- Common Core educational standards are losing support nationwide, poll shows
- More States Create Independent Charter-Approval Boards
- Henderson will join Georgetown University’s board of directors
Common Core educational standards are losing support nationwide, poll shows
The Washington Post
By By T. Rees Shapiro
August 20, 2014
A year ago, the term Common Core meant little to the American public. But today, a vast majority of people in the country are familiar with the nationwide educational standards, and most of them oppose the initiative touted by the Obama administration, a new survey shows.
The results of an annual poll by Gallup and the Phi Delta Kappa educators’ organization provide more evidence that support for the Common Core State Standards, originally adopted by 46 states and the District, has faded in recent years. The survey showed that those who opposed the standards thought that the Common Core will hurt teachers’ ability to craft lessons that they think will be best for students. The latest survey results echo findings from other polls on Common Core support.
“It’s pretty apparent that the Common Core has become a polarizing term,” said Terry Holliday, the education commissioner of Kentucky, which was among the first states to adopt the standards in 2010.
The wide-ranging survey also showed that trust in the nation’s public school system has evaporated, as a consistent majority of Americans approve of charter schools that operate independently of state regulations. Overall, more than 70 percent of Americans give President Obama a C, D or F grade in his support to public schools, the lowest rating he has received on the poll since he took office in 2009.
Survey participants said that the top issue facing public schools is a lack of financial support, while concern about discipline issues or crime in schools is dropping.
Respondents also said that they placed more trust in their local school boards when it comes to educational policy issues than in the federal government. The survey showed the Obama administration influence waning as many Americans believe that the federal government should play a smaller role in public education.
On average, respondents said they thought highly of their neighborhood schools. But the poll showed that close to 80 percent of Americans disapprove of the nation’s public schools at large.
The poll also showed that 68 percent of public school parents believed that standardized tests are not helpful for teachers measuring student achievement.
It’s a sentiment reflected among school administrators across the Washington area, including in Fairfax, where the school board has vowed to reduce the frequency and importance of standardized exams on gauging student performance. The poll also showed overwhelming support for Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams and college entrance tests such as the SAT and ACT.
The findings also showed that more than 63 percent of Americans said they favored charter schools. But respondents described widespread confusion of what exactly charter schools are. Slightly less than half of the survey participants described the publicly funded institutions as “private schools,” and 57 percent of respondents believed that charter schools charge tuition. Neither is true of charter schools, which are public schools funded by local tax dollars.
Michael J. Feuer, dean of the George Washington University graduate school of education and human development, said that the poll’s results were “stimulating and provocative” but not all that surprising.
Of the eroding American support for the Common Core, Feuer noted that some states have since dropped the Common Core standards.
“As people get more aware of the details and as implementation begins, there are more problems that arise,” Feuer said.
Last year, more than two-thirds of respondents in the poll had never heard of the Common Core. This year, more than 80 percent of Americans had heard of the standards, mostly from prominent coverage by newspapers, television and radio. A total of 60 percent of respondents said they opposed the Common Core.
“We have supported the Common Core standards because of their potential to help kids, whether from Bed-Stuy or Beverly Hills, to think critically, solve problems and work with others — skills needed to be successful in today’s economy,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents 1.6 million education professionals, said in a statement. “But these standards must be guides, not straightjackets . . . Support will continue to drop as people no longer see standards or standardized tests as helping children.”
More States Create Independent Charter-Approval Boards
Education Week
By Arianna Prothero
August 19, 2014
When First Place Scholars opens in Seattle this school year, it will not only be the first charter school in the state, it will also be chartered and overseen by Washington's new independent statewide authorizing board.
To win the Washington State Charter School Commission's approval—and the right to operate—the school, which will serve homeless students, had to undergo a rigorous process, including submitting an application of several hundred pages, sketching out a five-year budget plan, and passing the scrutiny of charter school experts assembled from across the country to advise the authorizing board.
Yet this kind of gantlet is one that's getting more popular. Washington is among a small but growing group of states that have created independent charter boards to ostensibly add a layer of rigor to the systems that approve, oversee, and close charter schools. Such boards go by different names but are generally authorizing bodies separate from other state and local agencies whose sole purpose is to authorize charter schools statewide. The press for quality—a recurring theme in the charter school debate—has pushed authorizing to the center of the discussion because, many argue, charter schools ultimately reflect the caliber of their authorizer.
