A key step in establishing a charter-school sector is identifying the institutions that can authorize would-be founders to create these new public schools and grant them charters. Authorizers are charged with evaluating charter applicants, awarding and overseeing charter contracts, assessing whether the school is improving student achievement and fulfilling the goals in its charter contract, renewing charter contracts for schools that perform, and closing schools that do not.

Engler figured that for the chartering strategy to work in Michigan, he could not “just put authorizing in the hands of traditional school districts.” He says, “The superintendents were far more defensive about and married to the status quo than anybody else we were dealing with…” Just as it would be an inherent conflict to put McDonald’s in charge of determining whether or not others should be allowed to open a new restaurant nearby, Engler reasoned that charter school authorizers should be outside the control of the traditional K–12 system. He designed Michigan’s charter-school law to allow community colleges and the state’s 15 public universities to authorize charter schools, along with school districts.

Engler signed Michigan’s charter-school law into effect on January 14, 1994, and in August of that year, Central Michigan University (CMU) became the first university in the nation to authorize a charter school. Ironically, the same day CMU’s board of trustees authorized its first three charter schools, a group spearheaded by the Michigan Education Association, called the Council of Organizations and Others for Education About Parochiaid, along with two members of the state board of education, filed a lawsuit challenging the law’s constitutionality.

Founded in 1892, CMU had a long history of preparing teachers and school administrators. Thus, its decision to authorize charter schools riled many of its alumni who were teaching in traditional public schools across the state. Some of them even notified the university that they would no longer donate to their alma mater because of the leadership role it was playing with charter schools. One now-infamous controversy arose when the superintendent of a school district in southeast Michigan wrote CMU’s president notifying him that his district would no longer accept student teachers from CMU, hire CMU graduates, or recommend their high-school graduates attend CMU.

W. Sidney Smith, who chaired CMU’s board of trustees at the time, recalls that the president was out of town when the letter arrived. Not wanting to let the situation get out of hand, Smith says he “called a ‘war room’ together to strategize a response. We had over 200 CMU alumni attend the district’s board meeting. They were wearing CMU colors and making it very clear that their children should be able to live, work, play and go to school wherever they choose and that the superintendent deserved to be reprimanded.” The strategy worked, and the district and the superintendent soon recanted and apologized for the letter.

This story illustrates the pressure that is brought to bear on those who disrupt the status quo and its existing arrangements, which is exactly what the chartering strategy is supposed to do. This is why alpha authorizers, chartering agencies that operate independently of school districts, are so desperately needed.

The Key to Quality

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Ten years after Engler’s departure, Michigan is home to more than 250 charter schools educating some 115,000 students or 8 percent of the state’s public-school students. At the start of 2012, CMU served as authorizer to 56 of the schools, which educate about 30,000 students (see Figure 1). The top-performing public school in Michigan for each of the past five years has been a charter school authorized by CMU, and three high schools authorized by CMU have been recognized by U.S. News & World Report as among America’s best. CMU schools have performed extremely well on state exams. Despite serving a substantially greater proportion of students from low-income families and minorities than district schools, a higher percentage of CMU schools (86 percent) made AYP in 2010-11 than did public schools statewide (79 percent). The consistent strength of the charter schools overseen by CMU testifies to the impact of high-quality authorizing.

Early on, the role of charter school authorizers seemed so straightforward that little focus was placed on them, while the politics of chartering and the action surrounding the schools themselves consumed most of the attention. But as the charter schools movement spread across the country, more and more observers began to grow concerned about the wide variances in how charter schools were being approved to open, what quality standards they were measured against, and whether or not those that failed to perform were being held accountable, as promised.

By nature, the chartering strategy is not a prescriptive policy for improving schools. Rather, it is a way for policymakers to challenge the “givens” of the existing system by harnessing the powerful dynamics created by choice, competition, standards, and accountability. But having a strategy and getting it properly implemented are two different things. As the University of Michigan’s David K. Cohen so aptly put it, “Once upon a time, students of American politics believed that policy turned out as intended. But they have recently concluded that intentions are an inconsistent guide to results.”

Since policymakers have empowered authorizers to actually do the chartering, how they perform their role will have a defining impact on how well the chartering strategy is implemented and refined over time.

In 2006, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute brought national attention to the idea that authorizing matters when it released a report called “Trends in Charter School Authorizing.” The report said,

Over the past decade or so, we and others have often claimed that charter schools are the most promising innovations in American education. We were wrong. Charter school authorizing and the act of chartering schools are the most promising contemporary educational innovation. After all, there’s little you can find in the nation’s charter schools that doesn’t also exist somewhere in the vast and varied world of public and private schools. But the process of authorizing new schools—allowing them to open, overseeing their progress, shutting them down if necessary, but not actually running them—is entirely new.

The Fordham Institute’s observation was right on: authorizing matters. In fact, charter school authorizers are now expected to play an even more assertive role in ensuring that charter schools offer parents high-quality choices and not simply more choices for their children’s education. Regrettably, though, too many authorizers lack either the will or the capacity to up their game.

The Case for Alpha Authorizers

If the chartering strategy depends on disrupting the existing arrangements for how public education functions, then most charter laws have a structural flaw that will dramatically limit the ability of charter schools to deliver real change for educators and students. The flaw is relying on school districts to be authorizers. This is happening in far too many parts of the country. For example, the annual report released by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), “The State of Charter School Authorizing 2011,” shows that of the nation’s nearly 1,000 authorizers, more than 850 are school districts. These districts, or LEAs (Local Education Agencies), authorize just over half (52 percent) of all charter schools. With the frequent reports of school districts doing a poor job of fulfilling their authorizing duties and school districts’ authorizing over half of the nation’s charter schools, it is easy to see how the real power of the chartering strategy is being negated.

This structural flaw runs counter to the original idea of chartering, allowing an entity other than the local school district to establish new schools. Further, it is unlikely that district authorizers will move beyond the regulatory-driven, compliance-based accountability systems that are the hallmark of public education or the troubling hit-and-miss formation of new schools that is raising questions about the ability of charter schools to deliver improvement on the scale that our country needs.

Even more concerning is the fact that school-district authorizers may be hostile to the charter idea itself. To understand why, one must understand the strategy Ted Kolderie, an early advocate of charters schools, outlined to lawmakers in a 1990 article titled, “The States Will Have to Withdraw the Exclusive.” Kolderie’s premise was that it was futile for lawmakers to continue trying to “improve existing schools within existing arrangements.” He wrote,

The existing arrangement has been…a checkerboard pattern of districts financed by taxes and appropriations, each with an “exclusive franchise” to offer public education within its boundaries. With customers required by law to use the service and assigned to the organization serving their “district,” such an arrangement effectively guarantees the organizations and the people in them most everything important to their material success: their enrollments, their revenues, their jobs, their incomes—and their existence.

Kolderie argued that this regulated public-utility model had led states to demand improvements and districts to promise improvements, in an endless exchange of money for promises. For this to change, he argued, lawmakers would have to enact policies that would no longer allow districts to take “students for granted.” So he exhorted lawmakers to consider “chartering,” as a way to allow entities other than school districts to establish new public schools that would be open to students regardless of where they lived, thereby beginning to withdraw the monopoly school districts held over the provision of public education.

For the chartering strategy to improve the whole of public education, we need to think strategically about what institutions we want authorizing schools. We need to support the emergence of more alpha authorizers, those who are independent of the K–12 system and have the courage and tenacity to serve as change agents, market makers, and forces for quality, while reliably performing the core functions of authorizing mentioned above.

Build an Education Marketplace

At the start of 2012, CMU served as authorizer to 56 of the 250 Michigan charter schools; the CMU charters educate about 30,000 students.

Alpha authorizers can play a significant role in helping transition the education system into a diverse and dynamic marketplace that fosters academic excellence for all children. Governor Engler believed that he had to establish a critical mass of charter schools before he left office or run the risk of having all his work undone. Mary Kay Shields, who served as Engler’s point person for charter schools, confirms this sense of urgency: “We were relentless in pushing towards progress…. It was about one thing and that was getting this done for the kids, and not about making adults feel comfortable.”

Because political leaders come and go, a long-term strategy like chartering needs people and organizations that have the staying power required to faithfully implement and refine the strategy over a long period of time. This is where alpha authorizers step in. For example, Shields reports that before Engler left office, he convened a meeting of key players, which included officials from CMU, and offered both encouragement and a list of directives aimed at ensuring that the charter strategy would continue to be implemented with fidelity.

In December 2011, after a decade-long political battle, Michigan’s legislature removed the cap restricting the number of charter schools that could be authorized by universities. Functioning as a market maker, CMU played a key role. Over the years, CMU was involved in establishing numerous organizations that would provide the support necessary to expand Michigan’s chartering strategy. For example, in 1996 CMU saw the need for charter schools to have representation in the state capitol and with the media, which led to the founding of the Michigan Association of Public School Academies, which now serves as the unified voice for Michigan’s charter schools and was a major advocate for removing the cap.

Several years later, CMU played a founding role in the establishment of both the Michigan Council of Charter School Authorizers and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. Each organization now publishes oversight and accountability standards that serve as a guide for quality authorizing. On another front, CMU founded the Michigan Resource Center for Charter Schools and in 2001 facilitated its transition to the National Charter Schools Institute so that it could support the development and performance of the entire charter-school sector.

Advance Performance-Based Accountability

Alpha authorizers can lead the way in transitioning the oversight and accountability of charter schools from a compliance- to a performance-based approach. This process begins by fostering a welcoming regulatory environment. It means protecting the integrity of the charter application process by making it competitive, transparent, and merit-based. Alpha authorizers can also develop innovative ways to make it easier for groups with a demonstrable track record of success to replicate and scale their operations by bypassing some of the selection procedures untested applicants must go through. For example, charter applicants that have been previously vetted and operate outstanding schools could be pre-qualified or fast-tracked so that they don’t have to resubmit the same paperwork or follow a pre-established process each time they seek to start a new school. At the same time, alpha authorizers need to conduct sound due diligence and avoid being mesmerized by applicants who have political, financial, or star power, but lack the competencies necessary to open and operate a high-quality school.

Finally, alpha authorizers must ensure the charter contracts they issue are arm’s-length, conflict-free performance agreements that contain clear, meaningful, and measurable academic, financial, and operational standards. For example, although the schools CMU chartered were required by law to administer the state testing system, the Michigan Educational Assessment Program or MEAP, the results were wholly inadequate for making high-stakes decisions like closing schools. To address this situation, CMU required schools to administer a computer adaptive test during a common testing window at the beginning and at the end of the school year. To minimize the burden on schools, CMU paid for the tests using a portion of the 3 percent school oversight fee that funds its authorizing operations.

Share Sustainable Systems

Alpha authorizers can enhance the value of the systems and processes they create by sharing them with school leaders and other authorizers.

Although the tests described above were created to measure the performance of schools, CMU shared with the schools ways in which they could use the data generated to improve teaching and learning. As the schools learned how to interpret this diagnostic information, many began using the system to individualize instruction, assess teachers, and pay for performance. Then, in conjunction with the National Charter Schools Institute, CMU developed a growth-to-standard assessment model, called Elevate360, using the ACT’s definition of college readiness as the standard: students have at least a 50 percent probability of earning a B or better, or a 75 percent probability of earning a C or better in their first-year English, algebra, biology, and social science classes. For students to meet this definition of college readiness, they need to earn the following subject-matter scores when taking the ACT exam: English 18; math 22; reading 21; and science 24.

Sadly, in 2010, of the 1.57 million high-school students who took the ACT, only 24 percent met the definition of college readiness. For African American students, the numbers are alarming. Only 4 percent met the standard in science, 7 percent in math, 14 percent in reading, and 25 percent in English. To begin tackling this problem, CMU backward-mapped from the ACT’s definition of college readiness to establish grade-level achievement targets for grades 2–8 that can be used with Northwest Evaluation Association’s Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) or the Performance Series by Global Scholar. This student growth and achievement system is now available for use by any authorizer or school in the country through the National Charter Schools Institute.

Finally, when CMU designed the Authorizers Oversight Information System (AOIS), the goal was to streamline and automate the regulatory reporting process so the schools could more easily fulfill their compliance obligations, thereby leaving them with more time to spend on their primary mission of serving students. Today, AOIS is being used by authorizers in 11 other states and the District of Columbia to oversee almost 500 schools.

Hard Work Ahead

If the integrity of the chartering strategy is to be upheld, authorizers need to do a better job of closing schools that fail to deliver results for students. Alpha authorizers can show the way by having the courage to tackle the politics associated with closing underperforming schools and knowing how to document the facts in order to prevail in the court of law and public opinion.

Of course, there is a risk that alpha authorizers could turn into overbearing, bureaucratic machines that stifle innovation and entrepreneurship. To guard against this, policymakers should encourage and enable multiple entities to serve as authorizers. Just as choice and competition are good for students and schools, choice and competition are good for authorizers.

James N. Goenner is the president and CEO of the National Charter Schools Institute and a former chairman of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers.

As impressive and amazing as these results by charter schools may be, it would be wrong to conclude from this that charter schools improve student achievement.  The only way to know with confidence whether charters cause better outcomes is to look at randomized control trials (RCTs) in which students are assigned by lottery to attending a charter school or a traditional public school.  RCTs are like medical experiments where some subjects by chance get the treatment and others by chance do not.  Since the two groups are on average identical, any difference observed in later outcomes can be attributed to the “treatment,” and not to some pre-existing and uncontrolled difference.  We demand this type of evidence before we approve any drug, but the evidence used to justify how our children are educated is usually nowhere near as rigorous.

Happily, we have four RCTs on the effects of charter schools that allow us to know something about the effects of charter schools with high confidence.  Here is what we know:  students in urban areas do significantly better in school if they attend a charter schools than if they attend a traditional public school.  These academic benefits of urban charter schools are quite large. 

In Boston, a team of researchers from MIT, Harvard, Duke, and the University of Michigan, conducted a RCT and found:  “The charter school effects reported here are therefore large enough to reduce the black-white reading gap in middle school by two-thirds.”

A RCT of charter schools in New York City by a Stanford researcher found an even larger effect: “On average, a student who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86 percent of the ‘Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap’ in math and 66 percent of the achievement gap in English.”

The same Stanford researcher conducted an RCT of charter schools in Chicago and found:  “students in charter schools outperformed a comparable group of lotteried-out students who remained in regular Chicago public schools by 5 to 6 percentile points in math and about 5 percentile points in reading…. To put the gains in perspective, it may help to know that 5 to 6 percentile points is just under half of the gap between the average disadvantaged, minority student in Chicago public schools and the average middle-income, nonminority student in a suburban district.”

And the last RCT was a national study conducted by researchers at Mathematica for the US Department of Education.  It found significant gains for disadvantaged students in charter schools but the opposite for wealthy suburban students in charter schools.  They could not determine why the benefits of charters were found only in urban, disadvantaged settings, but their findings are consistent with the three other RCTs that found significant achievement gains for charter students in Boston, Chicago, and New York City.

When you have four RCTs – studies meeting the gold standard of research design – and all four of them agree that charters are of enormous benefit to urban students, you would think everyone would agree that charters should be expanded and supported, at least in urban areas.  If we found the equivalent of halving the black-white test score gap from RCTs from a new cancer drug, everyone would be jumping for joy – even if the benefits were found only for certain types of cancer.

Unfortunately, many people’s views on charter schools are heavily influenced by their political and financial interests rather than the most rigorous evidence.  They don’t want to believe the findings of the four RCTs, so they simply ignore them or cite studies with inferior research designs in which we should have much less confidence.

Progress will be made in our application of research to charter school policies by encouraging everyone to focus on the most rigorous studies, of which we have several.  To do that, supporters of charter schools also have to refrain from citing weaker evidence, which only serves to legitimize the use of inferior studies by charter opponents.  As exciting as the outstanding performance of charter schools is in my own Global Report Card research, that evidence shouldn’t be used to endorse charter schools.  Supporters don’t need to rely on the Global Report Card to make the case for charter schools because they have four gold-standard RCTs on their side.  Opponents of charter schools have no equally rigorous evidence on their side.  And that’s the point we should all be making.

-Jay P. Greene

This blog entry originally appeared on the blog of the George W. Bush Institute for National Charter Schools Week.

Critics of voucher programs often argue that private schools do exclude most disabled students, and the matter occasionally has been the subject of litigation. Yet accurate information on students with disabilities served by private schools is notable for its absence.

The main reason for the lack of accurate information is that private schools do not operate under the provisions of the federal law that furnishes aid to the states for students identified as needing special education. Public schools expend considerable resources identifying children eligible for special services, both because they are under an obligation to provide those services and because they receive additional funds from federal and state governments if a child is identified as having a disability that affects their learning. Those obligations, rights, and funding support do not apply if parents choose to place their children in private schools with the help of a voucher. By and large, private schools have not developed the capacity to identify children with disabilities, and many of them are reluctant to do so, as they believe it leads to stigmatization of the children.

In other words, a child who may be classified as in need of special education in a public school may not be classified as such if his or her family chooses a private school, using a voucher to defray the cost. As a result, any official statistics on the prevalence of students with disabilities in public and private schools can be highly misleading.

We have not been able to surmount all of the obstacles to identifying the percentage of students in private schools who would have been identified as in need of special education in public schools, but we believe we have fairly accurate information on this question for the country’s largest and longest-running school-voucher program. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), first established in 1990 and steadily expanded to include more private schools and more students in subsequent years, now serves more than 23,000 students who attend 107 different private schools. The annual voucher a school receives for each MPCP student is approximately $6,000. MPCP thus provides an excellent context for detecting the admission policies of private schools when a modest-value voucher program for low-income students is operating at scale.

In 2006, the State of Wisconsin authorized our research team to conduct a five-year evaluation of MPCP. Through the course of that study, we collected a wealth of data about the students in the voucher program and in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) that permit us to estimate what proportion of the voucher student population would qualify for special education if the students were enrolled in public schools instead.

Drawing on different sources of data and various analytic methods, we estimate that anywhere between 7.5 and 14.6 percent of voucher students have disabilities that would land reported by the Wisconsin State Department of Public Instruction (DPI), a figure that gave rise to a lawsuit alleging discrimination by the MPCP program.

Following is a discussion of the procedures we followed to obtain our estimates and an explanation for the disparity between our estimates and the ones DPI has provided.

Structure of Special Education

As mentioned previously, receiving a special education designation brings with it certain legal rights for services or accommodations in the public educational sphere, as provided by the federal law known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Once so designated, public school students are entitled to receive a free and appropriate public education (FAPE), to include special education services in the least restrictive environment possible and according to an individualized education program (IEP). A student’s IEP is drawn up by a committee that includes the student’s parents or guardians, local public-school officials, and relevant medical or psychological diagnosticians and care providers. The resulting special services and accommodations are funded through a combination of federal, state, and local monies based on formulas established in law. In Wisconsin, the federal government pays about 11 percent of the extra cost of educating each special-education student, with the state paying 26 percent and the local public-school district covering the remaining 63 percent.

The legal and funding structure surrounding students with disabilities in the private sector differs greatly from the situation in the public sector. Unless a public school district itself places a special education student in a private school, the IEP and additional funding associated with a student with a disability in the public sector does not transfer with the student if the child enrolls in a private school. The point is made in an August 2011 DPI memo on the subject:

Students with disabilities attending voucher schools as part of the MPCP are considered parentally placed private school students and as such, DPI treats them in the same fashion as students attending private non-voucher schools. Under [state law] parentally placed private school students are…not entitled to a Free and Appropriate Public Education.

If a parent enrolls a student with special needs in a private school, that student must surrender her legal rights to special educational services. Private schools are not required by federal law to enroll students with special needs, and they are not entitled to any additional resources from the state if they do so. Private schools can either accommodate the student themselves, using whatever resources they have, or negotiate with public school officials regarding the provision of special services to the student by the public school system with additional public funds (a process called “equitable services”).

Maintaining a count of those thought to be in need of special services also varies by sector. In the public sector, careful record keeping is stressed because disability status has major implications for the kinds of instructional and other services students will receive. In the private sector, special education tends to be handled much less formally, inasmuch as schools are ordinarily not required to follow formal procedures in diagnosing or serving students with special educational needs.

Given the contrasts between how special education is governed and managed in the public and private education sectors, we hypothesize the following:

1. The same student will have a higher likelihood of being identified as in need of special education if in a public school than if in a private school.

2. Given the funding available for extra services for disabled children attending public schools, a higher proportion of students with disabilities than those without disabilities will choose to remain in the public sector rather than use a voucher.

3. Any data that rely on official reports of disability will under-count the percentage of students in private schools who would have been identified as in need of special education had they attended public schools.

To test these hypotheses, we used two alternative methods to estimate the actual percentage of students in private schools who would have been identified as in need of special education in public school had they selected that sector.

Method I: Same Student, Different Sector

The better of our two methods relies on information from those students who attended schools in both the public and the private sectors during the course of our study. During the five years of our evaluation, 20.1 percent or 1,475 of the 7,338 students in our MPCP and MPS study panels switched from one school sector to the other, in some cases multiple times.

We received enrollment files from MPS each year that included information on the special education status of each MPS student. We also collected enrollment lists from every private school in MPCP and asked school officials to indicate if students had disabilities that qualified them for special education. For students who switched school sectors during the study period, we can determine whether those who were identified as needing special education in the public sector were similarly identified when they attended private schools, and vice versa. In other words, we can use each student in our study as his or her own control group to learn whether disability designations vary by sector.

Our analysis indicates that Milwaukee students who switched between the public and private school sectors were much more likely to be identified as in need of special education when they were in the public sector. On average, controlling for factors such as year and student grade, those who attended schools in both sectors were classified as in need of special education at the rate of 9.1 percent when attending private schools but at a rate of 14.6 percent when attending Milwaukee’s public schools. If we assume that a student’s need for special education did not change at the time the student switched sectors, this suggests that 5.5 percent of students attending private schools were not identified as in need of special education but would have been had they been attending public school. In other words, the identification rate in the public schools appears to be 60 percent higher (the 5.5 percent increment divided by 9.1 percent) than in the private schools. The identification rate was higher when students were in MPS both because many students who switched from MPCP to MPS received special education designations in MPS and because many students with special education designations in MPS shed them when they enrolled in MPCP schools.

The 14.6 percent MPCP disability rate is based only on students who switched sectors (35 percent of MPCP students). Those students appear to have higher rates of disability than those who did not switch. Based on principal surveys, for the 65 percent of MPCP students who did not switch, the disability rate was 3.75 percent. To get an overall rate for MPCP students, we compute a weighted average for the two groups of 7.5 percent. We suspect that this rate is conservative, since several voucher school principals told us they resist labeling students in such a way. Combining this conservative estimate with the estimate from our analysis of only students who switched sectors yields a range of 7.5 to 14.6 percent, which we think captures the likely student disability rate in MPCP.

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Method II: Parental Estimates of Disability Rates

Our second estimate of the student disability rate in MPCP comes from interviews with parents. In 2007 we interviewed a random sample of parents of MPCP students in grades 3–8, all the parents of MPCP 9th graders, and a sample of parents of MPS students who were matched to the sample of MPCP students based on their grade in school, neighborhood of residence, ethnicity, test-score performance, and other characteristics. We expanded this sample with additional parents of 3rd-grade students similarly chosen in 2007 and 2008. Altogether, we interviewed a majority of the parents of 3,669 students in MPCP and 3,669 students in MPS.

The survey included the following questions:

• Does [child’s name] have any physical disabilities?

• Does [child’s name] have any learning disabilities?

If a parent answered yes to the learning disabilities question, we further asked,

• How well do the facilities at [child’s name] school attend to his/her particular needs?

According to parental responses to the first two of these questions, 2.5 percent of students in MPCP have a physical disability and 9.8 percent have a learning disability (see Figure 1). The corresponding rates reported by parents of MPS students were 4.1 percent and 18.5 percent for physical and learning disabilities, respectively. Combining the categories and eliminating overlapping cases, it is estimated that the disability rate in the MPCP sector is 11.4 percent, as compared to 20.4 percent for the MPS sector.

There is every reason to believe that these parental responses are consistent and fairly accurate indicators of what the parents are told by school officials and what they themselves know about their children. The official MPS rate for this time period is between 18 and 19 percent, just slightly less than the 20.4 percent reported by our MPS parents. The 11.4 percent disability rate for MPCP students based on our survey is midway between the 7.5 percent rate for all students in MPCP based on school staff designations and the 14.6 percent rate based on observing some of the students in both school sectors.

It is interesting that within a scaled-up, long-standing voucher program, parental satisfaction with services for students with disabilities achieves a balance across sectors. Similar levels of satisfaction with special education services are reported, regardless of whether the student was in MPCP or MPS (see Figure 2). Presumably, the choice of sectors and schools allowed parents to obtain an educational setting they view as appropriate for their child.

Discussion

Our estimates of the prevalence of MPCP students who have a disability range from 7.5 to 14.6 percent. The 14.6 percent estimate is based on the identification by public schools of the need for special services for those students who attended school in both sectors, while parental reports peg the rate at 11 percent, and the combination of MPCP and MPS school personnel suggest it is 7.5 percent.

All of these estimates are higher than the one provided, on March 29, 2011, by DPI, which said that “the private schools [participating in MPCP] reported about 1.6 percent of choice students have a disability.” That statement provoked a lawsuit by disability rights groups against DPI, which administers MPCP, based on the charge that the program discriminates in admissions against students with disabilities.

The estimate provided by DPI was based on the percentage of MPCP students who were given test accommodations on the 2010 state accountability exams. Only a fraction of students with disabilities receive accommodations on exams, and accommodations are only permitted if an IEP committee of school personnel requests them. Since few students with disabilities in private schools have IEP committees, the student-testing accommodation rate for MPCP may bear little relationship to the actual student-disability rate in the program. In fact, using administrative data we collected from the MPCP schools, we were able to determine that only one-quarter of the MPCP students judged by their school to have a disability were actually given any accommodation for last year’s test.

Using multiple measures of student disability, each of which is more valid and reliable than testing accommodation statistics, the estimates we produced indicate a 7.5 to 14.6 percent participation rate for students with disabilities in the voucher schools in comparison to the 17 to 19 percent participation rate reported for students with disabilities by the public schools. The difference could be due to discrimination against disabled students, as has been alleged, but the evidence is not sufficient to draw any such conclusions. Where disabilities are severe, private schools may not have the necessary facilities, and even in less severe instances, parents may prefer the legal entitlements and the greater range of funded services in the public sector.

What we do know, with considerable certainty, is that while the percentage of students in the voucher schools with disabilities is substantially lower than the disability rate in the public schools, it is at least four times higher than public officials have claimed. These statistical findings reinforce our views that the sectors cannot be easily compared to one another on this particular metric, because they operate under different legal obligations, financial incentives, and cultural norms. Special education is special in very different ways in public schools and in voucher programs.

Patrick J. Wolf is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas. John F. Witte is professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. David J. Fleming is assistant professor of political science at Furman University.

Founders of charter schools sign contracts (or “charters”) with an authorizer, such as a school district or higher-education institution, that stipulate the rules and regulations from which charters are exempted in exchange for accountability for results. In other words, a charter school can be closed if it does not meet certain reporting requirements and student achievement goals.

For years, South Carolina charters struggled mightily after their launch. Far fewer charters are now in operation in South Carolina than in some of the other states that were early adopters (South Carolina has 44, while California, Arizona, and Florida each has hundreds of charters), and charter students make up only 2 percent of the state’s public-school enrollment. Undoubtedly, some of these differences can be attributed to geography and population, but a recurring set of obstacles has also plagued the movement in South Carolina since its inception.

In 1996, then governor David Beasley signed South Carolina’s charter law, but few schools had opened by the turn of the century. This is surprising, considering the state’s record of low student achievement. According to commonly accepted performance indicators, South Carolina’s public schools are among the nation’s worst. Persistently low graduation rates, dismal SAT results, and low NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores, especially in reading, have long been the norm. In a historically red state with low-performing schools, a free-market education reform such as charters should be in demand and find strong support from lawmakers. What happened?

Fits and Starts

While South Carolina did indeed pass a charter school law in 1996, a combination of public-school establishment resistance and legislative reticence delayed the law’s maturation. As originally enacted, the law only allowed local school districts to authorize charters. When the first decade of South Carolina’s charter history concluded in 2006, there was little to show. Twenty-nine charter schools were operating, and few of these had a track record of success. Some 14 others had opened and closed. The average life span of the closed schools was 2.7 years, with most not even completing a second year. As is the case nationally, many of the closures were the result of financial problems or poor planning at the outset. While the state board of education addressed the planning concerns through regulation, other policy issues emerged, as certain districts developed a reputation for stonewalling reform efforts. For example, Greenville and Charleston, home districts for two early charter success stories, Greenville Tech and James Island, respectively, are the two largest districts in South Carolina, and each developed an adversarial stance toward charters.

The prolonged period of fits and starts forced charter advocates and their allies in the statehouse to seek a separate peace with their opponents in well-entrenched teacher, superintendent, and school-board associations. In responding, legislators created an alternative authorizer, the South Carolina Public Charter School District (SCPCSD, here CSD), with a plan to commence operations in 2008 under the leadership of an appointed board representing the governor’s office, House and Senate leadership, and various state associations. The new authorizing district proposed to relieve pressure on local districts as the only avenue for a charter. This, plus the authorizing district’s spartan funding provision, helped quell opposition—for a time.

Allison Reaves, principal at South Carolina Connections Academy, a virtual school and one of the first the CSD authorized, was surprised that so little effort had been made to prepare the public system for the new district. “I realized [charters] were still such a novel idea in South Carolina. Local districts have had little to no education on the charter movement,” she says.

With the creation of the CSD, charters could be authorized to operate anywhere in the state, under the auspices of an agency that had no responsibility for traditional public schools. This new state agency/school district hybrid would be a logical alternative for charter hopefuls, especially those in local districts with an anticharter reputation.

The CSD opened in 2008 with five schools, including Connections Academy and two other virtual charter schools, the first of their kind in the state. By the end of the 2008–09 school year, though, one school’s charter had been revoked, two others had asked for loans to make payroll, the district office was operating with barely enough on the balance sheet to make it month to month, and the hybrid administrative concept had been abandoned in favor of a more traditional district model. Further complicating matters, leadership changed, as the inaugural superintendent, Tim Daniels, and board chair, Terrye Seckinger, were replaced at the end of the year. What began as a hopeful new charter authorizer for South Carolina teetered on the brink of oblivion after only one year.

Money Problems

CSD schools immediately found themselves forced to defend their very existence, a common position for charters. Nationally, charters embrace this challenge by vowing to do more with less, but there is a distinct difference between whether a school can stock an additional computer lab or barely pay the electric bill. From the beginning, the South Carolina Charter School Act provided CSD schools with little more than the Base Student Cost (BSE), which varies from year to year depending on the state budget. The most significant source of funds for South Carolina’s traditional public schools—as well as for charters authorized by a local district—is the municipality in which the school is located. CSD schools do not have a local tax base and thus must operate without these funds. “The funding part was totally misleading—there was no way. Anybody with any understanding of finance and schools would realize that the bill created a situation that was not going to be long term,” says current CSD superintendent Wayne Brazell. Principal Reaves says the charter management company behind her school knew the difficulties it would face in South Carolina, but pressed on. “Connections realized they were taking a risk,” she says, “but they also knew there was a need for us in the state.”

In 2008–09, the BSE was $2,476 per student, while the average per-pupil expenditure for traditional public schools in South Carolina totaled $9,162. Some other state funding was available to CSD schools, and they relied substantially on Title I dollars in the district’s first year. But even when federal Title I funding was added to the mix, the CSD per-pupil average was below $4,000, less than half the state average for traditional schools. And this figure varied according to grade level, as high school students and disabled students are weighted more heavily by the state finance office.

“It [the charter school allotment] was certainly inadequate,” says current CSD board chair Don McLaurin, an entrepreneur whose private-sector experience enabled him to recognize immediately the CSD’s precarious financial situation. McLaurin joined the board halfway through the 2008–09 school year and has already been voted chairman twice. “It just wasn’t enough money to run a school. I think we can do things at a more reasonable price than traditional public schools, but the mechanism that was in place in the beginning didn’t allow for the realities of the world.”

Understanding the policy shortcomings in CSD’s creation, legislators added a $700 per-student proviso to the 2009–10 state budget to aid the district. But the proviso, Title I funding, and federal IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) funding failed to offset worsening financial conditions in 2009–10. The $700 proviso survived reauthorization in spring 2010 and was available to the district for the 2010–11 school year, but its benefit evaporated when BSE was cut to $1,757 per pupil. Statewide, general-fund revenue collections—for all state services, including education—dropped by nearly 25 percent between 2007 and 2010. The state faced a budget shortfall of $560.9 million in 2010–11, projected to reach $1.4 billion in 2012–13 unless spending was cut. In July 2010, midyear cuts slashed the BSE even further, to $1,630. Superintendent Brazell knew the proviso could only be considered a short-term solution. “My thoughts were that this was done just to get our foot in the door and other funding would become available later,” he says.

Having built annual budgets on significantly higher per-pupil allotments than they were receiving, CSD schools struggled to survive, and the threat of closure loomed. Compounding the problem, CSD schools experienced significant student turnover in their first two years, making enrollment unstable. “The funding level was so low and the opposition from so many traditional public-school groups was so fierce that many potential parents took a ‘wait and see’ stance. The growth in the district was mainly in the virtual schools and that student population was very transient,” says Brazell.

In an effort to save newly opened charter schools, the CSD extended loans to two of its five schools in 2008, but only one of the loans was repaid. This caused consternation among the authorizing district’s board members, especially as new requests for loans came in, and led to a swift reversal of district policy. “We violated what many of us thought we should have been doing as an authorizer, but we had to either help the schools or watch them all close,” says Brazell. With the damage done, the district and its schools were convinced that a funding scheme relying on BSE and Title I funding was untenable. For the next fiscal year (2009–10) the CSD aggressively cut costs, trimming office accounting fees and downgrading budget lines set aside for a legal retainer. As the district rebuilt its depleted reserves, schools again asked for short-term loans. Having learned a hard lesson, the district helped schools make payroll by advancing funds equal in amount to dollars due from the state. When the state funds arrived (typically at the end of the month), the district simply deducted monies already provided to the schools.

These actions were difficult for those board members with a background in education to come to grips with, says board chair McLaurin. But just as a start-up business has to be creative, he knew the new district had to be so as well. “The district either had to be flexible or not survive,” he says. “It was more difficult for educators than entrepreneurs to understand this—and that’s not a slight to educators, it’s just a different perspective.”

These unorthodox measures kept the district afloat while legislators moved to revise the funding scheme. Rep. Phil Owens of Pickens County, chair of the House Education and Public Works Committee, introduced a bill in 2010 aimed at establishing a more sustainable funding scheme for the district, but opposition from members of the education establishment stalled the legislation in committee. McLaurin says, “That we did become one of the largest districts in the state [after two years] was proof-of-concept to the legislature.” District enrollment more than doubled from 2,464 students in 2008–09 to 6,086 in 2009–10. “We proved that people want this; they signed up in droves, and that put a lot of pressure on the legislature to find more money for us,” he says.

Nevertheless, as the 2010 session ended, the CSD anticipated another year of uncertainty and prepared for more legislative battles in 2011.

The Schizophrenic District

From the outset, the CSD encountered another obstacle to progress, further exposing its policy-created vulnerability: it served as both authorizer and support office. Since charters struggled for more than a decade prior to the creation of the CSD, the district was not going to win public or legislative support by allowing new schools to evaporate into the ether due to lack of funds or ignorance of procedures, such as how to report accurate enrollment counts. CSD school officials labored to navigate the state reporting system, as the state shifted software providers between 2009 and 2011. At the same time, the CSD needed to uphold its mission of accountability to create, sustain, and retain high-quality charter schools.

“There is a lot of confusion, and there are a lot of roles and responsibilities [for the CSD],” says Reaves. “The district has to change personalities based on what it encounters in any given day or even any given hour.” Simple operational procedures, which existing traditional schools had mastered, were an enigma to CSD charters. How do they order textbooks? How can they order diplomas? “Student attendance and discipline questions were very common those first two years,” says Brazell, a 30-year veteran of public-school leadership in South Carolina. “I answered the same type of questions as when I was a superintendent in a traditional district.” The CSD desperately wanted to prove that charters could succeed under its auspices, so the district stretched beyond its authorizing role to help the new schools navigate the system.

In fall 2009, the CSD added three new schools, including a virtual high school that enrolled more than 1,000 students, and these schools needed the same guidance and services as the schools that had opened one year earlier. Two challenges faced the district office as it tried to distinguish itself as a charter authorizer and not just a traditional school district.

First, the CSD struggled to implement a comprehensive accountability scheme based on student performance on state assessments. The state department embargoes test scores for months after receipt, so the public does not have access to the results. District staff, parents, and teachers knew test scores, but schoolwide and districtwide averages could not be reported to the CSD board or its school boards because that would become public information. Without these data, school leaders did not have the current achievement information necessary to isolate areas of need and propose interventions. For charter schools, accountability for results is critical. By the time results were made public, the next school year had already begun.

Second, CSD staff continued to provide guidance to existing schools while simultaneously helping to launch new ones. With high staff turnover at existing schools (two of the five principals were replaced between the first and second year, not to mention numerous changes among assistant principals and teachers) and the addition of new schools, school officials needed training in critical procedures. Student information-system management and reports to the state, along with the means for implementing new curricula and distinguishing which state policies charters were exempt from and which they were not, were a mystery to many.

