- Math, reading performance is stagnant among U.S. 12th-graders, assessment finds
- Congress to consider charter-school legislation
- Speaker Boehner supports national charter school bill [AppleTree Early Learning PCS mentioned]
- Waiting Lists Grow for Charter Schools, Says an Advocacy Group
- Should we give up on urban public school districts and replace them with something completely different?
Math, reading performance is stagnant among U.S. 12th-graders, assessment finds
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
May 7, 2014
The nation’s high school seniors have shown no improvement in math and reading performance since 2009, and large racial achievement gaps persist, according to the results of a test administered by the federal government last year.
The results — released at an event Wednesday at Dunbar High School in Northwest Washington — detail student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP.
Also called the nation’s report card, NAEP is widely regarded as the most consistent measure of U.S. student achievement over time. Since the 1990s, it has been administered every four years to high school students and every two years to students in the fourth and eighth grades.
Younger students’ results on the 2013 NAEP were released in November and showed incremental progress, continuing a slow but upward long-term trend. Twelfth-grade performance, by contrast, has been stagnant in recent years, and senior achievement in reading has declined since the early 1990s.
Moreover, despite more than a decade of federal policies intended to close achievement gaps, the margin between white and Latino 12th-graders in reading remains as large as it was 15 years ago. The margin between black and white seniors has widened — not because white students have improved, but because black students’ average reading scores have fallen.
On Monday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan celebrated the nation’s 80 percent graduation rate, its highest ever. But Duncan called the test scores and the achievement gaps “troubling,” and he said they should galvanize the country to redesign high schools.
“We must reject educational stagnation in our high schools, and as nation, we must do better for all students, especially for African-American and Latino students,” Duncan said in a statement.
The test was administered between January and March 2013 to a nationally representative sample of 92,000 12th-graders across the country. Results were made public for the nation as a whole and for 13 states that volunteered to participate in individual reports to find out more about their students’ performance.
Nationally, 12th-grade reading scores averaged 288 on a scale of zero to 500 — the same as 2009 and down four points from 1992. Not quite four in 10 students scored high enough to be considered proficient or better in reading.
In math, only 26 percent of seniors scored high enough to be considered proficient or better. The national average was 153 points on a scale of zero to 300 — no different from 2009’s score and up three points from 2005. The test underwent significant changes in 2005, making it impossible to make dependable comparisons with results from previous years.
There are competing explanations for the stagnation. Some critics of U.S. education policies say the flat scores are evidence that test-based accountability has failed to produce meaningful change. Others say the scores demonstrate the need for more rigorous Common Core State Standards.
Some analysts contend that the 12th-grade scores are evidence only of an unsurprising truth: that high school seniors are not motivated to try their hardest on tests in which they have no real stake.
“We all remember exactly how engaged your 17-year-old high school senior is,” said Frederick Hess of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Hess said skepticism about high school results should serve as a reminder not to read too much into younger students’ scores, as well.
“We’re a little bit manic-depressive about test scores and what they tell us about reform efforts,” Hess said. “We get positive movement, and suddenly we have the secretary of education saying this proves that pre-K works or that teacher evaluation works. Then you see numbers that are not positive, and we start throwing our hands up and gnashing our teeth.”
Two states, Connecticut and Arkansas, made progress in both math and reading. West Virginia and Idaho demonstrated gains in math.
Maryland, Virginia and District were not among those jurisdictions for which results were reported separately.
Congress to consider charter-school legislation
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
May 7, 2014
A bipartisan group of senators plans to introduce a bill Wednesday meant to encourage the growth of charter schools across the country, mirroring legislation expected to be taken up in the House later this week.
The legislation would consolidate existing federal grant programs that encourage new charter schools to open and that help charter school leaders afford suitable buildings. The bills would also boost charter-school funding from the $250 million budgeted in fiscal 2014 to $300 million, though the Senate version would reserve more of those dollars for replicating existing successful schools as opposed to opening brand new schools.
States that are using charter schools to turn around long-struggling traditional schools, or that have policies in place to help charter schools secure facilities, would have an advantage in the grant competition.
“We're going to build on the success of charter schools with this bill,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), a key sponsor, who said the legislation would permit the development of 500 charter schools per year across the country.
Along with Landrieu, the bill’s supporters include Michael Bennet (D-Colo,), Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), ranking member of the Senate’s education committee.
On the other side of Congress, the effort has been spearheaded by Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the chairman and ranking member of the House education committee.
