Posts Tagged ‘charter schools’

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Summertime

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

When the days are long and fruit and flowers bloom, an abundance of articles about various school issues pop up in the newspapers and on websites.

USA Today (6/7/10) had a brief synopsis of reports saying that black students have moved to suburban schools in the Dallas, Texas, area.  Hispanic students have filled their places in the Dallas school district.  Another example of families who have become knowledgeable and made decisions to help their children.  Such a demographic move has happened many times all over the country and stands for one reason it is difficult to stick to the same old program forever.

The New York Times (7-3-10 “World Focus Is Gaining Favor in High Schools” by Tamar Lewin) described the International Baccalaureate (IB) program favored in several high schools as an alternative to the more common Advanced Placement (AP) programs.  The IB is a rigorous model to capture the attention of students who may want a balanced curriculum in a small group setting that also impresses college admission officers.  The emphasis is on philosophies worldwide, not separate academic subjects like AP courses.  Interesting that the article did not describe the variety of high schools across the nation that have instituted the IB model for many years, like California’s San Jose High School with many Hispanic students and some Denver schools with an IB program from upper elementary to high school.

The Nation (6-14-10) brought out its education issue “A new vision for school reform” with fact and opinion by a number of well-known education writers.  For this blog writer, the most unsettling conclusion came from Linda Darling-Hammond, Stanford University, who, in her view of the legislation in the revised Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) emphasizes “competition and sanctions as the primary drivers of reform rather than capacity building and strategic investments.”

Perhaps the despair of the teachers unions, both AFT and NEA, is the outcome of the quote above.  At their recent combined convention in New Orleans both union presidents seemed vexed about charter schools, teacher evaluation, and anti-union comment mainly made by conservative legislators.  The vote in the House of Representatives to commit $10 billion more dollars to reduce teacher lay-offs and other delays in school budgets, but the US Department of Education’s unhappiness in taking money from Race to the Top funds to pay for it, infuriated the unions.  See The New York Times “New Tension in Obama’s Ties to Teachers” by Sam Dillon, 7-5-10.

Closer to home, San Francisco is in the process of closing a middle school and overhauling 9 other schools, all hit by California’s determination to transform its low-performing schools-the good thing about the federal reform effort.  If only the school transformations will emphasize Darling-Hammond’s “capacity building and strategic investments.”  See San Francisco Chronicle “S.F. to shut school, overhaul 9 others” by Jill Tucker (7-3-10).

Now what about the litigation sent to court by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Los Angeles in February and by the California School Boards Association et al (CSBA) in May, also known as Robles-Wang vs. California?  The ACLU suit was to hold off Los Angeles teacher lay-offs in low-performing schools, and the CSBA suit was written to force the California legislature to restructure school funding to finance the requirements of education legislation.

Nothing has happened since the May 13, 2010, injunction in Los Angeles (see 6-2-10 post).  The California Assembly is proposing a California Jobs Budget which will stave off shortages in school funding for a year and still make up the $19 billion state budget shortfall.  We’ll see how long it takes to pass this year.

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Posted in American Federation of Teachers, ESEA, Elementary and Secondary Education Act, National Education Association, school finance reform |
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Spin the Arrow-Which Kind of School?

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

A lot has come to light about charter schools since the previous posts (9/9/09, 12/9/09, 1/29/10), none of which has made the choice clearer.  In fact, each school, whether public, private, charter, or parochial, depends on what the parent and student like.

Does the student want the school closest to home?  Does the parent want religion included in the curriculum?  Is the parent anxious about lack of discipline at the local school?  Does the student want to go where his friends are going?  Is some special program, like theatre arts or music, a drawing card at the school?

The list of choice questions goes on and on.

Note, however, that test scores have not been mentioned yet.  Except for the parents of high-achieving students that is not the first priority. Or parents who want high scores to improve the equity of their home.

But to educators, concerned about the lowest-performing students in poor inner city or isolated rural schools, student achievement on tests is the highest priority.  And the prognosis is mixed about the best model to improve learning in such schools.