"We never considered not having one," said Lisa D. Macfarlane, who directs Democrats for Education Reform's Washington state branch in Seattle and sits on the board of the Washington State Charter Schools Association. She helped draft the state's charter school law.
"It was pretty clear from looking around the country, if you're going to get good public charter schools, it's all about the authorizing experience," she said. "I think during the first years of the movement there wasn't enough attention paid to authorizers."
Best Practices
Nationally, authorizing agencies and practices are far from uniform, and the number and types of authorizers, which can include local school districts, nonprofits, and universities, vary greatly from state to state. Out of the pack, independent chartering boards are emerging as a best practice that is being pushed to a great extent by the Chicago-based National Association of Charter School Authorizers, or NACSA, in a campaign to improve school quality and establish some standardization in the authorizing space.
The strength of an independent statewide board, according to proponents, comes from two defining qualities: focus and scope. Its only job is to charter and oversee schools, and, because of that narrow focus and its statewide scope, the board can develop the best, most-equitable way to do that job quickly.
"When you think of a normal-size school district, maybe they'll have one charter school in their area; they will never have enough of them to develop chartering expertise," said NACSA President Greg A. Richmond. "All the other entities that authorize exist to do something else. School boards, universities do other things, and chartering is just stuck onto it."
Furthermore, Mr. Richmond said independent charter boards help meet the demands of an evolving charter movement that will likely include more multistate charter school networks, like San Jose, Calif.-based Rocketship, which has 10 schools across the country. Currently, networks that expand beyond their home base face a smorgasbord of agencies and systems across states or even within a single state. Retrofitting a school model to such diverse regulations can drain resources.
"That has a dramatic impact on us," said Katy Venskus, the vice president of policy at Rocketship, which recently decided to scale back its expansion into more states in part due to this issue. "If you look where we're active in, we have a slightly different authorizing structure in every one of [those areas]."
So far, 14 states have created independent charter boards, and, according to data from NACSA, the number has increased substantially in the last five years. In addition to Washington state, Mississippi updated its 2010 law this year to include an independent statewide authorizing board, which approved that state's first charter this summer. Maine, also a relative newcomer to the charter school movement, created a statewide board when it enacted its charter school law in 2011.
Lenient Versus Restrictive
In many ways, the growth of independent authorizing boards reflects the movement's growing pains, and is a reaction to both overly liberal and overly restrictive authorizing practices.
As policymakers and charter school advocates looked for footholds in the U.S. education system in the early 1990s, some focused on creating an unrestricted environment where legions of charter schools could open and flourish—a philosophy often described as "let a thousand flowers bloom." Ohio exemplifies this idea. According to data compiled by NACSA, Ohio has four different kinds of authorizing bodies for its 365 charter schools, none of which is an independent board, and nearly 70 active authorizers overall—more than nearly every other state.
But, an environment flush with chartering agencies can be vulnerable to "authorizer shopping," a strategy on the part of weak charter school operators to simply sidestep authorizers with high standards.
"They'll look for an authorizer that has more mediocre practices," said Thomas J. Lasley, an education professor and a former dean at the University of Dayton in Ohio.
This practice, in turn, can lead to a proliferation of poorly performing schools that, in some cases, end up generating headlines over academic or ethics complaints. Along with Ohio, Michigan has dozens of authorizers of multiple kinds and no independent charter board, and both states have been the subject of less-than-flattering news stories over the summer stemming from state- and press-led investigations into some of their charters. Following the recent Detroit Free Press investigation of Michigan's charters, the state schools superintendent said earlier this month that 11 of the state's authorizers may have their power to approve schools revoked.
This issue has fueled the argument among a segment of charter school supporters for greater oversight policies, including independent authorizing boards.
"If parents were really good critical shoppers, you would drive out the weaker-performing schools, but that's not the way it works," said Mr. Lasley. "It's not that those parents don't care about their children; they're just often driven by other problems, like transportation." Ultimately, he said, school choice doesn't help families if they don't have good schools from which to choose.
Bypassing Locals
Although stories of charter schools run wild may have inspired some states to adopt independent charter boards, others see the boards as a means to bypass authorizers that are approving too few schools. Generally, the culprit in this scenario is a traditional school district or local education agency, the most common kind of authorizer in the country, which may be reluctant to grant charters to potential competitors.
Such was the case in Georgia, according to Bonnie S. Holliday, the executive director of the state's Charter Schools Commission.
