Tag: Charter schools

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Latest Edu-Reads

As the charter school debate becomes increasingly partisan, Bellwether has a new report on autonomous schools, schools that occupy the middle ground between “traditional” and “charter.”

Brandon Lewis talks with Shaniola Arowolaju, a D.C. native and parent organizer, about how challenging it can be for parents to find the right school for their child.

“So for now, the thousands of minority parents relying on charter schools are on thin political ice, with indifference coming from the Republicans and hostility coming from the now-dominant wing of the Democratic Party.” That’s from Andy Rotherham and Richard Whitmire in The Hill on the deteriorating politics around charter schools.

Beth Hawkins interviews outgoing Louisiana schools chief John White.

Colleges that are part of the American Talent Initiative are on track to meet their collective goal of recruiting 50,000 more low- and middle-income students, but there are signs the gains are slowing. H/t to Goldie Blumenstyk.

The Urban Institute has a fun graphic on who would benefit from free college programs.

Mike Goldstein and Scott McCue on how they took the risk away from people wanting to become teachers: they guaranteed candidates a teaching job, and let students pay back their tuition after they graduated and found a job.

A big new CALDER paper looks at academic mobility. How much does a students’ relative performance in third grade predict how they will perform in later grades? The authors find quite large correlations (aka very little mobility) across six states. Moreover, the districts that see gains tend to help all of their students improve:

We also show that school districts exhibit statistically and economically significant variation in academic mobility. The predominant driver of cross-district variation in total academic mobility is absolute mobility, not relative (within district) mobility. That is, districts differ much more by whether they are effective in raising achievement throughout the entire distributions of their students than they do in their ability to improve lower-performing students’ relative ranks internally. Indeed, we do not find evidence of large differences across districts in relative mobility, which suggests that districts do not, in fact, differentially specialize in educating students at different achievement levels within their distributions (e.g., high versus low achievers).

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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Latest Edu-Reads

After Memphis instituted universal screening for its gifted and talented programs, it saw a dramatic uptick in the number of black and Hispanic students who were identified.

Dana Goldstein’s New York Times piece on how textbooks differ across states is well done (and laid out beautifully). History may be written by the victors, but apparently it also has to cater to the whims of state boards of education.

Newark charter schools are producing large gains in reading and math achievement.

Matt Barnum has a helpful rundown of what the research says on what works (and doesn’t) to help students complete college.

Mary Wells offers five ways districts need to change to support autonomous schools.

This two-part conversation with Rick Hess about the complex nature of educational reform and philanthropy is worth your time. Here’s part one and part two. Mostly, it made me think of all the strange career incentives that are baked into our educational system.

How basketball is changing, in one graph.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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Latest Edu-Reads

Education Week has a big new report on reading instruction. For example, here’s Liana Loewus on how reading is really being taught in schools:

Our new survey showed that 75 percent of teachers working with early readers teach three-cueing, an approach that tells students to take a guess when they come to a word they don’t know by using context, picture, and other clues, with only some attention to the letters.

Similarly, more than a quarter of teachers said they tell emerging readers that the first thing they should do when they come to a word they don’t know while reading is look at the pictures—even before they try to sound it out.

And Sarah Schwartz looks at the evidence behind and, in many cases, missing from popular reading programs.

Bellwether has a new deck out this week on rural schooling in America.

Dale Chu has an interesting look at the intersection of finance, choice, and accountability reforms in Indiana.

David Kirp writes, “The goal is not to lure high-schoolers into college with zero tuition, it’s to assure that those who do enroll graduate.”

James Shuls wants to ask what people mean when they say charter schools should be held to the “same standards” as traditional public schools.

As I warned earlier this week, we should be careful about ascribing Mississippi’s rising NAEP scores to any one thing. Here’s Todd Collins on Mississippi’s student retention policies.

Finally, this Matt Barnum and Gabrielle LeMarr LeMee Chalkbeat piece on GreatSchools.org is a must-read. It’s sparking a lot of debate over whether it’s better to share information that might not be perfect, or whether imperfect information will inevitably lead to imperfect decisions.

I don’t have a particular dog in that fight. I respect GreatSchools’ incredible reach–43 million annual site visitors!–and think the organization deserves praise for attempting to improve their ratings over time. The remaining flaws in their rankings–they’re still highly correlated with student demographic factors–are often true in other rating systems as well. Moreover, I’d much rather have a free rating system that’s open to all (and which is working to improve and reach all audiences) than no information at all. GreatSchools is waaaay better than relying on word-of-mouth or other snap judgments of the “best” schools in a neighborhood. We’ve seen what that looks like, even in today’s world, and it isn’t pretty.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

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Thanksgiving Week Edu-Reads

Allison Crean-Davis interviews Diana Cournoyer, the Executive Director of the National Indian Education Association.