Many in the education world say that those failing schools should be closed and reopened as charter schools which might experiment with curriculum and employment rules since most are not organized with teacher’s unions on hand.  However, studies keep appearing in the news with decidedly mixed results as to strong improvement in existing charter schools vs. local public schools.

At the first of May an evaluation by the School Choice Demonstration Project, comparing students in charter and public schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, found comparable performance, refuting one of the “pulls” of charter schools–that small schools allow more help to students and so better scores on state tests.

In April a charter school working with very low-performing children and run as a demonstration project by Stanford University had its charter rescinded by the public school district in which the school site was located.  The university staff was surprised, but the Ravenswood School Board, willing to try any model to improve student achievement, wasn’t impressed by the analysis of the test statistics and certainly didn’t like the scores.  The outcome was a ‘no’ vote with a condition to come back with another plan and maybe the New School would be funded once more.

A number of charter schools on both coasts have been caught with their hands in the funding pot or audited for finagling the dollar numbers or for pocketing money to finance trips that just didn’t go with the purpose of a school.  Is that what happens when the school is animated by business models to provide incentives?  The U.S. Department of Education has stated concern with the number of charter school fraud issues that have come to its attention.

Another problem comes up when a group of knowledgeable parents gets together to write up a charter proposal and insists on finding a way to get the public school district to find a site for the school and to provide the instructional funds per pupil.  If, as in Los Angeles, the parents are from a neighborhood with a failing school, the school board may be sympathetic.  If it is being set up in a high-achieving school district without a lot of extra money to spread around, the process can be combative, not collaborative.

This blog post is being written in California, filled with 6.3 million students, almost 1000 school districts, 10,000 public schools, and 715 charter schools (elementary to high school).  Last month 188 California schools, mostly middle and high schools, were labeled persistently low-performing-including the New School mentioned above that had its charter rescinded.

If each of those schools were closed and reopened as charter schools, and every student chose those schools thinking change would happen, they would be surprised.  It would still take relentless effort before the students showed consistent improvement in their reading and math abilities, science and social science knowledge base.  KIPP (a for-profit charter system) regional leaders have already declined to take on the challenge.

Most students and parents won’t flee to another town or to a private or parochial school.  Looks like those persistently low-performing schools will have to meet with their school communities and find their own model to transform their school.

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Posted in program improvement, public schools, school community, school reform |
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Another Day, Another Look at Charter Schools

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

Now that California, one of many states, has raised the cap on the number of charter schools allowed to apply for licenses each year, it’s time to look again at the realities of the charter school controversy.

California elementary charter school

California elementary charter school

Why do some praise charter schools as the savior of education in the United States?

Why are others cautious, if not outright antagonistic?

The charter school movement came to life in 1988 in Minnesota with the idea to design schools with “renewable licenses to innovate, free of most school district rules.” (John Merrow, “When Roads Diverge…”edweek.org) In 1992 the first charter school opened in Minnesota, followed soon by California after passage of the Charter School Act of 1992 and which now is #2 in the list of schools chartered.

Still charter schools have not, so far, swept over the country.  Let’s look at more numbers.  There are 4000 charter schools in 40 states and DC with 1.3 million students.  Minnesota has the most schools and California in 2009 has 700 charter schools out of 10,000 public schools with 4% of the 6.3 million students.

Even so, Michelle Rhee, superintendent of Washington DC schools, Antonio Villaraigosa, mayor of Los Angeles, and Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, all are doing their best to restructure their school districts by closing low-performing schools and reopening with smaller charter schools, often in the same building.

Why so?

Money.  State regulations for licensing charter schools have been revised in pursuit of federal Race to the Top funds geared mostly toward low-performing high schools, a desperate problem in large urban areas.  Limited data available does show that charter high schools outperform similar traditional high schools.  In addition, in California at least, charter high schools attract more disadvantaged Hispanic students, one of the groups the state must target for academic help.

Strong teachers and administrators who want to get away from the system of traditional public schools with union contracts that were needed for a long while, but now restrict change, love the idea of starting over with a new school.

In addition, high-performing charters are small schools (average 350 students) with longer school days and year, more time devoted to English language study, a clear academic mission, a moderate discipline policy.  Those schools do well on the assessments to ensure a license renewal.