"School boards weren't approving schools and people were complaining to their legislators," said Ms. Holliday. "Georgia—it's no secret—is a state that has a strong preference for local control, so there was a real value placed on local boards, but local boards were reluctant to relinquish that control."
Georgia created its independent statewide authorizing board in 2010. It was subsequently challenged in court, deemed unconstitutional, and then resurrected through a ballot referendum in 2012, nearly two decades after the state first passed its charter school law. Today, the Georgia State Charter Schools Commission essentially operates like an appellate court, reviewing applications denied at the school district level.
"I don't want to make it sound this simplistic, but it's like if you go to your mom to get one answer and then you turn around and try to go to your dad to get a different answer," said Jocelyn Marz, an elementary school teacher in Santa Clara County, Calif., and the president of the local National Education Association affiliate. Although California does not have an independent statewide board, charter school operators can appeal districts' decisions to a county office of education and then to the state school board.
"It seems that if you take away that local control, or oversight, you're going to have people making decisions who aren't familiar with the needs of that particular [area]," said Ms. Marz.
Long-Term Viability
Finally, there's the question of whether independent statewide boards fly in the face of the original intent of the charter movement.
"Are you just adding another layer of bureaucracy?" asked Rebecca J. Jacobson, an associate professor in the college of education at Michigan State University in East Lansing. She wonders whether the two elements of the charter school compact—namely, greater autonomy for greater accountability—would be knocked out of balance if states added another kind of authorizer to the mix. "We're already seeing, because of the accountability pressures, charter schools are starting to look more like public schools," she said.
However, underpinning the push for more rigorous authorizing practices is the realization that the charter movement's long-term viability rests in large part on whether it's really churning out schools that perform better than their more-typical counterparts in public school systems. Although charter schools often enjoy a rare status as a bipartisan issue, Mr. Richmond of NACSA said the movement cannot afford to rest on its laurels.
"If parents keep seeing negative stories in the media, attitudes could change," he said. "If authorizers don't do their jobs well, we'll have more problems and the public will lose confidence in these schools."
Henderson will join Georgetown University’s board of directors
The Washington Post
By Mike Debonis
August 19, 2014
Kaya Henderson has earned two degrees from Georgetown University, received an honorary doctorate and taught a course at the university’s school of public policy. And now this for the D.C. schools chancellor: She will join Georgetown’s board of directors later this year, the university said Tuesday.
News of Henderson’s appointment was first disclosed in an advisory opinion issued last week by the D.C. Board of Ethics and Government Accountability and posted on the agency’s Web site Monday. It responds to a request from Henderson for ethics guidance on whether she can serve on Georgetown’s board while continuing to serve as chancellor.
Darrin P. Sobin, the city’s director of government ethics, concluded that she may. “Here, your service on the Board would be part-time, and I otherwise find nothing to suggest that that service would conflict significantly with the performance of your duties or impair the efficient operation of DCPS,” he wrote.
There are some caveats: Because Georgetown has two contracts with DCPS — one to provide law students to teach pre-law classes to high-schoolers and another allowing selected DCPS principals to earn master’s degrees — Henderson has agreed to recuse herself in both of her roles from discussing or acting on those contracts and any other matter in which DCPS and Georgetown intersect.
Sobin also advised Henderson that she “cannot accept gifts or anything of value from Georgetown for your service or otherwise as long as you are DCPS chancellor,” given the business relationship between the entities.
University spokeswoman Stacy Kerr said Tuesday that Henderson will serve a three-year term and will begin her service in October. “She is a leader in the District and nationally on education related issues,” Kerr said in an e-mail.
Henderson will join a board that, according to the university’s Web site, has 36 members among them titans of business, sports and academia — including Wizards and Capitals owner Ted Leonsis, MedStar Health chief executive Kenneth A. Samet, National Basketball Association Hall of Fame player Alonzo Mourning and former National Football League commissioner Paul Tagliabue, the board’s chair. Eight members are women.
In an e-mail Monday, Henderson said she was approached about board service this year by Georgetown President John J. DeGioia, prompting her to inquire about serving while chancellor.
With the ethics guidance in hand, she accepted the offer.
“I am honored that they considered me and look forward to joining the board in October,” she said.
And, Henderson confirmed, she will not be paid. She won’t even get an upgrade to her men’s basketball season tickets. “I’m paying for my same old seats, just like every year,” she said.