Change is always uncomfortable.

-Team CRPE

I hope it goes without saying that not all charter schools are beacons of excellence, but I’ve had the good fortune recently to study some of the best. So it came as a bit of a shock when my colleagues and I visited district-run schools receiving School Improvement Grants (SIG) and saw no semblance of the school culture that characterizes high-performing charters: a pervasive attitude among teachers and leaders that there can be no excuse for students not meeting high academic and behavioral standards, an intensity of effort that says every minute counts, and an obsession with data and continual organizational improvement. Yes, individual SIG teachers are doing good things, but their efforts don’t add up to school-wide change. We’ll have a fairly depressing report out on this SIG study soon.

-Robin Lake

Andy here – I’m out of the office this week (and looks like the CRPE folks are doing a great job here on the blog) but my column at TIME is running:  It’s about civics and history education and an idea for how the media can help improve the sorry state of affairs and develop new business models at the same time.

This week we celebrate the sacrifices, risks, and achievements our founding fathers undertook so that we could skip work, drink beer, and set off fireworks. Actually, we don’t dishonor their memory by the way we spend the Fourth of July. We dishonor them all year long because of the sorry state of civics education in this country. Most Americans are alarmingly unfamiliar with the institutions our founders created, how they operate and what they are supposed to do. Don’t know much about Congress or the Bill of Rights? Civic ignorance is never a good thing, but it’s especially troubling as the country wrestles with fundamental questions about the role of government in our lives…

…newspapers and broadcast networks are sitting on a trove of material that can be converted into curriculum and sold — yes, sold — for use in our nation’s schools and universities. Digitizing these so-called rough drafts of history would not only bring to life many of the events and ideas that students (and adults) should understand as informed citizens, but would help a struggling industry expand its revenue sources.

There’s no fee, and perhaps a civic bonus, to read the entire column right here.

I am disappointed to see Jonathan Kozol, a lion in the struggle for education equity, refer to “so-called” achievement gaps.

Ingraham High School in Seattle, WA, is both racially and economically diverse. Of the 1051 students, half are low income, 30 percent are White, 30 percent Asian, 24 percent African American, and 12 percent Latino. In 2010, 65 percent of Ingraham’s White students were proficient in Math, compared to only 5 percent (yes, 5 percent) of African American students and 16 percent of Latinos.

How’s that for a “so-called” achievement gap? The question is whether district leaders in Seattle (and in other cities, most of which have similar schools) are up to doing something about it.

-Parker Baxter

Today we’ve been discussing CRPE’s new multi-year initiative on how states can become more capable, especially in moving big city districts toward bold experimentation and rapid improvement. Michigan and Tennessee are the first among an increasing number of states to consider imitating Louisiana’s Recovery School District (RSD), a statewide entity that can take over distressed schools. This new paper summarizes the “takeaways” from a New Orleans meeting about what other states can learn from the RSD experience.

-Paul Hill

The number of school districts pursuing the portfolio strategy of reform keeps growing. Through CRPE’s Portfolio School Districts Project a network of these districts has been meeting for two years, and their numbers have swollen from 9 to 23, including some that are fully implementing the strategy and some that are just taking it up.

A network meeting this month in DC will focus on linking district and state reform strategies, reform politics, and sustainability. Materials, including a constantly updated practical handbook, are here.

-Christine Campbell

Only a few months ago Atlanta was held up as the city that improved schools for poor kids without relying on chartering, school closings, or new sources of teachers. Atlanta stayed inside the box, relying on professional development, coaching, and other traditional methods. Now it turns out that positive results from Atlanta could have come from widespread falsification of test score sheets by school staff.

Clearly, it doesn’t take the threat of widespread teacher firings or school closings to induce test cheating. What does this mean? Should districts abandon testing, thus giving up the only means they have to identify situations where kids aren’t learning in time to do something about it? No. But it does mean that educators are not morally different from other people: many wouldn’t cheat under any circumstances, but some will cheat if they can benefit and expect to get away with it. Districts need to anticipate this and take sensible precautions, like delivering tests to schools minutes before testing periods begin, and picking up shore sheets immediately after test periods end. Longer-run and better solutions would involve online adaptive tests for which no one knows what the questions will be before they are asked, and results are available immediately.

-Paul Hill

The news that Race to the Top implementation is running into some speed bumps in states isn’t a surprise. The demands RTTT makes on state education agencies—to oversee and support performance, collect data, and analyze the effects of policy and practice on improvement—go far beyond what SEAs were originally designed to do.

How can states get started? They could imitate the talent strategies that key districts (e.g., New York City and Washington, DC) have used in redeveloping their central offices. For example: putting a senior executive in charge of human capital management; separating the talent strategy from HR process improvements; revamping policies and processes that frustrate flexibility and performance; and changing the organizational culture inside the bureaucracy to focus on performance.