Bellwether was part of a group to win the contract for a National Comprehensive Center, with Westat (the lead grantee), RMC Research, and Academic Development. Read more about that work here.

Bellwether also has a new publication out via Pathway 2 Tomorrow highlighting our work on postsecondary access and success. Because higher education is primarily a regional issue, particularly for underserved students, there is a unique opportunity to bring together stakeholders from both the K-12 and postsecondary sides to amplify successes and address common challenges.

I’m behind in my reading, but this David Steiner piece on why rigorous curriculum stays on the shelf is worth your time. It’s hard to do it justice with just one quote, but this was my favorite passage:

…in the United States we have built a system that not only fails to support the sustained use of demanding curriculum—but actively produces powerful disincentives to its use. In what school of education are teachers prepared to teach powerful and demanding works of literature to students who are two or three grade levels below the level required to make real sense of those texts? (I know of none, but would like to be mistaken.) Is there a high-quality ELA curriculum that includes materials for teachers whose students are below grade level? In how many districts are principal evaluation tools supplemented by curriculum-specific rubrics? Beyond the quizzes and curriculum-embedded assessments, how many standalone interim assessments actually measure students’ knowledge of what their curriculum asks them to read? How many summative assessments do the same?

Doug Lemov has a good story about when hands-on learning works, and when it doesn’t.

Is Missouri’s teacher pension plan “good?” That depends on who’s asking the question.

Mike Antonucci contrasts two surveys, one suggesting that 9/10 teachers are planning to leave the profession immediately… and the other suggesting they’re planning to stay until retirement. Which is it? Rather than trying to parse out these survey responses, shouldn’t we just look at revealed preferences instead?

A reminder from Chalkbeat that “public” schools often screen their students: “To get into Columbia Secondary for sixth grade, the school considers state test scores, and students must take a school-created test, have good attendance records, and live or attend elementary school in the surrounding neighborhoods. (Across the city, about a quarter of middle schools similarly set their own competitive entrance criteria.)”

Speaking of charters, kudos to Erica Green and Eliza Shapiro for digging into the racial politics around charters and Democrats. I also appreciated that the authors mostly quoted parents and school leaders and stayed away from pontificating pundits. But, wow, this talking point from Elizabeth Warren’s team is totally off:

In addition to following the same state and federal accountability laws that every other school follows, charters also must compete for students, provide their own facilities, and face the risk of being shut down for poor performance. Do traditional public schools really want to compete on those terms?

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

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Do Charter Schools Harm Traditional Public Schools?

It seems logical that motivated families leaving traditional public schools in favor of charter schools or private schools would harm the traditional school system. But that’s not what the research says, at least so far.

The graph below comes from a new Mathematica brief looking at studies that measured the causal effect of school choice on traditional public schools. As the graph shows, 10 studies that met Mathematica’s evidence bar found no effects of charter schools on traditional schools, nine found positive effects, two studies reported mixed results, and three found negative effects.

The studies included here were mainly looking at the early-stage phase-in of charter schools in various districts, and it’s possible that the balance might tilt away from charters as they grow their market share. But the evidence thus far suggests that charters either have no effect or perhaps even a slightly positive effect on traditional public schools.

In a separate brief, Mathematica looked at the effects of school choice on racial and economic integration. They concluded, “Among the studies with charter schools, 2 studies found that charter schools increased integration, 5 found no effect on integration, and 3 found that they decreased integration. Most studies we reviewed that found effects on integration tended to report small effects.”

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

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Latest Edu-Reads

Phillip Burgoyne-Allen on the intersection of public school choice and public transportation.

Yesterday I wrote about how states set their college attainment goals without looking at historical data on their recent progress. That’s not unique to higher ed. Andrew Ujifusa follows up on a few states starting to realize they are not close to achieving the “ambitious” goals they set under ESSA.

“Many juvenile-justice schools do not even offer the courses that a student needs to complete his or her freshman year of high school, and Native American youth are among the most poorly served in these facilities.” That’s Max Marchitello and Diana Cournoyer in a Hechinger Report op-ed.

This Kate Walsh essay is worth your time. It looks at the noticeable drop in attention to teacher quality issues–indeed, she found a search on the terms “teacher quality” and “teacher evaluation” revealed about a 75 percent drop in press coverage in the last five years. Still, Walsh ends with an optimistic tone, noting, “No matter how daunting change can be, when something’s founded on unassailable evidence and speaks to shared values of justice, fairness, and equity, it generally finds a way.”