Charter schools are taxpayer-funded but independently run. Most are not unionized, and their rapid growth across the country in recent years — helped along by the strong support of the Obama administration — has stoked endless debate in education policy and political circles.
The House bill is widely expected to pass, and Landrieu said she’s hopeful that a strong show of support from Democratic representatives — especially Miller — will spur the Senate to act.
“He’s a very well-respected, more liberal voice on schools,” Landrieu said of Miller. “I think his endorsement and support is going to go a long way to convince a lot of Democrats to join this effort.”
Speaker Boehner supports national charter school bill [AppleTree Early Learning PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
May 8, 2014
Yesterday, the Washington Post's Emma Brown reported on legislation in the U.S. Senate that would increase Congressional support for charter schools. Mary Landrieu from Louisiana is a key sponsor of this effort. Also yesterday, House Speaker John Boehner announced his backing of the Success and Opportunity through Quality Charter Schools Act. The bill would accomplish many goals of the charter school movement, among them providing funding for replication of high performing schools, financial support for the opening of new schools, make it simpler for charters to borrow money for facility acquisition, and promote the sharing of best practices regarding charter school operation. One important aspect as far as the future growth of Washington, D.C.'s AppleTree Learning is concerned, is that the bill changes the definition of charter schools to include early childhood learning programs.
The money associated with the new legislation is significant which includes $300 million each fiscal year from 2015 to 2020.
Mr. Boehner, of course, is a major supporter of the local Opportunity Scholarship Program, the private school voucher plan for under served children that President Obama has tried to eliminate each year that he has submitted a budget.
The Success and Opportunity through Quality Charter Schools Act is expected to pass both houses of Congress this week as a part of National Charter Schools Week.
Waiting Lists Grow for Charter Schools, Says an Advocacy Group
Education Week
By Denisa R. Superville
May 5, 2014
The number of names on public charter schools' waiting lists rose by 13 percent in the 2013-2014 school year, an increase that shows the continued demand for access to high-quality public education, according to a report by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
In the 2013-2014 school year, 1.04 million student names were on the waiting lists, compared with 920,007 the previous year, Nina Rees, the group's president and CEO, said during a conference call with reporters on Monday, the start of National Charter Schools Week. It was the first time the number of names on the list had exceeded 1 million, she said.
When duplicated names were removed from the lists, the number of individual student names dropped to 586,511, up from 523,335 the previous year. The longest lists were in New York, California, and Texas, the group said.
"Despite the increase in the number of charter schools year after year, and the growth in the number of students who are attending charter schools, the demand for high-quality public charter schools is extremely high, and that number keeps growing every year," Rees said.
Anticipating the report, the National Education Policy Center in Boulder, Colo., issued its own report, calling for skepticism in interpreting the numbers and questioning the methodology of the charter schools group.
The National Education Policy Center said it was impossible to know the survey response rate; what questions were asked; the data collection methods; and how the group came up with the number of students on the waiting list. The numbers may also be skewed by a large number of applicants applying to a small number of very popular public charter schools, the group said.
Nora Kern, the senior manager for research at the alliance, who oversaw the methodology, said the numbers came from three sources, including state education departments and statewide charter-support organizations. In states where wait-list data were not collected, the organization surveyed all the public charter schools, Kern said.
Rees stood by the organization's numbers. None of the organizations that criticized the study asked to review the methodology or how the report had been produced, she said.
"We feel very confident about the data that we are providing, and the handicapping that we have done is also quite sophisticated," she said, "and [it] goes to show that we are cognizant of the fact that, in some cases, a parent can have their child on multiple lists."
Still, she said, the numbers showed a continued clamor for better public schools.
"There is huge demand for high-quality public school options out there," she said, "and the fact that families are putting their names on multiple lists and trying to get the kids out of the schools they are in, tell us we have a lot of work to do to both increase the access to more high-quality public charter schools, to create more seats, but also to work with the school system to make sure that the quality of the traditional public school system also improves over the years.
"No one can be proud of these numbers," she continued. "We have to do a much better job of making sure that every family has access to a school that they are comfortable with and that they are not resorting to putting their students' names on wait lists to attend better schools."
Should we give up on urban public school districts and replace them with something completely different?
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
May 7, 2014
In a recent book, education analyst Andy Smarick argues that the traditional urban school district is broken beyond repair. He advocates a choice-based system that allows for the creation of new schools, the closure of persistently failing schools, and the expansion and replication of the most successful schools.
In The Urban School System of the Future, Smarick says that despite decades of effort, urban public school districts like DCPS continue to serve the vast majority of their students inadequately. In his view, they will never generate the results disadvantaged kids deserve.
What's needed, he says, is a "portfolio" approach. Instead of having the school district serve as the sole or even dominant operator of schools on a permanent basis, a city would manage a portfolio of its K-12 schools.
The city would remain neutral as to whether a school operator came from the traditional public, public charter, or private school sector. Its goal would be to increase the number of students in high-performing schools year after year.
Smarick is a partner at the DC-based consulting firm Bellwether Education Partners. He agreed to answer some questions about his ideas for GGE.
You advocate closing schools that are failing rather than trying to turn them around, making an analogy to the business world, where failure leads to an exit from the field. But closing a school arguably results in greater disruption than closing a business. And the effects on children could be long-lasting, especially if there's no better school available for them to go to. Is there any way to mitigate those disruptive effects under your proposed system?
This is one of the toughest issues in urban education reform. There's a huge difference between smart closure policies and clumsy, insensitive closure policies—and the latter have unfortunately dominated. I support the former because the success rate of "turnarounds," as evidenced by decades of experience, has been shockingly low.
We just can't rely on turnarounds if we want to dramatically improve student learning in inner-city public schools. This is why I advocate for an approach that has as its North Star the following goal: We will continuously grow the number of students in high-quality schools.
That leads to a set of strategies far more promising than relying on the schools and systems of yesterday. If we have a well integrated plan of smart closures, new start-ups in the charter sector, and the replication and expansion of proven models, we can grow the number of high-quality seats and facilitate families' selections of schools that best meet the needs of their kids.
On the specific issue of closures, I think we always need to have two guiding principles when we've decided a school is persistently underperforming and needs to be shuttered.
First, make sure those involved in the closure are aware of and sensitive to the history of the school and its place in the community. That school could be named after a civil rights icon, it could have been the first desegregated school in the city, it could have had a long history of academic or athletic success, it could provide other services to the neighborhood, and much more.
Second, never close a school unless you can ensure that displaced students have safer and higher-performing school options available to them.
Some say that high-performing charter schools serving high-poverty populations have succeeded because they skim off the best students and most engaged parents, either through active selection or because those who apply are a self-selected group. Is it possible that even a portfolio approach won't be enough to succeed with the students who are hardest to educate?
There's now plenty of research showing that charter enrollment in big cities is overwhelmingly low-income and minority, so this isn't the issue that charter detractors had hoped it would be. But there are a couple of issues we ought to grapple with.
First, it might be the case that in cities with moderately sized charter sectors families with students who have significant special education needs choose to keep their kids in the district because the district is large and has substantial resources. Most charters, even those operating as part of a CMO, are still quite small by comparison, meaning fewer staff and smaller budgets. And keep in mind that nationally, charters get significantly less funding per student than districts do.
If families are making choices based on their assessments of their children's best interests, we need to think long and hard before forcing a certain percentage of students with specific characteristics into any type of school—district, charter, or otherwise—in the name of equity.
But as a city's charter sector becomes dominant—especially if the district becomes a marginal or nonexistent presence—charters, collectively, will have to serve every single student well. With that future in mind, it becomes incumbent upon all of us to make sure we enable charters to deliver.
That will require smart policies and practices related to funding, human capital, parental choice, enrollment systems, and more. In other words, as the charter sector grows from ancillary to dominant sector, its responsibilities grow. And that requires a concomitant shift in the way policymakers, funders, families, and the public treat charters.
Charter schools are more capable of innovation and experimentation, but traditional public school systems have advantages of scale in providing things like special education, legal services, etc. Under your model, which focuses on the success or failure of individual schools, would there be a way for schools to take advantage of the benefits of scale?
I think those opposing charters and defending the establishment often misunderstand the lessons of scale. The way scale works best is if you take something small and successful and then find ways to grow it. They way it doesn't work so well is to take something large and unsuccessful and try to make it better. In other words, quality comes first, and then comes size.
Unfortunately, the benefits of the urban school district's scale have been the reform movement's chimera—something wished for but illusory. It has led countless individuals and organizations to bet on the district. Those efforts have amounted to astonishingly little; we still don't have a single high-performing urban district in the entire nation.
My view on scale is twofold. First, scale should result from great schools replicating and expanding. Clusters of 5 or more schools can then realize valuable economies of scale while getting terrific academic results.
Second, there are things that ought to be handled system-wide, like an enrollment system and the allocation of public-school facilities. I doubt the school district could ever do these things well, so I'd prefer they be housed in other entities. But those entities could and should have scale in the sense that they influence the city's entire portfolio of schools.