For a short CRPE paper on this idea, go here.

-Michael DeArmond

But Don’t Get Derailed.

-Team CRPE

Will capacity problems in state departments of education limit the spread of performance management and innovation? This new report by Patrick Murphy and Monica Ouijdani (the first product of a new CRPE initiative on the state role in reform) shows that state agencies now focus on compliance. However, they could have plenty of money to develop new data and performance oversight systems, if Washington D.C. allowed greater flexibility in the use of federal administrative funds.

-Paul Hill

One of the most unfortunate and counterproductive consequences of the winner-take-all tone of the current debate over public school choice is that very real and very complicated issues get ignored in substance and turned into sound-bites. The result is bad policy and bad practice.

Equitable access to transportation is a good example. Paul Teske’s research has shown that lack of transportation can be a significant obstacle to school choice for low- and moderate-income families. Teske found that “a little over one-quarter of respondents (and one-third of those with the lowest incomes) did not enroll their child in the school they preferred due to transportation difficulties.”

Fortunately, rather than engage in political mud-slinging about these kinds of challenges, the folks in Denver (of whom I am one) have embraced choice with equity and are tackling these hard issues head-on.

-Parker Baxter

Yesterday I wrote about my optimism for the charter-district love-fest going on in the Gates charter compact work and in CRPE’s Portfolio School Districts Project. There’s no doubt, however, that the changes these cities are pursuing also carry tremendous risk. On the charter side, for example, the compacts can create infighting between charter schools that sign on and those that do not. Charter leaders are notoriously independent and mini civil wars could erupt in compact cities between CMO-run charters and “mom and pop” charters or between minority and non-minority run charters. I also wonder whether some charters will accept deals under the compact, like allowing the district to assign students to the school or reduced autonomy, and later find that those deals compromise their focus and effectiveness.

On the district side, the risks are even higher. The compacts require visionary superintendents who are willing to annoy teachers unions by partnering with non-unionized charters, who are willing to divide up pots of money once reserved only for district-run schools, and who are willing to force their own schools to share buildings, playgrounds, and lunchroom space with schools once considered the enemy. These district leaders and central office staffs have to work constantly to make a strong case to their boards, especially, about why all this trouble is worth it. Given all these risks one has to wonder why more than two-dozen major urban districts are taking this on. I’ll be back to that topic later this week.

-Robin Lake

Hardcore bike porn.

-Team CRPE

Back in the mid 1990s, Chicago made headlines when the city decided to place schools with fewer than 15 percent of students at grade level in reading and math on probation.

The reason for setting the bar at 15 percent? About 100 schools would fall under that line and Chicago felt it had the resources to work with about 100 schools.

When it comes to intervening with low-performing schools, this is about as strategic as most districts get. What can a district do to be more strategic about improvement? Are there other factors to consider?

For example, most districts don’t map their school scores, but if they did, they might find some guides to action. In this map, high-performing schools are green and blue, average schools are yellow, and low-performing schools are orange and red.

The map shows a cluster of low-performing schools in the middle; the district might focus its improvement effort here. But the district might also notice that right in the middle of this cluster is a high-performing school. Could it help them figure out what to do next? Can its program be expanded? Can it be replicated? Are there aspiring leaders in this school who can move into one or more of the neighboring low-performing schools?

Nationally there are tens of thousands of low-performing schools in need of improvement. Setting bars and putting schools on lists hasn’t yielded much success. It is worth looking at patterns of performance within cities and neighborhoods for ideas about how to make more headway.

-Betheny Gross and Christine Campbell

Earlier this month, Joel Klein published an op-ed in the Washington Post on the ‘new generation’ of school reform leaders—leaders like J.C. Brizard in Chicago, John White in New Orleans, Dennis Walcott in New York City and others. Klein singled out these leaders for their boldness and for what they’re doing in two areas of reform: rethinking the teaching profession and school choice.

But what Klein didn’t say is that the boldest idea these leaders bring to public education goes beyond reforming teacher tenure and pay or expanding schooling options for underserved students—it’s treating school performance as a continuous improvement project. If you really want to understand what the ‘new generation’ of ed reformers is up to and the challenges they face, you have to understand this big idea.

School performance as continuous improvement means that districts try many plausible approaches to improving urban schools, keep the best, and are always on the lookout for something better. It is an idea that is taking root in more than 20 cities across the country, including New York City, New Orleans, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Hartford, Baltimore and others.