Kevin Carey sees a lot of smoke but no fire from Elizabeth Warren’s education plan, at least on accountability. I think he’s right on the policy specifics–although I might be more alarmed than Carey is about the smoke Warren is creating, and why exactly she’s sounding the alarm. (And, unlike Warren’s words on accountability, her charter school proposals could do real harm if enacted.)

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman  

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Weekend Edu-Reads

Caprice Young is a must-read on the new reality facing California charter schools.

Robin Lake bakes a bread metaphor into this piece on school districts and charter schools. It turns out that recipes involving living organisms can be hard to follow. She concludes, “let districts be districts, when they work. But when they don’t, try something else.”

Aaron Churchill has a new report on college readiness in Ohio. He looks at ACT scores, dual enrollment, AP, and industry credentials overall across the state, by county, and by race. While all of these indicators are trending upward across the state, the black-white gap remains large:

Dolly Parton is awesome. And so is this D.C. program she’s involved with that sends free books to kids under 5.

Phillip Burgoyne-Allen says, “Do the electric!” Bus, that is.

How tax policy gave us White Claw and other hard seltzers.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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Thoughts on Recent Edu-Reads

A typical teacher pension formula multiplies some factor (usually around 2 percent) times the employee’s salary and years of experience. It might look like this:

Pension = 2 percent X salary X years of experience

In the education context, we know that high-poverty schools tend to employ teachers with lower salaries and fewer years of experience. Pensions literally multiply those problems together. Max Marchitello explains and gives an example from West Virginia.

Technically speaking, Ohio school districts aren’t contributing toward teacher retirement benefits.

Tomas Monarrez, Brian Kisida, and Matthew M. Chingos have new work out on the intersection of charter schools and school segregation. They find that charters do contribute to segregation, a bit, but charters are not the primary driver and there’s wide variation across states and geographies. Here’s the Matt Barnum write-up or the Education Next version from the authors.

Even as someone with concerns about private school choice programs, I was reluctant to tout research showing that private school choice programs seemed to have a negative effect on student achievement in states like Indiana, Ohio, and Louisiana. I wondered if those results were driven more by alignment issues than quality ones. That is, it may be the case that private schools were no better or worse than public schools, but public schools were simply more focused on preparing students to pass state achievement tests. The Urban Institute is out with a new study this week supporting this theory. They found that private school choice programs in Florida and Milwaukee improved college enrollment and graduation rates (although not in Washington, D.C.). Personally, I think the debate over private schools comes down to a values question rather than being resolved by purely objective outcomes data.

Cara Jackson on how teacher residency programs can improve the diversity of our teacher workforce.

For-profit colleges have “got a friend in Trump.”

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

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Latest Education News

“Enrolling in a Boston charter school doubles the likelihood that students lose their special education or English Language Learner status, but exposes students to a high-performing general education program that includes high intensity tutoring, data driven instruction, and increased instructional time. The positive effects extend to college: charters nearly double the likelihood that English Language Learners enroll in four-year colleges and quadruple the likelihood that special education students graduate from two-year college.” That’s from this new working paper from Elizabeth Setren.

Jason Weeby has five lessons about designing effective convenings.

Read Max Marchitello on how teacher pension plans exacerbate salary differences across districts. The comparisons of teachers in Santa Clara versus Oakland, CA are particularly eye-opening.

Two interesting data briefs on early-career teachers in North Carolina public schools from Kevin Bastian and EdNC. See this one on placement rates by preparation program, subject area, and race/ ethnicity of the teacher candidates. And this one on early-career performance and retention.

Are colleges of education really cash cows? NCTQ’s Amber Moorer digs into some new data suggesting it might be time to retire that myth.

And if you liked The Lion King, you should probably read this.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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Weekend Edu-Reads

Jason Weeby on school boards, charter schools, and democratic control of schools. Ashley Jochim’s response is also worth checking out.

Josh Mitchell and Michelle Hackman take a look at the Kalamazoo Promise program for the Wall Street Journal. The entire piece is worth your time, but this graph really tells the story:

Ashley LiBetti interviews Kelly Riling, the manager of the AppleTree Early Learning Teacher Residency program in Washington, D.C. Unlike other residency programs, they make it work…  and offer residents a salary with benefits!

Matt Kraft, John Papay, and Olivia Chi look at teacher development through the lens of teacher performance ratings from principals. Like with value-added, teachers tend to improve over time, but the most promising early-career teachers make even faster improvements.

Conor Williams neatly summed up this week’s Democratic debates. With respect to education, “Precisely zero of the current Democratic candidates for that party’s presidential nomination believe that public education is the primary cause of American inequality.”

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman