining whether a pupil finds academic success, and Superintendent Dale Lewellen believes it’s why both Bath's elementary and high schools landed on the state’s…Read more...

• 21 Mahoning Valley schools designated Schools of Promise (Youngstown Vindicator)

Twenty-one Mahoning Valley schools have earned the designation “School of Promise” for the 2011-12 school year from the Ohio Department of Education…Read more...

Local Education News

• Ashtabula City Council tweaks curfew laws (Ashtabula Star-Beacon)

The children spoke and City Council heard them…Read more...

• Huron school board upholds firing former Superintendent Fox (Lorain Morning Journal)

A majority of Huron School Board members voted last night to uphold their firing of former Superintendent Fred Fox, despite a mediator’s report last month that said Fox should be reinstated with back pay…Read more...

Editorial

• Out of Akron (Akron Beacon Journal)

For the past several years, Akron Public Schools administrators have been engaged in an exercise they refer to as “right-sizing” the district. They have closed several school buildings and laid off staff members, including principals, teachers…Read more...

• Clarity on school funding urgently needed (Canton Repository)

Nothing about Gov. John Kasich’s proposed two-year budget is simple. It’s filled with fundamental changes in the way state government operates, and he faces opposition…Read more...

Teaching as team sport

A gues post by Robert Barkley

Yes, you read that title right. Traditional schools are structured and managed as if teachers were individual performers. Evidence and common sense say that's far from being the case.

Given the recent furor over the Chicago teacher strike and the accompanying union bashing that dominates the mainstream media, we'd do well to give thought to what can be learned from successful schools around the globe.

We talk much about American exceptionalism. A key element of that exceptionalism is our deep-seated belief in the merits of competition. So thoroughly have we adopted the notion that market forces inevitably lead to superior performance, we have great difficulty accepting the fact that schools that emphasize collegial relationships, encourage shared faculty planning, and make use of cooperative approaches to designing and implementing teaching and learning strategies, routinely outpace those that stress competition.

Most teachers know this intuitively, although too few articulate it well. Professional organizations, unions, school administrators, and schools of education are also familiar with the research and conclusions based on experience, but are no more successful than individual teachers at getting the message across. The narrow preoccupation with raising test scores at the expense of all else seems to have so rattled educators they can’t get their sensible messages out.

The need to work together is a major reason why private sector pressure to rate and pay teachers on the basis of test scores and other individual performance measures is a huge mistake. Predictably—given political reliance on corporate funding for campaigns—neither Republicans nor Democrats are willing to listen to educators. Vouchers, choice, charters, merit pay, school closings and “turnarounds,” and other silver bullets being fired by politicians and rich entrepreneurs block dialogue that could be productive if they came to the issues open to the possibility that the hundreds of thousands who actually do the work might just possibly know something about how to do it best.

Corporate fascination with competitiveness notwithstanding, in teaching and learning, competitiveness is almost always counterproductive. It blocks a host of useful strategies for evaluating performance, gets in the way of freely sharing good ideas, and wastes the benefits of knowing one is part of a team, the work of which will inevitably be smarter than that of individual members.

It’s ironic that teamwork—an idea the merit of which is taken for granted on factory floors and playing fields, in neighborhoods and families, and just about everywhere else that humans try to be productive—is seen as counterproductive in classrooms. Within companies managers want employees to collaborate with colleagues. An accountant sitting next to a fellow accountant is required to work with that person. No one wants the two of them to compete, withhold trade secrets, and crush the other by the end of the day.

Finding scapegoats, fixing blame for poor performance on a percentage of teachers or on a few individuals, has an appealing simplicity about it, but it’s a lazy, simplistic, misguided approach to improving system performance. As management experts have been pointing out for decades, if a system isn’t performing, it almost always means there’s a system problem. Since teachers have almost no control over the systems of which they are a part, it’s necessary to make the most of a bad situation, and the easiest way to do that is to capitalize on their collective wisdom. If they’re being forced to compete against each other, there’s no such thing as collective wisdom.

For a generation, under the banner of standards and accountability, teachers have been criticized, scorned, denigrated, maligned, blamed. Accountability in education as indicated by standardized test scores is no more about individual teacher performance than accountability in health care as indicated by patient temperatures is about individual nurse performance.

I’m not making excuses for poor educator performance. Teachers should be held accountable for identifying, understanding, and applying practices that produce the highest level of student achievement. Administrators should be held accountable for creating an environment that encourages the identification, understanding and sharing of effective practices. Schools of education should be held accountable for whatever improves the institution.

But the new reformers aren't interested in improvement, just replacement. Management experts say, "Don't fix blame; fix the system." Just about everyone in the system would love to help do that if given the opportunity, but the opportunity hasn’t been offered, so nothing of consequence changes.

Case in point: The Chicago teachers’ strike. Rahm Emanuel, like the rest of the current “reformers,” came to the table having bought the conventional wisdom in Washington and state capitols that educators either don’t know what to do or aren’t willing to do it. He obviously went to Chicago with the same tired suspicion of teachers, the same belief that they’re the problem rather than the key to a real solution, the same confrontational, competitive stance.

Will we ever learn? Don’t hold your breath.

Robert Barkley, Jr., is retired Executive Director of the Ohio Education Association, a thirty-five year veteran of NEA and NEA affiliate staff work. He is the author of Quality in Education: A Primer for Collaborative Visionary Educational Leaders, Leadership In Education: A Handbook for School Superintendents and Teacher Union Presidents, and Lessons for a New Reality: Guidance for Superintendent/Teacher Organization Collaboration. He may be reached at rbarkle@columbus.rr.com.