Borrowing language from finance, some leaders in these cities are calling this approach “portfolio management.” These leaders see their role as helping schools to improve, but also closing those that underperform and opening new ones in their place. Los Angeles’ Public School Choice initiative, which solicited bids from outside providers to run some of the district’s lowest-performing schools, is one example of what this looks like in action.

Klein’s new generation of school district leaders are likely to face some harsh challenges in the months and years ahead:

• As they open up the system to outside providers, they risk making enemies out of community groups and politicians who are used to having more control of how district funds are spent.
• As they close and replace chronically low-performing schools, they will anger schools and communities who will have a hard time accepting that the district and school failed.
• As they ask teachers to try new approaches to instruction using new combinations of staffing and technology, they risk being called anti-teacher.

Politically, adopting a portfolio strategy is risky. As Joel Klein notes in his op-ed, these leaders can’t do it alone. They need political support from parents, from students, from the community, and from one another. Results in New York City and New Orleans suggest they’re on to something.

-Christine Campbell

My colleague Parker Baxter and I were recently in Dallas helping about a dozen cities develop district-charter collaboration compacts. The compacts (and the grants from the Gates Foundation that go with them) are meant to help overcome long-standing animosity between the two sectors and to prod mutual problem-solving on behalf of students in district and charter schools.

Now, there’s reason for skepticism when you hear about initiatives that hope to inspire “collaboration” and “sharing of best practices,” but there’s very little Kumbaya in the compact initiative. These compact signatories are doing pioneering work, and we’re honored to help. Some are working together to recruit and train high-quality teachers. Others are working out agreements to give quality charter schools access to district buildings. In some cases, charters are agreeing to accept more students with disabilities. In turn, districts are agreeing to provide more equitable funding.

Some of the compacts are so substantive and bold, in fact, that they create very real risks for both sides.

More on that tomorrow…

-Robin Lake

Andy has fish porn. CRPE has bike porn.

-Team CRPE

Is political conflict about public education, particularly over replacement of low-performing district schools with charter schools, the noisiest it’s ever been? Well, no, the school desegregation conflicts of the 1950s and 60s were much louder and more passionate. But there are similarities—dueling demonstrations, struggles over control of facilities, fissures within political parties, and cascades of litigation.

These events signal that something important is happening. When big changes look possible, groups that had given up on influencing public education come back into the fray; and groups that had had things to their own satisfaction resist. The contending sides blame one another for making so much noise and upsetting so many people.

This kind of conflict is inevitable in public education, where the intended beneficiaries—children—are not very good at understanding or advocating their own interests. Adults all have their own interests and these inevitably color their views of what children need.

Today, adults who benefit from current arrangements are threatened by new schools, performance-based accountability, and teachers from new sources like TFA. Foundations and the “reform” community want to create new options for children they think have suffered under the traditional system.

Nobody should be fooled by charges that one side or the other is undemocratic, or “cares about money while we care about kids.” We are in a struggle over whether and how to change a key institution in our society, and the din it causes is in proportion to the importance of the issue.

-Paul Hill

This week Andy hands the keys to the blog over to Paul Hill and his team at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). I am proud to be joining them.

CRPE’s work is based on two premises: that public schools should be measured against the goal of educating all children well, and that current institutions too often fail to achieve this goal.

As Andy often reminds us, there is a full-blown education crisis for low-income kids in America today. Nationally, less than 10 percent of low-income kids will earn a college degree by age 24. Dropout rates in American cities hover between 40 and 50 percent.

As Andy also reminds us, our failure to educate tens of thousands of America’s children is “perpetuated by an incredibly powerful and durable set of political and stakeholder arrangements that are now under unprecedented scrutiny.”

This new scrutiny is part of a much larger revolution in public education, a relentless focus on doing whatever it takes to give educational opportunity to those kids our traditional, one-size-fits-all, industrial-age model fails to serve. CRPE is at the forefront of this revolution. And it has only just begun.

-Parker Baxter

Matt Weber at HGSE is producing a lively set of podcasts on education issues. I recently did one, my colleague Kim Smith has, and there are many others worth your time with a variety of viewpoints and issues.  Easy functionality, too.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to use a guestblogger a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes. So…

I’m tied up in meetings next week so rather than very sporadic blogging I’ve invited Paul Hill and his team at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) to take over Eduwonk for the week.  So I may post a little but basically they’ll be here running the show.  If you’re not familiar with CRPE’s work you should be.  Constantly creative, provocative, and grounded it’s influenced the education conversation in this country as well as federal and state policy choices. I’ve been affiliated with them and collaborated with them in different ways, including author, co-author, advisory boards, etc…More personally, Paul Hill’s been a terrific mentor to me, and many others, and is a guy who genuinely follows ideas rather than trends or politics.

Enjoy!

Leading the day – everyone is talking about this David Brook’s column. They’re stunned to learn that Whitney Tilson is a blogger…I especially like the last line, which is an important point in today’s debate.

But there is also pension news in two lawsuits (MN and CO), important if you follow that issue.  More from Denver Post. And here’s a good debate on school finance featuring Michael Rebell and Rick Hanushek.

Update: Check out Conor Williams on Brooks.

James Merriman, CEO of the New York City Charter School Center – and a longtime charter school expert in New York – takes a look at the NAACP lawsuit over charter schools there:

Now six weeks after the New York NAACP joined a teachers union lawsuit to stop charter school co-locations, charter leaders still find it surreal and sad to be on the other side of that storied organization—especially over children’s access to education. For anyone trying to make sense of the dueling rhetoric, I’d suggest stepping back to review some overlooked facts.

1. The space-sharing plans that prompted the lawsuit were never binding.

The lawsuit targets a set of building utilization plans (BUPs) which the NYC Department of Education (DOE) draws up whenever charter and district schools share buildings.  These BUPs allocate the number of classrooms each school gets and they also propose how other spaces—gyms, cafeterias, and so on—should be shared.

I say “propose” because that’s all the BUPs do. The actual arrangements for sharing the building’s common spaces are worked out, by consensus, through a committee made up of the principals in the building, plus one teacher and one parent from each school. (In rare cases of solid disagreement, the DOE arbitrates.) These committees are free to refer to the BUPs, but also free to ignore them—as often happens.  In other words, the lawsuit isn’t about how schools will actually share the space but merely one way they could share space.

2. The City was already revising its co-location plans before the lawsuit was filed.

The BUPs that were issued in January and February did include some proposals that did not divide space in strict proportion to schools’ relative population sizes. By the time the lawsuit was filed in May, however, the City was already revising the BUPs to be rigorously and scrupulously proportionate. The lawsuit went forward anyway and continues even though these revised BUPs have now been approved.

3. The lawsuit only alleges one instance of disproportionality in the new plans.

Out of 15 co-locations in the lawsuit, there is only one case that the NAACP says is still disproportionate under the city’s revised proposals. In that particular building, the district school’s lunch periods would be were spread out over a longer time, which meant that on rainy days its gym time would be more curtailed by indoor recess, compared to the charter school.

On the other hand, the lawsuit includes at least one case where the proposed plan gives the charter school a disproportionately small amount of time in the various shared spaces.  Moreover, there are four co-locations that the NAAC P and the UFT don’t even bother to make allegations against, but that didn’t stop them from including them in the lawsuit.

4. Most of the lawsuit’s complaints are about common, citywide challenges.

The bulk of the lawsuit’s claims are not about inequitable sharing, but about the less than perfect conditions co-locations sometimes create. Very early lunch hours, elementary and secondary schools together, and generally tight quarters are all less than optimal, to be sure but they are hardly unique to the buildings named in the lawsuit. These kinds of conditions are common throughout New York City, in the hundreds of co-locations not involving any charter school—or any lawsuit.  One need look no further than the NAACP’s own legal papers which show that in one building at issue, lunch hour starts at 10:15 a.m. though there is no charter school yet co-located there.  These conditions are also common in many buildings where there is a single school but more students enrolled than the building ideally can hold.  Yet both in co-located buildings and in simply just crowded buildings, many of these schools find ways to work for children.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped the lawsuit from proceeding or even making arguments that are absurdly self-contradictory. At one building, the NAACP argues that adding a charter school will cause overcrowding.  Yet at the same time the NAACP argues that the charter school shouldn’t be allowed in because it will stop a district school in the building from expanding!  Similarly in yet another case, it decries the fact that having the charter school co-locate will mean that the school can’t accept more than 80 kids who live outside the district.  It would be funny if it hadn’t left so many families in limbo.

5. It’s not too late for the national NAACP to lead in the right direction.

Away from glaring cameras and litigating lawyers, NAACP leaders should meet with each of the remaining charter schools that is targeted by the lawsuit. They’ll see what I’ve seen: charter school leaders revere the NAACP, for starters. They didn’t write the BUPs. They’re committed to fairness and want to be good neighbors, sharing facilities equitably and also sharing best practices (in both directions).

Everyone understands that the NAACP and the teachers union are longtime allies. But I believe that if the NAACP reaches out to these school leaders and takes the time to talk to them, they’ll find common ground and move to withdraw their claims against many if not all of the schools—as they’ve already done in three instances. That could be a blow for reasonableness, an end to this sad and divisive chapter, and perhaps the start of a more thoughtful dialogue about public education and civil rights.

James Merriman is CEO of the New York City Charter School Center.