Top charters really have tried to innovate.

K-5 Conservatory Lab Charter School in the Boston area led by Diana Lam, long time administrator, uses a curricular model called Learning Through Music to support students who must improve their academic achievement.  Teacher contract innovation also is a goal.  A management team is designing the pay formula based on 5 levels of teacher performance, each level geared to identify a teacher as s/he becomes more experienced.  In addition, the teachers collaborate, using the Cycle of Inquiry model to assess, analyze, and modify teaching strategies.

City Arts and Technology High School set in a working class San Francisco neighborhood is one of Envision Schools, a non-profit group of model charter high schools.  The curriculum is rigorous, students collaborate on learning projects, and support is available to ensure all 365 students do well on state exams.

What’s wrong?

Nothing, except those exceptional schools are having difficulty being replicated across the country and time is of the essence.  For instance, in California, elementary charter schools are less likely to serve minorities, English Language Learners, and low-income students.  The schools are small, not reaching enough children.  Studies of outcome data for many charter schools have not shown better results than traditional public schools.

Often said, the parent buyer must beware.  Disinformation has been generated about charter schools, emphasizing their good qualities, denigrating perfectly good public schools, and hiding the fact that 14% of charter schools lose their licenses, just like traditional public schools fall into the low-performance abyss.

Finally, a number of professionals associated with the education field see charter schools as a way to privatize education, paid for with public money.  Others who praise charter schools do so because they hope to drag down teachers’ unions that are accused of holding onto a fixed pay structure which offers no incentives to excel.

Looking again?

Teacher’s pay structure is being re-evaluated, but the public must support the thousands of public schools looking for a model to help students achieve, instead of antagonizing the very highly-qualified teachers needed to close the achievement gap.

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Posted in Race to Top, cycle of inquiry, highly qualified teachers, low-performing schools, public schools |
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School Business

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

Let’s look at schools as businesses.  You need a business economist’s point of view to understand how and why some of the latest premises to reform schools have appeared.

Education Next’s April 2009 interview “Many Schools Are Still Inadequate-now what?” featured the Hoover Institution’s Eric Hanushek who has done a lot of writing on education reform, lawyer Alfred Lindseth, and Michael Rebell from Teacher’s College at Columbia whose focus is on court decisions that have affected education change.  The focus of the article was on Lindseth and Hanushek’s book about the funding-student achievement puzzle and Rebell’s concerns with aspects of reform advocated in the proposal.

Most teachers and administrators, both local and state, already agree on several reforms outlined in the article:

  • give local schools flexibility to determine a model to meet high standards
  • establish reasonable funding based on needs of the particular school and school district (including local tax payer ability to authorize bonds or establish education foundations to upgrade school financial support)
  • best of the reforms, commit to evaluate school and program effectiveness using continuous improvement models such as “cycle of inquiry”-originating from business models of improvement

Sounds good.

Difficulties arise in the evidence to support other aspects of the proposal since all must be interlocked to achieve reform, according to Lindseth and Hanushek.

The two issues that stand out are the plan for performance-based pay, a business oriented policy, and the plan to increase the choice for vouchers and charter schools, seen as sanctions against schools or districts where students haven’t achieved designated levels of proficiency.

Pay-for-performance:  Mr. Hanushek is strongly against limits on spending and regulations for the use of funds provided by state and federal sources.  Further, he wants to do away with contractual obligations, mainly negotiated with unions.

Then, teachers would be rewarded for success in, for example, improving student achievement, bonuses for teaching in hard-to-staff schools, higher pay for taking on subjects with teacher shortages.  These are all “value-added” factors used to determine the teachers’ salary or bonus for the year.  (Exact procedures for setting up this plan were not part of the article.)

Vouchers and charter schools:  Not only would schools and teachers be rewarded, but well-articulated and decisive consequences would be imposed on schools not meeting the goals.  Liberal distribution of vouchers and transfers to charter schools are the sanctions advocated.  If a public school is deemed unsatisfactory, it is unclear how to guarantee that a student’s voucher or charter school choice would be suitable.  How to fund this change is not described in the article.

Enter Michael Rebell from Teacher’s College who does not agree with the data and statistics used as evidence for the Lindseth and Hanushek book.  He says, and many who might read the article (or book) would say, that testing outcomes, pay-for-performance, rewards and sanctions, vouchers and charter schools have been studied for a long time with mixed results.

Readers may also agree the reform proposal is based on unproven business models that may, but haven’t yet, shown great results.  The move to privatization of education may be an economist’s preference, but has not yet shown to improve the academic proficiency for the vast number of students needing help.  For example, is California with more than 6 million students going to privatize every school and turn each student into a perfect product?

Rebell supports standards-based reform, but maintains it is a state education policy goal, supported by ideas from business world economists, researchers in the legal and university community, and especially teacher leaders.

Finally, perhaps the book, but not the article, describes how to resolve the funding problems due to the heterogeneity of students and regions in the United States that underlie the challenges for the education world.

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Posted in cycle of inquiry, public schools, school finance reform, school reform |
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It Gets Dark Early

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Autumn days have zipped by.  I’ve met with the parents of every student in my class and sent home report cards for the first of three evaluation periods.  We’ve been to Mission San Juan Bautista, the culmination of the first unit of California history, from the Native Americans to the explorers to the Californios, settlers governed from Spain and later Mexico.

This year, writing process procedures have been established much earlier than I managed last year.  Most are busy writing the third or fourth in a collection of pieces, non-fiction personal narrative or reports on, for example, the Miwok, California Native American tribe.  “How to Annoy the Teacher,” is a composition that seems to be loved by all, even the most conscientious, well-behaved students.  They can fantasize by leaps and bounds.

Not long after the latest update on our district school budget problems was presented at a staff meeting, I read an article on the front page of the Sunday, November 15, New York Times, “Selling Lesson Plans Online, Teachers Raise Cash and Questions” by Winnie Hu.

While I can find an abundance of lessons and teaching ideas to download on the Internet, this was the first I’d heard about selling lesson plans.  I suppose, in a free market society, teachers can sell their plans, just like a book or a better potato masher.  It may make sense if the money is used to upgrade the materials in the classroom, but when I read that someone had used the cash for new kitchen countertops, I thought enough is enough.  Want to see the new thing?  Check out Teachers Pay Teachers.

Just shows, though, the problem for teachers who wish to be innovative and have access to the best for their students and the inability of taxpayers, even those wishing schools well, to bring themselves to pay for the success of public schools in this country.

Here’s another school budgets issue. I was talking to my sister-in-law who has a six-year-old in a Los Angeles charter school because the local public school is too big and too overwhelmed by second language and poor families.  She didn’t think her child would get enough attention.  Funny thing, the charter school uses classrooms in the public school building which leads to complaints on both sides about space, storage, and access to the playground.

My cousin sent a series of articles from the September 2009 Denver Post on charter schools, detailing the sunny-side-up viewpoint of the League of Charter Schools and the down-side views of longtime public school educators.  A “Letter to the Editor” from Louise Benson, Broomfield, Colorado, way back on Sunday, September 20, suggested my point of view: improvement for public schools means “teachers and staff buy in to programs known to increase achievement, and… avoid some union work rules that impede better instruction.”

Late November my class started its unit on earth science, analyzing rocks from each strata of the earth’s crust, delving down to the core of burning magma, always enjoyed by fourth graders.

What got in the way?

My jury duty summons from the Santa Clara County Superior Court arrived in the mail.  Same problem for every working adult, it came just at the wrong moment.  I spent my time writing lesson plans that will disrupt the class as little as possible, while doing my citizen’s duty checking on the Internet daily to see if my number had come up.

I never had to go to court, we spent our days looking at rocks and using all the strategies I know and the lesson plans I’ve gathered (without paying a penny) to make sure my students are achieving.

I feel lucky.  The parents in my district are happy with its highly-qualified teachers, innovations, and facilities; not asking to set up a charter school with funds from my strapped district.

Next is the Gold Rush unit.  Nuggets of shiny metal from the dark earth glittered in men’s eyes, a symbol of California wealth, hidden right now in the dark of the state legislature.

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Posted in highly qualified teachers, public schools |
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