All of these issues converged as schools performed their primary purpose of educating students, frustrating progress on both fronts (operations and accountability). The financial circus kept school budgets in flux, making it difficult to prepare for additional student services, hire teachers, and develop strategic plans.

To make matters worse, the S. C. Charter School Act requires board elections at each charter school annually, resulting in the loss of institutional knowledge every year. “Folks operating charter schools were very naive for the most part, simply because they had never done it before,” says Brazell. Sometimes these new boards wanted to change course and replaced the principal, even after a school’s first year. In other cases, a principal was hired and then replaced before a new school ever opened its doors. At every turn, the CSD was forced to use hasty, temporary measures to help resolve problems that could be traced to the state policies in place. What resulted was a haphazard set of practices, inconsistently applied, with plenty of doubt to go around. “All of this put the district in a really compromising position,” says Connections Academy principal Reaves.

Hope for the Future

Fortunately, the story does not end there. Today, the CSD oversees 13 schools that serve more than 10,000 students. In 2010–11, Superintendent Brazell finished his second school year with the district and has filled key staff positions with knowledgeable personnel, many with a history at the South Carolina Department of Education. CSD staff experience has proved invaluable to the new charter operators. “Staff with experience in operations has helped to get a school’s questions answered quickly, and it’s allowed us to start talking about what a good district should be,” says Brazell. Only one charter has been revoked, so despite a roller coaster of financial adjustments and procedural changes, the schools are stabilizing. In addition, the 2011–12 state budget included a funding increase for CSD schools. Virtual schools received an additional $1,750 per student, while brick-and-mortar charters received an additional $3,250. Although the amount depends on a student’s category (grade level, special needs, etc.), the average CSD student is funded at approximately $5,000, still much lower than the average traditional school student but better than prior levels.

What took South Carolina’s charter movement so long? First, advocacy from key leadership positions had been missing. Brazell had no choice but to handle operational and administrative duties while also explaining the charter concept to legislators in the statehouse. The 2010 elections propelled a strong charter supporter into the state superintendent’s office. Dr. Mick Zais expressed support for charters in his campaign and made the 2011 charter legislation one of his first priorities. “That was a game changer,” acknowledged board chair McLaurin. “I’ve got to believe that we are creating a change in the culture, and he bought into that. He’s genuinely a believer in competition. Our whole relationship with the state department [of education] has changed.”

Second, authorizers with varied commitments to the reform effort slowed the growth of new schools. The statewide authorizer allowed a set of schools located in different areas around the state to coalesce as a group with a common outlook on education reform. All agreed that charters can succeed only if the initial political and administrative obstacles are overcome.

South Carolina’s statewide authorizer is less schizophrenic these days, though the concern coming to the fore is greater focus on support and administration than was intended. Brazell is looking to change that. With less uncertainty as to whether the schools will actually survive, the CSD can concentrate more on school quality and achievement. “The district board is freeing our office to concentrate on oversight and accountability instead of authorization,” says Brazell, which helps to narrow the focus for district staff. “I’ve told the schools that the expectations are higher now, and we are going to be focusing efforts on compliance. We’ve come a long way.”

“In any start-up that I’ve ever seen succeed, five years out from the start the business is never exactly like the business plan said it would be,” says McLaurin. “You’ve got this view of how the world is, but then you get out there and start interacting with the world and things change. I think that process was inevitable.”

Should these problems be solved, the fact remains that so long as the CSD continues to authorize schools, the district will have to train new school leadership and staff on compliance with state standards, while also holding all schools accountable for performance. In August 2011, the CSD approved seven charter-school applicants to open in the 2012–13 school year. Perhaps the strong leadership in the state and district superintendents’ offices, along with more experience among district and school staff, will result in more effective operations and better student outcomes in the future.

Jonathan Butcher is education director for the Goldwater Institute and served as the CSD’s director of accountability from 2009 to April 2011. Joel Medley is the director of the North Carolina Office of Charter Schools and was the director of the Charter School Office at the South Carolina Department of Education from 2008 to 2010.

Behind the Headline
The Case for Special EducationVouchers
Education Next | Winter 2010

Former State Assemblyman Michael Benjamin makes the case for special ed vouchers in New York City in an op-ed appearing in today’s Post. Jay Greene and Stuart Buck explained how special ed vouchers work and dispelled myths about the vouchers in an article appearing in the Winter 2010 issue of Ed Next.

“[Y]ou simply cannot fix America’s schools by `scaling’ charter schools. It won’t work. Charters schools offer proof of the concept that great teaching is a huge difference-maker, but charters can only absorb a tiny fraction of the nation’s 50 million public schoolchildren. Real reform has to go beyond charters – and it has to include the unions. That’s what Brill figured out.”

Wrong. Like many education establishmentarians, Nocera makes the mistake of confusing pedagogy and governance. The former—e.g. great teaching—is a hard nut to crack and Nocera is right to suggest, as does Brill, that there perhaps aren’t enough great teachers in the pipeline (or in charter schools) to educate all 50 million public school students.

But there is certainly no such impediment to `scaling’ charters. Every public school in America could be a charter school tomorrow if policymakers would allow it. Would that “fix” America’s schools? Not necessarily. But it would help.

The other problem with the scaling argument is that it assumes that big is beautiful—that no matter how successful you are, if you can’t replicate your methods of success, then your model won’t be useful to the American public school system. That is true only if you assume a governance structure like the one we now have: a system managed from above. The monolith that we now call public education is dominated by special interests, including unions, that are able to dictate education policy by keeping their hands on a few levers of control (mainly on Capitol Hill and in state capitals).

It is not so much that “reform has to go beyond charters” as it is that real reform must embrace choice—choice at the individual level. In fact, scaling up is really about scaling down.

The new MDRC study of New York City’s small schools seems to make the point perfectly. To quote from the document,

During the past decade, New York City undertook a district-wide high school reform that is perhaps unprecedented in its scope, scale, and pace. Between fall 2002 and fall 2008, the school district closed 23 large failing high schools (with graduation rates below 45 percent), opened 216 new small high schools (with different missions, structures, and student selection criteria), and implemented a centralized high school admissions process that assigns over 90 percent of the roughly 80,000 incoming ninth-graders each year based on their school preferences.

At the heart of this reform are 123 small, academically nonselective, public high schools. Each with approximately 100 students per grade in grades 9 through 12, these schools were created to serve some of the district’s most disadvantaged students and are located mainly in neighborhoods where large failing high schools had been closed. MDRC researchers call them “small schools of choice” (SSCs) because of their small size and the fact that they do not screen students based on their academic backgrounds.

And, according to MDRC, these schools worked. Graduation rates were nearly 10 points higher in the small schools. And the positive effects were spread out to all subgroups, including minorities and the poor.

“Are these small schools perfect?” writes Joe Williams in a New York Post op-ed. “Of course not. In fact, the MDRC report adds to the growing evidence that, while New York City is graduating students at a higher rate than a decade ago, most of these kids are still not ready for college…. Bloomberg and his would-be successors should read the MRDC report from the vantage point of those whose job it is to drive change.”

Williams is right to call out “those whose job it is to drive change.” But that change, as the dramatic restructuring of the system that MDRC studied in New York City shows, must be bold. And it suggests that the question we must ask is “How do you `scale up’ small?”

- Peter Meyer

This post was originally published on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View

In the first round, the state supreme court in 2004 struck down a statewide voucher program enacted by the legislature for the benefit of students in low-performing districts. The plaintiffs alleged, and the court narrowly concurred, that the program violated a provision of the state constitution that school boards “shall have control of instruction in the public schools of their respective districts.” The court held that to require school districts to turn over some locally raised money to private schools, as the law did, offended that provision.

This seemed to suggest that a program adopted by a local school board might survive, and a test recently emerged. Suburban areas with high-performing school districts have shown little support for vouchers, so it was surprising to have the first locally enacted voucher program come from Douglas County, a Denver suburb with one of the highest median incomes in the country. School choice advocates, however, had targeted the district in school board elections. As a result, the normally nonpartisan elections turned partisan in 2009, when the Republican Party endorsed a slate of four candidates and handily defeated candidates endorsed by the teachers union.

Those efforts bore fruit in March 2011 when Douglas County’s school board unanimously approved the Pilot Choice Scholarship Program. Through this plan, any student who had been enrolled in district schools for at least one year could apply for a voucher of approximately $4,600, equal to 75 percent of state per-pupil funding, to attend a “partner” private school, with the school district keeping the other 25 percent. Religious schools would not have to waive admission requirements to participate, but would have to offer an exemption for voucher students who wished to be excused from religious services. Of the 19 initial partner schools, 14 were sectarian. The school board capped the program at 500 students but expected it to expand. As the third-largest district in the state, Douglas County serves more than 61,000 students.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), along with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, sued, citing a host of constitutional offenses, including violating the ban on support for private schools and churches (the state’s Blaine Amendment), the ban on religious tests, the guarantee of religious freedom, the uniformity requirement in the education clause, the prohibition on support for private institutions, and, for good measure, the guarantee of local control. After a three-day hearing in August, state district court judge Michael Martinez granted the ACLU’s request for a permanent injunction. Clearly alarmed by the religious instruction that would occur at religious schools—“not only is the risk of religion intruding into the secular educational function great, that risk is inevitable and unavoidable due to the very structure of the Scholarship Program”—Judge Martinez accepted nearly all of the ACLU’s claims.

Voucher supporters lined up to assist Douglas County in defending the program. The Daniels Fund, a well-regarded and influential foundation in the Rocky Mountain region, pledged $530,000 for legal expenses. In addition, the libertarian Institute for Justice filed an appeal on behalf of several families whose children were granted vouchers.

While the ACLU obviously has a grab bag of provisions at its disposal going forward, one risk is its reliance on the state Blaine Amendment. If state courts rule that the amendment requires that religious students and institutions be treated differently than secular ones, as Martinez’s ruling seems to imply, it could potentially raise a federal challenge under both the First and Fourteenth Amendments as a violation of free exercise and equal protection. The most promising outcome for Douglas County would be for Mickey Mouse to meet the U.S. Constitution.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

Yes, answers Roland Fryer in an amazing study released this month.  Based on earlier work, he identified 5 features of charter schools that helped them produce strong results: “increased time, better human capital, more student-level differentiation, frequent use of data to inform instruction, and a culture of high expectations.”  Fryer then somehow convinced the superintendent and school board in Houston to pursue these five reforms in a serious way in 9 struggling traditional public schools. (CORRECTION — the Houston folks report that they were eager to pursue some promising reforms and required no convincing.  They should be commended for that.) Here, in brief, is what they did:

To increase time on task, the school day was lengthened one hour and the school year was lengthened ten days. This amounts to 21 percent more school than students in these schools obtained in the year pre-treatment and roughly the same as successful charter schools in New York City. In addition, students were strongly encouraged and even incentivized to attend classes on Saturday. In an effort to significantly alter the human capital in the nine schools, 100 percent of principals, 30 percent of other administrators, and 52 percent of teachers were removed and replaced with individuals who possessed the values and beliefs consistent with an achievement-driven mantra and, wherever possible, a demonstrated record of achievement. To enhance student-level differentiation, we supplied all sixth and ninth graders with a math tutor in a two-on-one setting and provided an extra dose of reading or math instruction to students in other grades who had previously performed below grade level. This model was adapted from the MATCH school in Boston – a charter school that largely adheres to the methods described in Dobbie and Fryer (2011b). In order to help teachers use interim data on student performance to guide and inform instructional practice, we required schools to administer interim assessments every three to four weeks and provided schools with three cumulative benchmarks assessments, as well as assistance in analyzing and presenting student performance on these assessments. Finally, to instill a culture of high expectations and college access for all students, we started by setting clear expectations for school leadership. Schools were provided with a rubric for the school and classroom environment and were expected to implement school-parent-student contracts. Specific student performance goals were set for each school and the principal was held accountable for these goals.

And the result:

In the grade/subject areas in which we implemented all five policies described in Dobbie and Fryer (2011b) – sixth and ninth grade math – the increase in student achievement is dramatic. Relative to students who attended comparison schools, sixth grade math scores increased 0.484σ (.097) in one year. In seventh and eighth grades, the treatment effect in math is 0.125σ (.065) and is statistically significant. A very similar pattern emerges in high school math: large effects in ninth grade and a more modest but statistically significant effect in tenth and eleventh grade, which suggest that two-on-one tutoring is particularly effective. The results in reading exhibit a different pattern. If anything, the reading scores demonstrate a slight decrease in middle school, though not statistically significant, and a modest increase in high school. Impacts on attendance – which are positive and statistically insignificant – are difficult to interpret given the longer school day and longer school year.

Strikingly, both the magnitude of the increase in math and the muted effect for reading are consistent with the results of successful charter schools. Taking the treatment effects at face value, treatment schools in Houston would rank third out of twelve in math and fifth out of twelve in reading among charter schools in NYC with statistically significant positive results in the sample analyzed in Dobbie and Fryer (2011b).

Using data from the National Student Clearinghouse, we investigate treatment effects on two college outcomes: whether a student enrolled in any college (extensive margin) and whether they chose a four-year college, conditional on enrolling in any college (intensive margin). Calculated at the mean, students are 6.2 percentage points less likely to attend college, though the effect is not statistically significant. Conditional on attending college, however, treatment students are 17.7 percentage points more likely to enroll in a four-year institution, relative to a mean of 46% in comparison schools – a 40% increase.

Traditional public schools can get results like a KIPP school without having to actually become KIPP schools. They just have to imitate a few of the key features employed by KIPP and other successful charter schools. This is incredibly encouraging news. It means that traditional public schools are really capable of making significant progress if only they become more open to learning from successful charter schools. They can make that progress without having to cure poverty and all other social ills (although I’m sure that would be nice too).

Of course, there are serious concerns about bringing these reforms to scale, which Fryer considers in his conclusion. He dismisses union opposition as a serious obstacle based on the fact that the unionized school system in Denver is pursuing a similar reform strategy. I’m not so easily convinced that unions nationwide will jump aboard a plan that involves huge turnover in staffing and significantly more hours and days per year. Cost is another barrier to bringing this reform strategy to scale, but he notes that the marginal cost is only $1,837 per student and the rate of return on that investment would be roughly 20%.

But the most serious concerns seem to be fidelity to implementation and shortages of quality labor. We could all be heart surgeons if we just did what heart surgeons do. But there are only so many people capable of doing that work and not every office building can be re-organized as a hospital. Then again, successful teaching isn’t exactly heart surgery (although it can be just about as important), so perhaps there is real hope of bringing this to scale. We won’t know until we try it in more places with more schools.

- Jay Greene

Addressing these challenges is the focus of three new white papers a Public Impact team led by Lucy Steiner recently produced with the support of the National Charter School Resource Center and the U.S. Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program. The papers in this series, co-authored by Steiner, Daniela Doyle and Joe Ableidinger, offer practical ways for city-based organizations to support creation of high-quality charter schools, foster development of talent pipelines, and guide prospective investors. Here’s a quick synopsis of all three papers.

Growing the best charter schools is one strategy Public Impact has previously addressed.  But starting excellent new schools is essential, too. Incubating High-Quality Charter Schools: Innovations in City-Based Organizations explores how the members of a national network of city-based organizations—the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust—are using one promising approach to creating high-quality school options: incubating charter school leaders.

These are the major lessons learned by CEE-Trust member organizations:

• Attract and develop effective school or CMO leaders by building local and national recruitment pipelines, while also removing candidates who fall short.
• Partner strategically to help leaders open and operate high-quality charter schools and CMOs by delegating some training and support responsibilities to external partners and pooling resources and tools such as application materials with other incubators.
• Champion school leaders in the community both by introducing leaders to communities in advance of school opening and recruiting exceptional board members.
• Coordinate advocacy to support new charter leaders by enlisting partners to push for supportive policies, building relationships with local districts and authorizers, and publicizing success.

Developing Education Talent Pipelines for Charter Schools: A Citywide Approach explores how New Orleans and Indianapolis are developing robust talent pipelines to expand the supply of effective charter school teachers and leaders in their cities. The paper highlights the indicators of a robust talent pipeline so that charter supporters of all kinds can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their own efforts.  The six indicators include:

• A facilitator who focuses specifically on the talent pipeline
• Local and national talent providers
• High-performing charter schools (because they become magnets for talent)
• Philanthropic funding for education talent initiatives
• Political support
• A favorable state policy environment

Developing City-Based Funding Strategies: Investments to Create a Robust Charter Sector outlines five lessons learned from veteran charter school investors:

• Address market failures by targeting a bottleneck in the sector that others are unwilling to fund or have not yet identified. School leaders and facilities are common examples.
• Have a laser focus on quality. Charter schools’ credibility and transformative powers rest in their quality.
• Scale what works. The charter sector has produced some remarkable proof points.  Yet the best charter schools serve just a tiny fraction of the students who need them, causing demand to far outstrip supply.
• Leverage investments by funding fewer projects more deeply.
• Identify opportunities for district collaboration. One of the best ways to maximize each dollar is to invest in efforts that not only improve the charter sector in a city, but the district school system as well.

While federal support and state-level legislative changes are crucial to wide-scale excellence in the charter sector, city leaders need not sit on the sidelines. Indeed, city-based organizations can take charge to attract and grow excellent charter schools using these strategies.

NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit grant-making organization, has been for more than a decade one of the leading private funders of CMOs serving low-income urban neighborhoods. Along the way, we have amassed data and direct experience that provide a window into this world. Our analysis suggests that most of the CMOs in our “portfolio” are outperforming the local districts, especially for low-income students. Nevertheless, there is significant variation across our sample. The highest-performing CMOs in the NewSchools portfolio tend to be those that have embraced a “no excuses” approach to teaching and learning. These CMOs have created organizational and school cultures based on explicit expectations for both academic achievement and behavior, with meaningful consequences when those high expectations are not met.

Creating a New Market

In 1999, NewSchools Venture Fund made its first grant to University Public Schools, an emerging charter school network founded by Don Shalvey and Reed Hastings in California that would soon be renamed Aspire Public Schools. Supported by follow-on investments from NewSchools and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Aspire became the nation’s first nonprofit charter management organization. Since then, NewSchools has helped launch and grow many more CMOs, mostly in California, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Working alongside NewSchools have been national funders like the Walton Family Foundation, the Fisher Fund, the Robertson Foundation, the Dell Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Charter School Growth Fund (see “The $500 Million Question,” forum, Winter 2011). These and a variety of locally based investors, notably the Robin Hood Foundation in New York and the Renaissance Schools Fund in Chicago, have channeled hundreds of millions of dollars into developing an entirely new sector of public education.

What’s a CMO?

Unlike EMOs (education management organizations), their somewhat older cousins, CMOs are not-for-profit. Their nonprofit status has at least three advantages: access to philanthropic capital, greater mission alignment, and diminished political resistance. And, unlike more loosely organized school networks, CMOs manage their schools directly, either under contract to a school board of trustees or under a fully integrated governance structure (in states where single charter school boards can operate multiple schools or campuses). Under such arrangements, a CMO has effective authority to hire and fire a school’s leadership team and to establish most of the educational and operational systems in each of its schools.

Most CMOs are organized much like a typical school district, at least on paper. There are centralized functions, including executive leadership and several operations teams, which provide certain administrative, financial, and educational support services to each school in the network. The schools are generally distinct units (often with separate legal status and their own boards of directors), but they operate under the overall control of the central office.

By the most recent national accounting in 2008, there were more than 80 CMOs, operating almost 500 schools. The most well-known charter school network in the country is the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), but the KIPP Foundation is not a CMO. The 99 KIPP schools around the country are legally and operationally distinct from the foundation and, up until recently, each KIPP school stood on its own as an individual charter school. Over the past few years, several high-performing KIPP schools have begun to grow their own small clusters of schools, often managed in a way that qualifies them to be called CMOs.

My focus in this article is on the CMOs in the NewSchools portfolio, which often operate 10 to 20 schools or more, serve thousands of children, and are materially different from their smaller counterparts, especially in terms of finances and management. Beginning in the school year 2003–04, we began to collect data on our CMOs: their central offices, student performance, staffing, growth, and finances. The combination of quantitative data and a decade of firsthand observations of CMOs in action forms the basis for this analysis.

Although the data presented below represent a unique look inside some of the more well-established CMOs in the country, it is important to keep in mind their limitations. First, the NewSchools portfolio includes 18 CMOs, just a slice of the total market. Second, this sample was not randomly selected. Indeed, the NewSchools investment model is based on high standards and thorough diligence for each venture we support. Third, the achievement data that we have collected do not track individual student growth over time, but instead are based on annual snapshots of grade-level and school-level performance. Finally, the data are mostly self-reported by the CMOs, and although we have scrubbed the submissions, there may still be errors and inconsistencies.

It should also be noted that NewSchools is not an unbiased observer. We believe strongly in the potential of charter schools and CMOs to transform educational outcomes in historically underserved communities and on that basis have invested millions of dollars and thousands of hours. Nevertheless, we are committed to transparency and to letting the facts speak for themselves.

The Portfolio

If the NewSchools CMO portfolio were a single school district, it would rank in size among the top 50 in the country, comparable to that of Fresno or Fort Worth. These CMOs operate exclusively in urban neighborhoods, serving predominantly low-income, high-need students (see Figure 1). The demographics of the CMO schools are roughly similar to nearby district-run schools.

On average, each CMO operates about a dozen schools, with future growth projected to reach just over 20 schools each. Our CMOs have been adding an average of 1.6 schools per year, although the pace of new school openings in any CMO is often uneven from year to year. The average annual CMO enrollment growth rate has been just over 45 percent. Many schools open with one or two grades and grow upward, adding one grade per year, to keep pace with the original cohort of students. Average school size at full enrollment is 442 students. Half of our 18 CMOs serve (or will serve) students in grades K through 12, three serve middle and high school, three are networks of elementary schools (including K–8 schools), and three operate only high schools.

Closing the Achievement Gap

The first question in any discussion about CMO schools is, how good are they? Measuring school or student performance is fraught with problems, especially if the goal is to make comparisons across classrooms, schools, districts, or states. We do not propose to solve these problems here. Specifically, our analytical approach is to use statewide assessments to compare student performance in our CMOs’ schools to that of students in the local district and state. Although we are able to track school and grade-level performance over time, our data set does not capture individual student results. Consequently, we are unable to measure directly the value our schools are adding to their students’ learning growth, relative to other schools. Given the similar demographics between schools in our portfolio and those in their local districts, however, we believe it is possible to make reasonable, albeit imperfect, comparisons between these two samples.

Looking at each of the CMOs in the NewSchools portfolio individually, we find that half are producing breakthrough results, with average proficiency rates that are at least 15 percentage points higher than their local districts. About 20 percent are outperforming the districts by a modest amount (proficiency rates that are between 5 and 15 percent higher than the districts). Another 20 percent are performing about the same as the local district, and the remaining CMOs are underperforming their districts. Performance among schools within a CMO can also vary. When comparing school-to-district gaps within a CMO, the typical standard deviation is almost 10 percentage points. This level of variation seems to hold for large and small CMOs alike.

Viewed as a group, schools managed by our CMOs achieve rates of proficiency on state assessments in reading and math that average about 9 percentage points higher than those of schools in their local districts (see Figure 2). The gap widens to almost 12 percentage points when we compare only low-income students. Limiting the sample to schools open five years or more, the gap widens to more than 14 percentage points. Across the portfolio, CMO schools perform somewhat better in math than in reading, when benchmarked against their local peers on state assessments. On average, the math-reading proficiency gap is about 4 percentage points. Not surprisingly, the performance of these CMO schools relative to their non-low-income peers statewide is not as impressive.

Although the NewSchools data set does not include state test results for individual students, it does include grade-level performance for most schools, which makes it possible to track improvement of cohorts of students from one year to the next. Looking at these data across all the elementary and middle schools that had test results for at least one grade in 2007, one finds a fairly consistent pattern of improvement. Annual math gains between 2007 and 2010 were almost 6 percentage points, while reading gains averaged more than 8 points per year.

Critics often suggest that superior performance in the charter sector is a result of high levels of attrition, caused by implicit or explicit efforts on the part of school staff to “counsel out” the students who are hardest to educate. Excluding students who move away, our data show average attrition rates of about 12 percent, compared to many schools in high-poverty urban neighborhoods that have annual attrition rates of close to one-third. Interestingly, the highest performers in our portfolio have below-average attrition rates of approximately 9 percent, while the lowest performers have above-average attrition rates of close to 20 percent. Apparently, the dynamic is what one would hope for: Parents at higher-performing schools are more likely to stay put, while those at lower-performing schools are voting with their feet.

A recent study commissioned by America’s Promise Alliance found that the average four-year graduation rate nationally is approximately 75 percent. Graduation rates among minority students are typically less than 65 percent, and among large urban school systems, graduation rates fall below 55 percent. Across the NewSchools CMO portfolio, comparable graduation rates average 65 percent. According to a 2010 U.S. Labor Department study, just over 70 percent of the graduating class of 2009 enrolled in college the following fall. Statistics for low-income students show the college-going rate for high school graduates at 57 percent. Eighty-four percent of graduating seniors from our CMOs enrolled in college, almost 60 percent in four-year colleges.

Finances and Staffing

The second question about CMOs is inevitably, how much do they cost? To answer this question, one has to examine financial data at both the school and central-office levels. Even though most CMO schools operate at breakeven on public revenue, many require significant private financial support before they can survive on public revenue alone. Philanthropy plays a key role in financing CMO start-up and growth.

The underlying economic model of all CMOs is based on predictable public revenue streams, tied to school enrollment. Average per-pupil public revenues (from all sources, including federal Charter School Program start-up grants) across the NewSchools portfolio were more than $11,500 in 2010, ranging from about $9,000 to $16,000, depending on the states and cities where schools are located. Public revenue for charter schools is typically 10 to 20 percent below per-pupil funding levels at neighboring district-run schools. In addition, charter schools are generally required to spend a significant portion of their budgets on rent or facilities-related debt service, an extra cost that is generally not included in most charter-school funding formulas. Taken together, these two factors can reduce charter school resources available for educational programs by 25 to 35 percent, relative to comparable district-run schools.

With a few exceptions, the vast majority of charter schools operated by NewSchools CMOs are self-sufficient on public revenues (excluding major capital costs). These schools typically incur deficits prior to their first year of operation (although these deficits are sometimes carried on the books of the CMO central office), as they begin to hire staff, upgrade facilities, and purchase equipment and supplies, all before the first students arrive and before any public tuition payments are made. About half of new schools run at breakeven during their first year of operation, although school-level deficits are common in the first three years of operation for those schools that begin with only one or two grade levels. About 40 percent of schools in the NewSchools portfolio incur cumulative deficits through their first three years of operation. These early deficits are often partially offset by start-up grants from the federal Charter School Program and the Walton Family Foundation, which together typically amount to more than $500,000 per school, spread out over several years.

The largest component of a typical school operating budget within our CMO portfolio is instructional personnel, which comprises just under half of all school spending (see Figure 3). School administration and other noninstructional activities account for about 17 percent of expenditures on average, with facilities expenses close behind at 15 percent. Nonpersonnel instructional expenses are just under 10 percent of a typical budget, with the remainder going toward building reserves and CMO management fees.

Operational spending per pupil during the 2010 school year was approximately $10,200, with average school surpluses of just under $500,000. Typically, these surpluses are used to build operating reserves of about 5 percent of a school’s yearly budget, to insure against normal cash-flow needs, temporary revenue interruptions, or fluctuations in annual per-pupil funding levels. Additional reserves are occasionally required as part of debt covenants, especially regarding bonds or loans for school buildings. Many schools have larger reserves to lay a financial foundation for a future purchase or renovation of a permanent facility.

The net philanthropic need for all schools managed by CMOs in the NewSchools portfolio is effectively zero, but since the schools that operate with surpluses generally do not cross-subsidize those with deficits (sometimes even within the same CMO), the actual school-level philanthropic need across the 71 schools in the portfolio with operating deficits was more than $25 million in the 2010 school year, or just under $360,000 per school.

The average central-office budget in 2010 was about $5.3 million, or more than $1,500 per pupil. More than 60 percent of central-office costs were for personnel. On average, central offices employed about 45 staff, which is 14 percent of total CMO staff, including school-level personnel. Staffing in the average CMO home office is dominated by personnel providing educational services (including assessment, curriculum, and professional development) and operations (including finance and facilities). Over the past five years, the relative sizes of these two categories have been moving in the opposite direction: The education staff has been growing (from 21 percent to 34 percent), while the operations staff has been shrinking (from 33 percent to 25 percent).The ratio of central-office staff to total CMO staff tends to decline over time, averaging about 30 percent in year one and falling to 12 percent by year seven. The average number of central-office staff per school fluctuates from year to year within most CMOs, but does not seem to consistently trend up or down over time. Across the NewSchools portfolio, central offices tend to have about 4.5 staff per school, although some of the larger CMOs are beginning to see this ratio drop.

As Figure 3 shows, CMO management fees are typically about 7 percent of a school’s budget, although it is not uncommon for fees to reach 10 percent or higher, depending on the breadth of services provided by the central office. On average, these fees covered more than 55 percent of central-office costs in the 2009-10 school year.

During its first year of operation, a CMO central office earns relatively little of its revenue on management fees from preexisting schools. If the central office is established before the first school opens, annual fee revenue begins at zero. On average, fee revenue rises steadily as a percentage of total central-office costs, as the number of schools and students grows, exceeding 60 percent by year seven (see Figure 4).

Over the first seven years of operation, a typical CMO central office in the NewSchools portfolio incurred a cumulative operating deficit of more than $7.3 million, which translates into $800,000 to $900,000 per school, or up to $2,000 per seat at full enrollment. The distribution of deficits around this mean, however, is wide, ranging from under $300,000 per school to $2 million or more. Although it is difficult to allocate these costs precisely to specific activities, a significant portion of central-office expenditures is associated with growing the network of schools and building capacity for supporting new schools that are just beginning to come online.

Putting school-level and central-office economics together, CMOs in NewSchools’ portfolio have run cumulative deficits through the 2010 school year of more than $250 million, which amounts to about $3,150 per student at full enrollment for the schools that are currently up and running. Some school-level deficits are offset by surpluses at other schools within the same CMO network; other annual deficits at both the school and central-office levels are funded out of reserves built up through surpluses in prior years. As a result of these factors, the net philanthropic need to date has probably been closer to $200 million, which translates into an average per-seat need of about $2,600, or more than $1 million per school. In some cases, this figure has exceeded $4,000 per seat and in others it has been under $500 per seat. (These figures appear consistent with an unpublished analysis conducted by the Charter School Growth Fund on the CMOs it has supported.) To keep this in perspective, the 25 to 35 percent inequity in per-pupil funding for charter schools mentioned above amounted to approximately $275 million in lost revenue for our CMOs in the 2009-10 school year, an amount that swamps their annual philanthropic need, even if the public funding gap is greatly exaggerated.

Patterns and Connections

The final question about CMOs is, what makes the highest performers better than the rest? The data do not point consistently to the causes for this variation, but there are some differential patterns in spending, staffing, and school design that suggest possible sources. Based on direct observations by the New-Schools team over the years, the effectiveness of management and execution may be equally important, although it is not so easily quantified.

The five highest-performing CMOs in NewSchools’ portfolio operate 85 schools and serve more than 28,000 students. Their low-income students have proficiency rates that are more than 25 percentage points higher than those in their local districts. Comparing these CMOs with the bottom five performers in the NewSchools portfolio, we find similarities: school sizes are virtually the same; central-office spending as a share of total CMO spending is about the same, as is instructional spending as a percentage of total spending. Nevertheless, there are quantifiable differences: School-level spending per pupil is higher, central-office staff comprises a higher percentage of total CMO staff, and the share of central-office staff devoted to human resources is greater.

The 20 percent spending gap between the lowest and highest performers is clearly a significant factor, although at least one of the CMOs in the top five spends less per pupil than the portfolio average. Our high-performing organizations spend some of the extra money hiring more teachers. Although the average number of students per teacher among the top five performers is only slightly lower than among the bottom five (15.1 vs. 16.6), the average masks larger differences. Three of the top five performers have student-teacher ratios below 14, while three of the bottom five performers have ratios above 18.

Another important factor is the investment that the most successful CMOs are making in building the capacity of their central offices, especially the focus on recruiting and developing talent, as well as building instructional support systems that are grounded in the use of performance data. Based on our observations and feedback from school personnel, these deep levels of central-office investment appear to be adding significant value to student performance.

The rate and pattern of growth also appear to have some connection to performance differences. Although the high-performing CMOs have added new schools at a faster overall rate than the low performers (1.7 per year vs. 1.3), their average enrollment growth is slower (37 percent vs. 49 percent). At the same time, the pattern of growth among the high performers has been more consistent over time, while the low performers tended to grow faster early in their development.

Of at least equal importance are less easily quantifiable differences in school design. Specifically, the most successful organizations strive to create enthusiasm for learning and an expectation of college success for all, with a commitment to hard work and persistence in the face of initial failures or setbacks. They have adopted standards-based curricula, with an intensive focus on literacy and numeracy as the first foundation for academic achievement, which typically manifests itself in extra time for reading and math each day and a relatively heavy reliance on direct instruction and differentiated grouping, especially in the early grades. And they are increasingly focused on developing and deploying comprehensive student assessment and coaching systems to ensure more effective and consistent classroom practice, not just from year to year but during the course of each school year.

Although several factors appear to distinguish the highest from the lowest performers, there is no obvious or simple pattern. With respect to almost every variable that we have examined, there is a wide distribution of data from one CMO to another, even among organizations with comparable performance, operating in the same markets, serving similar grade levels. Although the data can give us some hints about where the answers lie, some of the differences in CMO performance are most likely tied to the quality of management and effectiveness of execution, factors that are difficult to measure. It has been said that high-performing schools are the result of a hundred 1-percent solutions. Not only is there no silver bullet, but there is not even a secret sauce. The key to success is an unflagging attention to detail and an uncompromising commitment to excellence in all things, from the classroom, to the hallway, to the principal’s office. As difficult as it is to do all of this while growing a new organization, it is even harder to sustain it over time, especially as the original founding teams give way to a new generation of leaders. Some CMOs are already beginning to take and pass this test, but it will remain one of their greatest enduring challenges.

James A. Peyser is managing partner for city funds at NewSchools Venture Fund and a former chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education.

Indeed, young Matthew Sprowl, “disruptive and easily distracted,” seems to be the poster child for what charter critics have long said is the unfair advantage that charters have over their traditional school counterparts: charters don’t have to take all kids, regular schools do. In his third week of kindergarten at Moskowitz’s Harlem Success Academy 3, Matthew was suspended for three days, writes Winerip, for “bothering other children.” The problems escalated and, with help from Harlem Success, Matthew soon found a regular public school, where he was later diagnosed as having “attention disorder” and, over the last three years, “has thrived.”

It’s an interesting story and Winerip tells it well – too well to make his argument against charters stick. He gives Moskowitz schools their due, pointing out that her “students earn top honors.”  Typically, that’s the setup for the skimming trap.  It didn’t work — Success 3 just has too many Special Ed and English Language Learners to make the charge stick.  Winerip makes another mistake (for his argument’s point of view) in allowing Moskowitz assistant Jenny Sedlis to explain what happened to Matthew. Even in the short space Winerip gives her, Sedlis makes the chase for charters, convincingly;  at least for these eyes and ears. In what Winerip says were “two voluminous e-mails totaling 5,701 words,” Sedlis writes:

We helped place him in a school that would better suit his needs…  His success today confirms the correctness of his placement. I believe that 100 percent of the time we were acting in Matthew’s best interest and that the end result benefited him and benefited P.S. 75, which now has a child excelling.

Though Winerip tries mightily to cloud the issue with statistics (cherry-picked?), this is exactly how choice is supposed to work.  Many children do not thrive in traditional public schools and now have a choice to “move” to one that might be a better fit.  If sometimes movement is in the other direction, will we accuse traditional schools of cherry-picking?  We should be applauding Matthew, his mother, and the educators that have given him this  opportunity to succeed.

–Peter Meyer

‘Private school vouchers are not an effective way to improve student achievement,” said the White House in a statement on March 29. “The Administration strongly opposes expanding the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and opening it to new students.” But less than three weeks later, President Obama signed a budget deal with Republicans that includes a renewal and expansion of the popular D.C. program, which finances tuition vouchers for low-income kids to attend private schools.

School reformers cheered the administration’s about-face though fully aware that it was motivated by political expediency rather than any acknowledgment that vouchers work.

When Mr. Obama first moved to phase out the D.C. voucher program in 2009, his Education Department was in possession of a federal study showing that voucher recipients, who number more than 3,300, made gains in reading scores and didn’t decline in math. The administration claims that the reading gains were not large enough to be significant. Yet even smaller positive effects were championed by the administration as justification for expanding Head Start….

The positive effects of the D.C. voucher program are not unique. A recent study of Milwaukee’s older and larger voucher program found that 94% of students who stayed in the program throughout high school graduated, versus just 75% of students in Milwaukee’s traditional public schools. And contrary to the claim that vouchers hurt public schools, the report found that students at Milwaukee public schools “are performing at somewhat higher levels as a result of competitive pressure from the school voucher program.” Thus can vouchers benefit even the children that don’t receive them.

Research gathered by Greg Forster of the Foundation for Educational Choice also calls into question the White House assertion that vouchers are ineffective. In a paper released in March, he says that “every empirical study ever conducted in Milwaukee, Florida, Ohio, Texas, Maine and Vermont finds that voucher programs in those places improved public schools.” Mr. Forster surveyed 10 empirical studies that use “random assignment, the gold standard of social science,” to assure that the groups being compared are as similar as possible. “Nine [of the 10] studies find that vouchers improve student outcomes, six that all students benefit and three that some benefit and some are not affected,” he writes. “One study finds no visible impact. None of these studies finds a negative impact.”

Such results might influence the thinking of an objective observer primarily interested in doing right by the nation’s poor children. But they are unlikely to sway a politician focused on getting re-elected with the help of teachers unions.

“I think Obama and Duncan really care about school reform,” says Terry Moe, who teaches at Stanford and is the author of a timely new book, “Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools.” “On the other hand they have to be sensitive to their Democratic coalition, which includes teachers unions. And one way they do that is by opposing school vouchers.”

The reality is that Mr. Obama’s opposition to school vouchers has to do with Democratic politics, not the available evidence on whether they improve outcomes for disadvantaged kids. They do—and he knows it.

So Boehner deserves a thank you from the children of the District of Columbia for knowing how to play the one best policy card at his disposal.  But Boehner could not have played that card had he not had convincing evidence that the voucher program he was trying to restore had been effective.  For that evidence, we must thank the official evaluation of the voucher program conducted by University of Arkansas Professor Patrick Wolf and his research team.  That evaluation was conducted as a randomized experiment—something akin to a pill-placebo comparison that informs medical research.  All sides admit that these kinds of experiments are the gold standard for establishing what works and what does not.

A randomized evaluation proved possible in DC because more students wanted to use a voucher to go to private school than the number of vouchers available and the vouchers were distributed by means of a lottery (a la “Waiting for Superman”). When the results from the DC voucher experiment showed that the voucher students, who won the lottery, were going to college at a noticeably higher rate than those who had lost the lottery and remained in public schools, few could question the effectiveness of the program.

Just before this study was released, Obama signed into law a bill killing the program. Although government officials knew the study’s results at the time the president affixed his signature, the results were released to the public by the U.S. Department of Education only after the program had been killed.

So two years ago, the DC voucher story seemed to prove that research, no matter how well conducted, is generally too little and too late to have any impact.  Having conducted much of the early voucher research that led up to the DC evaluation, all these events were truly disappointing.  So in the account given in my book on the history of school reform (Saving Schools, Ch 7 & 8), I reluctantly came to the conclusion that the school choice movement may have to look to alternatives to school vouchers.

Boehner has proven me wrong. His tactical skill and personal commitment has resurrected a program in the District of Columbia—and a strategy for reform—that seemed as dead as Jack Robin. And policy researchers can be pleased that their work can, if circumstances are correct, provide a Speaker with the instrument needed to recall even politically contested programs, like school vouchers, to life.

- Paul E. Peterson

While the Administration appreciates that H.R. 471 would provide Federal support for improving public schools in the District of Columbia (D.C.), including expanding and improving high-quality D.C. public charter schools, the Administration opposes the creation or expansion of private school voucher programs that are authorized by this bill. The Federal Government should focus its attention and available resources on improving the quality of public schools for all students. Private school vouchers are not an effective way to improve student achievement. The Administration strongly opposes expanding the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and opening it to new students.

Rigorous evaluation over several years demonstrates that the D.C. program has not yielded improved student achievement by its scholarship recipients compared to other students in D.C. While the President’s FY 2012 Budget requests funding to improve D.C. public schools and expand high-quality public charter schools, the Administration opposes targeting resources to help a small number of individuals attend private schools rather than creating access to great public schools for every child.

A few quick thoughts:

1. The path to ESEA reauthorization just got a lot steeper, as many Republicans will refuse to play ball with an Administration not willing to compromise on a top GOP priority.

2. The Administration is being dishonest about the evaluation data, which show strong positive effects for the recipients of the DC vouchers. In fact, if anything, the current research shows stronger impacts for students receiving vouchers than for students attending charter schools.

3. The NEA: 1. Poor black kids in DC: Zero.

-Mike Petrilli

Additional photographs of the Catalyst Schools are available here.

It wasn’t exactly a marriage made in heaven. In fact, the idea that one of the Catholic Church’s most respected religious orders might run a public school sounded odd, maybe even, as Francis Cardinal George, head of the Archdiocese of Chicago, conjectured, illegal.

But a decade ago several trends in American education, and in the Catholic Church, made a Catholic-operated public school seem increasingly possible: 1) the traditional, parish-based Catholic school system, especially in the inner cities, was crumbling; 2) equally troubled urban public-school systems were failing to educate most of their students; and 3) a burgeoning charter school movement, born in the early 1990s, was beginning to turn heads among educators in both the private and public sectors.

The various currents merged in the Windy City in 2006 and 2007 when the Christian Brothers helped open two charter schools in impoverished neighborhoods on Chicago’s west side, embarking on a unique experiment in public education. Could Catholics run a school without mentioning Jesus, Mary, or Joseph? Without prayer, Mass, the rosary, the sacraments? Without God? And could the high wall between church and state be kept intact?

Back to Their Roots

The Christian Brothers—known in France, where the Catholic order was founded in 1680, as Frères des écoles chrétiennes or Brothers of the Christian Schools—have had some experience in education. The order’s founder, Jean-Baptist de La Salle, is the church’s patron saint of teachers and today the order serves nearly 1 million students in more than 80 countries, including some 20,000, mostly middle-class, students in 90 Catholic middle and high schools and education centers in the United States.

But what caught the eye of Arne Duncan, while he directed Chicago Public Schools (CPS), was the success the brothers were having with an initiative the order had launched in the early 1990s. They had opened San Miguel schools, named after a Christian Brother saint from Ecuador, in American pockets of poverty, including an Indian reservation in Montana, the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, and inner-city Camden, New Jersey. (In 2006 San Miguel merged with the Jesuits’ Nativity Schools; today the NativityMiguel Network operates over 70 schools for the poor in 26 states and the District of Columbia.)

The first Chicago San Miguel school opened in 1995, behind the infamous (now gone) stockyards. The goal was simple enough: bring to poor children, tuition-free, what the brothers were delivering to middle- and upper-class students in their other American schools, including small class sizes and a college-prep academic program.

It worked. Within a few years of opening, San Miguel Back of the Yards School’s low-income students were outperforming their Chicago Public Schools counterparts. The school’s success prompted Lands’ End company founder Gary Comer to donate $1.2 million to open a second school, now known as the Gary Comer Campus, in the blighted Austin neighborhood.

The schools employ a year-round academic calendar, have a 9:1 student-to-teacher ratio, and a core academic curriculum. They put heavy emphasis on reading—80 minutes a day, an average of 165 books read per year—and individualized instruction.

“Our model is not rocket science,” says Mike Anderer-McClelland, a former brother who is now president of the San Miguel organization in Chicago. “It is a lot of reading, writing, and arithmetic.”

The schools also have a Family and Graduate Support Program that not only tracks students through high school but helps them and their parents with tutoring and counseling, long after they leave left San Miguel at the end of 8th grade.

“We graduate 85 percent of our kids from high school in a neighborhood that traditionally graduates less than 40 percent,” says Anderer-McClelland. “Sixteen percent of our kids graduate from four-year colleges, compared to less than 5 percent of public school kids in our neighborhoods; and it’s only 3 percent of CPS Latinos and 4 percent of CPS blacks who graduate from college.”

Brother Ed Siderewicz and former Brother Gordon Hannon discuss the future of the Catalyst Schools.

Getting from No to Yes

A faith-based or church-sponsored charter school had been the subject of some discussion among Catholics in Chicago almost from the moment that Illinois passed a charter school law in 1996. Though the law initially allowed just 20 charters statewide, 15 of the slots were assigned to Chicago.

Coincidentally, the Archdiocese of Chicago, which ran the nation’s largest parochial school system with more than 130,000 students, was in the midst of a demographic and financial crisis. The archdiocese had closed 55 of its schools in the previous 10 years. (See my story, “Can Catholic Schools Be Saved?” features, Spring 2007.) At the time, CPS CEO Paul Vallas and others encouraged the church to consider converting their closed and closing schools to charters. But in 1999 Cardinal George said “No.” It was “a square circle,” he remarked, “not because of archdiocesan protocols but because of the nature of the beast.”

That view was shared by others, including the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA). “Are charter schools another way to keep Catholic schools alive, as some proponents suggest?” the NCEA asked in a 2009 press release. “Absolutely not.”

Catholic leaders could not support schools that were not grounded in religious instruction.

However, in what was perhaps an unintended consequence of the church’s crisis, a former priest became one of the first to open a public charter school in Chicago. John Horan, director of the Archdiocese’s Catholic Youth Organization when he was a priest, opened the public North Lawndale College Prep charter in 1998 as a layperson. “Catholic schools were terrific,” says Horan today, “but there just wasn’t enough financial support to send all of our poor kids to Catholic schools. So we thought, we…have to make public schools work.”

This is what Paul Vallas and Arne Duncan were thinking, too. Vallas had floated the idea of the Christian Brothers running a public school as early as 1997, recalls Ed Siderewicz, a young Christian Brother who helped start the San Miguel Back of the Yards School, “but we shrugged it off as compromising our mission.”

The question would keep coming up.

“The [San Miguel] board really wrestled with this,” recalls Sister Margaret Farley, director of personnel for the archdiocesan schools of Chicago and a founding board member of San Miguel. “We thought we could do a values-based school, but many members of the board were superparanoid about anyone thinking it would be a Catholic school.”

Early on in the discussions, Brother Gordon Hannon, a Chicago native and cofounder of San Miguel Back of the Yards School, researched the question in a paper for a graduate course at DePaul University. He concluded that though the San Miguel model “meets a clear and urgent secular need,” it was an open question whether “a faith-based group of competent, licensed educators” could run a publicly funded school without crossing the church/state line.

Brother Mike Fehrenbach, head of the Christian Brothers’ Midwest District, saw an opening in the “values-based” charter idea (instead of faith- or religious-based) and convinced the San Miguel board that the question was worth exploring. And in July of 2004 they formed a special charter-school planning committee.

Money was a significant consideration.

“We are probably near the limit of our ability to raise the dollars necessary to expand effectively,” wrote Fehrenbach in a one-page memo to the group, referring to the cost of running the two private San Miguel schools. He suggested that a charter school, which was publicly financed, might be a way of bringing education to the poor without having to spend so much time fundraising.

“This sounded like a growth company,” smiled Terry Toth, recalling his initial reaction to the idea. Toth, a lifelong Catholic, was a member of the San Miguel board as well as head of the world’s 12th largest investment bank, Northern Trust. “We would get 85 percent of our costs paid for—versus the need to fundraise 100 percent,” he laughs. “Win-win.” Toth also recognized that it was an opportunity to have an impact on more people. “Obviously, there was a church/state issue. But it was worth trying.”

“We Can Do This”

That is what Arne Duncan said, Ed Siderewicz recalls, when Gary Comer brought him to visit the San Miguel Austin campus in 2004. “You get your team behind it and I’ll make it work.”

“We asked a few questions,” recalls Siderewicz, “but I remember thinking that if our starting point is how to make it work rather than what we have to give up, then we should continue talking.”

And they did continue talking, with more and more detailed attention given to the question of San Miguel’s core mission. God or no God? For his part, Mike Fehrenbach didn’t see the charter undertaking as a challenge to the brothers’ mission, which he believed was “about offering people an opportunity for a future worth living.” They could do this by exemplifying Christian and Catholic values; they didn’t have to preach them. (This was not unknown territory for the Christian Brothers. In many countries they ran secular schools; in Indonesia, in fact, they operated a Muslim school.)

At the end of January 2005, the order’s district council voted to launch the charter school. And a month later, Brother John Johnston, then the order’s Superior General in Rome, weighed in: he saw “no important reasons for saying no” and “important reasons why we should say yes.”

Brother Mike Fehrenbach suggested that a publicly financed charter school might be a better way of bringing education to the poor.

Too Good to Be True

But the Christian Brothers were suddenly given another challenge. In the middle of writing the application for the charter school they wanted to open, Arne Duncan asked them to take over a public school he was closing in the North Lawndale neighborhood. This was part of the “turnaround” strategy that Duncan initiated in Chicago and would bring to his job as secretary of education in the Obama administration: improve some schools by closing them, then reopening under new management.

This was fine except that the brothers had already found the neighborhood for their new charter school: Austin, near the Gary Comer Campus San Miguel School. Austin was clearly needy; it had the highest number of homicides in Chicago in 2003 and nearly 30 percent of families with children under 18 lived in poverty. The neighborhood high school had the second-highest dropout rate in the state of Illinois. And the brothers had good connections in Austin, including with Circle Urban Ministries and the Rock of Our Salvation Church, an active evangelical Baptist congregation that owned a former Catholic school there.

“It was like manna from heaven,” recalls Rev. Abraham Lincoln Washington, pastor of the congregation, remembering Brother Ed Siderewicz’s request to open a charter school in his facility. Circle Rock had been struggling to keep open its 185-student religious school for the poor. “We had a vacant building and they had 300 years of experience educating kids.”

Reverend Washington’s congregation was also a strong one, providing a rich mix of social services, including a food pantry, legal and medical services, transitional housing, and education. “Education is like preventive medicine,” he says. “It’s so important.”

But the perfect union between Christian Brothers and Baptists would have to wait.

“At the last moment, Duncan asked us to take over the Howland School in North Lawndale,” recalls Siderewicz, “before we opened Austin Circle Rock. Naively, we said ‘Okay.’”

Although the neighborhoods are, technically, adjacent, Austin and North Lawndale are among Chicago’s largest neighborhoods and so the Howland School was more than five miles south of Austin Circle Rock—a world away. Especially for the Christian Brothers, who had no presence there.

Worse, North Lawndale was even needier than Austin. At the time of the 2000 U.S. Census, approximately 10,000 adult males from the neighborhood were in prison. Says Father Lawrence Dowling, pastor of St. Agatha Parish, which is just four blocks from the Howland School, “We have the highest incidence of HIV in the state, the highest rate of asthma for kids in the state, and the highest percentage of grandparents raising grandchildren in the nation.”

“As poor a census tract as you can find,” says John Horan, who had established his North Lawndale charter high school in one part of the sprawling Howland building. “Do I know the neighborhood?” he chuckles. “I am completely grey because of it.”

But the Christian Brothers didn’t know the neighborhood, and the neighborhood didn’t know them. Recalls Fehrenbach, “The community was in an uproar over the closing of their school—and then we came in.”

At an initial public meeting, a group calling itself “The Voice of the ExCon” sent dozens of people, who shouted and screamed. “It was a bit scary,” recalled Siderewicz. “But we made it through.”

The Christian Brothers eventually won the group over by giving them a tour of their San Miguel schools, but the initial animosity was a sign of things to come.

At the time of the 2000 census, approximately 10,000 adult males from the North Lawndale neighborhood were in prison.

A Tale of Two Schools

The brothers opened Howland Catalyst Charter School, on schedule, in the fall of 2006 and Austin’s Circle Rock Catalyst in 2007. The Howland plan called for starting with 4th and 5th grades, with two classes of 15 students in each grade; it would add 3rd and 6th grades in year two, 2nd and 7th grades in year three, 1st and 8th grades in year four, and kindergarten in year five, growing to 540 students in grades K through 8 by 2010. The Austin plan was to start with 5th and 6th grades beginning in 2007, add 7th and 8th grades in the second year, then build up from kindergarten to 4th grade in the next two years.

Both plans reflected the brothers’ belief in the importance of middle school, which was the focus of their San Miguel initiative. And true to the San Miguel model, they brought to the Catalyst charters their 9:1 student-to-teacher ratio, a belief in academic excellence, graduate and family support, and the goal of having every child reading at or above grade level before graduation (8th grade). They also brought modern assessment tools, including standardized testing several times a year, teacher-designed testing on a weekly basis, nightly homework that was checked each day by the teacher, and daily testing/assessment in core subject areas.

Despite the model, the polished floors, new banners, and students outfitted in spiffy olive and khaki uniforms, the staff at Howland was quickly overwhelmed by the outsized needs of its student population, which was 100 percent African American and 98 percent eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

“These children live in a world where you can’t appear weak—it can be deadly,” says assistant principal Igbazenda Moses, a Nigerian native and former Christian Brother who came to Chicago in 2002 and joined the Catalyst staff in 2006. “All of this makes the kids very uptight and creates a huge barrier to learning.”

Howland’s was a student population suffering from enormous environmental, economic, and social trauma—a kind of permanent Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

“Three weeks ago we had a child whose dad was shot and killed,” Moses says. “We have two kids like that here now. There is so much violence in their daily lives. They hit you—and they’re used to getting hit back. Self-control is a big issue for these kids.”

Howland’s leaders were caught off guard by the severity of the social and environmental ills, and the effort it would take to address them. As Brother Ed Siderewicz recalls, “We had every problem in the book and more. I had forgotten how hard it was to start a school.”

In 2009, Austin Circle Rock outperformed the other Austin neighborhood schools on the composite Illinois Standards Assessment Test.

God Help Us!

Assistant Principal Moses believes that the inability to teach religion was a significant part of the problem. “Talking about how to be respectful and trustworthy is not the same as talking about a person’s life being grounded in the knowledge of God,” he says. “And that’s what these children and their families need. ‘Character Counts’ just doesn’t do the trick.”

Brother Mike Fehrenbach smiles at this in-house dissent. “We’re doing fine.”

Both Catalyst schools use the popular youth ethics program developed in the early 1990s by the Josephson Institute of Ethics. Character Counts includes “six pillars”: Trustworthiness, Respect, Responsibility, Fairness, Caring, and Citizenship. Banners with those words are hanging throughout the school.

“Yes, we’re doing character education,” says Gordon Hannon, no longer a Christian Brother, but who was brought back in as Catalyst CEO at the end of the 2009 school year to help right the Howland ship. “But we have to go beyond that. To capture the essence of Catholic education, one of our core values is reverence. We must instill a sense of reverence for each other and show how that is different than respect.”

“You can get lost in debates about whether you should have a crucifix on the wall or not,” says John Horan. “It’s more about violence and drugs and poverty than the decorations.”

And leadership.

“I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach,” says Megan Dougherty, who arrived in August 2007, at the beginning of Howland’s second year, and was assigned a 5th-grade classroom. “There was no new teacher training,” she recalls. “And there was a new principal and a brand-new administrative team. The kids were being bad and teachers didn’t feel they had any support.”

Five teachers quit that year; another five didn’t return the next year. Dougherty would have been gone early except that when she came back from Christmas holiday, she realized that “my kids really missed me. I had to stay for them.” But she did eventually leave. “No one was happy with their job,” says Dougherty. “I loved the school. I loved the kids. But I couldn’t stay another year.”

Fourth-grade teacher Tina Corsby calls herself “the last of the Mohicans.” A veteran of CPS, she started at Howland Catalyst when it opened in 2006 and is still there in 2010. “It’s better than a regular public school,” she says. “Here, they really do care about the kids.”

But Corsby and her teacher colleagues were caught in the classic bind: trying to do a good job, they seemed to get no help from the top. “Job one in a school like this is to establish a culture of peace and high academic expectations and do rigorous social supports,” says John Horan. “Stable leadership makes all the difference in the world. You can’t end-run this one. The principal makes it all happen.” Howland has had three principals in three years.

“We’ve struggled from the get-go,” says Catalyst CEO Hannon. “We had everything we had at San Miguel, but we weren’t clear enough or deliberate enough about who we are. We were hesitant. We were not tough enough about the teaching, about embracing reading as the number one priority…. The bottom line is that the leadership wasn’t there.”

“It’s better than a regular public school,” says 4th-grade teacher Tina Corsby. “Here, they really do care about the kids.”

While these lessons were being learned, the San Miguel team opened its second Catalyst charter school, at Austin Circle Rock, in 2007. Perhaps it was just luck that Sala Sims, a seven-year veteran of CPS classrooms, applied for the job of principal. “I knew I wanted to start a school,” she recalls. The Chicago native met Brothers Mike and Ed in early 2007 “and never looked back.”

“She gets it,” says Brother Mike Fehrenbach.

And it showed. After just two years, Austin Circle Rock had an air of order that eluded Howland after three. From the front desk to the back offices and faculty lunchrooms, students and adults at Austin Circle Rock were both more relaxed and more disciplined. And the test scores proved it.

In 2009, Austin Circle Rock students outperformed the other Austin neighborhood schools on the composite (reading, math, and science combined) Illinois Standards Assessment Test (ISAT), with from 68 to 76 percent of students in grades 4 through 8 meeting or exceeding the state standard.

“It’s part of the Resurrection before our very eyes,” says Brother Ed Siderewicz.

Perhaps it was just luck that Sala Sims applied for the job of principal. “I knew I wanted to start a school,” she recalls.

How was Howland doing on its test scores?

“Flat would be generous,” says Hannon. In fact, Howland ISAT scores in 2009, with just 49.8 percent of its students meeting or exceeding the state standard, tied for last place among five public schools in North Lawndale.

How could the “formula for success” have gone so far wrong in Howland?

In many respects, it is as simple as what Donnell Harrison, the safety manager at Austin Circle Rock, calls, “following the model.” Donnell has manned the front desk at Austin since it opened. “At Howland they’re conforming to the community instead of to the model.”

This point has not been lost on Catalyst leaders, especially as they work on turning Howland around.

With Hannon as the new Catalyst CEO came a new principal, Chaun Johnson, and the two have become a veritable tag team. Johnson grew up in the Austin neighborhood, where Circle Rock is located and where his wife Natalie now teaches, and he attended Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School (now closed) in Lawndale. Johnson is articulate, self-assured, and, at over six feet tall, a commanding presence in a room full of teachers and students. (The photograph on page 40 shows him leading the “principal’s choir.”)

“This is a community of potential,” Johnson says. “It would appear that nothing can grow here. I’m here to change that.”

And it would appear, at the beginning of his second year, that he has done that.

Fehrenbach noticed the change “just after Christmas,” he says. “The tone shifted radically. Kids in the classrooms were actually smiling; there was less shouting.”

There is an air of discipline—in the old sense of the word, order—in the school that had not been there the previous two years. All children are now wearing uniforms with shirts tucked in. Test scores have improved markedly. Among Chicago’s 91 charters, Howland showed the fourth-best improvement on ISAT composite test scores in 2010, jumping from a 49.8 percent to a 60.8 percent passing rate.

With Hannon’s help, Johnson began conducting weekly teacher and staff training sessions. They brought in a curriculum instructor, and he brought in trainers for grade-level teacher meetings. The eventual goal, says Hannon, is to send teachers to a Lasallian Leadership Institute. Run by the Christian Brothers and named for the founder of the order, these three-year programs, including a one-week intensive training session during the summer and several weekend sessions, are meant to introduce teachers and administrators to the Lasallian mission and show them how to implement it in their classrooms and schools.

“This is a community of potential,” says Principal Chaun Johnson. “It would appear that nothing can grow here. I’m here to change that.”

Though the church/state question will no doubt live on, for now the leaders of the Catalyst charter experiment are convinced that the essence of their San Miguel schools can work in a public school setting. “We will live the values and virtues of the Christian Brothers without speaking the words,” says Chaun Johnson. “And that will open the doors so that our education plan can work.”

Johnson represents what it is that the Catalyst backers believe is the point of their charter: they bring a Catholic ethos, not the catechism, to children. And they educate them in reading, writing, and ’rithmetic.

While admitting that Howland still has challenges, Catalyst leaders believe they have turned the corner. And they have learned some hard lessons.

First, they did inadequate relationship building in the community. As many of those involved in the early discussions with the city have said, the Christian Brothers were “naive” or “stupid” to have taken on the Howland project before getting to know the neighborhood.

“A second mistake was starting Howland with grades 4 and 5,” says Ed Siderewicz. Taking on older kids, the brothers now know, requires the kind of knowledge of and relationships with a community that they did not have in North Lawndale.

Third, leadership and staff must understand the model. “Reforming the academic leadership team was our biggest challenge,” says Hannon.

And finally, “we worried too much about the church/state issue,” says Terry Toth. “We run a public school. We don’t have crucifixes on the wall. We don’t teach religion. We teach truth and honesty.”

Is there any one ingredient of success in these matters?

Says North Lawndale College Prep charter school’s John Horan, “You have to have a community of full-grown adults who understand the culture piece and the academic expectation piece. The kids will come around.”

“Hard work,” adds Hannon, who has all but lived at Howland for the last year and shows no signs of slowing down.

And Terry Toth remains bullish on Catalyst’s future. “We’re working on a strategic plan,” he says. “We’re trying to button down the academics and get more consistency there. We’ve taken faith-based and made it values-based. We’re even exploring opportunities to add more schools. The Circle Rock campus got more traction because of Rock of Our Salvation Baptist church and there was community support. So, we’ll be looking for similar things as we expand: a pastor, a supportive community, etc. We’ve learned that you can’t just plop a school down in a neighborhood and expect it to work.”

Brother Mike Fehrenbach would agree. “Be good citizens,” he told a Circle Rock graduation class. “We pledge to stand by you. Failure is not an option.”

Peter Meyer, former news editor at Life Magazine, is currently senior policy fellow with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and contributing editor at Education Next.

Additional photographs of the Catalyst Schools are available here.

Just weeks after the storm, officials turned the city’s failing schools over to the state-run Recovery School District (RSD) and gave the RSD five years to turn them around. That deadline was reached last December, and a vote by the state school board has extended the RSD’s reform effort, albeit with modifications that promise greater autonomy to schools that meet performance targets and create a process for qualified operators to take over failing schools. The December vote was a victory for charter schools and the RSD, one that boldy advances a school reform model as innovative as it is controversial.

District in Recovery

For decades, the deterioration of the New Orleans public school system had been shocking and seemingly inexorable. Students graduating with honors were sometimes incapable of elementary mathematics and some were barely able to read. One high-school valedictorian failed the graduate exit exam and then failed it some more—five times all told—and this was the school’s top student. Deferred maintenance and contract fraud ensured that the system’s physical infrastructure was as degraded as its instructional capacity. The system was bankrupt and the payroll so padded with no-shows—some of them deceased—that the FBI had set up a satellite branch within the school board’s central office. The hurricane was the coup de grâce. Some 110 of 127 schoolhouses were completely destroyed.

But ruin so extreme bred opportunity.

The RSD had been established in 2003 to manage “recovery” from academic failure, not from Hurricane Katrina, as the name is sometimes taken to imply, but had seized only five New Orleans schools before Katrina. After the storm, the RSD took control of an additional 63 deemed in need of radical intervention. The elected Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) retained authority over the system’s 16 still-viable schools, an administrative domain that shrank further as several of the best schools fled central control for the greater autonomy that comes with charter status. Today, the majority of OPSB schools are charters (see Figure 1). Further erosion of the board’s legitimacy came with the jailing of its former president for bribery.

In a similarly pivotal blow to the old order, with teachers scattered to 50 states and schools shuttered for the 2005 fall term, the OPSB discharged the 7,000 employees who had answered to it prior to Katrina, effectively nullifying the system’s contract with United Teachers of New Orleans. When the collective bargaining agreement formally expired at the end of the 2005–06 school year, it was not renewed.

Freed from union rules and OPSB central-office control, the RSD was able to act on its conviction that improved performance lay in spinning off as many schools as possible and chartering them as independent institutions with open-enrollment admissions policies and citywide catchment areas. Critics on the left accused Louisiana of implementing a version of the “shock doctrine,” whereby disaster is exploited to rescind worker protections and other strands of the social safety net. Critics on the right lamented that the Bush administration and its allies within the parochial school establishment failed to go even further and make private school vouchers a bigger part of the new regime.

Five years later, the city’s bet on charter schools had begun to pay off. The average rate of improvement in the New Orleans public schools stood at three to four times the statewide rate, despite persistent poor performance by several schools. For a change, extraordinarily good things could be said about New Orleans’s traditionally atrocious public school system.

Wake-up Call

Forced to compete for students and rank, the New Orleans schools were jolted from a decades-long coma. The awakening coincided with efforts in reform-minded cities like New York, Long Beach, California, and Washington, D.C. But what  was  distinctive about New Orleans was that the dynamic tension among schools was built into the system’s new polycentric administrative structure. The old apparatus of central control had not, as in other cities, merely been tweaked in the name of reform; it had been scrapped. Under the old order, the all-powerful school board and central office had seemed to view the district more as an adult jobs program and dispenser of patronage-based contracts than as a source of education for young people. Now, by design, no single apparatus of power—not OPSB, RSD, or the charter schools and charter management organizations that answered to them and to the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE)—could assert hegemony and dominate the others.

That made New Orleans a test not just of cutting-edge instructional practices but of variant administrative models as well. The city became a laboratory for the reinvention of its school system and, as was attested to by the enthusiasm of major foundations and the Obama administration, a crucible for ideas that might well be replicable in other cities.

As reformers hoped, the opportunity attracted a raft of independent school service providers ranging from charter management organizations to firms that aligned curricula with state standards and then developed metrics for measuring individual student achievement on a monthly or even weekly basis. Teach For America and the New Teacher Project saw opportunity and beefed up their presence in New Orleans, as did a homegrown organization called Teach NOLA. The Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools gained prominence as a deft legislative advocate for what was being called the New Orleans reform model. The largest of the independent reform groups, the nonprofit New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO), developed an array of services, subsidies, and other forms of support. To plug the human capital deficit in a city still depopulated by Katrina, NSNO began training prospective school leaders and directors as well as teachers. It also sponsored a small nonprofit to engage and inform parents about student choices in the new landscape. By 2010, NSNO had incubated 10 citywide, open-admission charter schools, the basic integer of local reform, and provided key personnel and services for dozens more.

Katrina spawned a gamut of visionary ideas for the transformation of New Orleans. They ranged from land-use plans to flood protection to the development of neighborhood health-care clinics to economic development and governance proposals. Many died at inception, undone by the impulse to re-create the old order before attempting its improvement. School reform was the exception. A sense of moral obligation combined with hard work and sheer exasperation to make it the most far-reaching achievement of the post-Katrina era. The decent public education long denied New Orleans youth was framed as a civil right at least as fundamental as the access to jobs, public accommodations, and polling places that had been milestones in an earlier generation’s fight to overcome segregation. The numbers show that charter schools were the barricades from which a new struggle was being waged successfully (see Figure 2). Parents, initially skeptical about school reform efforts, or accustomed to thinking of them as concessions aimed largely at luring parochial and private school students back into a low-income, black-majority system, flocked to the new schools, even lining up in pre-dawn hours to assure a child’s admission. Alone among American cities, New Orleans was actually beginning to close the much-discussed “performance gap” among students of different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. A poll in late autumn 2010 by Tulane University’s Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives found that 60 percent of New Orleans residents opposed returning the schools to OPSB. Small wonder then that many politicians had loosened their ties to teachers unions and school system contractors. Change was in the air and the implications were revolutionary.

Sustaining Momentum

Now, the question, as keenly studied by chartering’s foes as by its friends, is this: Can the early success be sustained? The challenges remain numerous and daunting. There is concern that school reform’s bountiful harvest in the half decade since Katrina has been low-hanging fruit and that further gains—even with sharp improvement, the system remains subpar—will be much more difficult. Looking ahead, Neerav Kingsland, a Yale Law graduate and strategist for NSNO, talks about “Charter Issues 2.0,” the problems that arise on the way from being 10 percent of the system to being 80 percent of the system, the next and far more demanding phase of work.

For the nation’s foremost experiment in charter schools to rest even briefly on its laurels would be to risk setbacks, Kingsland and like-minded reformers contend. Loss of momentum would be pounced on by now-disenfranchised partisans of the old regime eager to buttress their claim that the rising test scores are somehow bogus or, in any event, temporary, merely a blip. That argument has been made by Larry Carter, president of the United Teachers of New Orleans. Like other skeptics, Carter seized on a 2010 report from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes that portrayed many charter schools as doing no better, and indeed sometimes worse, than traditional schools nationwide. Carter rushed into print in New Orleans’s daily newspaper, The Times-Picayune, with an editorial saluting the Stanford study as proof of failure, but without mentioning the parts of the report that identified charters in New Orleans as a sharp exception to the national numbers and particularly successful with low-income students. In light of rearguard attacks of this sort, the only way to ensure that the system remains performance-driven, many of reform’s proponents believe, is to push the New Orleans model—predicated on open-admission, citywide charter schools—all the way to scale. That means encouraging the RSD to complete the chartering of its entire portfolio of schools; it also means resisting return of a still-shaky school system to OPSB, with or without a collective bargaining agreement. Above all, sustaining charter-based school reform means taking very seriously the criticisms that have been lodged against it.

The Search for a Governance Model

The 2005 legislation that designated New Orleans a district in crisis and placed more of its failing schools under state control gave the RSD five years to achieve recovery. The timetable guaranteed that school governance would emerge as a focus of debate on Katrina’s fifth anniversary. Eli Broad, whose foundation has committed millions to the reform effort, put the governance question at the top of the agenda as schools reopened for the 2010–11 school year:

The most important areas in which we think the city should focus going forward are putting in place a sustainable governance structure, continuing to develop and support teachers and leaders to become long-term, high-performing employees and continuing to improve the lowest-performing schools.

Last December BESE decided to extend the RSD’s shelf life rather than return the schools to OPSB control. In the run-up to the December decision, public interest swelled and rhetoric heated up. Opponents of the state’s post-Katrina intervention rallied to the cry of “local control,” which usually meant restoring power to the school board or something like it. The argument carried a racial subtext, sometimes explicit, more often coded. The bureaucrats in a white-majority state were cast as having usurped administrative power over a district in which 9 out of 10 students were African American, as were many teachers, politicians, and contractors.

Another theme popular among advocates of local control was the contention that RSD’s school performance gains were somehow illusory or rigged: students with special needs were being turned away from schools and those with disciplinary problems were being expelled to keep performance scores high, critics insinuated. The argument lost some of its political punch when 2009–10 enrollment figures revealed that the schools overseen by the OPSB, not the RSD, have the lowest proportion of special needs and behaviorally challenged students.

State Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek, shortly after Labor Day, pointed the way for BESE’s December decision. The gist of his recommendation was that RSD would retain control of its current portfolio of schools for at least another two school years. At that point, schools that had met or surpassed minimum standards could return to local governance, if—the big if—they chose to do so. Pastorek’s further proviso was that local capacity to administer the schools would be reviewed before such transfers were approved. Many, if not most, eligible schools are expected to resist a return to OPSB control. In a late amendment to his plan calculated to impose greater accountability on the RSD, Pastorek advocated giving OPSB and others a crack at taking over not just successful schools, but also those that are still failing after five years in the RSD portfolio.

The December vote was not a foregone conclusion. Some board members were inclined to override Pastorek’s recommendation and restore the entire city system to OPSB control. But former OPSB and BESE board member Leslie Jacobs, widely regarded as the founder of Louisiana’s school reform movement, correctly predicted that BESE did not have the votes to oppose Pastorek.

Darryl Kilbert, the superintendent hired by OPSB to manage its small portfolio of schools, portrays the current transitional arrangement as an erosion of democracy itself and espouses restoration of “community control.” He tactfully makes clear that community control need not necessarily mean OPSB control, but clearly assumes that it will.

The countervailing observation is that the locus of democratic control has merely shifted, from an elected school board to an elected governor and a partly elected, partly appointed BESE. The mantralike criticism that a diminished OPSB means control is less “local” ignores the fact that the once all-powerful seven-member school board has been augmented by a growing cohort of charter school board members numbering in the hundreds. (The Left counters by deploring the charter schools as “privatized,” notwithstanding that most of them observe an open-enrollment admissions policy and that they, like all public schools in Louisiana,  are publicly authorized, funded, and evaluated. By statute, their meetings must also be open to the public, though critics say access is sometimes grudging.)

While its argument for regaining control of the schools rested on the principle of local control, a chastened OPSB also pointed out that it had instituted financial reforms since the system’s bankruptcy prior to Katrina.

But the broader political context was aligned in ways that favored continuing the reform effort, at least for now. Under the New Orleans city charter, the school system is a separate entity that does not answer to the mayor, but the incumbent administration, like the state education bureaucracy in Baton Rouge, was and remains vehemently opposed to cutting it short.

“There will be no turning back,” New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu said to cheers in his inaugural address in May 2010. He was reiterating a slogan that had been embedded in his campaign platform. If reform were to fail, he asserted in a network TV appearance in late September, it would be precisely because politics, perhaps especially racial politics, had eclipsed the commitment to improve the education of children. Landrieu is white and a Democrat, the first white mayor of New Orleans since his father served in that capacity in the 1970s, but he was elected with overwhelming black support. Governor Bobby Jindal, a conservative Republican and a devout Catholic, is even less disposed to resurrect the old regime. Indeed, he is a proponent not only of charter autonomy but of vouchers, which though ardently desired by the parochial system, are so far only a token presence in the New Orleans schools landscape (see “In the Wake of the Storm,” features, Spring 2010).

Paul Vallas, who as superintendent of the RSD since 2007 has lengthened both the school day and the school year, sees technical as well as political reasons why charters are here to stay. “You can’t turn back. Charters are authorized by the state,” Vallas told PBS Newshour during a July 2010 appearance. “The state would have to not renew them. The great thing about this system is, it’s really going to be hard to dismantle what’s been created.”

The influential Jacobs agrees. OPSB couldn’t roll back the clock even if it wanted to, Jacobs contends; the charter school constituencies—the families who use them—won’t let it happen.

And yet Jacobs, like many others, including Eli Broad, sees eventual return to an upgraded form of local control as both inevitable and wise. In the interim, every governmental entity with a management role in local schools, and that would include BESE, must maintain a local presence to facilitate citizen access, she told an independent citizens forum on school governance that met throughout the summer. Longer term, she believes any resolution of the governance question must observe two categorical imperatives: One is that any and all decisions must be based on whether they measurably improve the quality of the education being provided to children. The other is that the management of schools must be cleanly separated from the business of authorizing and evaluating them.

Extrapolating from these core values, Jacobs envisions a school board–like body, perhaps the OPSB itself, eventually recovering the power to authorize charters, reorganize failing schools, set policy consistent with state mandates, and provide systemwide services. Actual management of schools would be left to autonomous charter boards, each of which comprises a school “district” under the current arrangement.

Building Anew

As the December vote was approaching, Jacobs was also grappling with the question of whether central administrative functions should include facilities management, or whether that responsibility should lie with the schools that occupy assigned campuses. The real estate is owned by OPSB and is subject to reconstruction or replacement now that the city has finally settled with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for a post-Katrina allocation of construction funds totaling $1.8 billion—big, big money in a relatively small city like New Orleans (see sidebar).

Up-to-date information and photos can be found at www.rebuildingnolaschools.com

NO’s Master Plan Under Way

It’s the biggest school construction project in Louisiana since the Civil War and one of the largest in the nation’s history: 85 campuses, some overhauled, most being built from the ground up, at a total cost of about $2 billion. Another 89 buildings on 38 campuses are being demolished. By 2016, New Orleans antic­ipates a student population of about 45,000, compared to about 65,000 before Katrina.

With the system in the throes of convulsive reform, the build­ings are master-planned for flexibility. Not only is the population in flux, so are school management styles at a time of increased autonomy and experimentation. A charter school operator may be around for three to five years, but these are buildings that must last for a century, notes Ramsey Green, who, as the Recovery School District’s chief operating officer, is in charge of creating campuses for both RSD and OPSB schools, charters and direct-run alike. (For project news, interactive map, and photographs, visit www.rebuildingnolaschools.com.)

As the work kicked in, Louisiana got its first public building that meets the LEED “silver” standard for “greenness”—as will all 85 schools. The buildings also reflect the city’s vulnerability to storms and flooding: Many are elevated above flood levels. Ground floors are terrazzo so they can be easily scrubbed down and bleached if flooding occurs. The electrical systems origi­nate on the roof and flow down through the buildings so that only the lower extremities need to be replaced in the event of catastrophic flooding.

Of particular interest to progressives in the urban planning world, the buildings embody the potential for multiple uses by the surrounding community. Libraries and gyms and health clin­ics have separate entrances, allowing community groups to gain access for appointments, meetings, or after-hours exercise without having to traipse through the school itself. Air-conditioning and heating sys­tems are zoned to contain costs when a building is only partially in use.

In a city famous for corruption, procurement and payment are audited exhaustively at sev­eral levels within the RSD and at the state and federal level before checks are actually cut by FEMA. Early bids have been running nicely below estimates, thanks to the national recession, Green says.

Momentum has been building rapidly since early 2010, when the city and FEMA ended five years of squab­bling and came to terms on the federal commitment. Autumn saw eight groundbreakings, one a week. The excitement is pal­pable. So is the urgency of the work. Says Green, “We’ve still got 6,000 kids in modular campuses.”

Where those schools should be placed and what they should look like has long stirred debate. Some factions have clamored for a return to “neighborhood schools.” To some, this is code for an antireform agenda, given that citywide open access is one of the hallmarks of the new generation of charter schools since Katrina. That open access is a deliberate and effective assault on racial inequity associated with the segregation era is an irony not lost on reform advocates. In debating the issue, they point out that charters with open-access admission policies are an option already available to neighborhood residents; for admission to most they need only show up on time and enroll. Moreover, reform advocates note, basing admissions on geographical boundaries is an exclusionary practice, all too redolent of the days when low-income students of minority background desperately sought to escape from “slum” or “ghetto” schools and gain access to the generally superior schools in “good” neighborhoods from which they had been barred.

The neighborhood schools movement has found friends among some of the city’s more progressive urban planners. The master plan for reconstruction of the school system after Katrina envisions schools as centers of the adjacent community. At a time when budgets are tight, obesity epidemic, and fuel costs likely to rise, schools at the center of walkable communities are seen as both healthful and thrifty. School-centered communities also further neighborhood cohesiveness, the argument goes. To that end, the Orleans schools master plan calls for bundling several community services within or adjacent to new and reconstructed schools—a library branch, a wellness clinic, a community garden, and a senior center, for example.

The Money Factor

No discussion of school reform in New Orleans is complete without acknowledging that notable gains have occurred at a time of unusually high levels of government financial support, chiefly drawn from special funds set up in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster. Those dollars nearly doubled per-student allocations in New Orleans, lifting the figure above $12,000, even without factoring in support from foundations and individual donors (see Figure 3). That tide of money has now begun to ebb. It was hoped that reversion to more normal funding levels would be mitigated by federal Race to the Top (RttT) money, but Louisiana was not selected in the program’s first two rounds, in part, it was assumed, because upstate districts and teachers unions were not wholehearted in their support for RttT goals.

New Orleans has, however, secured $28.5 million in federal “i3” funds for educational innovation. The award, announced over the summer of 2010, will go to the RSD and to NSNO primarily to lubricate reorganization of failing schools. To test the replicability of the New Orleans model, some of the money will be used to help launch charter schools in Memphis. On the home front, NSNO is committed to implementing i3’s goal of reorganizing the lowest-performing 5 percent of failing schools. The intended uses of the i3 money align with an evolving vision of philanthropy’s role. As Broad put it,

Foundations can continue to play an important role in enabling school districts and states around the country to understand how and why New Orleans has made better relative academic gains in such a short period of time, and to encourage them to adopt similar approaches. We’ve only begun to unlock the lessons this city holds for education reform nationwide.

In early December 2010, notwithstanding a lawsuit threatened by OPSB, BESE accepted Pastorek’s recommendation to extend the current reform paradigm. The vote was preceded by histrionics at times reminiscent of pre-Katrina meetings of the Orleans school board at its most chaotic and dysfunctional. From the speaker’s rostrum, one OPSB member warned that a vote for Pastorek’s plan would be an act of criminal malfeasance that would trigger “civil war,” an indication that regardless of the board’s decision, the political battle was far from over.

Where to Go from Here

Amid changes as exciting as they are fragile, this much seems clear to the reform community: Even briefly settling for today’s improved performance levels is to avail critics of the opportunity to say that school reform has stalled after early gains that were easy and perhaps unsustainable (see Figure 4). It would be to settle for schools that are, not excellent, but merely “good enough.”

Efforts by the old order to claw back power are portrayed as only the most obvious threat to the gains achieved in New Orleans. The more insidious threat, reformers contend, is for schools and the communities of students and parents they serve to get comfortable with a still-inadequate status quo. A stubborn loyalty to the school they know, and indeed may have helped build, can abort the wrenching changes that may be required for a school to become truly excellent.

Reform advocates call it “churn,” the business of aggressively and systematically zeroing in on the least successful schools, ousting failed managers, and reorganizing the schools as open-enrollment, citywide charter schools. Churn is “disruptive,” a term of approbation in the school reform lexicon. But disruption breeds resistance. Even badly failing school administrations sometimes secure the affection of parents and students uncertain that striving for a truly excellent school will necessarily lead to improvement of the mediocre institution with which they have grown comfortable. That psychology is what for a time bedeviled the process of replacing a popular principal at the International High School of New Orleans, a BESE charter, with a controversial but dynamic former superintendent of the New Orleans system. In other school settings the resistance is communitarian or racial. The delicate and sometimes unpleasant politics of churn are the reason many reformers question whether an elected body, such as a traditional school board, has the gumption to handle tasks as potentially unpopular as declaring schools to be failures and handing them over to more capable managers, or shuttering them altogether.

Resolving the issue of governance will be the biggest test ahead for cities engaged in Charter Issues 2.0. At stake is not just the credibility of the reform movement but the prospect, at last, of convincing America that an excellent education is a civil right worth the kind of struggle that so far is exhilarating New Orleans with the possibility of transformational change.

Jed Horne educated two sons in Orleans Parish public schools. He is the author of Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City.

Somewhat surprisingly, then, South Carolina is on the cusp of leapfrogging most of the competition by passing one of the most ambitious pieces of school choice legislation in the country.  Called the South Carolina Education Opportunity Act (SCEOA), the legislation would provide tax credits to parents choosing to send their children to private school, extend smaller tax credits to homeschooling families, and provide scholarships for low-income students to attend private schools.  The scholarships would be dispensed by Student Scholarship Organizations.

Pointing to the success of Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship Program (see “Does Competition Improve Schools?”), the bill’s supporters contend that it would improve student achievement and save money.   The CATO Institute has already weighed in, saying that the bill would “do a better job” than similar school choice programs in other states.

While one would hope that the legislature would be most interested in the academic gains generated by the bill, its budgetary effects might be what gets it through the legislature.  The state has been hit particularly hard by the recession, and over the past few years has had to rely on furloughs, reductions in local aid, and various cuts to balance the budget. The scholarships and tax credits could not exceed half of the state’s spending per student, which averages around $5,000.  (The remainder comes from the federal government and would be unaffected by the program.) Thus, for every student taking advantage of a scholarship and tax credit, the state would save $2,500.  Regardless of the legislators’ motivations, the bill’s passage would undoubtedly be welcome news to parents who simply want a better education for their kids.

Should the bill pass, opponents of school choice will no doubt be waiting with knives sharpened and a battalion of attorneys. That makes the U.S. Supreme Court’s pending decision in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn even more important.  Arizona passed a scholarship program funded by tax credits and subsequently found itself sued by the ACLU (and nominal plaintiffs that it rounded up) because many of the scholarship organizations were religious and sent recipients to religious schools.  If the Court sides with Arizona and the Obama Administration, which to its credit defended Arizona’s program and said that the ACLU and its plaintiffs shouldn’t even have standing to sue, it would go a long way toward insulating the SCOA from a legal challenge.

-Joshua Dunn

EN: How should we define a “quality” charter school? How does quality vary between those operated by CMOs and those that are not? What is the track record of CMOs to date, in terms of quality-conscious growth and replication?

Kevin Hall: At a minimum, a high-quality charter school produces a vast majority of students who meet or exceed academic standards regardless of their ethnic or socioeconomic background and who are well prepared for postsecondary success.

The Charter School Growth Fund invests in CMOs that operate networks of high-quality charter schools, providing grant and loan financing packages that enable these organizations to expand their capacity to serve more low-income and minority students. Over the past five years, CSGF has invested in more than 20 nonprofit charter-school operators. Among them are successful charter school networks across the country, such as Achievement First, YES Prep, KIPP, Rocketship Education, and IDEA Public Schools. In fall 2010, CSGF announced the launch of a new fund of $160 million to invest in the expansion of the best-performing charter schools and CMOs nationally over the next five years.

Approximately 95 percent of CSGF’s member schools enable students to outperform comparable district schools in both math and reading; nearly 70 percent of schools enable their students to outperform state averages in both math and reading, although they serve much higher than average percentages of low-income and minority students. Some of our CMO schools are beginning to close the achievement gap; their students perform better than affluent students who traditionally outperform low-income students by a significant margin. This is an extremely rare level of performance, particularly for organizations that run a number of schools.

While success stories reveal the potential of high-quality charter schools (and CMOs in particular), there are certainly many poorly performing charter schools across the country as well. It is important that those schools be closed in order to protect the integrity of the charter schools proposition: increased flexibility in exchange for performance accountability. As a balance to that strategy, however, there also needs to be an effort to expand the reach of the highest performers, particularly those that are able to scale their work to serve more students. Several of the  CMOs in our portfolio are improving their performance as they get bigger, a historical rarity in the K–12 sector, though a phenomenon that is quite common in other sectors.

Robin Lake: The quality of any school, charter or not, has to be measured in terms of outcomes: are students better prepared for college, career, and citizenship than they would have been had they not attended that school? Rigorous research on charter school performance (studies that make true apples-to-apples comparisons) shows that there is tremendous variation nationally; charter schools often outperform traditional public schools, though not the majority of the time. When it comes to educating low-income students, however, charter schools do tend to outperform other public schools.

Many hope that by replicating high-performing schools CMOs will provide more consistent results than stand-alone charter schools have achieved, but there is no rigorous evidence yet to support that claim nationally. Many CMOs do seem to outperform their district schools, but there is also a lot of variation among CMOs and even within a particular CMO’s portfolio of schools. The CMOs we often point to as successes represent a very small portion of the 80 or so CMOs in the country. It’s not clear that the CMO model, as a rule, produces more consistent quality than does effective authorizing and oversight of “one-off” charter schools.

CMO founders are finding that large-scale replication with fidelity, especially at the high-school level, is a lot more difficult than they thought it would be. It’s also true that CMOs sometimes serve fewer special needs and ELL students and students with severe behavior challenges than their district counterparts, so achievement studies have to take that into account. The study we (CRPE) are conducting in partnership with Mathematica is the first nationwide apples-to-apples analysis of CMO effectiveness. “The National Study of Charter Management Organization (CMO) Effectiveness: Report on Interim Findings” is available on the CRPE website. A final report, with achievement results, is due out in 2011.

EN: How much private funding has gone into CMOs so far and have these investments delivered?

RL: Most estimates put the total philanthropic investment in CMOs at around $500 million, and most of the big foundations are no longer funding stand-alone charter school start-up. I don’t think anyone would disagree that some great things have come from those investments. Some CMOs are creating opportunities for low-income and minority students that people didn’t generally think were possible, and they have shown the results can be replicated. That’s a very important lesson.

But CMOs are growing slowly and exist in a very limited number of cities. The CMO model is typically highly centralized, with services akin to school districts. That model, so far, has produced new schools pretty slowly (the average CMO grows by one school a year), and many CMOs have built up very expensive central offices that could not exist without continued philanthropic support. Many of the well-known CMOs report annual spending of more than $13,000 per student. That level of spending may be necessary to serve our neediest students, but in no way represents an obvious cost saving over school districts and stand-alone charter schools. The CMO business model is so far proving impossible to sustain on public funding alone. A well-known CMO in California recently required an infusion of $700,000 in private funding to prevent financial collapse. More of these bail-outs may be on the horizon.

It’s hard to say exactly how many schools have been created from private money invested in CMOs, but our estimate is around 400. That means that more than 1 million private dollars have gone into each of the existing CMO schools so far (though some of that money is likely intended to fund central office systems to support future growth).

Could that half billion dollars have been spent in ways that produced a far greater number of high-quality charter schools? I think it’s likely. Diverse investments in innovative approaches to scale, such as back office and data management services, leadership training, and technology platforms for promising stand-alone charter schools, might have vastly increased the quality and number of new schools throughout the country. The important question now is how to make the most out of new federal dollars intended to support replication and scale. It would be a shame and a great waste of money not to be honest about, and learn from, the first generation of CMOs to create faster and more efficient paths to scale. Our report suggests a variety of ways that that can happen, including experimentation with smaller and leaner management organizations like those that are cropping up in New Orleans and New York City.

KH: CMOs have demonstrated that they can create high-quality schools at a fraction of the cost of traditional school districts, but like any growing organization they need capital to expand. Until CMOs can benefit from the billions of dollars of school bonds raised by districts, they will need “equity-like” investments from philanthropy in order to expand and effectively serve more students. The schools operated by CMOs often receive less overall public funding on a per-pupil basis than comparable district-run public schools, with the deficit ranging from approximately 10 to 30 percent. The deficit varies widely by geography, due to differences in the cost and funding of facilities as well as other factors. Many CMOs utilize a model where new schools operate with a deficit for two to four years until the schools reach full enrollment capacity, at which point the schools will generate operating “surpluses” at the site level.

To date, CSGF has committed more than $75 million to more than 20 emerging CMOs that represent more than 55,000 seats and are on track to exceed 100,000 seats. At that point our portfolio’s total enrollment would place it in the top 30 school districts by size in the nation.

CSGF’s goal as a financial investor is to enable organizations to reach sustainability on public revenues. When the schools reach capacity, they pay management fees to fund central administrative costs, such as academic coaches, student data systems, and payroll.

The scaling of high-performing CMOs provides one of the highest levels of return and leverage for philanthropic funds, particularly when you consider that CMOs tend to deliver much higher student achievement than the local district; these schools will continue to serve students in a high-quality way over time; and there are few investments in K–12 that have consistently yielded this level of performance.

The long-term funding solution is twofold: equitable funding and access to publicly financed school facilities. The federal government has a critical investment role to play in 1) supporting the replication and scale-up of the best providers through its grant programs; 2) improving access to low-cost public facilities for charter schools through its own funds and by leveraging existing public-school space; 3) pushing states and local districts toward more equitable funding systems for all public school students, including those in charter schools; and 4) supporting efforts to create early-stage, innovative, and scalable models that incorporate greater uses of learning technology.

EN: What is the largest number of high-quality charter schools you could see existing CMOs creating over the next five years? What’s the theory that envisions how these schools will have an impact on the larger system?

KH: Over the past 10 years, the total number of students attending schools run by high-performing CMOs increased at least tenfold, from approximately 10,000 students in 2000 to more than 100,000 students today. Over the next decade, the opportunity exists for CMOs to continue this pace of growth and serve more than 1 million students by 2020.

Growth in the CMO sector will come in three main areas: 1) Existing CMOs will continue to scale up. Most CMOs are adding one to five new schools per year as well as filling out their existing schools, and a few over the next several years may begin to expand to new regions. Currently, the CMOs in our portfolio are averaging annual growth rates of about 30 percent. 2) New CMOs will emerge from outstanding single schools, particularly in regions where many high-performing schools were launched over the past five to seven years. 3) Next-generation models showing promising early results will take root. Rocketship Education, a CMO based in northern California, uses a “hybrid” model that combines learning technology with great teaching to deliver outstanding results at much lower school site–level costs.

High-quality CMOs will set the bar for the entire K–12 sector when it comes to educating disadvantaged students. Over the next decade, several successful operators will serve a significant share of their local market (at least 10 to 15 percent of all students). More importantly, based on continuing their historic levels of performance, these schools could double the number of low-income students going on to college in these communities. Even though charter school enrollment is relatively small, we expect charter schools to dramatically increase the number of low-income students graduating from four-year colleges, and, in many cases, exceed the number of college graduates emerging from the much larger local district schools. This level of performance at scale will have a deep impact in those communities on the expectations for what schools can accomplish.

About half of the public school students in the U.S. attend schools in districts that have fewer than 10,000 students. Many CMOs that started from scratch over the last decade will grow to be among the largest 10 percent of districts in the country. Aggressive smaller districts may adopt some of the practices of these CMOs, including how they recruit, select, and develop talent; the culture they build in their schools; and the way they manage multiple schools, more effectively pairing accountability and decisionmaking rights throughout the school system.

RL: The CMOs we’ve surveyed (about half of those in the country) say they plan to create just over 300 new schools in the next five years. If we double or even triple that number, we are still nowhere near the number of schools needed to replace or transform the 13,000 chronically low-performing schools in the U.S. So while CMOs are replicating as quickly as they can and are becoming a significant presence in some cities, they are clearly still “a drop in the bucket” when it comes to large-scale public-school improvement.

Some have suggested that the next generation of CMOs will produce far greater numbers of schools, but CMO growth projections have historically been overly optimistic. What’s more, many U.S. cities have no hope of attracting CMOs: a large majority of CMOs are either committed to staying in a particular city or state or cannot operate in states with lower per-pupil funding. Few existing CMOs are interested in turning around existing schools, one of the highest priorities of Secretary Duncan.

Some CMOs believe that by flooding a particular district with high-quality schools and by providing proof that it is possible to close the achievement gap, they will prod entire school systems into changing. Unfortunately, so far only a few school districts in the country are responding to CMOs in this way. It seems clear, then, that if the charter sector hopes to contribute to transformational numbers in high-quality public schools, the current CMO approach alone can’t get it there.

EN: How big a challenge is the replication of high-quality schools, even by admired CMOs? What measures, whether in terms of practice or policy, could help CMOs succeed at delivering more high-quality schools at scale?

RL: Finding ways to replicate successful schools has stymied public education for decades. CMOs have so far scaled faster and seemingly with more consistency than any of the many failed dissemination and replication strategies of the past, including comprehensive school reform. But the challenge is still immense. Most CMOs say that facilities costs, inadequate per-pupil funding, and limited access to high-quality teachers and leaders are barriers to growth. All of those issues could be addressed by changes to local, state, and federal policies.

But CMOs also suffer from many self-inflicted problems as they scale: many are dealing with very high teacher turnover, increasing standardization and bureaucracy, and difficulty maintaining consistent quality, especially in their high-school models. Larger CMOs are beginning to look a lot like the very school districts charter schools wanted to escape. The expense of CMO central supports means that few CMOs have shown they can replicate without the massive philanthropic subsidies they have enjoyed in the past. In our survey, CMO leaders said that uncertainty about continued philanthropic funding is second only to limited access to facilities as their most significant barrier to scale.

These challenges are not reasons to dismiss the CMO model, but they do point out that CMO problems will not be solved with simply more public funding or access to public facilities. CMOs were meant to help charter schools capture economies of scale, given expected lower per-pupil funding relative to school districts. Large CMO models have not achieved those economies (though they are likely achieving other goals), and it is possible that other initiatives might be better able to capture economies of scale and still maintain high quality. Some possibilities: CMOs might spin off schools once they are stabilized or they might only offer very limited central office services. New technologies might make it possible for stand-alone charter schools to “plug in” to remote services that provide CMO-like supports, such as data analysis or real-time teacher coaching.

KH: We are beginning to see CMOs succeed in delivering consistent high-level quality across their networks. For example, Aspire Public Schools operated 25 schools last year and averaged a 9.5 (out of 10) similar-schools ranking, meaning their schools are averaging a ranking in the top 5 percent of schools in California serving similar demographics. Organizations like Aspire, Uncommon Schools, IDEA, and YES Prep are proving beyond a doubt that school systems can deliver high quality at scale. The main barriers to replication are indeed building a quality talent pipeline, particularly at the school–site level; ensuring full per-pupil funding follows the student; access to publicly financed facilities, one of the largest barriers, particularly for early-stage CMOs; patient, long-term focused growth capital sufficient to enable CMOs to build out high-performing networks; and the regulatory framework, as state and district-level structures and policies are often at odds with scaling up high-performing and promising new operators.

There has been good progress over the past year on the policy front in many states, and the Obama administration and Secretary Duncan have been working on smart ways of lowering the barriers outlined above. Recently, a few states and cities have been working to create environments where the best-performing CMOs might be able to expand and thrive.

EN: How do CMOs compare to traditional school districts? Will they replicate the same dysfunctions as large school districts, or will they be able to avoid this fate?

KH: The successful CMOs in our portfolio have been able to put student achievement as the driving force within their organizations. Because of this relentless focus on achievement, we have seen these organizations innovate in critical areas like improving instruction in the classroom, providing career paths for teachers, and principal leadership training. We believe these innovations are possible in traditional school districts, but the work is complicated by factors that distract from the core mission of student achievement.

Many outstanding CMOs incorporate common elements in their approach. In many cases, this means a longer school day and a longer school year than those found in a traditional public-school setting. The organizations emphasize carefully recruiting, selecting, developing, and evaluating talent, especially at the principal and teacher level. The organizations have a firm conviction to use data to make hard choices. The enterprise is built from the classroom and school level “up” versus an organizational model of a central, bureaucratic organization driven “top down,” as is typical in most U.S. school districts. Principals and teachers at the school level have considerable latitude for decisionmaking inside the construct of the academic, operational, and financial model of the organization. These organizations have an intense and meaningful focus on a set of values that permeate the school and entire organization. Students, faculty, and staff are held accountable for living these values, and they are reinforced by authentic “cultural norms” shared by all.

The central office is a “service provider” that seeks to free schools and educators from operational burdens and allow them to maximize the time and resources that are focused on student learning. A focus on efficiency, particularly with respect to nonschool expenditures, enables more funds to be spent closest to the student and the use of school time to maximize the amount of learning for students. While each of these elements is consistently present, high-performing CMOs offer a diversity of models through which they accomplish academic excellence. These models cater to the unique needs of each CMO’s student population.

Because many of these elements are highly scalable, the rise of high-performing CMOs represents one of the most promising developments in K–12. Other key differences between CMOs and most school districts will enable the former to continue to scale effectively: 1) Governance structure. CMOs are governed by self-perpetuating boards that can align their governance and oversight around the organization delivering on its mission over time. Elected school boards are often unable to deliver upon this function effectively. 2) Client focus. CMOs are subject to market forces. They have to deliver for their parents, students, and employees every day or they will lose them. This discipline helps to maintain focus on providing the environment where students can achieve. 3) Talent opportunities. With their flexibility, CMOs are better able to attract and reward talent, most importantly, great teachers and school leaders. They create a culture in which people are united around a common mission, and their growth enables them to provide talent with new challenges and opportunities. CMOs are beginning to achieve a level of scale, in which they are developing more of their own leadership and building great cultures of excellence. As an example, YES Prep was recently named one of the “Best Places to Work” in Houston, based on the feedback from their team members.

As our successful CMOs grow, they must work hard to remain nimble and innovative to avoid replicating the bureaucracies we have encountered in other school systems. So far, they look more like high-performing companies and nonprofits than school districts. They have many of the same functions as those found in a “traditional” district structure, but their culture, incentives, and alignment are very different from the majority of larger school districts in the U.S.

RL: Many CMO leaders fear they will re-create the same systems they had hoped to escape and to some extent there are signs this is happening. This is in part because a centralized approach to school management is what everyone—district leaders and businesspeople working in education—knows. The organizational charts and central office services offered look strikingly similar. It’s also true that as CMOs have grown larger and more bureaucratic, many are struggling to find ways to remain innovative, flexible, and responsive to their teachers. Our research shows that larger CMOs are more likely to prescribe solutions to their schools and are more likely to have formalized policies. Organizational rigidity and complexity are classic pathologies of scale that most large organizations, including schools districts, encounter. Unchecked, they can carry serious organizational and financial costs. One-fifth of CMO central office leaders say that efforts are underway to unionize their teachers.

There are important differences between CMOs and districts, however. Most notably, CMOs tend to include significantly more time for instruction in their schools and focus much more on leader and teacher accountability. CMO leaders also say it is easier to keep the organization nimble and focused on the mission without the politics of elected school boards. It’s impossible to say, however, whether these potential advantages over districts can be sustained over time as CMOs grow and mature.

In theory, one of the prime advantages of the charter sector is its decentralized nature, which allows teachers and principals to adopt innovative missions, methods, and organizational structures that work best for its community of students and change them quickly if they do not work. Some of the most effective charter schools thrive because the culture of the organization is nimble and informal, inspiring teachers to work as cohesive, trusting teams and put forth monumental effort on behalf of the neediest students. If large, centrally planned organizations like CMOs come to dominate charter schooling, much of that advantage may be lost.

EN: How do CMOs compare to for-profit education management organizations (EMOs)? Given that CMOs have more difficulty generating capital, must rely more heavily on philanthropy and government grants, and have few incentives to expand aggressively, is there value in envisioning a larger role for EMOs going forward?

RL: A lot of investors were disappointed with what they perceived to be lackluster quality in early EMO expansion. Many early EMOs expanded quickly and opportunistically to meet aggressive investor growth targets and imploded as a result. They also struggled with local community politics because state charter laws required them to contract with nonprofit governing boards rather than run schools directly. The theory was that nonprofits would have more incentive to stay focused on quality and would be able to avoid the political and governance fights of EMOs. CMOs do seem to have set a higher bar on student learning and their governing boards are typically pretty high functioning, but the trade-offs mentioned are real. Some EMOs, such as National Heritage Academies, are expanding aggressively throughout the Midwest, and we should study their results. Given the need for more high-quality schools, we should be open to finding ways for any high-quality public-school operator to be successful, whether they are stand-alone charter schools, EMOs, franchises, networks, or CMOs. There may even be new organizational models and structures that could combine the best elements of all of those organizational types.

KH: Students, parents, and teachers should have choices among schools operated by a variety of providers. The key is the quality of the school, not who runs it. Schools run by for-profit EMOs will be an important part of the long-term picture, but there are structural differences that make the CMO approach more attractive now, including the ability of a CMO to hold its own charter, which many for-profits cannot do. For-profit organizations have strong potential in terms of their ability to develop new models, particularly those that operate in various “turn-around” environments and incorporate individualized learning technology. In the near term, there are significant barriers to raising for-profit venture capital for operators.

EN: How much potential is there for charter schooling to utilize virtual learning or introduce new technologies? Are CMOs a good way to help make use of these new tools at scale, or are there faster and better ways to expand their use?

KH: A new generation of education entrepreneurs will find ways to transform the current “one teacher, one classroom” mind-set that dominates K–12 education. CMOs are beginning to figure out ways to combine adaptive learning technologies and great instruction to deliver outstanding student achievement. CMOs like Rocketship Education have been early innovators in this area, and they are inspiring a new wave of technology innovation in the charter school sector. These “next generation” models are highly compelling in the context of persistently poor academic performance and declining education funding anticipated over the next several years.

Technology can provide a wealth of data about what students know and where there are gaps. Over time, educators will find new ways to harness this information to accelerate learning and use school resources more effectively.

Leading-edge innovation will initially happen outside of traditional school districts and will most likely occur in charter schools and the home school market. It is important that CMOs play a central role in this innovation because they can implement new ideas while setting the standard for high student achievement. In the past, “innovation” in K–12 has not always resulted in better student outcomes. Many large districts will struggle to create an atmosphere that promotes innovation as they wrestle with dramatically changing the existing teaching and learning paradigm, especially given existing labor contracts; building a spirit of risk-taking; and maintaining an unwavering commitment to success that will be required to develop new and innovative models that produce outstanding results.

RL: So far CMOs seem to have used technology mainly as a way to create central office systems, such as data dashboards and internal organizational tools. These tools seem to be valuable performance-management tools, but if CMOs hope to expand much faster and more effectively than they have, they need to find ways to reduce costs at the school level. Several new CMOs are experimenting with ways to use technology to help reduce school labor costs, and some charter school networks exist as virtual schools. I expect to see a lot more experimentation with technology as CMOs seek ways to operate schools for less money and find new ways to educate students effectively. CMOs have so far not been hotbeds of innovative practices, but they seem to be able to adopt others’ innovations quickly. I suspect that online learning will continue to expand mainly via course providers like K12, but savvy customers like CMOs and high-performing stand-alone charter schools will help increase the quality of high-tech platforms.

EN: When we look out to 2020, what kind of role will CMOs be playing in the delivery of education?

RL: CMOs are important in education reform, but they can and should only be one piece of the scale puzzle. In the next 10 years I hope CMOs will evolve to operate in partnership with school districts that want to turn around low-performing schools and oversee a portfolio of different school-governance models. In any given community I expect we will see CMOs operating alongside high-quality stand-alone charter schools, franchises, and networks. I also expect we’ll see lots of mutations of the CMO idea. Some might act as incubators for new schools and spin-off schools once they are stable. Others might see their role as matching students with online and community services rather than running schools directly.

The best CMOs are obsessed with continuous improvement and adopt a “whatever it takes” mentality to solve problems that get in the way of student achievement. We need to adopt the same level of urgency and commitment to problem solving around getting to scale, continually inventing a new architecture to support effective new schools rather than being wedded to any model of the past. This will mean a commitment from CMO leaders, funders, and policymakers to address weaknesses in the current CMO model as well as experimentation and real ingenuity to regularly develop and test new models.

KH: In the next decade, the highest-performing CMOs have a tremendous opportunity to transform American education and ensure that demography is not destiny for our nation’s students. By 2020, the following is possible: High-performing CMOs will be graduating more than 80 percent of their students college- and work-ready regardless of family income. Their schools will set the pace both locally and nationally for achievement performance, particularly for low-income students. More than 200 CMO organizations will be delivering a consistent level of high-quality education, creating this performance across many cities and states. A small number of CMOs will have grown to serve at least 20,000 students, placing them among the largest 2 percent of school districts nationally in terms of size, while delivering a level of performance that will change the current paradigm of delivering performance at scale. Many CMOs will serve more than 10 percent of the students in a local market and will help to more than double the number of low-income students going to college in their community. Several CMOs will become the leading-edge providers using “hybrid” approaches that combine the best of emerging adaptive learning technologies with great teaching talent and school cultures to provide more personalized and effective instruction for students.

There is no “silver bullet” that will transform K–12 education in our country. However, the creation and rise of very high performing charter management organizations that have a very distinct culture, operating philosophy, and ability to deliver results will be an important element in driving change.

Adapted from Chester E. Finn Jr., Terry Ryan, and Michael B. Lafferty, Ohio’s Education Reform Challenges: Lessons from the Front Lines, Palgrave McMillan Publishers (June 2010).

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation’s long and deep immersion in Ohio education policy, particularly in the charter-school realm, includes a half decade of direct experience as “authorizer” of several charters. To recount and draw lessons from that experience, Fordham president (and Education Next senior editor) Chester Finn, Fordham vice president for Ohio policy and programs Terry Ryan, and veteran journalist Michael Lafferty authored the new book from which this article is adapted.

Initially, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) was chief authorizer of charter schools in the Buckeye State. After the state auditor released a scathing review of ODE’s handling of its role, the legislature “fired” the agency and in early 2003 invited a host of other entities to undertake the challenges of school sponsorship. Along with state universities, and district and county school systems, the list of potential authorizers included nonprofit organizations that met certain criteria. If too few new authorizers were willing to step up to the plate, however, the legislature’s move would orphan more than 100 extant charter schools, forcing them to close.

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation had long been active on the Ohio charter scene as critic, policy analyst, facilitator of new schools, and source of assistance (both financial and technical) to promising charter operators. But we had never really rolled up our sleeves and plunged into the fray. After fruitlessly seeking new sponsors to take on the potential “orphans”—eligible organizations feared the political, financial, and legal-liability risks—and after much internal soul-searching and debate, Fordham decided in 2004 to apply to become a school authorizer and by June 2005 we found ourselves occupying that hot seat.

Our 10 schools were a varied bunch. Eight had previously been sponsored by the Ohio Department of Education. The other two were allowed to open by virtue of winning the state’s 2005 lottery for new charters; both were sister schools of Cincinnati’s acclaimed W. E. B. Du Bois Academy, a now-defunct charter school that was much acclaimed at the time. All 10 schools faced challenges that generally paralleled those of other charter schools across Ohio. Among the eight schools with track records, one was rated Excellent by the state in 2005 (Du Bois), and one was rated Continuous Improvement (Dayton Academy, an Edison-operated school), but the remaining six were in Academic Emergency. (At the time, 60 percent of Ohio’s charter schools were rated in Academic Emergency, 11 percent in Academic Watch, 18 percent in Continuous Improvement, and just 11 percent Effective or Excellent.)

Troubled Schools

The Moraine Community School had struggled since opening in 2002, but surely it was worth trying to rehabilitate. The charter represented this Dayton suburb’s only public school. Moraine was a General Motors industrial town, and many of its families were connected to the GM plant that had once made Frigidaires and later built SUVs. (The last vehicle rolled off its assembly line on December 23, 2008. The sprawling factory is now dark.)

Before the charter opened, all Moraine students were bused to schools in the nearby suburbs of Kettering and West Carrollton. Many felt like strangers there, and they and their parents longed for a neighborhood school of their own. For that reason, the Moraine charter originally enjoyed the support of community leaders and served about 200 children in grades K–12. Almost from the start, however, the school encountered serious governance, leadership, financial, and academic difficulties. Moraine Community School was in Academic Emergency for two years prior to Fordham sponsorship, and its board and principal had gone through a nasty split just before we took over. A serious leadership vacuum remained. Our sponsorship agreement made clear that we expected it to improve markedly—and fast. Its board assented. According to our contract, the school would show

•  adequate academic gains from autumn 2005 to spring 2006, as measured on a national norm-referenced test

•  market demand by enrolling at least 225 students by April 2006

•  compliance with all special-education requirements by October 2005

•  implementation of a viable curriculum by February 2006.

As the February deadline approached, we received a letter from the school’s board president stating, “Our one-year sponsorship agreement had renewal terms that we likely won’t meet. There was an opportunity to secure 2006/2007 sponsorship through the Cincinnati-based ERCO (Education Resource Consultants of Ohio).”

With those words, Fordham learned, the Moraine school was fleeing our tough-love embrace. We had thought its leaders were game to make the hard decisions needed to render their school effective. We were wrong, and they spurned us for a less-demanding sponsor. What’s more, under Ohio law the school was within its legal rights to “sponsor hop” when its leaders realized we were serious about holding them to account for improving their school. Two years later, the Moraine school and three others (with no Fordham sponsorship connections) would be sued by then Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann, citing a failure to educate children.

In hindsight, we were naïve about the Moraine school and our ability to turn it around through tough love. No matter how much we wanted the school to succeed academically, those in charge—the school leadership and teachers—did not have the capacity to make it perform at a high level. Even more important, we gradually realized that the school’s leadership did not see their primary mission as delivering academic success to children.

For them, the goal was to provide a place that cared for the community’s children with love, respect, and understanding. If learning also occurred, well and good, but the school’s very existence was a sufficient end in itself for both the board and many parents. It was, quite simply, “their” school. Our efforts to inject a sense of urgency and focus on academic results just did not fly. That we didn’t share the same values should have been obvious from the start. But we failed to see it.

Technical Assistance

Moraine was not the only school in our new “portfolio” that opened our eyes to some realities of the charter world that we had not fully appreciated in our earlier think-tank role. As we were learning, threats and deadlines alone did not bring about better performance. Thus, within the bounds of state law and our budget, we also provided technical assistance to “our” sponsored schools to improve their performance. For example, we offered all those in Academic Emergency expert counsel on how to use achievement data to improve instruction, develop a strategy for maximizing performance on state assessments, and help students gain test-taking prowess.

Toward that end, we engaged Douglas Reeves and his team at the Denver-based Center for Performance Assessment (CPA). In November 2005, participating schools were provided with the tools to analyze their own test data to ascertain where their students needed the most help. In February 2006, CPA trainers conducted sessions at each participating school to assess staff needs and provide more-focused professional development based on school and student-specific data. This assistance cost Fordham about $70,000, but held out hope of helping the schools to boost student achievement relatively quickly.

We also offered the schools outside evaluations by a Massachusetts-based team of charter experts that provided school leaders and Fordham with thorough analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of individual schools and assisted in developing plans for bettering their performance. We asked team leader Joey Gustafson for a written report on each school akin to those produced by the acclaimed British school inspectorate. Four schools agreed to such evaluations—at Fordham’s expense.

After visiting the schools, Gustafson reported that all four—each an independent “mom-and-pop” operation with no links to national groups—faced a host of challenges, including strained budgets, low enrollments, curriculum problems, inexperienced staff, weak professional development for teachers, and board members ignorant of testing and other academic essentials. She also found a widespread belief that their academic setbacks were not the schools’ responsibility but, rather, the result of too many students from poor families with “home life” issues.

According to Gustafson, “These kids cannot” was the start of far too many conversations. She urged Fordham to take school leaders to visit high-performing charters in other states so they could see how such institutions worked. The result was a trip to Washington, D.C., where the heads of Fordham-sponsored schools spent time in a high-performing Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) school and the excellent charter boarding school called SEED Academy.

These repair efforts bore some fruit. The Phoenix Community Learning Center in Cincinnati, for example, made solid academic gains during 2004–5, when it was in Academic Emergency, to 2005–6, when it was rated Effective by the state. (The school sustained those gains in both 2006–7 and 2007–8, then faltered in 2008–9.) This school, led by a savvy, veteran educator, was committed to constant academic improvement and willing to change course in order to strengthen student results. It also built a strong instructional team and in time turned into a reasonably solid performer, a lamentably rare success within Ohio’s bumper crop of “mom-and-pop” schools.

It was evident, however, that some schools still needed far more help than we felt appropriate delivering as their sponsor, and more than we could afford financially. There was a real risk of veering from our role authorizing schools into school operations as we delved deeper into their problems and possible solutions. In 2004, before we even became a sponsor, one of the nation’s leading experts on charter schools and authorizing (and a Fordham board member), Bruno Manno, urged us to stop issuing grants to schools we would sponsor and to refrain from doing anything that could be seen as entangling us in their operations. Indeed, we agonized throughout the first year of sponsorship as to how much direct support to give schools for which we also served as monitor, evaluator, and judge. In the end, we offered financial help via modest grants and reduced sponsorship fees, plus substantial technical assistance in the form of advice from outside experts.

This support was manifest in our budgets. In 2005–6, Fordham collected $244,840 in school fees while our sponsorship expenses for the year totaled $715,512, of which more than one-third went toward outside consultants, school-specific grants, and foregone sponsorship fees. The following year, we collected $197,674 in school fees while our operating budget was $788,520, nearly half of it for consultants, grants to schools, and reduced fees. In fact, during the first four years of our sponsorship operation, we spent more on consultants and grants (targeted toward helping individual schools to tackle specific problems or needs) than we actually received in school fees. Under state law, we could charge schools sponsorship fees of up to 3 percent of their per-pupil funding, but our schools were paying closer to 1 percent, and several received free sponsorship. As a result, school fees covered just 30 percent of our costs from 2005 through 2009.

We continued to remind ourselves, the schools, and the state that we would not cross the line into providing direct services nor would we charge schools anything beyond their sponsorship fees. In June 2006, we shared a formal policy along those lines with every Fordham-sponsored school, building on what we had told the Ohio Department of Education in our sponsorship application two years earlier. In short, our provision of technical assistance was a good-faith effort to help schools improve but, at the end of the day, they were responsible for their results and we were responsible for holding them to account for those results.

Our refusal to sell services to sponsored schools proved prescient in the long run, as became obvious when another sponsor’s school, Harte Crossroads School in Columbus, blew up in 2007, revealing deep financial maladies. Its collapse resulted in much finger-pointing between sponsor and school as to who was responsible—and liable—for what. Even today, the state is still trying to sort out these tangles. In any case, this cautionary tale strengthened our conviction that sponsors ought not sell supplemental services to their schools. Unfortunately, many sponsors in Ohio made—and today still make—their own ends meet by doing precisely that. Legislation introduced in 2006 and 2007 to prohibit sponsors from selling supplemental services to their schools failed to become law. It would have unbalanced the books of too many sponsors. But neither did lawmakers solve the underlying problems of sponsor funding in Ohio: the chronic need to raise operating funds from the schools themselves, whether by charging fees or selling services, combined with the perverse incentives and inherent role conflicts that arise when saying no to a school is tantamount to reducing one’s own revenue.

Dollars and Cents

Sponsors weren’t the only ones on the Ohio charter scene that faced financial challenges. We also came to realize that independent charter schools faced almost insurmountable hurdles in delivering high-quality academic instruction while running these small businesses on tight margins. Consider the Omega School of Excellence, one of the ODE “orphans” that Fordham came to sponsor in Dayton and a school that in 2005 enrolled just 184 students. It received about $1.4 million a year from state and federal sources, which worked out to about $7,610 per pupil. In contrast, the Dayton Public Schools were at the time operating at about $13,000 a child. That difference was the result of some $5,500 per student in local tax dollars going to district schools that charters such as Omega did not receive—all this in addition to money for facilities and other outlays that were also denied to Ohio charters.

From its meager per-pupil allocation, Omega had to pay for all staffing, food services, special education, facilities, instructional materials (books, computers, etc.), and other expenses associated with running a school. Omega spent about $120,000 annually on facilities and utilities alone, and another $75,000 on food services, leaving about $1.2 million for instruction and operations. It was required to contribute to the state retirement system some 14 percent of salaries for every employee. Omega also offered basic health insurance and met the cost of federal Medicare payments. That meant the school paid about $645,000 in salaries and $175,000 in benefits. The result was that the average Omega administrator earned about $36,500 in 2005 while the average teacher made about $38,350. By contrast, Dayton’s district-school administrators earned about $68,500 and teachers about $50,550.

Starting in July 2005, charter schools also had to pay fees to their sponsors, which cut further into their operating margins and was seen by many in the charter community as a harsh tax. It certainly created animosity between new sponsors and schools. More than once we heard complaints that “under ODE we received free sponsorship, and now we’re paying you for sponsorship and you actually scrutinize our efforts far more than the state ever did.” This was another reason for us to keep our sponsorship fees as low as possible, but it made for an unsustainable situation over the long run.

Quality sponsorship costs money that somebody has to pay. Other states have realized this and fund their authorizers in more rational (and less tight-fisted) ways. For example, Florida provides sponsoring agencies 5 percent of revenue, as do Colorado and Oklahoma. These dollars come directly from the state to the sponsors, not out of the schools’ operating funds. In fact, the average payment structure for U.S. sponsors falls in the range of 3 percent to 5 percent of a school’s per-pupil allotment.

Besides keeping charter schools on short fiscal rations and “taxing” them for sponsorship, Ohio imposed onerous and disruptive reporting requirements. For example, charters had to report their student counts to the state every month while districts did so only twice a year. A charter school’s monthly revenue could suddenly drop by several thousand dollars if, for example, a mother lost her job and moved her five children to another school. Districts also feel the pain of losing students but they adjust their spending annually, not monthly. This becomes significant as teachers and other staff sign yearlong employment contracts, meaning that the charter school is on the hook for these costs whether pupils stay or leave.

Districts, of course, can also seek operating levies from local taxpayers to boost revenues beyond what the state affords them, while charters depend entirely on state and federal per-pupil allocations and whatever they can raise from philanthropy (see Figure 1 for current spending estimates). Some states—but not Ohio—provide charter schools with extra dollars in an effort to partially compensate for the absence of local dollars. Many now assist their charters with facility costs, too.

Strengthening the Support Network

The economic challenges facing charter schools, especially the mom-and-pop variety, were not just problems for Fordham-sponsored schools. In 2009, Ohio had 309 charters, of which almost 100 were independent operators. All but a handful served fewer than 300 students and many enrolled fewer than 200. In fact, fully 75 percent of the charter schools operating in Ohio in 2009 served fewer than 300 children apiece. Many ran on razor-thin margins.

In hindsight, many were financially doomed from the outset. In examining the causes of charter school closures in the United States, former National Charter Schools Institute CEO Brian Carpenter reported in 2008 that low enrollment was pivotal in the demise of almost three-fourths of the 100 cases he studied. He advised school boards and authorizers to “strive for 300 students as the minimum desired enrollment for each school.” Yet most Ohio charters were and are below that threshold.

In studying charter schools nationally, Paul Hill of the University of Washington observed in 2008 that, while money doesn’t assure educational success, it’s needed to innovate successfully. “Due to the way money flows,” Hill wrote, “new [charter] schools face major competitive disadvantages. Only entities that believe they can run effective schools with less money than district-run schools, or are able to gain some forms of subsidy, either philanthropic contributions or donated labor, can hope to compete.” The exception seemed to be schools associated with large, deep-pocketed national school-management organizations such as Edison and National Heritage Academies.

Worried about the appearance, the legitimacy, and the politics of a charter sector dominated by big out-of-state firms, many of them for-profit, we thought it was especially important for Ohio to develop and sustain a healthy crop of mom-and-pop schools with bona fide community roots. In 2001, we launched the Education Resource Center (ERC), originally housed at the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce and later within a private-scholarship organization named PACE.

The concept was straightforward. We would help independent charter schools acquire benefits of scale by concentrating some of their needs and corresponding services in a single place, particularly their business management and other “back office” functions. This should, we thought, lead to lower-cost services for individual schools while improving the quality of those services for all. This, we expected, would reinforce their capacity to compete, stay viable economically and, ultimately, deliver stronger academic achievement.

In 2003, ERC became a standalone nonprofit organization named Keys to Improving Dayton Schools, Inc. (k.i.d.s.). At the outset, Fordham’s Terry Ryan (as volunteer executive director) and Dayton businessman Doug Mangen ran the day-to-day operations of k.i.d.s., with help from Dayton-area philanthropists and business leaders, including the former CEO of Copeland Industries, Matt Diggs, who also worked to raise money for the new venture.

About 20 charters were then operating in Dayton. Mangen surveyed their needs and found that their most pressing challenges were improving financial management while boosting academic performance. It wasn’t just record keeping and poor test scores. Several schools admitted that they were on the verge of financial collapse. The situation was captured in a memo from Ryan to the k.i.d.s. board in late 2003. “Early hopes for their transformative potential,” he wrote, “are yielding to the realities of meager academic results, financial woes, leadership and governance difficulties, and political challenges. Local charter schools are largely consumed by issues of survival. As a result, they’re not pointing the way toward educational excellence.”

The Omega School of Excellence was first to sign on with k.i.d.s. Organized to serve 5th through 8th graders, Omega was modeled after the acclaimed Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools. Its graduates won scholarships to top local private high schools and to several of the country’s elite prep schools. But, like other one-off charters, Omega faced severe challenges on the business side. Co-founder Vanessa Ward (with her husband) admitted that she lacked those skills. “This is a business. It’s a start-up business. I think most persons who are in education don’t necessarily come with those gifts managing budgets and forecasting, insuring that you’re making the best decisions fiscally to allow a start-up business to survive.” The Wards and their colleagues on the Omega board craved quality financial-management support, and k.i.d.s. was set up to help provide it to worthy but needy schools like this one.

By mid-2005, k.i.d.s. employed six staffers and three consultants who not only had the school-finance knowledge and appropriate state certifications, but also possessed real expertise in navigating Ohio’s byzantine data-reporting systems. At the start of the 2005–06 school year, k.i.d.s. was serving 11 schools in four cities with a combined enrollment of about 1,860 students. The services generated about $400,000 in fees for “back office” services. Fordham also subsidized k.i.d.s. to the tune of about $150,000 a year.

The board of k.i.d.s., which included Fordham’s Finn as well as Ryan, widened its mandate, adding academic and operating activities (e.g., food service support) and new schools in other cities. Too many Ohio charter schools were struggling academically as well as financially. K.i.d.s. wanted to see if it could build a full-fledged, high-quality, local charter-management effort, something almost absent from Ohio at that time. This service might even include running whole-school operations.

By this point, the Omega school was facing serious academic as well as financial challenges. Its initial success had been driven largely by Vanessa Ward’s vision, energy, and commitment. In 2005, however, she had to shoulder more church responsibilities when her husband became seriously ill. School heads came and went. Enrollment dropped and the school faltered. Such challenges, we were coming to discover, plagued many one-off charter schools that depended too much on the vision and leadership of a single dynamic individual.

Gradually, Omega’s future prospects became more and more entwined with those of k.i.d.s., both because the school came to consume more of the nascent CMO’s (charter management organization) time and attention and because k.i.d.s.’ other revenues were drying up. A support grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was spent. In 2006, Mangen spun off the one successful part of k.i.d.s.’ work—the financial services program—into his own new private business. Though Fordham and one or two other private donors did their best, the money just wasn’t there to keep k.i.d.s. afloat so long as its main client was the faltering, shrinking Omega School of Excellence.

When the Omega board authorized a formal resolution ceasing the school’s operations in June 2008, its demise dealt a mortal blow to k.i.d.s. and to our dream of creating a nonprofit school-management organization that could run successful schools across Dayton and southwestern Ohio.

Both organizations were also wounded by the national economic downturn that reduced Fordham’s endowment—and those of many others—by more than one-third. This fiscal misery made it far harder to raise money for a struggling school and a fledgling CMO that faced uncertain futures, even in flush times.

Human capital proved problematic, too. Finding and keeping great talent to work in Dayton’s charter sector was a nut that k.i.d.s. never cracked. And when it engaged the services of really capable individuals, they swiftly proved to be in great demand elsewhere.

Under these circumstances, we had to shelve our hopes for a Dayton-based CMO. There are, to be sure, several national charter outfits—e.g., Edison Learning, National Heritage Academies, Building Excellent Schools, KIPP—operating in Ohio and some of them do good work. But what this approach neglects, and what Ohio (and many other places) still needs, are mechanisms for strengthening the “mom-and-pop” schools like Omega that have deep roots in their communities yet lack the educational and management capacity necessary to sustain success.

Sobered and a bit battered, Fordham continues as an authorizer of Ohio charter schools—six of them today, with a seventh in the offing—and a vigorous participant in the state’s larger education-policy debates. We’re constantly exploring new options including, at this writing, possible merger with several other authorizers into a larger and, we hope, more stable and effective statewide sponsorship venture. Meanwhile, we’ve learned a lot about how much harder it is to walk the walk of education reform than simply to talk the talk, and about how the most robust of theories are apt to soften and melt in the furnace of actual experience. ?

Something about those findings sounds like a bell striking thirteen. Not only is the clock wrong, but the mechanism seems out of whack.  How can more students graduate from private schools if they weren’t learning more? Are expectations so low in the private sector that any one can graduate?

Peering beneath the press release and the executive summary into the bowels of the study itself one can get some, if not all the answers, to these questions.

Let’s begin with the most important—and perfectly uncontested—result:  If one uses a voucher to go to school, the impact on the percentage of students with a high school diploma increases by 21 percentage points (Table 3-5), an effect size of no less than 0.46 standard deviations.  Seventy percent of those who were not offered a school voucher made it through high school. That is close to the national average in high school graduation rates among those entering 9^th grade four years earlier. As compared to that 70 percent rate among those who wanted a voucher but didn’t get one, 91 percent of those who used vouchers to go to private school eventually received a high school diploma.

Most people would be thrilled to learn about a new way to lift the graduation rates of students from low income families by 21 percentage points—especially if it costs the taxpayer nothing at all. Indeed, the school voucher program actually saved money, because vouchers cost only about half the cost per pupil per pupil of going to District of Columbia public schools.

The results are especially exciting because they come from a Randomized Field Trial, the gold standard in social scientific and medical research.  A lottery decided which applicants had the opportunity to use a voucher to go to private school, and so all the comparisons between voucher students and other students are strict ones that control for family background, parental motivation, child motivation and everything else.  That is the great thing about a randomized trial.  It does a better job of showing the effect of a program than any other research strategy, because it compares two groups that are essentially alike, apart from the luck that one group had on lottery day.

But how were such high graduation rates achieved, when voucher students learned no more than the other students?  The answer to that riddle is that the study shows exactly the opposite: Those who went to private school scored 4.75 points higher on the reading test, an effect size of 0.13 standard deviations.

Admittedly, that is not as big an effect as is the voucher impact on graduation rates, and it is only fair to point out that statistician purists insist that any finding, before it can be declared undeniably true, must have only 5 chances in 100 of being wrong. The chances that the reading impact is in fact phony are greater than 5—in fact they are 6 in 100–and so it must be declared—by the statistician purists who supervise reports by government agencies—that “there is no conclusive evidence that [the vouchers] affected student achievement (p. xv).”

But notice the wording—there is “no conclusive evidence.” That is quite  different language from saying there is “no evidence” that vouchers raised achievement.  Indeed, if you invested $1,000 every time you had 94 chances in 100 of picking the right stock—and only 6 chances of getting it wrong–as is the case here, then, with modern technology, you could become richer than Bill Gates by sundown.

So the evidence is only overwhelming, not “conclusive,” that the voucher program raised student reading scores.   Math results are noticeably weaker, however.  It is true that there is a considerably better than even chance that those in private school also learned more in math, but still the effects are small.  Private schools appear not to be teaching math as effectively as they teach reading.

One other fact to note is that the graduation data include many students who were not tested in the final stages of the study. By that time they were beyond 12^th grade, and no test was possible. For these students, we don’t know—we can only suspect—that they would have tested better than their non-voucher counterparts.

But all of these considerations still do not quite explain the very large impact the voucher program had on graduation rates.  For that we have to turn to the reports from parents on school safety, an orderly school climate, and overall satisfaction.  Here we find effect sizes of 0.14 and 0.17 and 0.22 standard deviations, not quite 0.46 standard deviations (the size of the impact on graduation rates) but sizeable enough to suggest that there was something about the private school that supported the development of the young person in ways that went beyond the mere acquisition of reading and math skills.

In short, the various pieces of the DC voucher study hang together more nicely than one might first conclude.  So the next time someone tells you there is no evidence that vouchers help kids, tell them, “I’m sorry, that just ain’t true. A darn good study by an agency of the federal government has yielded strong evidence that school vouchers can help the children of low income families who live in places like the District of Columbia.”

Back in 1989, one of those teachers, Joshua Pechthalt, joined Villaraigosa for a rally downtown in Exposition Park. Pechthalt remembers his charismatic young friend pumping up the crowd. “Antonio was the master of ceremonies who had parents and teachers on their feet,” recalled Pechthalt, now vice president of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA). “When we see each other, to this day, we give each other a hug.”

By 1994, the popular Villaraigosa was departing for the state capitol, rocketed into a legislative seat by grateful teachers, not to mention the union’s campaign contributions. Fellow legislators chose Villaraigosa to become the first-ever Latino Speaker. Back home in East Los Angeles, the teachers associations would spend over $1 million during his six-year tenure in Sacramento to ensure that Villaraigosa would be reelected.

“As Speaker, I was without question the number one advocate for the unions,” Villaraigosa reminisced. Teacher pay hikes sailed through the legislature. He made sure that the push to hold educators accountable for results stopped short of challenging protection of dismal teachers and stymied efforts to send strong teachers into weak schools.

Fast-forward to 2010 and Villaraigosa finds himself in the vortex of a political torrent. “I’m Public Enemy Number One within the UTLA,” he told me. In his quest to turn around the schools, the mayor has united working-class Latino parents, civil rights leaders, and big-money Democrats to challenge union leaders. “It’s been a war,” he said. “It’s a war I’m willing to wage.” After a series of bloody battles against his old union friends, including a 2007 loss in the courts, the mayor gained the upper hand last fall when the L.A. school board passed a radical reform plan that he helped to craft. Over the next few years, the district intends to hand off one-third of its 800-plus campuses to managers of charter schools, other nonprofits, and inventive district educators.

Democratic leaders have enriched the unions over the past half century, creating millions of jobs for dues-paying teachers, feeding the building trades via school construction, and granting bargaining rights to teachers in the 1970s. But union leaders, of late, find themselves on the far edge of the national debate over how to lift students and their flagging schools. Test scores have largely stalled in recent years and gaps have widened slightly, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Labor chiefs are openly miffed over President Obama’s offer of moral support and billions of federal dollars to escalate the “war” being waged by Villaraigosa and his fellow mayors. “In a place like L.A. or Detroit, where the public schools are dysfunctional,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told me, “I don’t think that the system can by itself go where it has to go. You have to rally all elements of the community. The person who can rally all those actors is the mayor.”

Villaraigosa is not the only city chief to take charge of urban schools. But his battle for mayoral control in Los Angeles offers a cautionary tale for all sides. It reveals new tensions between teachers union leaders and Democratic mayors. But charter school enthusiasts should not expect that close alliance, nurtured over many years, to be disrupted overnight. Politicians are highly skilled at finding a middle ground between demands for reform and protection of old connections. As much as Villaraigosa—and the school superintendent with whom he is allied—have appeared committed to rapid charter school expansion, when the L. A. school board took decisive action in February, charters were forced to settle for much less than they expected. Instead of getting the lion’s share of the schools they sought, charters were left with only four. Newly formed teacher groups won the vast majority of school contracts after they formed an alliance with UTLA. The charters were left with their tongues hanging out.

The Players

Villaraigosa returned to L.A. in 2000, eager to become the city’s first Latino mayor since 1872. His union friends contributed another $2 million in traceable dollars to his mayoral campaigns in 2001 and 2005. Leaders of the California Teachers Association even talked up Villaraigosa as California’s next photogenic governor, the Democratic heir apparent to Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger.

At first, the old polarities seemed to hold, pitting education groups like the UTLA against downtown developers and fiscal conservatives. Then the mayor began to echo the impatience expressed by blue-collar Latino parents, packed into graying apartments and tiny cottages spread across East Los Angeles. For decades these families saw no options other than sending their children to overcrowded, sometimes dangerous schools. Villaraigosa grew up in a broken barrio home. “My father left when I was young; we lived in abject poverty,” he recalled. His roots in Chicano politics taught him about L.A.’s racial dynamics in the 1950s, when “Mexicans” were simply kept out of predominantly white schools.

Running for mayor in 2005, after losing his first bid, Villaraigosa began talking with a variety of activists, including Maria Brenes, who runs Innercity Struggle, a group that fights for small, more rigorous high schools. She works from a modest office in the heart of East Los Angeles. A musty fragrance permeates two rooms, blending L.A.’s unrelenting heat with too many eager organizers stuffed into a small space. “Public education has been going downhill in East L.A. for some time,” Brenes said. “Schools built for 1,000 students are now at 5,000.”

Parents worry over these densely packed schools in which teachers simply lose track of kids. Alicia Ortiz, for example, made sure that her daughter escaped Garfield High School, once home to Jaime Escalante, the math teacher made famous in Stand and Deliver. “They have so many students it doesn’t matter if your student is in school or not,” Ortiz said. Her daughter now attends a charter school.

Candidate Villaraigosa also met with wealthy Democrats worried sick over the quality of the schools, like developer and philanthropist Eli Broad. “In L.A. there is no one responsible for the schools,” Broad said. “The board is made up of political wannabes. The only time we have seen dramatic change in urban education is when you have mayoral control.”

Initial evidence backs Broad’s claim. After tracking progress in a dozen cities where mayors have grabbed the tiller—including Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C.—Brown University professor Kenneth Wong concluded that students benefit significantly. Reading performance in these cities’ high schools climbed by one-third of a standard deviation when compared with urban districts serving similar kids, on par with the impact of providing quality preschools. City residents also reported feeling better about their local schools, a key win for municipal leaders eager to stem white flight and shrinking property values, as Wong detailed.

Broad’s collateral assault on the downtown school bureaucracy includes growing new charter schools and attracting strong principals who gain unfettered authority to hire and fire their own teachers. L.A.’s activists are further bolstered by a statewide charter lobby that’s picked up considerable clout in recent years, capitalized by Broad, Netflix founder Reed Hastings, and most recently Bill Gates. Villaraigosa soon came to see charters as a lever for organizational innovation, since “parents are hungry for change,” he said. And these well-heeled Democratic donors, for now, offset declining campaign support from the unions.

The Setting

Villaraigosa’s predecessor, James Hahn, did little to challenge the pace of change inside the L.A. Unified School District. Roy Romer, the former Colorado governor and head of the Democratic National Committee, came to L.A. as superintendent in 2001. He pushed to award principals more discretion over budgets and the power to assemble strong teams of teachers, reforms largely thwarted by the UTLA. Romer standardized the curriculum and required teachers to follow weekly timetables. Student scores inched upward on Romer’s watch. Still, less than one-sixth of L.A. 8th graders now read and write proficiently, according to federal assessments.

After winning the mayor’s race in 2005, Villaraigosa wasn’t about to accept this glacial pace of progress. Catching his union benefactors off guard, he soon announced his intention to take control of the far-flung L.A. school system, citing strides made by Mayor Richard M. Daley in Chicago and Michael Bloomberg in New York. “We have got to move away from a model where school boards are defenders of a failed status quo, where the unions just control the board,” Villaraigosa said.

But wresting control of the schools from Romer and loyal board members required that Villaraigosa return to Sacramento to win legislative approval. Unlike other states, California sets the powers of local school boards in the state constitution. Villaraigosa had to negotiate with statewide teacher groups since they continue to sway Democratic legislators through old alliances and rich campaign contributions.

UTLA president A. J. Duffy sensed an opening, negotiating with Villaraigosa to grant teachers greater control over curriculum and pedagogical practices. In return, the unions would endorse the mayor’s plan. The surreal and controversial power-sharing deal that emerged in Sacramento resembled governance of the Palestinian territories (see “Power Struggle in Los Angeles,” forum, Summer 2007). And the school board, which the UTLA could often dominate, would have lost most of its authority. The union’s conservative wing came unglued, forcing a vote on Duffy’s deal with the mayor, which the rank and file soundly rejected.

The Plot

The notion that anyone might take command of the sprawling L.A. Unified’s 885 schools, even a mayor with boundless energy, feels like a Disney movie, an ever-hopeful fiction. The district spreads across 710 square miles, half the size of Delaware, and serves more than 688,000 students. The system hosts the nation’s single largest public-works program, a $27 billion effort to build more than 130 new schools and renovate countless others. It employs over 36,700 classroom teachers and, curiously, an equal number of managers and support staff.

Back in Sacramento, Villaraigosa emerged victorious. The legislature passed the mayoral-control plan, and Governor Schwarzenegger signed the deal in the summer of 2006. But Romer fought back in the courts, winning on appeal in spring 2007. So, the unstoppable mayor simply pivoted and went with Plan B. “We also had a Plan C,” Villaraigosa joked, reviewing his battles against the union. “We would go to the end of the alphabet if necessary.”

Villaraigosa outflanked Romer, rallying support for three challengers to incumbent members of the school board who had sided with the schools chief during the prolonged legal battle. “I raised millions, defeated the union candidates, and we won a majority of the board,” the mayor recalled. Three million to be exact, coming mostly from wealthy Democratic donors. Among the mayor’s allies, newly elected to the school board, was another rising L.A. star, Yolie Flores.

Petite in stature, soft-spoken in style, Flores seemed an unlikely dragon slayer. Yet she had already proven to be a Latina Saul Alinsky of sorts, organizing parents around the issues of scarce child care and unsafe schools. She arrived on the board impatient and eager to ramp up reform efforts. “The community has reached a level of exasperation, of ongoing failure (in the schools),” she told me. Little love was lost between Flores and the UTLA. During her campaign, she opposed a moratorium on opening new charter schools. In turn, the union refused to endorse her candidacy. Still, no one predicted that she would lead a palace revolt.

Flores’s idea to push charter expansion and parental choice took shape by early 2009. Sessions with advocates included well-connected operators like Ben Austin, first a deputy to Republican mayor of Los Angeles Richard Riordon, then a political aide to film director Rob Reiner. Austin is a hard-driving politico from the affluent west side of L.A., and now the unlikely head of Parent Revolution, a mostly Latina advocacy group led by the Los Angeles Parents Union and bankrolled by Broad and charter proponents. He argued that newly built campuses would provide the affordable facilities that charter firms required to expand. Flores also found on her desk a UCLA study of dropout rates, revealing that fully two-thirds of students entering the high schools in her area, including Garfield High, never graduate. Flores felt like the only sane person in an asylum, “walking around not knowing whether to cry or scream. In the district office there was a very casual sense of the crisis,” she said.

By early summer, Villaraigosa felt that he could swing his school board to support Flores’s dramatic proposal. He also received an unexpected dose of capital to advance the plan from Hollywood mogul Casey Wasserman, who donated $4.5 million to the district’s own reform office. For Villaraigosa, charters were just one piece of the puzzle. Along with the new schools chief, Ray Cortines, the mayor sought to integrate Flores’s charter plan with his own “partnership schools” and Cortines’s commitment to “pilot schools” and thin labor contracts. Together, these experiments were to extend decentralized management and dollars to hundreds of L.A. schools (see sidebar).

One Democratic donor told me, not for attribution, “This is an all-out war that needs to be attacked from every angle. Charters are a piece of the puzzle, but not the only, nor the largest, piece.” With about 55,000 kids enrolled in L.A. charter schools, “you don’t solve the problem through 10 percent of the kids.”

Tensions were intensifying between Latino leaders and the UTLA by early in the summer of 2009. As Flores walked into the cramped auditorium at Annendale Elementary School for a meeting, she suddenly deciphered the shrill chanting of neatly dressed 2nd graders. “Shame on you, shame on you,” they cried out with quizzical faces, miffed by their own angry words. “I was shocked, I couldn’t believe it,” Flores recalled. She had voted for necessary budget cuts as the recession deepened, and her reform ideas had surfaced. Now union activists had wound up these children to deliver their barbed message. Villaraigosa parried back, calling Duffy and company “the most backward labor union in the nation. We’re not going to be held hostage by a small group of people,” a thinly veiled reference to UTLA leaders.

By mid-summer, Flores and Villaraigosa were ready to hatch their charter-and-choice initiative, at first urging the school board to hand off 50 recently opened campuses to charter firms and nonprofit reform groups. Then, a second board ally pushed the mayor to include a total of 251 low-performing schools within the proposal. If the mayor could deliver his new majority on the board—the vote was set for late August—more than one-third of L.A.’s schools would eventually compete in a marketplace unprecedented in scope. UTLA leaders, not surprisingly, went ballistic.

The Mayor Wins a Round

To bolster their stance, union leaders highlighted their recent support of certain innovations, including expanding Cortines’s experiment with decentralized pilot schools, operating under flexible labor contracts and granting principals greater authority. But the union reluctantly endorsed this model, “because teachers are demanding them,” said Brian Fritch, a Garfield High history teacher and union insurgent. Fritch’s generation of teachers has few historical roots with the labor movement, yet they speak of social justice and daily serve kids from working-class families. He has spoken out publicly against the UTLA’s habits of protecting lousy teachers and resisting greater power for reform-minded principals.

UTLA leaders, including the mayor’s old friend, Joshua Pechthalt, worry that new Democrats, like Flores, Villaraigosa, and even President Obama, are “looking to have one teacher competing against another, one school against another.” Market values and monetary incentives are displacing a cooperative spirit, Pechthalt argued. “Our satisfaction (as teachers) comes when you look around and say, ‘the students got it,’ and you have connected with the kids.”

But Villaraigosa is not one to mull over competing political theories. The week before the crucial board vote on the charters-and-choice proposal, he convened a press conference, surrounded by six civil-rights leaders who endorsed Flores’s radical plan. Tom Saenz, national head of the Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund, talked of “parents whose kids are victims of poor schools. There’s a level of impatience because of repeated reforms that have not provided the dramatic change on the quick timeline that the community expects.” Or, as one East L.A. parent, Maria Leon, told me, “We need more options.” Each charter school “takes only 400 students, and there’s a very long waiting list.”

The new school year was just getting under way as the board convened to vote on Flores’s proposal. At sunup that morning last August, a line of buses snaked around the 28-floor tower that houses the city schools office. Out came 3,000 mostly Latino parents sporting bright yellow and powder blue T-shirts that read, “My Child, My Choice.” Villaraigosa arrived to stir the already animated crowd. “We are here to stand up for our children,” the mayor shouted, beneath a banner that proclaimed, “Parent Revolution.”

Inside, UTLA’s Duffy, appearing before the board, was berating Flores. “When all is said and done, you will have sold this district down the road for political gain and for a mayor whose own program has been a dismal failure,” he said. But once again, Duffy had overplayed his hand. The board voted 6–1 to approve the reform plan. Los Angeles would now host “the most important charter-school reform market in the country,” said Jed Wallace, head of California’s charter lobby.

The Twist

It didn’t turn out quite that way. For the school year beginning in the fall of 2010, 36 schools on 30 campuses were eligible for takeover, including 12 so-called focus schools with lifeless achievement trends, along with 24 newly opened schools. When the takeover plans were tallied in January, far more had arrived from local district managers and teachers than from charter operators (see Figure 1). The schools attracted more than 80 bids in total, about half coming from within the district, including area superintendents, teacher confederations only sometimes involving union activists, and the mayor’s own partnership school organization. Charter firms, including Aspire, Green Dot, Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, and smaller charter operators, put forward one-quarter of the takeover plans, but only one plan was aimed at turning around a chronically low-performing focus school. The Los Angeles Times editorial board blasted the charter firms, questioning their commitment to equity. Independent nonprofits submitted the remainder of the proposals.

Few predicted that renegade teachers and grassroots activists would out-bid the established charter firms. The L.A. school board’s decision to hand off potentially hundreds of schools had been powered largely by charter school advocates who had won over Flores and Villaraigosa. But now upstart teachers had joined in common cause with neighborhood activists, arguing that even popular charter firms were “outsiders.”

Cortines formed an independent panel to review the bids. By February, Villaraigosa’s majority on the school board began to unravel. The neutral panel recommended a balanced mix of charter firms, nonprofits, and district educators to take over the 36 schools. But after joining forces with charter comrades to pass the public school choice legislation, neighborhood activists and teachers now split off to fight the charter awards, alleging that charter firms were too imperial and noting fresh statistics that special education students were underrepresented in the charter sector. Over  the mayor’s and Flores’s vocal objections, the board awarded just four schools to charter organizations.

Devil’s in the Details

Despite the charter lobby’s reversal of fortune, L.A. Unified has become “a network of schools,” as Claremont Graduate University professor Charles Kerchner points out. Even before Villaraigosa pushed through public school choice, the district watched over 15 magnet schools with long waiting lists, and Cortines’s pilot campuses were showing promising results, at least in terms of decentralizing school management. The 161 charter schools operating within the district’s boundaries ranged from fragile mom-and-pop organizations to those run by franchise firms like the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools and the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). The Gates Foundation has begun funneling $60 million to these big charter players, hoping to boost teacher effectiveness through incentives and training efforts. L.A. may yet become the poster child for Secretary Duncan’s $4.3 billion Race to the Top initiative.

New questions continue to surface from the twists and turns of the L.A. story. How rapidly and responsibly can L.A. Unified hand off as many as 251 schools to charter firms, nonprofits, and breakaway teachers? Will a robust count of charismatic innovators surface in Los Angeles to take over complicated urban schools? “No. 251 schools, no,” says charter advocate Wallace. “Most of our organizations are going to be up for taking on one or two schools every other year.” This capacity constraint allowed local nonprofits and teacher confederations to compete against charter firms.

The nerve-wracking work of handing off schools began on cue. Matt Hill is Cortines’s top aide for crafting the emerging confederation. A total of 219 letters of intent were initially submitted. “It’s more than I anticipated in the first year,” Hill said. “As far as a jolt to the system, it has been a great process.” Yet the major charter firms moved prudently, each bidding on just one or two schools, and favoring the spanking-new campuses rather than attempting to turn around chronically ailing schools.

Teacher groups went after and won most of the schools, with some opting for the pilot model, embracing the idea of autonomy with all the trappings, “except a thin labor contract,” Hill said. This model, in which principals are no longer hog-tied by elaborate bureaucratic or confining union rules, proved attractive to teachers eager to take over campuses, but who equate charters with privatization of school management. And the UTLA much prefers flexible labor contracts under the pilot model to charter agreements that freeze out the union.

Parents are confused over their options. “It was so rushed (in this first year) parents didn’t really understand what was going on,” Hill said. “Empowerment is a relationship,” as UCLA law professor Joel F. Handler remarked.

And the story is far from over. The UTLA filed suit in December to block the mayor’s entire charter-and-choice program, even as the union helped some teachers to develop school bids. Soon Villaraigosa will be back in court, once again battling his old friends.

The Roots of Reform

Back in 1989, Bill Clinton and his fellow governors first pushed labor to swallow more demanding learning standards and stiff accountability measures, betting this would renew voters’ confidence in the schools. The patient responded with strong vital signs for a time, as test scores climbed in the 1990s and achievement gaps narrowed. Now President Obama is upping the ante, spurring local activists to shake up, even break up, downtown school bureaucracies. “Charters…force the kind of experimentation and innovation that helps to drive excellence in every other aspect of life,” the president told the Washington Post. His Race to the Top fund sends dollars to states that have lifted caps on charters, offering aid and comfort to urban agitators like Villaraigosa. “The president is demanding innovation, and there are funds out there,” as L.A.’s Brenes put it.

Still, Washington’s feeding of new charters may fail to lift students until quality climbs. Warm results arrived this past winter in New York City from Stanford University economist Caroline Hoxby, who detailed how students winning slots via lotteries in over-subscribed charters out-performed applicants who remained in regular public schools. Secretary Duncan, up to speed on the national evidence, told me, “I am not for charters. I’m a fan of good charters. Second- and third-rate charters should be closed down.” But will Washington nudge states to prune lifeless charter schools after pushing for a major expansion?

Still, the political realignment seen in L.A. narrows the choices available to union leaders: either navigate these treacherous waters more mindfully, or get swept away downstream. “My style is never about being in your face,” Duncan said. “[But] do the unions have to move? Absolutely. We all have to get outside our comfort zones.”

One unforeseen lesson for Duncan from L.A. is that high-quality charter firms can expand only so quickly. And once the neighborhood-control genie is out of the lamp, managing democratic impulses is difficult, no matter how disciplined the charter lobby. After pushing the school board to cut out several charter bids and go for pilot schools instead, Brenes explained, “Some of our best teachers rolled-up their sleeves and developed quality plans.” As for the charter schools? “A lot of folks out there were just not grounded in the community, [they] underestimated our organizing capacity in East L.A.”

When the school board finally turned 36 schools over to new management, only four were awarded to charter school operators. Most of the remaining schools were allocated to the newly formed teacher groups who had greatly strengthened their political position by siding with UTLA against the charters. “We knew from the beginning there was a lot of push back from the unions,” said Yolie Flores, one of the two board members who opposed the decision. But Steve Zimmer, one of the members who voted with the majority, said the board had found an appropriate compromise. “There was a lot of pressure from UTLA not to vote for a single charter,” he explained.

Of course, the mayor was furious over losing his earlier majority on the board. “We have accountability in our schools, and high-quality charter schools hold themselves to these standards,” Villaraigosa said in a statement. “Choosing more of the same reinforces the status quo.”

The lesson for Villaraigosa, and fellow mayors committed to charter schools that have shown results, is to remain steadily engaged and forceful politically. When Villaraigosa lost focus, then assumed his board majority would hold tight, reputable charter organizations lost out.

All sides will be back next year for another round of takeover bids. And union leaders may warm up to decentralizing management, even with more flexible labor contracts, especially if they can win control of pilot and autonomous schools by uniting with Latino neighborhood activists.

The UTLA’s sudden enthusiasm for innovative school management is breathtaking, and largely the work of a young generation of impatient members. Fritch, after helping to win a pilot school with Brenes, put it simply, “We need to become a more progressive union, or we’re going to be a done union.”

Bruce Fuller is professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent book is Standardized Childhood (Stanford University Press).

Claire Anderson provided invaluable research assistance.

On the latest tests of achievement, one sees some progress among 4th graders, even a bit among 8th graders. But the performance of students at age 17 has shown virtually no improvement since nationwide testing began in 1969. Whatever extra students achieve early on is washed away by graduation.

Nor is graduation day itself any more likely for today’s young people than it was for their predecessors in 1970. About 30 percent of all 9th graders still fail to finish high school within four years.

The quality of high school teachers has also slipped in recent decades. They are less likely to have scored strongly on the SAT and less likely to come from selective colleges. Moreover, it’s the secondary-school teacher whose salary has declined the most relative to other college-educated workers. Putting specialized high-school teachers on the same uniform pay schedule as elementary-school generalists has proven to be a step backward.

Yet the primary and middle-school years have captured most of the reform attention. No Child Left Behind requires testing in grades 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, but only once in high school. Most charter schools serve mainly elementary students, and young children make up the largest share of the few voucher programs that have been attempted.

Perhaps it is this focus on the early grades that helps to explain the less-than-overwhelming success that either the accountability or choice movements have had. Like the proverbial drunk who hunts for his keys near the lamppost, school reformers have searched for the educational keys to success by looking where the solutions are the easiest, not where the problems are most severe. It is easier to create a new school for young children, and educators almost always prefer to grow their school’s enrollment from the bottom up. Elementary-school costs also lag those of high school.

So it is worth highlighting the charter high school findings in this issue. Kevin Booker and his colleagues (“The Unknown World of Charter High Schools,” research) find that such schools in Florida and Chicago do better than their traditional counterparts at helping students reach graduation day and ensuring that graduates go on to college. Of course, researchers need to see whether similar results are being produced by charter high schools elsewhere. But if the findings prove robust, charter authorizers and charter-friendly foundations should devote at least as many resources—and perhaps even more—to creating alternatives for high school students as they do to opening charter doors to kindergartners.

Charter schools have become a popular alternative to traditional public schools, with some 5,000 schools now serving more than 1.5 million students, and they have received considerable attention among researchers as a result.

Most studies focus on the effects of charter attendance on short-term student achievement (test scores), using either data sets that follow students over time (see “Results from the Tar Heel State,” research, Fall 2005) or random assignment via school admission lotteries (see “New York City Charter Schools,” research, Summer 2008) to control for differences between students in charter and traditional public schools. Beyond measuring achievement effects, however, there has been only limited analysis of the impacts of charters on the students who attend them. Even less research has been conducted on the effects of charter high schools specifically, though a large portion of all charter schools in the U.S. serve some or all of the high school grades.

Developing a high school model suited to the 21st-century student has been the Holy Grail of education reform in recent years, absorbing governors, task forces, and vast sums spent on small schools, university-based schools, and concept schools (see “High School 2.0,” features). With roughly 30 percent of American students dropping out before receiving a diploma—a rate that has been stable for several decades—assessing existing alternatives to the traditional high school is an urgent task.

In this study we use data from Chicago and Florida to estimate the effects of attending a charter high school on the likelihood that a student will complete high school and attend college. Given the impact of educational attainment on a variety of economic and social outcomes, a positive result could have significant implications for the value of school-choice programs that include charter high schools. We find evidence that charter high schools in both locations have substantial positive effects on both high school completion and college attendance. Controlling for key student characteristics (including demographics, prior test scores, and the prior choice to enroll in a charter middle school), students who attend a charter high school are 7 to 15 percentage points more likely to earn a standard diploma than students who attend a traditional public high school. Similarly, those attending a charter high school are 8 to 10 percentage points more likely to attend college (see Figure 1). Results using an alternative method designed to address concerns about unmeasured differences between students attending charter and traditional public high schools suggest even larger positive effects. Our main results are comparable to those of some studies which find that attending a Catholic high school boosts the likelihood of high school graduation and college attendance by 10 to 18 percentage points.

Methods

Determining the influence of charter school attendance on educational attainment is difficult because students who choose to attend charter high schools may be different from students who choose to attend traditional public high schools in ways that are not readily observable. The fact that the charter students and their parents actively sought out an alternative to traditional public schools suggests the students may be more motivated or their parents more involved in their child’s education than is the case for students attending traditional public schools. Since these traits are not easily measured, the estimated impact of charter high schools on educational attainment could be biased.

Our main analysis uses two methods to address students’ self selection into charter schools. First, we control for any observable differences between charter and non-charter high school students prior to high school entry. These include factors such as race/ethnicity, gender, disability status, and family income. The most important characteristic included among our statistical controls is 8th-grade test score, which aims to capture differences in student ability and students’ educational experiences prior to high school.

Second, we limit our analysis to students who attended a charter school in 8th grade, just prior to beginning high school. That is, we compare high school and postsecondary outcomes for 8th-grade charter students who entered charter high schools (the treatment group) with outcomes for 8th-grade charter students who entered conventional public high schools (the comparison group). If there are unmeasured student or family characteristics that lead to the selection of charter schools in general, these unmeasured characteristics should be relatively constant among students and families who choose charter middle schools. Unlike other nonexperimental studies of charter school impacts, our study therefore addresses student self-selection into charter schools directly by ensuring that the comparison students as well as the treatment students were once charter choosers.

Charter school 8th graders who went on to attend a charter high school differed from their peers who subsequently attended a traditional public high school in several respects, particularly in Florida, which suggests the importance of taking such differences into account when assessing the effects of charter attendance (see Figure 2). However, there may still be unmeasured differences that explain why one charter 8th grader attends a charter high school while another charter 8th grader attends a traditional public high school. For this reason, we estimate charter school effects by comparing students who are more likely to attend a charter school because they live closer to one to those less likely to attend a charter school because it is less convenient. For many charter middle-school students, attending a charter high school may be infeasible due to the lack of a charter high school within a reasonable distance. Such students make different choices not because of unmeasured characteristics, but because of a factor out of their control: the distance from home to the nearest charter school.

Data

The data required to analyze the impact of charter high schools on educational attainment are substantial. One must have data on school type (charter or public) and test scores of individual students prior to high school, individual-level high school attendance records and exit information, and college attendance after high school. Finally, the jurisdiction studied must have a sufficient enrollment of students in charter high schools to provide reliable results. The areas we analyze, the state of Florida and the city of Chicago, are two of just a handful of places where all of the necessary data elements are currently in place.

The Florida data, which cover the four cohorts of 8th-grade students from the school years 1997–98 to 2000–01, come from a variety of sources. The primary source for student-level information is the Florida Department of Education’s K-20 Education Data Warehouse (K-20 EDW), an integrated longitudinal database covering all public school students in the state of Florida. The K-20 EDW includes detailed enrollment, demographic, and program participation information for each student, as well as reading and math achievement test scores.

As the name implies, the K-20 EDW includes student records for both K–12 public school students and students enrolled in community colleges or four-year public universities in Florida. The K-20 EDW also contains information that allows us to follow students who attend private institutions of higher education within Florida. Data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a national database that includes enrollment data on 3,300 colleges from throughout the United States, is used to track college attendance outside the state of Florida. Any individual who does not show up as enrolled in a two- or four-year college or university is classified as a non-attendee.

High school graduation is measured using withdrawal information and student award data from the K-20 EDW. Only students who receive a standard high school diploma are considered to be high school graduates. Students earning a GED or special education diploma are counted as not graduating. Similarly, students who withdrew with no intention of returning or left for other reasons, such as nonattendance, court action, joining the military, marriage, pregnancy, and medical problems, but did not later graduate, are counted as not graduating.

The Chicago data, which cover the five cohorts of students who were in 8th grade during the school years 1997–98 to 2001–02, were obtained from the Chicago Public Schools. The data include 8th-grade math and reading test scores and information on student gender, race/ethnicity, bilingual status, free or reduced-price lunch status, and special education status. This data set is also linked to the National Student Clearinghouse. High school graduation is determined by withdrawal information from the Chicago Public Schools data. As in Florida, only students who receive a standard high school diploma are considered to be high school graduates.

Results

The raw data on our study population of students who were in charter schools in 8th grade reveal substantial differences in educational attainment between attendees of charter high schools and those of traditional public high schools. In Florida, 57 percent of students who went from a charter school in 8th grade to a traditional public school in 9th grade received a standard high school diploma within four years, compared to 77 percent of charter 8th graders who attended a charter high school. In Chicago, the corresponding high school graduation rates were 68 and 75 percent. Similar differences are found for college attendance. In Florida, among the study population of charter 8th graders, 57 percent of students attending a charter school in 9th grade went to either a two- or four-year college within five years of starting high school, whereas among students who started high school in a traditional public school the college attendance rate was only 40 percent. In Chicago, the gap in college attendance is smaller but still sizable: among the study population of charter 8th graders, 49 percent of students at charter high schools attended college, compared to 38 percent of students at traditional public high schools.

Controlling for student demographics, 8th-grade test scores, English language skills, special education program participation, free or reduced-price lunch status (a measure of family income), and mobility during middle school does not alter the basic patterns of graduation and college attendance seen in the descriptive comparisons. The estimated impact of attending a charter high school on the probability of obtaining a high school diploma is positive in both Florida and Chicago. In Chicago, students who attended a charter high school were 7 percentage points more likely to earn a regular high school diploma than their counterparts with similar characteristics who attended a traditional public high school. The graduation differential for Florida charter schools was even larger, at 15 percentage points. The findings for college attendance are remarkably similar in Florida and Chicago. Among the study population of charter 8th graders, students who attended a charter high school in 9th grade are 8 to 10 percentage points more likely to attend college than similar students who attended a traditional public high school (see Figure 1).

As discussed above, there remains the possibility that unobserved changes occur between 8th and 9th grade that influence both high school choice and subsequent educational attainment. For example, dissatisfaction with performance in a charter middle school that is not captured by test scores (such as discipline issues or a poor fit between the student’s interests or ability and the curriculum being offered) could lead parents to choose to send their child to a traditional public high school. When we correct for this potential bias by examining students who attended charter or traditional public school based on proximity, we continue to find highly significant positive effects of attending a charter high school on both receipt of a high school diploma and college enrollment. The magnitude of the effects is large, roughly double the size of our main results.

This pattern suggests that, among students enrolled in charter schools as 8th graders, it is those who are less likely to graduate who are choosing to attend charter high schools. We can only speculate as to why this is so. It is possible that parents whose children are at risk of dropping out are more likely to choose charter high schools in a belief that the traditional public school environment would make it more likely that their child leaves school early. Alternatively, although we control for free or reduced-price lunch eligibility, it may be the case that low-income families have a stronger preference for charter schools. If so, families with children in charter high schools would be less likely to be able to afford to send their children to college.

Possible Mechanisms

The analyses reported above cannot explain how or why charter high schools appear to produce positive effects on their students’ educational attainment. Our study lacks data on operations and instruction in the charter schools, so we have little opportunity to explore the mechanisms contributing to their success. Nonetheless, we have a few pieces of information that permit exploratory analyses of factors that might play a role.

First, it is worth considering that charter high schools may raise rates of high school graduation and college enrollment directly, or indirectly through improved academic achievement. We attempt to distinguish between these explanations by controlling in the analysis for math and reading achievement as measured in the 10th grade. Controlling for 10th-grade test scores explains about half the graduation differential for charter high schools in Florida but less than 20 percent of the difference in Chicago. And it has an even smaller effect on the results for college enrollment, reducing the estimated effect of charter school attendance by only about 10 percent in both locations. These patterns suggest that the positive effects of charter school attendance on educational attainment are not due solely to measured differences in the achievement of students in charter and traditional public high schools. This result is similar to those found in some studies of Catholic high schools, which suggest larger benefits for attainment than for test scores.

Second, given that charter high schools tend to be much smaller than traditional public high schools, charter school effects might simply be attributable to their smaller size. In order to assess this possibility, we ran the analyses for high school graduation and college attendance again with an additional control for the total number of students attending the school. The results are comparable to those reported above, indicating that the estimated effects of charter high schools are not due to differences in school size.

Third, we consider the possibility that the charters’ success might be related to grade configurations that often differ from those of traditional public schools. In the traditional public school sector in both Chicago and Florida, high schools are almost always separate from middle schools. This is not the case for charter schools. In 2001–02, about 22 percent of charter schools in Florida offering middle-school grades also offered some or all high-school grades. As a result, about 30 percent of Florida charter 8th-grade students attended schools that also offered at least some high-school grades. In Chicago, 40 percent of charter middle schools offered both middle- and high-school grades, and nearly half of the 8th-grade charter students could attend at least some high-school grades without changing schools. This raises the possibility that the measured effects of attending a charter high school on educational attainment could simply reflect advantages of grouping middle and high school grades together, thereby creating greater continuity for students and eliminating the disruption often associated with changing schools.

In order to examine whether charter-school effects might be attributable to eliminating the transition between middle and high school, we restricted the Florida analysis to those students whose 8th-grade charter school did not offer 9th grade and ran our analyses again. For high school graduation, restricting the sample produces estimates that are nearly identical to the original estimates from our main method. Using the restricted sample and our alternative method, the estimates are about 30 percent smaller than when the full sample is employed, but still large. Meanwhile, estimates of the effect of attending a charter high school on college enrollment are even larger using the restricted sample than with the original sample that includes schools offering both 8th and 9th grade. In Florida, grade configuration is not a primary driver of the estimated positive effects of charter high schools on attainment. In Chicago, however, we could not run similar analyses because grade configuration is too strongly correlated with charter status; we therefore cannot rule out the possibility that positive results in Chicago could be partly attributable to eliminating the transition from middle school to high school.

Finally, we examined an interpretive concern arising from the fact that some charter schools in Florida are former traditional public schools that converted to charter status. If conversion schools were better-than-average traditional public schools to begin with, they may be distorting the estimated impact of charters on educational attainment. We calculated separate effects for Florida conversion and non-conversion (“de novo”) charters in Florida. (In Chicago, virtually all of the charter high schools in our sample were de novo charters). We found that although Florida’s conversion charters have significantly greater effects on high school graduation than do de novo charters, the impact of non-conversion charters is still sizable (nearly equal to the estimate in Chicago). For college attendance, the estimated positive impacts of Florida’s de novo charters are statistically indistinguishable from the estimated positive impacts of Florida’s conversion charters.

Conclusions

Although a number of recent studies analyze the relationship between charter school attendance and student achievement, this is the first analysis of the impacts of charter school attendance on educational attainment. We find that charter schools are associated with an increased likelihood of successful high-school completion and an increased likelihood of enrollment at a two- or four-year college in two disparate jurisdictions, Florida and Chicago. The reasons for these large charter-school effects are not clear. There is certainly room for future work to explore how differences in curricula, expectations, peer characteristics, and other factors may cause charter schools to diminish the high-school dropout rate and ease the transition to postsecondary schooling.

Our findings are consistent with some research on the efficacy of Catholic schools, which finds substantial positive effects of attending a Catholic high school on educational attainment. While just a first step, the results presented here and in the Catholic-school literature suggest that school-choice programs that include alternatives to traditional public high schools may reduce high-school dropout rates and promote college attendance.

Kevin Booker is researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. Tim R. Sass is professor of economics at Florida State University. Brian Gill is senior social scientist at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. Ron Zimmer is associate professor at Michigan State University. This article is adapted from research reported in Charter Schools in Eight States (RAND Corporation, 2009).

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The warm greetings given by both Republicans and Democrats on the committee reflect Duncan’s reputation as a centrist in the ideologically fraught battles over education reform. He has received national attention for moves favored by reformers, such as opening 75 new schools operated by outside groups and staffed by non-union teachers; introducing a pay-for-performance plan that will eventually be in 40 Chicago schools; and working with organizations, including The New Teacher Project, Teach For America, and New Leaders for New Schools, that recruit talented educators through alternatives to the traditional education-school route.

At the same time, Duncan maintained at least a cordial working relationship with the Chicago Teachers Union, and both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) backed his nomination. He supported the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB), but also called for dramatic increases in spending to help schools meet the law’s targets, and additional flexibility for districts like his own. In nominating Duncan, Obama said, “We share a deep pragmatism about how to go about this. If pay-for-performance works and we can work with teachers so it doesn’t feel like it’s being imposed upon them…then that’s something that we should explore. If charter schools work, try that. You know, let’s not be clouded by ideology when it comes to figuring out what helps our kids.”

Given the strong union support for the Obama presidency, there was great speculation within education circles throughout the fall as to whether the new president would turn out to be a reformer—willing to challenge existing practices and the teachers unions in order to achieve dramatic changes in schools—or play it politically safe by backing programs that brought only marginal changes. A sharp divide among Democrats was in full view at the party’s national convention in Denver, where urban mayors and educators, gathered at a forum sponsored by Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), challenged the dominant role of teachers unions in shaping policy. Newark mayor Cory Booker told those assembled, “We have to understand that as Democrats we have been wrong on education, and it’s time to get it right.”

Even before the national convention, conflicts between the unions and Democratic reformers were intensifying. At a New York fundraiser in 2007, Obama reportedly made a similar point. According to Joe Williams, DFER’s executive director, Obama incriminated the teachers unions when the director of a Harlem charter school asked the then candidate why Democrats threw up so many obstacles.

Williams explained, “We’re at this point where the nation wants to change education more than the unions and the unions are going to have to decide if they’re going to be part of the change or be left out of it entirely.”

Two manifestoes issued during the Democratic primaries laid out competing philosophies on improving student achievement that were intended to influence the eventual Democratic nominee. A “Broader, Bolder Approach to Education,” a letter issued by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, signed by national leaders across much of the political spectrum, and endorsed by the AFT, argued that improving schools alone would not close achievement gaps between disadvantaged and advantaged students. It called on policymakers to provide preschool, afterschool programs, and summer school, and take steps to improve students’ health and social development. Another letter, issued by a coalition called the Education Equality Project, advocated addressing school system failures through greater accountability, school choice, and changes in compensation that would promote teacher quality. Those who signed on to the project, a diverse group of leaders in education, philanthropy, and public service, vowed to “challenge politicians, public officials, educators, union leaders and anybody else who stands in the way of necessary change.”

Obama has allies in both camps. Arne Duncan was one of only a handful who signed both statements. Yet in his confirmation hearing, Duncan left little doubt that the administration wants to make systemic changes.

“We must do dramatically better,” Duncan told the Senate committee. “We must continue to innovate. We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn’t work. And we have to continue to challenge the status quo.”

Advisors to Obama say the rhetorical distinction was overdrawn and that the thrust of the president’s strategy is to make progress without causing further polarization. His education platform reflected that approach. Like many Democrats, he wants to spend more money: on helping students attend college; early childhood care and education; and improving teaching through mentoring and professional development for both principals and teachers. He has criticized NCLB for encouraging teaching solely focused on preparing students to pass tests. But in line with many Republicans and more conservative Democrats, Obama, like Duncan, supports school choice, charter schools, performance-based pay, and alternatives to education schools for teacher preparation (see sidebar). He and his opponent, Senator John McCain, both praised the work of Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who has fought the local union as well as the AFT over tenure and teacher pay.

Economic Stimulus

Widespread agreement that only a massive stimulus package could rescue the U.S. economy presented the new administration with the opportunity to placate both sides of the Democratic divide. The unions and their allies would get a massive infusion of federal funds into the schools that would help offset state and local budget cuts. And this would give Obama cover to push for tougher reforms down the road.

House Democrats, after negotiations with Obama’s team, in mid-January proposed a stimulus package of $825 billion that included between $120 billion and $140 billion for public schools and colleges. Most of the money would have few strings attached.

The spending package would boost federal spending on Title I programs for low-income students and for special education, distributing the money according to current formulas. It would also provide at least $39 billion to offset state cuts in education budgets and $20 billion for capital improvements at schools and colleges. About $15 billion would be available to states as bonuses for efforts such as ensuring that low-performing schools and districts have effective teachers and that the performance of English-language learners and special education students is properly assessed (see Figure 1). One Obama aide said similar incentives would be incorporated into education programs to be introduced later in the spring.

The stimulus package also proposed to boost funding for the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF), a Bush-era program that provides financial incentives to teachers and principals who raise overall student achievement and close achievement gaps. After Democrats took control of Congress in 2006, they zeroed out funding for TIF but restored $100 million for the following year. In his last budget, Bush requested $200 million for the program, the same amount Obama’s team has proposed.

Thirty-six states plus the District of Columbia already have local or statewide teacher compensation systems that add some sort of financial incentive to the standard step-and-column pay plan, according to the NEA. Former NEA president Reg Weaver cautioned that “while we can be open to alternatives, we should always oppose politically motivated, quick fixes designed to weaken the voice of teachers and the effectiveness of education employees. If they want to talk about changing the way we’re paid, they need to do that with us, not to us.”

In Obama’s platform, he agreed that such plans should be developed in consultation with teachers. Among the promising models is a voluntary pay-for-performance program in place in districts in a dozen states, funded in part by TIF, and implemented by Duncan in Chicago. The Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) provides teachers with professional support, helps them to use data in instruction, holds them accountable for results, and provides bonuses. Teachers in 10 Chicago schools voted to participate in TAP starting in the fall of 2007, and bonuses totaling $340,000 were given out the following year for improved test scores at 9 of the schools. “This is a landmark event for Chicago’s schools—recognizing and rewarding educators for exemplary work and compensating them accordingly,” Duncan said at the time.

The scale of the proposed spending on education is stunning, more than doubling the federal contribution. Of course, even an increase of that magnitude would leave the feds as the junior investors in public education, their contribution dwarfed by current state and local spending. But the funds proposed to offset cuts in state funding would mean that, for the first time, the federal government would be directly covering the cost of basic school operations. That kind of money could buy a lot of goodwill, especially if it helps states avoid laying off thousands of teachers. By December 2008, 19 states had cut K–12 education spending, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group. Even with the infusion of federal support proposed so far, states may have to make further cuts in their education budgets if the economy does not improve quickly. States spend between one-third and one-half of their budgets on elementary and secondary education, and the revenue available to state and local governments is shrinking fast. By January 2008, states had reported deficits of $350 billion. “If the economy doesn’t get better, schools are in trouble,” said Jack Jennings, founder and CEO of the Center on Education Policy. “For the sake of the schools it’s important that Obama pay attention to the economy.”

Even if the economy recovers and the stimulus package goes through intact, some observers question whether the proposed spending will do enough to address persistent disparities in achievement. Despite past federal support directed toward the needs of low-income students, African American 4th and 8th graders did not make measurable progress on the National Assessment of Educational Progress between 2005 and 2007. “Is the stimulus going to benefit kids in ways that are palpable and real and that improve achievement?” asked Dianne Piche of the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights. As the House was passing its version of the stimulus package (see Figure 1), Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute noted that most of the money simply gave states dollars to keep intact the programs of the past: “It’s like an alcoholic at the end of the night when the bars close and the solution is to open the bar for another hour,” he told a New York Times reporter.

No Child Left Behind

The pressing economic issues, as well as difficult politics, will likely push reauthorization of NCLB into 2010 or even 2011. California Democrat Representative George Miller, who was one of four members of Congress who worked with the first Bush administration on the original NCLB, wants to see it revised and reauthorized. Yet Miller acknowledged to the Washington Post that “at the end of the day, it may be the most tainted brand in America.”

NCLB has been a great success in the sense that no one disagrees with its goals: accountability for results, addressing issues of teacher quality, putting a spotlight on the learning of all students, and better targeting of funds to districts serving the most disadvantaged students. Still, its detractors argue that the law has had unfortunate side effects: too much time spent teaching to narrow tests, schools focused on boosting the scores of students who are just below the proficiency threshold, and some states lowering their standards to reduce the number of schools missing their achievement targets.

“We’ve learned over the past five to 10 years that we have to align curriculum, align standards, and align tests with professional development,” Jennings said. “We’ve also learned that it is very, very hard to do. We’ve also learned that if we really set certain goals…teachers will pay attention to those students who are just below the goal and not pay attention to those who are further down or further up.”

Obama spoke during his campaign at length about the ins and outs of testing and decried teaching to the test. Rather than abandon the testing in NCLB, he has said he wants to invest in improving assessments, so that they measure a broader range of skills than just the basics.

The battle fought over reauthorization of NCLB in 2007 offers a preview of the challenges the Obama team will face. In a speech at the National Press Club outlining his priorities for reauthorizing the law, Representative Miller said, “Throughout our schools and communities, the American people have a very strong sense that the No Child Left Behind Act is not fair, not flexible, and is not funded. And they are not wrong.”

Hope for Reform
Despite the challenges, many in Washington are hopeful that public schools may in fact improve under an Obama administration. Although he cannot ignore the unions that form a key part of the party’s constituency, Obama owes less to them than did past Democratic presidents. The unions did not support him in the primaries and, because he raised so much money on his own, Obama was not as dependent on their money as others have been. Of course, he is hugely popular with teachers, and the staggering amount of money he appears to be willing to spend on education will only make him more so.

In addition, the leaders of the two unions at least appear more willing to be flexible on some long-standing issues. AFT president Randi Weingarten has said several times that “nothing is off the table” except vouchers. Not that much is known about Dennis Van Roekel, the Arizona math teacher who became president of the NEA last summer (see “Same Old, Same Old,” features, Winter 2009). But he was among those who supported Bob Chase, an earlier NEA president, when he tried to get the union to endorse what he called the “new unionism.” Chase wanted the union to experiment with new forms of performance pay and peer review of teacher performance, but the rank-and-file members nationally were reluctant to go along. It remains unclear how far Weingarten and Van Roekel will be able to push their members now to accept changes in compensation, evaluation, tenure, and so on.

Weingarten finds it “very sad” and frustrating that unions are always blamed for opposing reforms. “There’s a lot of demonizing and blame-mongering going on in education and it’s ridiculous…because it just creates excuses,” she said. “It says to me that they don’t think anything can be done because they are looking for the fall guy rather than helping all kids achieve.”

Weingarten expressed hope that Obama would push for more rigorous standards, better curricula, more valid assessments, and investments in helping teachers improve. “You can’t buy it by putting money out there and saying to teachers, ‘if you don’t do it, you’re fired,’” she said, referring to her opposition to Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C. “We have the responsibility…to recruit and support and retain teachers if they’re doing a good job, and if not, to counsel them out of the profession.”

But Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, counters that the unions have resisted that course of action. “I think the unions are up against the wall,” she said. “The whole movement toward the notion that teachers don’t have a basic right to be in the classroom unless they are effective is proving so powerful as an idea that they’re weakened because they’ve run away from it rather than embrace it.”

It is well known that one of the strongest threads in the narrative of Obama’s journey from his childhood to the White House is educational opportunity (see “The Early Education of Our Next President,” features, Fall 2008). Schooled first in Indonesia, he returned to Hawaii because his mother wanted him to get a better education. There, his maternal grandmother and grandfather enrolled him in the private Punahou School, where he studied with the island’s elite. Then, it was on to Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School.

“I wasn’t born with a lot of advantages, but I was given love and support, and an education that put me on a pathway to success,” Obama said during a major campaign speech on education last September in Dayton, Ohio. “The reason Michelle and I are where we are today is because this country we love gave us the chance at an education. And the reason that I’m running for president is to give every single American that same chance.”

Joe Williams believes that all of those factors, as well as Obama’s personal commitment to improving education, create a real opportunity to bring about systemic, long-lasting changes. “Everyone says they support the goals of NCLB and if that’s real, then he can use his bully pulpit to say that we’ll do in education the equivalent of saying we’ll put a man on the moon in 10 years.

“He can say that we will make sure that every kid who starts the race will cross the finish line and it will give everyone goose bumps and start a new type of discussion about what the game is. But it only has the potential to change the game if he treats it as an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and inspire people to think very big about what is possible,” adds Williams. “Obama is the only person I’ve seen in the last 20 years who may be up to that job.”

“His vision of education is as a foundation not just of the economy but of a society in which people take care of each other,” explained Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond, who advised Obama during the campaign and handled education policy for the president-elect’s transition team, in remarks delivered in November 2007 at a National Academy of Education event. “I think we can make great strides in a very short time.”

Although some may worry about the cost of all of the new programs, Darling-Hammond views the amount Obama wants to spend on education as a relatively small part of the overall bailout and recovery package, which could exceed $1.5 trillion.

In his speech last September in Dayton, Obama assured his audience, “We can do it all.”

Richard Lee Colvin is a longtime education journalist and director of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, Teachers College, Columbia University.

During a decade when voucher programs were handed defeats in Florida, Arizona, Utah, and Washington, DC, the state of Louisiana established a scholarship program that now provides vouchers worth up to $7,000 so that 1,324 poor youngsters in New Orleans can attend private schools.

How did vouchers come to the Big Easy? Michael Henderson tells the story in an article just published on the Ed Next website, “In the Wake of the Storm.” (The article will appear in the Spring 2010 issue of Ed Next.)

You can also hear Michael Henderson discuss how the voucher program came about in a video just posted on the Ed Next website, “How Vouchers Came to New Orleans.”

And here’s a press release that summarizes the main points of the story: Voucher Supporters Achieve Political Success in Louisiana.

Voucher programs and their supporters have had a tough last few years. The Florida Supreme Court declared vouchers in that state unconstitutional in 2006. Three years later, the Arizona Supreme Court did the same. In 2007, voters in Utah handed a resounding defeat to a voucher program there. In 2009, the U.S. Congress refused to continue funding the federal voucher program in Washington, D.C., effectively killing the program in the nation’s capital.

The Louisiana legislature stood apart from this trend and in the summer of 2008 passed Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence, the state’s first voucher program, specifically for New Orleans. In the fall, 870 students in kindergarten through 3rd grade whose families earned less than two and a half times the federal poverty level and who would otherwise attend some of the worst schools in the city received vouchers worth up to $6,000 to attend private schools of their choice. In the second year, 2009–10, the maximum voucher amount rose to more than $7,000. The number of students receiving vouchers increased to 1,324. Thirty-one private schools, most of them parochial, in Orleans Parish and neighboring Jefferson Parish serve these students. As was the case before Hurricane Katrina (see “Hope after Katrina,” feature, Fall 2006), private schools educate about one-third of the students in Orleans Parish (see Figure 1).

How did the Louisiana legislature pass this proposal when so many other states were rejecting similar programs? At first glance the question may not seem particularly interesting. After all, Louisiana is seen as the perennial exception to the general rule of American political culture. The state’s most famous political personality and a uniquely Louisianan character, Huey P. Long, once described himself as sui generis, one of a kind. The moniker is as fitting to the land of Long as to the man himself. On top of that, Hurricane Katrina brought unprecedented physical destruction, demographic shifts, and economic impacts that reshaped state and local politics as well.

In fact, passage of House Bill 1347, which established  the Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence Program, depended on many factors, only some of which can be traced to Hurricane Katrina. The legislative success of the program was more a political story than a fluke of geography or history.

“In a way we’ve never done before”

Policy innovation comes slowly along the muddy banks of the Mississippi River. Frequently, it seems only an external catalyst (federal civil-rights enforcement, international fluctuations in the price of oil, or floodwaters) can spur new approaches to the social and economic challenges that have long faced New Orleans. The city’s Old World persona has frustrated the reformer at least as much as it has intrigued the tourist.

School governance is no exception. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) was the strongest board politically in the state. It oversaw the largest district, the most students, and the biggest budget. It employed more teachers and staff than any other district, a ready resource for phone calls and letters directed at state officials. Its boundaries overlapped with 15 seats in the Louisiana House of Representatives and another 7 in the Senate, representing about 15 percent of the legislature, far more than any other school district. New Orleans was also home to the state’s strongest teachers union, United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO). In the 1970s, it was the first teachers union in the Deep South (and the only one in Louisiana) to win collective bargaining rights.

But the political clout of the OPSB and UTNO was not matched with a will for reform. When the Louisiana legislature proposed to address the state’s troubled schools in the 1990s with a series of policy innovations—charter schools, school accountability, and high-stakes testing—the OPSB and UTNO (occasionally even the New Orleans City Council) opposed the changes at each turn. A decade later, when the state sought to tighten fiscal oversight over the district, the OPSB balked, despite having lost track of millions of federal dollars and facing bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, public school enrollment steadily declined, dropping by more than 30,000 students over 30 years. Those students who remained attended some of the nation’s worst schools. Nearly two-thirds of the district’s schools were identified as “academically unacceptable,” the state’s lowest performance category. Only 12.5 percent of schools statewide received that designation.

Reform would have to come from outside. As House Bill 1347 approached passage in 2008, a representative from New Orleans stood on the House floor desperately urging his colleagues to delay the final vote, “We are spending $10 million on 1,500 students in a way we’ve never done before!”

He was correct. The legislature had rejected some 20 voucher proposals in the 10 years leading up to the 2008 legislative session. In 2005, a voucher proposal survived a hearing in the House Education Committee and passed the entire House. The Senate Education Committee put a stop to its progress, defeating it by one vote.

Voucher proposals were defeated because a persistent legislative coalition opposed them. Urban legislators tend to be mostly black Democrats from within the cities of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Shreveport. Legislators from the more affluent areas in and around the state’s cities tend to be white Republicans. Rural and small-town legislators are mostly conservative white Democrats and Republicans. How these groups pair off spells the fate of most any legislative proposal.

Almost without exception, suburban Republicans support urban vouchers, and urban Democrats oppose them. As a result, the stance of rural and small-town legislators has been decisive on the issue. They represent districts that are spread over large geographic areas and are typically not situated neatly within radio and television markets. Legislators from these areas build strong ties with local officials—sheriffs, parish (county) government officials, and school board members—who provide name recognition, organization, and personal contact with their constituents. Rural legislators pay particularly close attention to the interests of these officials and to groups that lobby on their behalf, such as the Louisiana School Boards Association.

Opposition to vouchers was particularly acute in rural northern Louisiana, which has relatively few private schools. Most of the state’s private schools are Catholic institutions in southern Louisiana. Critics would, therefore, cast vouchers as a handout to the majority Catholic south, an unappealing prospect in the majority Baptist north. With their constituents uneasy about vouchers and their political allies on local boards actively opposing all such programs, these legislators opposed the proposals and the bills died.

Hurricane Katrina

What made 2008 different? The easy answer is Hurricane Katrina. The storm wiped out the status quo. On the first day of the 2005–06 school year, more than 100 public schools served 65,000 students under the purview of the OPSB. Then the storm damaged or destroyed two-thirds of the district’s school buildings, an estimated loss of $800 million. It also dispersed tens of thousands of New Orleans residents throughout the country. When the school year ended, only a handful of public schools had reopened, serving fewer than one-fifth as many students as had begun the year. To recover from such devastation, the city of New Orleans needed help from the state to restore infrastructure, homes, places of business, and schools.

The need for rebuilding opened up the opportunity for reform. “We’re not going to simply re-create the schools of New Orleans,” then governor Kathleen Blanco announced in her first speech following the storm. “Tonight, I am calling on all Louisianans and all Americans to join an historic effort to build a world-class, quality system of public education in New Orleans. Our children who have weathered this storm deserve no less.” She called the legislature into special session and requested authorization for state takeover of schools in New Orleans. The legislation easily passed, and the Louisiana Department of Education took over all but the handful of top-performing schools in the city. Today, the OPSB runs only 5 schools and the state runs 30. A majority of public school students attend the 40 charter schools. Whether district-run, state-run, or charters, all of these schools operate under a system of public choice without attendance zones.

Damaged as much by revelations of its own misdeeds as by the hurricane and state takeover, the OPSB has become politically obsolete. Likewise, UTNO was decimated. In August 2005, before Hurricane Katrina, the union claimed more than 7,000 members among the district’s teachers and support personnel. Lacking schools to staff, the OPSB terminated all teachers and education personnel in January 2006. UTNO filed suit the next day to force the district to reopen more schools. More unsuccessful suits followed, for back pay, disaster pay, lost sick days, and employee-paid health care and pension contributions. When the collective bargaining agreement expired in June 2006, the OPSB declined to renew it.

So if the storm brought state takeover and dramatic expansion of charter schools to New Orleans, did it also bring vouchers? On its own, Hurricane Katrina cannot explain it. In the weeks after the storm, the superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of New Orleans appeared before the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) urging board members to consider using vouchers as a way for the state and Catholic schools to collaborate in serving the students who remained in the city. BESE declined. Later, when Governor Blanco called the legislature into special session (twice) to address the crisis, vouchers were not on her agenda. In the spring of 2006, when the legislature held its first regular session after the hurricane, it killed three voucher proposals.

“If Bobby Jindal gets elected”

Passage of a voucher bill required political change. That change came in the fall of 2007 when Bobby Jindal, a Republican and strong supporter of vouchers, was elected governor. Thirty-six at the time, Jindal is one of the state’s youngest governors. But he has a long résumé: Rhodes scholar, a stint at McKinsey & Company, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, president of the University of Louisiana System, assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services, and member of the U.S. House of Representatives for the 1st District of Louisiana, a suburban district outside New Orleans and the geographic base of the state’s Republican Party.

Jindal casts himself as a “policy wonk” and reformer, and his agenda for education features several ideas unfathomable in previous administrations: teacher pay for performance, school vouchers, and tax credits for private school tuition. Proponents of these proposals saw promise in Jindal. Just days before the vote, Howard Fuller, founder of the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) and a strong supporter of vouchers, told national reporters, “If Bobby Jindal gets elected, I think we have a chance to do something in Louisiana.”

“A few green stamps to spend”

Jindal had help from a 12-year-old term-limits law that changed the face of the legislature in 2007. Sixty of the 105 districts in the House had open-seat elections. Eighteen of 39 Senate seats were also vacant. Although 15 seats were filled by incumbents from one chamber running for election in the other, the vast majority of open seats were filled by first-time legislators. This massive influx of new blood marked the largest turnover in the Louisiana legislature since Reconstruction. The turnover changed the prospects for voucher legislation.

Most important, Republicans increased their numbers. Louisiana has been trending Republican for decades as Republicans replaced retiring Democrats, but the process was slow. When term limits forced the retirement of 60 incumbents, most of whom were Democrats, Republicans saw the largest boost in their legislative ranks in over 100 years. This increased Jindal’s base of support. But Republicans still fell short of a majority: 48 percent in the House and 42 percent in the Senate. A party-line vote would defeat the bill. Governor Jindal needed Democrats as well.

The governor initially sought to build a biracial coalition between white Republicans and black Democrats. A similar coalition had passed vouchers in Wisconsin 20 years before. Jindal was not so fortunate. The Legislative Black Caucus consists almost entirely of Democrats, and its membership overlaps significantly with the Orleans delegation. Although a few members have been prominent supporters of charter school expansion, the group has tended to support traditional public-school interests like greater funding for struggling schools and pay raises for teachers rather than choice proposals. The 2008 session was no different. With the Black Caucus opposed, the few black legislators’ “Yea” votes Jindal secured were not enough to change the outcome. However, he managed to transform the image of the proposal’s supporters. For the first time, black legislators from New Orleans, Rep. Austin Badon and Sen. Ann Duplessis, sponsored the voucher bill. All of the previous attempts (even those specifically aimed at the majority black school system in New Orleans) had been sponsored by white Republicans.

Similarly, the most prominent organizations to lobby in support of these proposals, the Archdiocese of New Orleans and the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, were represented by whites. In 2008 these organizations took a backseat. Instead, most testimony in support of the bill came from BAEO. During one key committee hearing, national and state leaders of BAEO were accompanied by two teenagers from Desire Street Academy, a private school in the New Orleans Ninth Ward. The students spoke about how attending a private school changed their lives, reflecting on the cousins, friends, and neighbors who lacked this opportunity. Each closed his comments with the phrase, “We can’t wait.” For the first time, supporters represented the population to which the bill was directed.

Still short of votes, Jindal turned to conservative white Democrats from the state’s small towns and rural areas. Local school board members and superintendents had yet to establish alliances with their new legislators. For freshman legislators, the most powerful source of political power was not the local school board; it was the new governor. When he offered to work with them on legislation to help their constituents, they were willing to listen to his agenda.

Soon Jindal had lined up votes from even the most unlikely supporters. For example, Rep. Noble Ellington Jr., a Democrat from the small northern community of Winnsboro, had opposed vouchers for more than a decade. In 2008 he had a change of heart or at least a change of vote. Ellington told reporters that he would vote for the bill because he was “willing to work with the governor as long as he is willing to work with me on things in my district.” Another northern Louisiana representative captured the political situation during debate in the House Education Committee, “We have a governor who is very interested….The administration has a few green stamps to spend.”

“What has changed is the frame”

The administration still had to provide legislators with the necessary political cover to explain their votes back home and so crafted the legislation in the most amenable terms possible. The term voucher is conspicuously absent from the 11-page act. Its official title is the Student Scholarships for Education Excellence Program. The bill’s supporters took care to use the term “scholarship” in all their discussions of the bill. House Speaker Pro Tempore Karen Carter Peterson, a prominent opponent, first noticed a reference to the program during a routine review of the governor’s proposed budget several weeks before the legislative session began. “That wouldn’t be vouchers would it?” she asked Commissioner of Administration Angèle Davis. “No. It’s a scholarship program,” Davis replied.

Opponents tried to reclaim the lead on framing the issue. During the House Education debate two months after Peterson’s exchange with Davis, Steve Monaghan, president of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, declaring “what has changed is the frame,” described the program as camouflaged vouchers. But the bill’s language remained intact and allowed legislators to tell their constituents that they had voted for “scholarships.”

The administration also won the spin battle over the measure’s cost, paying careful attention to how the bill treated the state’s education funding formula, the Minimum Foundation Program (MFP), the main source of state support for districts and a sacred cow in the statehouse. No legislator wants to be charged with cutting funds for children.

Jindal set aside $10 million for the program from the state’s general fund, rather than from dollars reserved for the MFP. Opponents argued that the bill would still reduce MFP dollars for New Orleans indirectly, as the formula is based on enrollment in public schools. But since the official enrollment counts for the MFP are conducted at the end of the school year (to determine dollars for the following year), any indirect impact on MFP funding from the voucher program was delayed for a year after the bill’s passage. Legislators who supported the bill could tell their constituents that they did not cut the MFP.

Finally, in crafting a proposal that would affect only New Orleans, the administration gave legislators additional political cover. Those who might oppose vouchers in their own districts could support them for New Orleans. In the end, the language of the bill permitted the administration to tell legislators (who could then tell their constituents) that the scholarships would not harm the MFP and would not affect schools in their own districts.

A Low Profile

The administration’s strategy to keep the bill’s profile low also helped secure passage. Except for Rep. Peterson’s exchange with Commissioner Davis in February, there were only rumors about a $10 million scholarship program. Neither Jindal’s fall campaign nor his inaugural address made an issue of vouchers. The governor never mentioned the proposal until his speech to open the legislative session in late March. Even then, the 49 words devoted to the program (out of a 4,000-word speech mostly dedicated to education issues) offered no details. Voucher opponents remained in the dark until the bill was filed one week into the session. By then, much of the administration’s work to line up votes was complete.

The administration further avoided early grass-roots opposition in New Orleans by navigating around the rules for “local” bills, a tactic that had been employed previously in Cleveland and Milwaukee. In Louisiana, bills that affect only a single community must be filed before the session begins and must be advertised in the community they will affect. The administration avoided the “local” designation by singling out New Orleans only indirectly. The bill applied to school districts with a population greater than 475,000 as of the 2000 census. Only Orleans Parish meets this criterion.

The bill received only modest press attention. There was no barrage of advertisements urging citizens to contact their representatives. One exception was a radio spot aired in New Orleans criticizing Rep. Peterson for her opposition to the scholarship program. Interest groups did not mobilize supporters or opponents to gather on the capitol steps or in the streets of New Orleans. BAEO was an exception, but its efforts were aimed more at recruiting students and parents to testify at the committee hearing than at organizing public rallies.

“This bill is already on the books”

The only close vote came in the bill’s first test. The 17-member House Education Committee heard the bill in late April. All but five members had begun their first term only six months before and were hearing the debate for the first time. Rep. Peterson joined the committee for the hearing. As Speaker Pro Tempore, she has the right to participate in any committee hearing but cannot vote. After three and a half hours of testimony and debate, all six Republicans on the committee voted for the bill. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Badon, who was also the committee’s vice chairman, voted for the bill, but the other five black representatives on the committee voted against, along with a white Democrat from New Orleans. The bill’s fate depended on the remaining five white Democrats who represented smaller towns throughout the state. Three of them voted against but two voted in support. The bill passed committee 9 to 8, with Rep. Peterson sitting on the sidelines unable to cast the vote that would have kept the bill from moving forward.

When the bill returned to the House floor in mid-May, Rep. Jean-Paul Morrell (D-New Orleans) opposed it but conceded, “At this point I think we can all agree that this bill is already on the books.” The only shot at defeat was to stall until the legislature was required to close the session in June. Rep. Peterson moved to send the bill to House Appropriations, ostensibly because it required a $10 million appropriation. The motion failed.

In the Senate Education Committee, the debate was limited to amendments dealing with implementation: how long private schools had to operate before participating, what tests students receiving vouchers would have to take, what agency would be responsible for the costs of auditing the program.

Opponents took on an air of resignation. The New Orleans Times-Picayune, one of the most prominent papers in the state, had run an editorial condemning the bill in May. By June, editors could read the writing on the wall and in their pages argued for “strengthening” the bill (i.e., amending the accountability provisions) rather than defeating it.

The amendments gave opponents their final chances at running down the clock. The bill was next heard in the Senate Finance Committee, where Sen. Edwin Murray (D-New Orleans) repeatedly asked the chairman, Sen. Mike Michot (R-Lafayette), to table the bill while the committee members took time to digest the amendments. Michot, noting the dwindling number of days left in the session, declined.

The bill returned to the House floor on June 18 for concurrence in the Senate amendments. Only five days remained in the legislative session. The House could concur in the amendments, effectively passing the bill, or reject them. Supporters voted to concur in the amendments and send the bill to the governor’s desk immediately.

The bill passed the House 62 to 34, with eight representatives recorded as absent. Almost every Republican voted for the bill and all but six members of the Legislative Black Caucus opposed it. White Democrats cast the deciding votes; urban and suburban white Democrats voted with their Republican peers. Rural Democrats split for and against the bill in almost even numbers, but this was far more support than any previous bill had found from these legislative districts. The bill passed in large part because the governor had won over more rural white Democrats than anyone had before (see Figure 2).

Beyond Sui Generis

So far, the program has survived legally and politically (see sidebar). But was passage of the Louisiana voucher program a fluke arising from situations just too unique to replicate elsewhere? Or does it offer more general lessons about the politics of school choice? The fact that the program came so close on the heels of Hurricane Katrina seems to suggest the former. The storm set the stage, raising the salience of education reform and crippling some traditional political opponents. Perhaps most important, it wiped out the political strength of the local teachers union, an occurrence unlikely to be repeated elsewhere.

But once the stage was set, the political dynamics were not so uniquely Louisianan. Passage of House Bill 1347 ultimately depended on the votes of rural legislators unaccustomed to supporting vouchers. Winning over those votes depended on a popular governor committed to expanding choice, his willingness to put his political capital to work for the proposal’s success, and adept navigation of the legislative process. This is where voucher supporters found their greatest asset: a popular governor committed to school choice. Supporters did not have to lobby the governor for support; he was a supporter already. Instead, they could simply assist him in lobbying the legislature. The critical lesson for proponents outside the Bayou State seems to be: Get strong voucher supporters elected.

The political story of every reform will have some unique features. In New Orleans, the critical factors in establishing vouchers were 1) the weakened union presence; 2) parent-based lobbying support; 3) new faces in the legislature; and 4) strong gubernatorial support. Except perhaps for the first of these, none is too uniquely Louisianan to be inimitable.

Michael Henderson, a native of Louisiana, is research fellow at Harvard University’s Program for Education Policy and Governance and graduate student in the Department of Government.

Various people began lining up with one study or the other – largely it seems on the basis of which results they liked.  Those supporting expanded charters emphasized the New York results, while those generally disliking charters emphasized the other.

There were two major differences among the studies:  they used different evaluation methodologies, and they analyzed different sets of charter schools.  The CREDO study employed a matching approach that compared students in charter schools to a virtual student who had similar prior achievement, race, income, and so forth along with being in one of the feeder schools from which a given charter drew its students.  The New York study compared students who won a lottery for entry into each (oversubscribed) charter to students who lost the lottery.  The CREDO study looked across 15 states (which did not include New York), while the NBER study was confined to New York City schools.  Either or both of those differences could be responsible for the different results.

A new study by CREDO clears up the uncertainty.  They took their matching approach to evaluation to New York City charters, thus holding constant location.

The new CREDO results were virtually the same as the prior NBER results:  Charter schools in New York City do significantly better than the traditional public schools that feed them.  Thus, it is not methodology that drives the prior differences in results, but instead it is the fact that New York City simply is doing something different.

These results change the focus of debate.  They bring us back to considering what is it that makes some charters fly high and others fall flat.  Is it the authorizing environment?  The state of existing public schools in an area?  The role of state regulations and oversight?

It is really important to dig deeper into the underlying causes of effectiveness across the charter sector.  They will not only give us insights about how to organize charter schools but also how to manage and improve the traditional public schools.

The session in the second-floor seminar room at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany had already featured a detailed presentation of “charter facts” from the new executive director of New York’s Charter Schools Institute and a dozen friendly questions from the mostly pro-charter audience. Ward, the dignified and cerebral deputy director of the institute, seemed anxious to wrap things up. “So, thank you—”

He stopped in midsentence. A hand had shot up at the back of the crowded room. “Eva, did you want to ask a question?” he asked.

All eyes turned to the dark-haired woman sitting on a folding chair along the back wall of the room. Some eyes rolled, as most of the group knew Eva Joseph, the embattled superintendent of Albany Public Schools (APS). They had seen her at countless education forums, on the local nightly news, and in the daily paper at every turn of the school budget clock, determinedly defending her district and, increasingly, railing against charter schools. “I’ll make it quick,” said Dr. Joseph. “I do want to thank you for acknowledging the situation in Albany, but going to the heart of what’s real, we have 10 charter schools in Albany with a total public school population of 10,500 students. Compare that to 23 charter schools in the Big 5, with the exception of New York City. Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, Yonkers. Twenty-three total charter schools and you total up their enrollment. The proliferation here. The oversaturation, per pupil and per capita, is glaring. And it has serious implications for the district. It destabilizes it on many fronts….”

Standing a few feet away, as Joseph plunged on, a man leaned against the wall, smiling. It was not a smug or obvious smile, nor the smirk of a man who was mocking or scornful. Tom Carroll was smiling because he had heard the speech before and because he knew, as founder of the charter school foundation that had siphoned off nearly a quarter of Dr. Joseph’s 10,500 students, that he was at least an immediate cause of the vitriol. It was the smile of victory.

The Holy Grail of Charter Schooling
During much of the previous nine years, Carroll had overseen the launch of eight charter schools (see Table 1) in Albany, a small city (pop. 94,172), as Joseph suggested, for so many charters (to see additional images of the schools and their students please click here). Joseph, who began her Albany tenure as an assistant superintendent in 1997 and took the top job in September 2004, had been engaged in the charter battle for most of that time. “Fifth Albany Charter School Approved” was the headline just two months after she became superintendent. “SUNY adviser suggests city district cut staff, rent out extra space as students depart.”

What had been especially maddening for Dr. Joseph and her school board, which issued routine condemnations of the charters, was not just the presence of so many of the new schools—“the proliferation, the oversaturation”—but that they were so good. The destabilization was real and deep, creating not just viable, but quantifiably better, educational alternatives for children. And this is the singular accomplishment of Carroll’s charter organization: they had found the Holy Grail of charter schooling, quality and scale.

It is still an elusive goal for the charter school movement, which has grown to include more than 4,500 schools and 1.3 million students in 40 states and the District of Columbia. This remains a drop in the public school bucket (nationally there were more than 94,000 public K—12 schools and more than 49 million students in 2007), which is why “market share” is considered a crucial milestone, one of the few ways to pinch traditional schools in their pocketbooks. According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, in 2007 New Orleans had reached 55 percent market share, Washington, D.C., 31 percent, and Southfield, Michigan, and Dayton, Ohio, 28 percent each.

Albany at that time came in at 17 percent, tied with Buffalo for 12th place nationally. But it had already distinguished itself as the only member of the market-share club with consistently high academic outcomes.

In fact, the failure of charters to offer a meaningful choice, i.e., a better education, has become a sore point among charter promoters. Education Next editor Chester E. Finn Jr., in a 2007 confessional in his Thomas B. Fordham Institute newsletter (the Education Gadfly), wrote, “Why are so many charter schools inadequate, even mediocre? What went wrong?” Finn noted that in his own “charter-saturated” Dayton, where Fordham was born, things had gone terribly awry. And though charters have taken to putting a good face on things by comparing themselves to their local district schools, which is fair, the truth about quality is uncomfortable. In the fall of 2008, for instance, the Dayton Daily News published a story headlined, “Most charter schools made gains; most Dayton district schools saw losses.” But an accompanying chart revealed that 12 of Dayton’s 19 K—8 charters did not make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP); 8 of the 10 charter high schools fell short of their AYP benchmark.

By contrast, all of Tom Carroll’s Albany charter schools made AYP. Not only that, they had become the best schools in the city. “Last year our students were number one in math in every single grade,” says Carroll, who now runs the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability (FERA), which furnishes research help to charters, and serves as chairman of the Brighter Choice Foundation (BCF), which provides start-up financing aid. “In English, we were number one in 4th and 7th grades. We’re expecting to do even better this year.” And they have. On the 2009 state test in English language arts, in four of the six grades tested, the top school in Albany was one of Carroll’s charters.

Albany public school parents, mostly black and mostly poor, not only have a choice; they have one that will make a significant difference in their children’s futures. The Brighter Choice network has turned largely forgotten students into serious achievers. These schools have not only closed the achievement gap; they have reversed it.

An Unlikely Road to School Reform
“You might say that our success is the revenge of the amateurs,” jokes Carroll, over a recent lunch at a downtown Albany bistro. “We didn’t really know anything about education when we started—and perhaps that’s why we have succeeded.”

A veteran of the sharp-elbowed politics of New York’s infamously dysfunctional state legislature (called the worst in the nation by the Brennan Center for Justice in 2004), Carroll assembled a team of equally determined and savvy colleagues, most of whom had honed their political skills in those same tough trenches. They sounded like a law firm: Carroll, Backstrom, Murphy, Bender, and Brooks. Eva Joseph called them, disparagingly, “the white guys.” In fact, they knew money and they knew politics, and when they stumbled on to the disastrous state of public education, they became determined to know schooling.

“We were all focused on budget and tax issues that would make New York a more job-friendly place,” recalls Peter Murphy, who had worked with Carroll in the state’s budget office. “But we did lots of work examining various parts of the government, including education.” Increasingly, more budget and tax roads led to education, which consumed more than a quarter of the state’s revenues.

While Murphy continued work with a think tank called the Empire Foundation for Policy Research, helping to produce a report on education choice in 1993, Carroll and Brian Backstrom, another veteran of the budget office, and Jason Brooks, a fresh-faced triple major (history, religion, and political science) from Syracuse University, started FERA in 1998. FERA would seal their fates as education reformers when Virginia Gilder, then the wife of one of their major political reform benefactors, Wall Street financier Richard Gilder, asked Carroll what she could do to help fix the schools. Since there was no charter law in New York at the time, the group launched a voucher program. And in an early test of their market-share strategy, Carroll and company decided to spend all of Gilder’s money at just one school, offering $2,000 to 153 students, a third of the student body, at Giffen Elementary, “one of the worst public schools in New York State,” according to Forbes magazine, which featured the program on its cover.

The focus on one school, the national attention, and Giffen being “within spitting distance of the State House,” as Forbes put it, ensured that FERA would be an education reform player and an immediate thorn in the local school district’s side. Even Fred LeBrun—an influential columnist for the Times Union who once called Carroll and his political friends “a blustery gathering of overstuffed three-piece suits with watch fobs”—sympathized, praising the group for “walking the walk, not just talking the talk.” (The message was lost on Albany Public Schools: to this day, Giffen remains hopelessly behind the academic eight ball, with just 46 percent of its 168 remaining students in grades 6—8 able to pass proficiency tests in English and 57 percent passing in math. Carroll still oversees the voucher program, which continues to provide options for 38 Albany public school students each year.)

The next opportunity to walk the walk came in 1998 when the group helped write the state’s charter school law, passed in December, making New York the 34th state to have one.

The Road to a Brighter Choice
Carroll and his colleagues, now fully engaged in their roles as school reformers, immediately established the Charter School Resource Center to offer technical assistance to anyone willing to set up a charter school.

They knew their market. Almost overnight 90 applications for charter schools (the law set a cap of 100) were submitted to the state education department’s Board of Regents and the newly formed Charter Schools Institute at the State University of New York (SUNY). “You know you’ve hit on something when there is that level of interest across the state for doing something different in public education,” says Backstrom.

Carroll, Backstrom, and Brooks traveled the country and spent months on the phone quizzing successful school leaders: what works in your school, what doesn’t work? “And time and time again we were struck with how similar the answers were,” says Backstrom. Longer school day. Longer school year. Content-rich curriculum. School uniforms. Even the single-sex school, they learned, which had been all but driven off the education landscape by Title IX, was being tried, if quietly, and was working.

In November 2000 the group submitted a 300-page application to the Board of Regents to open the Brighter Choice Charter School for Boys (BCCS-Boys) and Brighter Choice Charter School for Girls (BCCS-Girls), which, initially, would be housed in the same building.

“The City of Albany is an educational tale of two cities,” the applicants wrote. Some 30 percent of Albany students already attended private schools—almost double the state average—and only 2 of the city’s 15 public schools managed even “respectable test scores.” Failure rates in the rest of the schools ranged from 50 percent to 80 percent in 4th-grade reading tests; citywide, the failure rate was 64 percent.

This, said the charter applicants, was “not acceptable.” The Regents agreed and granted charters to the two schools. And the rest, as Eva Joseph and a city of doubters would soon learn, is history.

Political Savvy Meets Commitment to Excellence
Even though they would have fewer than 100 places when the two schools opened in September 2002 (with just two grades, K—1, and plans to expand through grade 5), the schools received a thousand applications. This for a place that promised longer days (an hour more than the regular public schools), an extra 25 days of school per academic year, tough discipline, uniforms, and rigorous academic standards.

Success, of course, was anything but guaranteed. “They fought us every step of the way,” recalls Carroll of the APS and the teachers union. The New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), which boasted 600,000 members and had a retirement fund of $70 billion, was considered the most powerful lobbying group in the state. “They bring the cash to the legislators in wheelbarrows,” says Peter Murphy, only half-joking, “and not a day goes by that they aren’t trying to kill charters.” On one occasion, NYSUT slipped an amendment on to an obscure law that would have limited the market share of charters in Albany to 5 percent. Thanks to their many legislative connections, Carroll and team heard about the move and sent a busload of parents and students to the legislative hearing room. “If we had not had a legislative political background,” says Carroll, “they would have taken us to the cleaners.”

And then came Chris Bender, who was 10 minutes into pitching his school insurance product to Carroll when Carroll said, “You should be on my board.”

It was not an impetuous offer. Carroll knew that Bender was a fifth-generation Albany native and heir to a local publishing fortune. “We had people who knew a lot about charter schools,” explained Carroll. “But Chris Bender’s family had been here for 400 years, since the Dutch arrived. Between the two of us there are very few people of any significance in Albany that one of us doesn’t know. If we needed advice on construction, for instance, we could get to the best people. Who knows historic preservation? Who knows environmental regulation? We could figure all that out. If you were just starting out, if you helicoptered in from another country and tried to do it, you would trip over yourself a million times. With a master’s degree in education from Teachers College at Columbia University, Bender was also the only member of the team with real education credentials.

Three months after joining the board Bender became executive director of the group’s new nonprofit, the Brighter Choice Foundation, a technical and financial resource organization for Albany charter schools that would become the key to scale.

Through BCF, Carroll expanded the “what works” operating principle to include not just re-creating specific proven policies and practices, but replicating whole schools. The Achievement Academy middle school, which opened in the fall of 2005, was modeled after the Amistad Academy in New Haven, Connecticut, a pioneer of charter success. Albany Prep, which also opened in 2005, was modeled on the International Baccalaureate program and offered extended instructional periods for core academic subjects. The BCF would not only scout out potential charter school operators; it would build them a building; arrange for financing; and provide operational start-up money and free technical assistance, including community relations, politics, media relations, vendor advice, and legal advice if needed. The BCF lobbied KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) founder David Levin to open a school in Albany, offering KIPP both financial and logistical support and the freedom to focus on academic excellence. KIPP Tech Valley, a middle school, opened in 2005.

The financing scheme is both ingenious and, Carroll argues, replicable (see sidebar, page 36). For instance, BCF turned a $15 million loan from the Walton Foundation into a “revolving loan fund,” explains Carroll, that “allows us to build a facility and then take out a mortgage on it.” Once the building is built and the kids are in the chairs, BCF secures a short-term mortgage, which it pays while the new school is starting. When the school reaches full enrollment, usually within four or five years, it can then issue tax-exempt bonds and buy the building from BCF.

Getting It Right
The financing strategy, which includes start-up grants to new schools of up to $500,000, “helps schools start smaller, so they can start good,” says Chris Bender, who also believes that the smart leveraging of small amounts of money is what makes the BCF model replicable.

With such a model in hand, “a paradigm shift for us,” says Carroll, Brighter Choice was able to go to scale with quality and begin to make deep changes in the city’s educational system. The strategy is working so far.

At BCF’s flagship schools, Brighter Choice for Girls and Brighter Choice for Boys, 3rd and 4th graders have been outperforming their district counterparts almost from the beginning on the statewide English language arts and mathematics exams (see Figure 1 for the 2009 test results).

“The Brighter Choice and KIPP schools are even outscoring the white suburban districts surrounding Albany,” says Carroll. “KIPP beat Bethlehem Middle School and Shaker Junior High (both in Albany’s affluent white suburbs), which is North Colonie’s middle school, in 7th grade English and math last year. The point is that we are not just beating crappy mediocre Albany schools; we’re beating the top public school districts in the area.”

Things have not always gone perfectly for Carroll and company. There was early backsliding in performance indicators at the Brighter Choice charter schools, for instance. The Brighter Choice board, which Carroll chairs, immediately asked the state department of education for permission to postpone adding a 5th grade as had been planned. They then did what traditional public schools seem so reluctant to do: they immediately changed leadership personnel. Brighter Choice went through three principals in three years, “until we got it right,” says Carroll.

Carroll’s missteps highlight the secrets to Brighter Choice’s success: constant vigilance, constant adaptability. When the Achievement Academy scores tanked, coming in below the district average in 2006, its second year, the school’s board immediately fired the principal and several teachers (who work with one-year contracts), changed textbooks as well as some systems and routines, and saw, the following year, a marked increase in test scores.

Scale Counts
The second part of the Brighter Choice story has been taking that quality to scale, to provide the kind of pressure to change that will improve the educational landscape.

“In a country this size, creating 50 or 60 really good schools barely creates a ripple,” explains Carroll. “It has a profound impact, of course, on the children educated in them, but it doesn’t challenge any of the institutional structures.”

Scale also provides a certain element of political protection, as Carroll has learned. “If you’re a single school and they close it down, most political people are willing to take that hit. But they’re not willing to close down schools serving thousands of kids.”

Though no one on the Brighter Choice team ever imagined shepherding eight schools into existence (the ninth, a girls’ high school, Albany Leadership, will open in 2010, and applications for two new middle schools are in the pipeline), they were even less sanguine about their chances of moving Albany’s public school system to change.

“We learned early on,” says Brian Backstrom, “that you couldn’t get the schools you needed by changing the schools you had. So that’s why we decided to build new schools, from the bottom up.”

But there have been signs of change at Albany Public Schools, which suggests that scale can count. “They have done some things,” says Backstrom. “Uniforms in one school. They’ve renovated all their facilities, gotten small class sizes—of course, they’ve done that in part because we’ve taken 2,200 kids away from them, but they’ve done it.”

The district has also lengthened its school day, albeit by only 30 minutes, but it is the first change in the union-contracted school day since the district was created in the mid-1970s. And they’ve even closed a perennially underperforming school (the Livingston Middle School). “Admittedly,” says Carroll, “our decision to locate [KIPP Tech Valley] charter school across the street from their weakest school was not subtle.”

Jason Brooks went through the minutes of Albany’s board of education meetings and discovered that, in fact, they were indeed listening, watching—and talking about Brighter Choice. At a March 17, 2005, meeting, for instance, board member Bill Barnett exclaimed, “I think that it’s high time for this district and the Board to have an in-depth discussion around the implications and the associated cost of increasing the number of instruction days.”

Added board member Scott Wexler, “We cannot compete with charter schools with 200 days while our…calendar committee [has] not [had an] instructional discussion [but] an employee benefit discussion. Our employees apparently need to understand our desire to have more time on task so we can be more successful.”
It’s a hopeful start and Brooks created a memo called “The Positive ‘Ripple Effect’ of Charter Schools” to note it.

And, though the district won’t admit the connection, Carroll believes that the recent overall rise in district elementary- and middle-school test scores is the result of “competition from charter schools [which] has forced an increased district focus on measurable outcomes.”

Finally, on March 25, 2009, just two weeks after her Rockefeller Institute charter critique, Eva Joseph announced her resignation. “She said the job has consumed so much of her time, sometimes seemingly 24 hours a day, that she looks forward to relaxing mentally,” wrote Scott Waldman in the Albany Times Union. “Under Joseph, Albany also became ground zero for the charter school movement, with the city’s 11th school expected to open soon. Joseph and the city’s charter school leaders often were at odds.”

“The question remains,” says Carroll, “as charter schools continue to grow in the city—within a year of this September roughly a third of public school children in Albany will be in charter schools—will the district put its head in the sand or finally be forced to reform its schools in order to compete?”

Carroll and company are not waiting around to see what happens. “Our opponents would love to freeze us in our tracks through a moratorium or a market-share cap,” notes Carroll. “But, as long as Albany has a shortage of good schools, the demand from parents and students for more charter schools will not diminish. Why would we want to stop creating charter schools to meet this demand when we know the alternative is for these children to attend bad schools?” A good question.

Peter Meyer, former news editor of Life magazine, is a freelance writer and contributing editor of Education Next.

First, advocates must answer a fundamental question: What type of relationship should the nascent charter sector have with the long-dominant district sector? The tension between the two is at the heart of every political, policy, and philosophical tangle faced by the charter movement.

But charter supporters lack a consistent vision. This motley crew includes civil rights activists, free market economists, career public-school educators, and voucher proponents. They have varied aspirations for the movement and feelings toward the traditional system. Such differences are part of the movement’s DNA: a National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) study found that the nation’s charter laws cite at least 18 different goals, including spurring competition, increasing professional opportunities for teachers, and encouraging greater use of technology.

Because of its uniqueness, chartering is unable to look to previous reform efforts for guidance. No K–12 reform has so fundamentally questioned the basic assumptions—school assignments based on residence, centralized administrative control, schools lasting in perpetuity—underlying the district model of public education. Even the sweeping standards and assessments movement of the last 20 years, culminating in No Child Left Behind, takes for granted and makes use of the district sector.

Though few charter advocates have openly wrestled with this issue, two camps have organically emerged. The first sees chartering as an education system operating alongside traditional districts. This camp contends that the movement can provide more options and improved opportunities, particularly to disadvantaged students, by simply continuing to grow and serve more families.

The second group sees chartering as a tool to help the traditional sector improve. Chartering, the argument goes, can spur district improvement through a blend of gentle competitive nudging and neighborly information sharing.

Both camps are deeply mistaken. For numerous policy and political reasons, without a radical change in tactics the movement won’t be able to sustain even its current growth rate. And neither decades of sharing best practices nor the introduction of charter competition has caused districts to markedly improve their performance.

Both camps have accepted an exceptionally limited view of what this sector might accomplish. Chartering’s potential extends far beyond the role of stepchild or assistant to districts. The only course that is sustainable, for both chartering and urban education, embraces a third, more expansive view of the movement’s future: replace the district-based system in America’s large cities with fluid, self-improving systems of charter schools.

A Parallel System

Charter advocates are rightfully proud of their achievements. As of spring 2007, 4,046 charter schools were serving more than 1.1 million children across 40 states and the District of Columbia. In a number of cities, charters educate a significant proportion of public school students (see Figure 1). But when compared to the expanse of the traditional district-based system and the educational needs of low-income families, the movement’s accomplishments are modest.

Nationwide, only 2 percent of public school students attend charters. Over the last five years, an average of 335 new charters started annually. At this rate, it would take until 2020 for chartering to corner just 5 percent of the national market. Even these humble figures inflate the movement’s true national standing. In 2007 nearly two-thirds of charter schools were in only seven states. Today, 24 states have less than 1 percent of their students in charter schools. Though strong expansion continues in places like California and Florida, the 2006–07 school year saw 26 states open five or fewer new schools, while 5 states—because of closures—began the school year with fewer charters than they had the year before.

None of this, however, should be taken as an assault on charters’ popularity or effectiveness. In New York, 12,000 students are on charter wait lists; in Massachusetts 19,000; in Pennsylvania 27,000. Students on all of the nation’s charter wait lists would fill an estimated 1,121 new charter schools.

Research on student achievement in charters is encouraging. A recent analysis of the charter school studies since 2001 that measured student or school performance over time—the ideal way to measure a school’s “value added”—reported that 29 of 33 studies found charters performing as well as or better than traditional public schools. The New York Times Magazine spotlighted charter networks KIPP, Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First in a major feature on how to close the achievement gap. Yet despite these successes, chartering’s current status and growth trajectory won’t enable it to become a parallel system large enough to serve the millions of needy students across the country within the foreseeable future.

Some might respond, “Then just accelerate growth.” But the forces that have held chartering back over the last 15 years aren’t going away. Worse, even today’s growth levels may be in danger.

Twenty-five states have imposed some type of cap on charter expansion, and in eight states those limits currently constrain growth. The battle against caps must be fought state by state by under-resourced, overextended charter advocates against entrenched opponents. In New York, an expensive and sophisticated multiyear effort by charter advocates that was supported by the governor and New York City’s mayor and schools chancellor finally resulted in legislation that raised the cap, but only by 100 schools. The new limit will be reached in just a few years.

Unequal financing is another obstacle. A Fordham Institute study found that on average charters receive $1,800 less per student than traditional public schools, despite serving more disadvantaged students. This discourages educators from starting new charters and traditional schools from converting. It also inhibits existing charters from growing enrollment or expanding to new campuses. Facilities are a major piece of this puzzle. While traditional public schools are provided a building, charters still must find, secure, and pay for a roof and walls. Only 13 states and Washington, D.C., provide some sort of facilities assistance.

The greatest impediment to growth is the wide array of political, legal, and administrative attacks. Institutional players—teachers unions, school boards, and state and district administrators—frequently petition state leaders for charter caps and reduced charter funding and vigorously oppose alternative authorizers and facilities aid. The nationwide Democratic landslide in the 2006 elections left many state governments less charter-friendly. For example, Ted Strickland, Ohio’s new Democratic governor, made a moratorium on new charters one of his top priorities.

In a number of states, most recently Ohio and Michigan, coalitions have attacked chartering through the courts. Though these challenges have been beaten back so far, even one loss could force the closure of hundreds of schools. A 2006 Florida Supreme Court decision was foreboding. Striking down the state’s voucher plan for contravening the state constitution’s requirement of a “uniform” public education system, the court opened the door to challenges to the state’s 350 charters, which, by definition, are not uniform.

Finally, chartering is held back by its administrative arrangements. Ninety percent of authorizers are local school districts, many of which view charters as an administrative inconvenience, competitive nuisance, or worse. In a NAPCS survey of charter school leaders, nearly two-thirds said working with the district was a problem. This summer, a high-performing KIPP charter school in Annapolis, Maryland, was forced to close because it couldn’t find a permanent facility, even though the school district, according to its own study, had 900 empty seats in a nearby, underutilized school. Responding to the school’s pleas for help, the district’s superintendent told the local newspaper, “It’s not my responsibility. It’s not my school.”

The “parallel system” approach to chartering’s future rests on two mistaken assumptions: first, that by simply creating new schools and not purposely antagonizing the traditional system, chartering wouldn’t attract the ire of defenders of the status quo; and second, that if chartering proved successful and popular, the sky was the limit on growth. As it turned out, district stakeholders have fought charters tooth and nail from the beginning, and they have erected policy obstacles that have severed the link between charter demand and supply.

The District Partner

The second camp envisions a vastly improved traditional school system, achieved through charter cooperation. This group believes that consistent collaboration between the two sectors would enable charters to experiment and then share lessons learned so all students, the vast majority of whom still attend traditional public schools, could benefit. “I believe that districts and charters will benefit by building more collaborative relationships,” says Tom Hutton, a staff attorney for the National School Boards Association and a former board member of the Thurgood Marshall Charter School in Washington, D.C.

Like Hutton, many in this camp are veterans of the traditional system who recognize the value of chartering. But they assume district immortality—districts have been the sole delivery system of public education for generations—and believe a collaborative relationship to be wise, pragmatic, and ultimately necessary. The late Appleton, Wisconsin, superintendent Tom Scullen supported charters within his district but cautioned, “Charter schooling will fail if it tries to become a second track of public education. There isn’t enough money to support two systems.” Deborah McGriff, executive vice president of Edison Schools and former Detroit superintendent, agrees: “Charters need to start thinking about how we move from suspicion and competition with districts to collaboration and cooperation.”

This collaborative relationship is becoming institutionalized. The federal Charter School Program, which provides charter start-up funds, requires that states disseminate charters’ best practices to districts. KIPP has an open-door policy for local teachers and principals; they are welcome to visit and take away whatever lessons they can. Funders in particular are buying into this strategy. NewSchools Venture Fund, whose goal is to improve school districts, invests in charter entrepreneurs in the hope that they can “spark broader transformation in the public school system.” One of the Boston Foundation’s high priorities in its education giving is supporting the sharing of effective practices between chartered and traditional schools.

Though the move toward greater cooperation has emotional appeal, to embrace it you have to believe that districts, including major urban districts, are both willing and able to change and significantly improve student achievement at scale. Sadly, there is prima facie evidence that they are not. The achievement gap has been well documented for 40 years: in the Coleman Report, NAEP data, SAT scores, and state assessments. Given the threefold increase in per-pupil spending and countless policy changes, blue-ribbon panel recommendations, and foundation initiatives in the intervening years, it is undeniable that districts have already tried, or have been forced to try, to shape up.

Diane Ravitch recently reported in the Education Gadfly (June 7, 2007) on the disappointing achievement scores from New York City, whose much-heralded schools leader, Joel Klein, has implemented some of the nation’s most aggressive reforms. Ravitch found that during Klein’s five-year tenure academic gains have been smaller than during the previous five years and that the reading scores of cohorts of students are actually declining as they progress through the system. New York’s inability to improve despite major interventions is far from unique. NAEP’s Trial Urban District Assessment, which measured the performance of 11 large urban systems in 2005, provides compelling evidence of the futility of district-based reforms: even the highest-performing district studied (Charlotte) had only 29 percent of its 8th graders at or above proficient in reading.

It is unreasonable to believe that charter collaboration will significantly alter these stubbornly disappointing district results. High-performing low-income schools, though too rare, have been documented for decades, and yet their lessons have never been translated into comprehensive district improvement. This is despite major efforts to spread best practices widely, including the work of education schools and $15 billion spent annually on teacher professional development. All in all, the uncomfortable but unavoidable question for collaboration advocates becomes, why should chartering invest in a strategy—helping major urban districts solve the achievement gap—that has consistently failed for 40 years when pursued by others?

Many strong believers in school choice, myself included, were convinced that the competitive pressure exerted by charters would lead to a renaissance in the traditional system. The vast district improvements we expected never materialized. The clearest evidence comes from Dayton, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., two cities with significant charter sectors.

In the nation’s capital, 26 percent of students attend one of the city’s 71 charter schools. The city’s charter sector is remarkably innovative and energetic, including such standouts as KIPP KEY Academy, the SEED School, and DC Prep. Nevertheless, the District’s traditional system remains among the very worst in the nation. Of the 11 cities participating in the NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment in 2005, Washington, D.C., had the lowest scores in math and reading in both grades tested. Among its 8th-grade students, only 12 percent reached proficiency in reading and 7 percent in math. A Progressive Policy Institute study of D.C.’s charter experience summarized the situation perfectly: “There is no clear evidence that charter schools have had a direct impact on student achievement in DCPS schools or otherwise driven systemic reform.”

Charters educate 28 percent of Dayton’s students. Last year, the district reached only one of 25 state indicators and failed to make AYP. Seventy and 56 percent of its 8th graders failed to reach proficiency in math and reading, respectively. Residents are understandably frustrated: a 2005 Fordham Foundation survey found that 69 percent of Dayton residents are in favor of either major change from the district or an entirely new education system.

Some studies, like those by Hoxby (see “Rising Tide,” research, Winter 2001) and by Holmes, Desimone, and Rupp (see “Friendly Competition,” research, Winter 2006) have found a small bump in a district’s achievement when it faces charter competition. Bifulco and Ladd (see “Results from the Tar Heel State,” research, Fall 2005) and Buddin and Zimmer, however, found none. There are legitimate disagreements about the influence of additional factors in these studies, such as the amount of competition, the policy environment, and the type of test data used. But when this research is considered alongside our other experience, the only fair conclusion is that competition hasn’t dramatically altered district performance for the better.

Charter competition has caused one unexpected and fascinating phenomenon. When facing a growing number of charters, districts turn to advertising. In January 2006, the Boston Teachers Union and the district were in negotiations to spend $100,000 to promote the virtues of traditional public schools to families choosing charters. Also in early 2006, the Cincinnati district sent letters and held information sessions designed to have charter families reenroll in traditional public schools. In May 2007, the St. Louis district awarded a no-bid contract to a marketing firm to “drive the message of the negative impact of charter schools.” Seemingly unable to improve results, districts rely on public relations to stem the migration of students to other schools.

Why is it that major urban school districts are unable to improve student learning at scale? A compelling argument, and a roadmap for charter schooling’s future, can be found in Ted Kolderie’s excellent and underappreciated book, Creating the Capacity for Change. Kolderie applies to K–12 education the lessons Harvard economist Clayton Christensen has drawn from the private sector. Christensen, studying how industries evolve and improve over time, found that critical advancements don’t come from old firms changing their ways. They come from new firms (or independent subsidiaries) entering the market, introducing new products and systems, and responding nimbly to the demands of consumers.

When an industry experiences a major change, existing firms find themselves unable to adjust to navigate the new world. Every aspect of its identity—culture, staffing, practices, priorities—was geared toward succeeding in the old environment. When the environment changes, it’s impossible for the horse and carriage to transform into a steam locomotive.

The implications for public education are profound. For 150 years, public schooling has been a one-factory town: a board- and superintendent-led district manages, staffs, and oversees an area’s entire portfolio of public schools. But in this time, the world has become a radically different place and the expectations of schools have changed even more. As Kolderie points out, if private firms, which are built to respond to competition, are unable to make this kind of leap, we can’t expect gigantic, byzantine school systems, which are insulated from competition, shackled by union contracts, and constrained by a sticky web of regulations, to do so.

The system is the issue. The solution isn’t an improved traditional district; it’s an entirely different delivery system for public education: systems of chartered schools.

A Transformed System

Charter advocates should strive to have every urban public school be a charter. That is, each school should have significant control over its curriculum, methods, budget, staff, and calendar. Each school should have a contract that spells out its mission and measurable objectives, including guaranteeing that all students achieve proficiency in basic skills. Each school should be held accountable by an approved public body.

“Charter” will no longer be seen as an adjective, a way to describe a type of school, but as a verb, an orderly and sensible process for developing, replicating, operating, overseeing, and closing schools. The system would be fluid, self-improving, and driven by parents and public authority, ensuring the system uses the best of market and government forces. Schools that couldn’t attract families would close, as would those that ran afoul of authorizers for academic, financial, or management failures. School start-ups, both the number and their characteristics, would reflect the needs of communities and the interests of students, but would also be tightly regulated to generate a high probability of school success.

So, while the government’s role would still be significant, it would no longer operate the city’s entire portfolio of public schools. Instead, it would take on a role similar to the FAA’s role in monitoring the airline industry or a health department’s monitoring of restaurants. Today, we take airline safety for granted and make our choices based on service, connections, and so on. Similarly, we know all restaurants have fire exits and meet food safety standards, so we choose based on our tastes and schedules. A well-regulated chartered school system could guarantee that all public schools were providing a safe, high-quality education and properly managing operations, thereby allowing families to choose a school based on other criteria.

The government’s substantial oversight role in guaranteeing safety and quality would differentiate a charter system from a universal voucher program. To many, a voucher system would undesirably blur the lines between church and state, add the profit motive to schooling, remove the “public” from K–12 education, and leave too much to the vicissitudes of the market. By contrast, in a chartered system, public schools would be nonreligious, managed by nonprofits, overseen by a public authority, and held to clear performance standards.

But a chartered system would capitalize on market forces largely absent from district systems, such as constant innovation, competition, and replication. Replication is arguably the most valuable. Chartering has not only created some of America’s finest schools, it has enabled their leaders to identify the characteristics that made those schools so remarkable and then develop systems for creating additional, equally successful schools. In addition to well-known charter management organizations like KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools, new ones continue to emerge: Green Dot, High Tech High, Aspire, Noble Street, IDEA, and more. Major funders like the Charter School Growth Fund and NewSchools Venture Fund are helping other high-performing charters expand as well.

So how do we transform today’s urban district systems into chartered systems? Absent political realities, the shift could be quite simple. Any district could decide tomorrow to relinquish day-to-day control of its schools and develop performance contracts with each. Every school could develop its own governing board and acquire control of its budget, staffing, and curriculum. The district could then change from a central operator to an authorizer, monitoring schools, closing them when necessary, and allowing new ones to open. The “every school a charter school” idea is not new; others, most prominently Paul Hill of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, have been writing variations on this theme for some time.

Unfortunately, for reasons having more to do with power than student learning, this scenario is highly unlikely. Most districts assiduously avoid the loss of one school, let alone all schools. When one of Washington, D.C.’s highest-performing traditional public schools pursued plans to convert to a charter in 2006, the district agreed to several of its demands in exchange for the school’s agreement to stop flirting with charter status. This spring, after faculty at Locke High School in Los Angeles signed petitions to convert into a Green Dot charter, district officials scrambled to put together a counterproposal and convinced some teachers to rescind their signatures.

No government entity likes to lose control of any of its components and the budget and prestige that go with them, especially when the loss suggests a failure by the organization. But shifting from an operator into an authorizer would mean cutting hundreds of central office jobs as well: since charters handle their own transportation, facilities, staffing, and more, district employees filling those responsibilities would become redundant. Such a shift, then, would be vigorously opposed by district staff and those who represent them. Countless powerful organizations, like unions, book publishers, and service providers, would also be adversely affected by a decentralized system of schools.

Clearly we can’t expect the political process to swiftly bring about charter districts in all of America’s big cities. However, if charter advocates carefully target specific systems with an exacting strategy, the current policy environment will allow them to create examples of a new, high-performing system of public education in urban America.

Here, in short, is one roadmap for chartering’s way forward: First, commit to drastically increasing the charter market share in a few select communities until it is the dominant system and the district is reduced to a secondary provider. The target should be 75 percent. Second, choose the target communities wisely. Each should begin with a solid charter base (at least 5 percent market share), a policy environment that will enable growth (fair funding, nondistrict authorizers, and no legislated caps), and a favorable political environment (friendly elected officials and editorial boards, a positive experience with charters to date, and unorganized opposition). For example, in New York a concerted effort could be made to site in Albany or Buffalo a large percentage of the 100 new charters allowed under the raised cap. Other potentially fertile districts include Denver, Detroit, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Oakland, and Washington, D.C.

Third, secure proven operators to open new schools. To the greatest extent possible, growth should be driven by replicating successful local charters and recruiting high-performing operators from other areas (see Figure 2). Fourth, engage key allies like Teach For America, New Leaders for New Schools, and national and local foundations to ensure the effort has the human and financial capital needed. Last, commit to rigorously assessing charter performance in each community and working with authorizers to close the charters that fail to significantly improve student achievement.

In total, these strategies should lead to rapid, high-quality charter growth and the development of a public school marketplace marked by parental choice, the regular start-up of new schools, the improvement of middling schools, the replication of high-performing schools, and the shuttering of low-performing schools.

As chartering increases its market share in a city, the district will come under growing financial pressure. The district, despite educating fewer and fewer students, will still require a large administrative staff to process payroll and benefits, administer federal programs, and oversee special education. With a lopsided adult-to-student ratio, the district’s per-pupil costs will skyrocket.

At some point along the district’s path from monopoly provider to financially unsustainable marginal player, the city’s investors and stakeholders—taxpayers, foundations, business leaders, elected officials, and editorial boards—are likely to demand fundamental change. That is, eventually the financial crisis will become a political crisis. If the district has progressive leadership, one of two best-case scenarios may result. The district could voluntarily begin the shift to an authorizer, developing a new relationship with its schools and reworking its administrative structure to meet the new conditions. Or, believing the organization is unable to make this change, the district could gradually transfer its schools to an established authorizer.

A more probable district reaction to the mounting pressure would be an aggressive political response. Its leadership team might fight for a charter moratorium or seek protection from the courts. Failing that, they might lobby for additional funding so the district could maintain its administrative structure despite the vast loss of students. Reformers should expect and prepare for this phase of the transition process.

In many ways, replacing the district system seems inconceivable, almost heretical. Districts have existed for generations, and in many minds, the traditional system is synonymous with public education. However, the history of urban districts’ inability to provide a high-quality education to their low-income students is nearly as long. It’s clear that we need a new type of system for urban public education, one that is able to respond nimbly to great school success, chronic school failure, and everything in between. A chartered system could do precisely that.

Andy Smarick is former congressional aide and charter school founder. Until recently, he served as chief operating officer of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

An interview with Patrick Wolf about his evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and about its likely future is available here.

School choice supporters, including hundreds of private school students in crisp uniforms, filled Washington, D.C.’s Freedom Plaza last May to protest a congressional decision to eliminate the city’s federally funded school voucher program after the next school year (to see additional images of this event please click here). That afternoon, President Obama announced a compromise proposal to grandfather the more than 1,700 students currently in the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program, funding their vouchers through high school graduation, but denying entry to additional children. Both program supporters and opponents cite evidence from an ongoing congressionally mandated Institute of Education Sciences (IES) evaluation of the program, for which I am principal investigator, to buttress their positions, rendering the evaluation a Rorschach test for one’s ideological position on this fiercely debated issue.

School vouchers provide funds to parents to enable them to enroll their children in private schools and, as a result, are one of the most controversial education reforms in the United States (to see an interview with Patrick Wolf about his evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and about its likely future please click here). Among the many points of contention is whether voucher programs in fact improve student achievement. Most evaluations of such programs have found at least some positive achievement effects, but not always for all types of participants and not always in both reading and math. This pattern of results has so far failed to generate a scholarly consensus regarding the beneficial effects of school vouchers on student achievement. The policy and academic communities seek more definitive guidance.

The IES released the third-year impact evaluation of the Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) in April 2009. The results showed that students who participated in the program performed at significantly higher levels in reading than the students in an experimental control group. Here are the study findings and my own interpretation of what they mean.

Opportunity Scholarships
Currently, 13 directly funded voucher programs operate in four U.S. cities and six states, serving approximately 65,000 students. Another seven programs indirectly fund private K—12 scholarship organizations through government tax credits to individuals or corporations. About 100,000 students receive school vouchers funded through tax credits. All of the directly funded voucher programs are targeted to students with some educational disadvantage, such as low family income, disability, or status as a foster child.

Nineteen of the 20 school voucher programs in the U.S. are funded by state and local governments. The OSP is the only federal voucher initiative. Established in 2004 as part of compromise legislation that also included new spending on charter and traditional public schools in the District of Columbia, the OSP is a means-tested program. Initial eligibility is limited to K—12 students in D.C. with family incomes at or below 185 percent of the poverty line. Congress has appropriated $14 million annually to the program, enough to support about 1,700 students at the maximum voucher amount of $7,500. The voucher covers most or all of the costs of tuition, transportation, and educational fees at any of the 66 D.C. private schools that have participated in the program. By the spring of 2008, a total of 5,331 eligible students had applied for the limited number of Opportunity Scholarships. Recipients are selected by lottery, with priority given to students applying to the program from public schools deemed in need of improvement (SINI) under No Child Left Behind. Scholars and policymakers have since questioned the extent to which SINI designations accurately signal school quality because they are based on levels of achievement instead of the more informative measure of achievement gains over time.

The third-year impact evaluation tracked the experiences of two cohorts of students. All of the students were attending public schools or were rising kindergartners at the time of application to the program. Cohort 1 consisted of 492 students entering grades 6—12 in 2004. Cohort 2 consisted of 1,816 students entering grades K—12 in 2005. The 2,308 students in the study make it the largest school voucher evaluation in the U.S. to employ the “gold standard” method of random assignment.

Voucher Effects
Researchers over the past decade have focused on evaluating voucher programs using experimental research designs called randomized control trials (RCTs). Such experimental designs are widely used to evaluate the efficacy of medical drugs prior to making such treatments available to the public. With an RCT design, a group of students who all qualify for a voucher program and whose parents are equally motivated to exercise private school choice, participate in a lottery. The students who win the lottery become the “treatment” group. The students who lose the lottery become the “control” group. Since only a voucher offer and mere chance distinguish the treatment students from their control group counterparts, any significant difference in student outcomes for the treatment students can be attributed to the program. Although not all students offered a voucher will use it to enroll in a private school, the data from an RCT can also be used to generate a separate estimate of the effect of voucher use (see sidebar, page 50).

Using an RCT research design, the ongoing IES evaluation found no impacts on student math performance but a statistically significant positive impact of the scholarship program on student reading performance, as measured by the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT 9). The estimated impact of using a scholarship to attend a private school for any length of time during the three-year evaluation period was a gain of 5.3 scale points in reading. That estimate provides the impact on all those who ever attended a private school, whether for one month, three years, or any length of time in between (see Figure 1). Consequently, the estimate should be interpreted as a lower-bound estimate of the three-year impact of attending a private school, because many students who used a scholarship during the three-year period did not remain in private school throughout the entire period. The data indicate that members of the treatment group who were attending private schools in the third year of the evaluation gained an average of 7.1 scale score points in reading from the program.

What do these gains mean for students? They mean that the students in the control group would need to remain in school an extra 3.7 months on average to catch up to the level of reading achievement attained by those who used the scholarship opportunity to attend a private school for any period of time. The catch-up time would have been around 5 months for those in the control group as compared to those who were attending a private school in the third year of the evaluation.

Over time, in my opinion, the effects of the program show a trend toward larger reading gains cumulating for students. Especially when one considers that students who used their scholarship in year 1 needed to adjust to a new and different school environment, the reading impacts of using a scholarship of 1.4 scale score points (not significant) in year 1, 4.0 scale score points (not significant) in year 2, and 5.3 scale score points (significant) in year 3 suggest that students are steadily gaining in reading performance relative to their peers in the control group the longer they make use of the scholarship. No trend in program impacts is evident in math.

What explains the fact that positive impacts have been observed as a result of the OSP in reading but not in math? Paul Peterson and Elena Llaudet of Harvard University, in a nonexperimental evaluation of the effects of school sector on student achievement, suggest that private schools may boost reading scores more than math scores for a number of reasons, including a greater content emphasis on reading, the use of phonics instead of whole-language instruction, and the greater availability of well-trained education content specialists in reading than in math. Any or all of these explanations for a voucher advantage in reading but not in math are plausible and could be behind the pattern of results observed for the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships. The experimental design of the D.C. evaluation, while a methodological strength in many ways, makes it difficult to connect the context of students’ educational experiences with specific outcomes in any reliable way. As a result, one can only speculate as to why voucher gains are clear in reading but not observed in math.

Student Characteristics
The OSP serves a highly disadvantaged group of D.C. students. Descriptive information from the first two annual reports indicates that more than 90 percent of students are African American and 9 percent are Hispanic. Their family incomes averaged less than $20,000 in the year in which they applied for the scholarship.

Overall, participating students were performing well below national norms in reading and math when they applied to the program. For example, the Cohort 1 students had initial reading scores on the SAT-9 that averaged below the 24th National Percentile Rank, meaning that 75 percent of students in their respective grades nationally were performing higher than Chart 1 in reading. In my view, these descriptive data show how means tests and other provisions to target school voucher programs to disadvantaged students serve to minimize the threat of cream-skimming. The OSP reached a population of highly disadvantaged students because it was designed by policymakers to do so.

Did Only Some Students Benefit?
Several commentators have sought to minimize the positive findings of the OSP evaluation by suggesting that only certain subgroups of participants benefited from the program. Martin Carnoy states that “the treated students in Cohort 1 were concentrated in middle schools and the effect on their reading score was significantly higher than for treated students in Cohort 2.” Henry Levin likewise asserts that “the evaluators found that receiving a voucher resulted in no advantage in math or reading test scores for either [low achievers or students from SINI schools].”

The actual results of the evaluation provide no scientific basis for claims that some subgroups of students benefited more in reading from the voucher program than other subgroups. The impact of the program on the reading achievement of Cohort 1 students did not differ by a statistically significant amount from the impact of the program on the reading achievement of Cohort 2 students, Carnoy’s claim notwithstanding. Nor did students with low initial levels of achievement and applicants from SINI schools experience significantly different reading gains from the program than high achievers and non-SINI applicants. The mere fact that statistically significant impacts were observed for a particular subgroup does not mean that impacts for that group are significantly different from those not in the subgroup. For example, Group A and Group B may have experienced roughly similar impacts, but the impact for Group A might have been just large enough for it to be significantly different from zero (or no impact at all), while Group B’s quite similar scores fell just below that threshold.

From a scientific standpoint, three conclusions are valid about the achievement results in reading from the year 3 impact evaluation of the OSP:

• The program improved the reading achievement of the treatment group students overall.
• Overall reading gains from the program were not significantly different across the various subgroups examined.
• Three distinct subgroups of students—those who were not from SINI schools, students scheduled to enter grades K-8 in the fall after application to the program, and students in the higher two-thirds of the performance distribution (whose average reading test scores at baseline were at the 37th percentile nationally)—experienced statistically significant reading impacts from the program when their performance was examined separately. Female students and students in Cohort 1 saw reading gains that were statistically significant with reservations due to the possibility of obtaining false positive results when making comparisons across numerous subgroups.
  Why examine and report achievement impacts at the subgroup level, if the evidence indicates only an overall reading gain for the entire sample? The reasons are that Congress mandated an analysis of subgroup impacts, at least for SINI and non-SINI students, and because analyses at the subgroup level might have yielded more conclusive information about disproportionate impacts for certain types of students.

Expanding Choice
The OSP facilitates the enrollment of low-income D.C. students in private schools of their parents’ choosing. It does not guarantee enrollment in a private school, but the $7,500 voucher should make such enrollments relatively common among the students who won the scholarship lottery. The eligible students who lost the scholarship lottery and were assigned to the control group still might attend a private school but they would have to do so by drawing on resources outside of the OSP. At the same time, students in both groups have access to a large number of public charter schools.

The implication is that, for this evaluation of the OSP, winning the lottery does not necessarily mean private schooling, and losing the lottery does not necessarily mean education in a traditional public school. Members of both groups attended all three types of schools—private, public charter, and traditional public—in year 3 of the voucher experiment, although the proportions that attended each type differed markedly based on whether or not they won the scholarship lottery (see Figure 2). In total, about 81 percent of parents placed their child in a private or public school of choice three years after winning the scholarship lottery, as did 46 percent of those who lost the lottery. The desire for an alternative to a neighborhood public school was strong for the families who applied to the OSP in 2004 and 2005.

These enrollment patterns highlight the fact that the effects of voucher use reported above do not amount to a comparison between “school choice” and “no school choice.” Rather, voucher users are exercising private school choice, while control group members are exercising a small amount of private school choice and a substantial amount of public school choice. The positive impacts on reading achievement observed for voucher users therefore reflect the incremental effect of adding private school choice through the OSP to the existing schooling options for low-income D.C. families.

Parent Satisfaction
Another key measure of school reform initiatives is the perception among parents, who see firsthand the effects of changes in their child’s educational environment. Whenever school choice researchers have asked parents about their satisfaction with schools, those who have been given the chance to select their child’s school have reported much higher levels of satisfaction. The OSP study findings fit this pattern. The proportion of parents who assigned a high grade of A or B to their child’s school was 11 percentile points higher if they were offered a voucher, 12 percentile points higher if their child actually used a scholarship, and 21 points higher if their child was attending a private school in year 3, regardless of whether they were in the treatment group. Parents whose children used an Opportunity Scholarship also expressed greater confidence in their children’s safety in school than parents in the control group.

Additional evidence of parental satisfaction with the OSP comes from the series of focus groups conducted independently of the congressionally mandated evaluation. One parent emphasized the expanded freedom inherent in school choice:

“[The OSP] gives me the choice to, freedom to attend other schools than D.C. public schools….I just didn’t feel that I wanted to put him in D.C. public school and I had the opportunity to take one of the scholarships, so, therefore, I can afford it and I’m glad that I did do that.” (Cohort 1 Elementary School Parent, Spring 2008)

Another parent with two children in the OSP may have hinted at a reason achievement impacts were observed specifically in reading:

“They really excel at this program, `cause I know for a fact they would never have received this kind of education at a public school….I listen to them when they talk, and what they are saying, and they articulate better than I do, and I know it’s because of the school, and I like that about them, and I’m proud of them.” (Cohort 1 Elementary School Parent, Spring 2008)

These parents of OSP students clearly see their families as having benefited from this program.

Previous Voucher Research
The IES evaluation of the DC OSP adds to a growing body of research on means-tested school voucher programs in urban districts across the nation. Experimental evaluations of the achievement impacts of publicly funded voucher and privately funded K—12 scholarship programs have been conducted in Milwaukee, New York City, the District of Columbia, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Dayton, Ohio. Different research teams analyzed the data from New York City (three different teams), Milwaukee (two teams), and Charlotte (two teams). The four studies of Milwaukee’s and Charlotte’s programs reported statistically significant achievement gains overall for the members of the treatment group. The individual studies of the privately funded K—12 scholarship programs in the District of Columbia and Dayton reported overall achievement gains only for the large subgroup of African American students in the program. The three different evaluators of the New York City privately funded scholarship program were split in their assessment of achievement impacts, as two research teams reported no overall test-score effects, but did report achievement gains for African Americans; the third team claimed there were no statistically significant test-score impacts overall or for any subgroup of participants.

The specific patterns of achievement impacts vary across these studies, with some gains emerging quickly, but others, like those in the OSP evaluation, taking at least three years to reach a standard level of statistical significance. Earlier experimental evaluations of voucher programs were somewhat more likely to report achievement gains from the programs in math than in reading—the opposite of what was observed for the OSP. Despite these differences, the bulk of the available, high-quality evidence on school voucher programs suggests that they do yield positive achievement effects for participating students.

Conclusions
School voucher initiatives such as the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program will remain politically controversial in spite of rigorous evaluations such as this one, showing that parents and students benefited in some ways from the program. Critics will continue to point to the fact that no impacts of the program have been observed in math, or that applicants from SINI schools, who were a service priority, have not demonstrated statistically significant achievement gains at the subgroup level, as reasons to characterize these findings as disappointing. Certainly the results would have been even more encouraging if the high-priority SINI students had shown significant reading gains as a distinct subgroup. Still, in my opinion, the bottom line is that the OSP lottery paid off for those students who won it. On average, participating low-income students are performing better in reading because the federal government decided to launch an experimental school choice program in our nation’s capital.

The achievement results from the D.C. voucher evaluation are also striking when compared to the results from other experimental evaluations of education policies. The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE) at the IES has sponsored and overseen 11 studies that are RCTs, including the OSP evaluation. Only 3 of the 11 education interventions tested, when subjected to such a rigorous evaluation, have demonstrated statistically significant achievement impacts overall in either reading or math. The reading impact of the D.C. voucher program is the largest achievement impact yet reported in an RCT evaluation overseen by the NCEE. A second program was found to increase reading outcomes by about 40 percent less than the reading gain from the DC OSP. The third intervention was reported to have boosted math achievement by less than half the amount of the reading gain from the D.C. voucher program. Of the remaining eight NCEE-sponsored RCTs, six of them found no statistically significant achievement impacts overall and the other two showed a mix of no impacts and actual achievement losses from their programs. Many of these studies are in their early stages and might report more impressive achievement results in the future. Still, the D.C. voucher program has proven to be the most effective education policy evaluated by the federal government’s official education research arm so far.

The experimental evaluation of the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program is continuing into its fourth and final year of studying the impacts on students and parents. The final evidence collected from the participants may confirm the accumulation of achievement gains in reading and higher levels of parental satisfaction from the program that were evident after three years, or show that those gains have faded. Uncertainty also surrounds the program itself, as the students who gathered on Freedom Plaza in May currently are only guaranteed one final year in their chosen private schools. What will policymakers see as they continue to consider the results of this evaluation? The educational futures of a group of low-income D.C. schoolchildren hinge on the answer.

Patrick J. Wolf is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and principal investigator of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program Impact Evaluation. The opinions expressed in this article are his own.

An unabridged version of this article is available here.

The Education Equality Project champions accountability, pay reform, and school choice, while the Broader, Bolder coalition insists we must attend to health care, preschool, and parenting skills if students are to succeed in school. The Obama administration must negotiate this split in pursuing education reform; indeed, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was the only individual to serve as a founding member of both groups.

In this forum, president of Democrats for Education Reform Joe Williams speaks for the Education Equality Project and Pedro Noguera offers the Broader, Bolder perspective on improving K–12 schooling, the early record of the Obama administration, and the challenges that lie ahead.

Education Next: What principles unify the signers of the coalition [Education Equality Project or A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education]? Can you explain the key reforms the coalition is calling for?

Pedro Noguera: The basic principle underlying the Broader, Bolder Approach to school reform is that efforts to raise student achievement cannot ignore the unmet social needs of children, particularly those related to concentrated poverty—inadequate health, housing, and nutrition. These conditions have a tremendous impact upon child development and learning.

Poverty does not cause academic failure, but it is a factor that profoundly influences the character of schools and student performance, in at least three broad and interrelated ways: 1) in most cases, considerably less money is spent on the education of poor children. Per-pupil spending has bearing on the quality of facilities, the availability of learning materials, and the ability of schools to attract and retain highly qualified personnel. While high levels of funding do not guarantee that children will receive a quality education, money matters, and many of the most acclaimed charter schools spend more per pupil than public schools, even though they generally serve fewer high-need students (i.e., special education or English language learners); 2) the unmet, nonacademic needs of children (social, emotional, and psychological) often have an impact on learning; 3) schools serving large numbers of poor children typically lack the resources and expertise to respond to their academic and social needs.

This does not mean that poor children cannot learn or that until we eliminate poverty and related social issues we will not be able to educate all children in this country. There are schools across the country—some are charter, some are private, and many are traditional public—that have shown us that it is possible for poor children to achieve at high levels when we respond to their needs and create conditions that are conducive to learning. However, the fact that a small number of schools have experienced a degree of success does not mean that we can simply blame other schools for their failures or ignore what is happening to children outside of school. Many, though not all, schools that succeed with poor children devise strategies to mitigate the effects of poverty with site-based social services and extended learning opportunities.

BBA advocates providing universal access to health care for children, quality early-childhood education, and expanded access to extended learning opportunities, after school and during the summer. While these measures alone will not guarantee higher student achievement or large-scale school improvement, they are essential for creating a context in which other education reforms can be effective.

Joe Williams: The Education Equality Project is a coalition of leaders (from education, civil rights, government, public policy, and business) who believe that what happens inside schools (and in the politics surrounding schooling) plays a tremendous role in shaping the achievement gap that exists in this country between the haves and the have-nots. The focus for reform, therefore, should be on what happens between teachers and students. That isn’t meant to be glib; we keep finding ourselves debating that key distinction with people who argue that the external forces in a child’s life represent obstacles too large for even great schools to overcome. While we are very sympathetic to the obstacles that impoverished children face to their physical, emotional, and educational development, and support policies to address these deficiencies, we believe that when conditions outside of the classroom are less than stellar, it is even more important that we get the schooling piece right.

One of the beliefs that has tied together the signatories of EEP thus far is a commitment to eliminating the racial and ethnic achievement gap in this country. This is not just an education issue, but a civil rights issue. If we neglect the education needs of our children, we are depriving them of the kinds of opportunities that the American dream can offer.

The EEP has called for an effective teacher for every child (paying teachers as professionals, giving them the tools and training to do their work effectively, and making tough decisions about ineffective teachers); empowering parents by allowing them to choose the best schools for their children; holding grown-ups at all levels accountable for the education of our children; and, very important, having enough strength in our convictions to stand up to anyone who seeks to preserve a failed system.

EN: Is it fair to expect all students to meet a uniform performance baseline? Is it reasonable to hold schools and educators responsible for ensuring that students meet that bar?

JW: Yes, these expectations are fair and reasonable. The key is making sure that schools and educators have the tools to provide students with the kind of education they need to clear the bar, including resources, the ability to build teams of excellent educators, and enough flexibility at the school level to adjust the length of the school day and year (among other things). This will likely require both additional resources and smarter use of education budgets around the country. Newark mayor Cory Booker often talks about the fact that we allow time spent on education to be the constant, while achievement is the variable. We need the flexibility to flip that notion so that time is the variable and achievement is the constant.

PN: Setting high academic standards for schools and students to meet is important but relatively easy to do. The harder and more important task is to adopt and implement standards that create optimal conditions for learning. This means ensuring that all children, regardless of where they live, have access to high-quality schools. This is what government policy must strive to achieve. We have quality standards for airports, highways, food, drugs, and water, but no state has adopted standards for learning environments, and many poor children attend under-resourced, inferior schools.

In fact, the most troubled schools typically serve students with the greatest needs. These schools cannot solve problems related to inequality and poverty without additional support. Yet this is essentially what No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and most education reforms that preceded it have expected. Almost eight years after the enactment of NCLB, high dropout rates and low achievement are still pervasive throughout this country, particularly in schools where poor children are concentrated.

EN: Do you think the administration’s actions thus far on school choice and charter schooling have been too aggressive or not aggressive enough?

PN: School choice is an idea that should be supported in principle. It is good for parents to have a variety of schools from which to choose because not all children have the same needs or interests. The greater challenge is ensuring that there are many high-quality schools to choose from and ensuring that choice does not contribute to further segregation in schools. Unfortunately, in many communities that have enacted choice plans, well-organized and informed parents do their best to gain access to the better schools, and invariably, others are left out. Racial segregation in schools has increased in the last 20 years, and poor children have become concentrated in the worst schools. Furthermore, in most choice systems it’s not parents but schools that really do the choosing. The better schools are often able to screen out needy students and limit enrollment. Because of high demand, they can be selective about whom they choose. This often occurs even in charter schools that use lotteries to determine admission but set criteria that are difficult for low-income parents to meet. Those who are not chosen by the superior schools invariably end up in lower-quality public schools with fewer resources.

Many, but not all, charter schools have demonstrated considerable success in educating poor children. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has expressed his support for charter schools, even though in several states, such as Texas and Arizona, the charter schools are often no better, and in some cases are worse, than the public schools. As a trustee of the State University of New York, I am proud to say that the charter schools we authorize consistently outperform similar schools in the communities where they are located. If such quality-control measures can be adopted in other communities, charter schools should be supported as a means to increase the supply of good schools available to poor children.

JW: Choice, in and of itself, won’t bring about the kind of systemic change that we need. But it is difficult to imagine how we can drive that systemic change without choice playing a role. The administration’s actions to limit the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship (K–12 vouchers), for example, were perplexing, if only because the actions were accompanied by empty rhetoric about doing what is best for children. How do we look at low-income families with a straight face and tell them they can’t send their children to better schools because it isn’t the right policy to pursue for the broader system? We need to be doing everything we can to reform the larger system, but by all means, let’s help those families who need good schools now. All of that said, President Obama and education secretary Arne Duncan have provided tremendous cover for the public charter-school movement and have helped shift the focus toward identifying those schools that are doing an outstanding job of educating students and giving them the green light to bring their models to scale.

I have never believed that a voucher or a charter can teach a child to read or do math at exceptionally high levels. That stuff happens in great schools, and vouchers and charter school lotteries offer access to those schools for families who can’t afford to live in affluent neighborhoods or send their children to effective private schools. The key is ensuring that they have an abundance of great schools from which to choose. The public charter-school movement, in addressing both the supply and demand sides of this equation, has emerged as the most promising development in the broader attempt to save public education. The question is whether the charter movement will provide the political spark needed to fundamentally transform our public schools.

EN: Is basing pay on teacher performance essential to school improvement? Is it possible to craft a merit-pay plan that the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) will endorse? Are teachers unions and existing collective-bargaining agreements an impediment to school quality?

JW: I think we have gotten way too far ahead in this discussion. We are talking about merit pay and performance pay in school systems that recognize neither merit nor performance. Teachers unions are understandably squeamish about this topic because today’s testing regimens were not created to serve this purpose. Until people feel confident in the tests that we are using, it will be difficult to build compensation systems on them.

This is an issue we can’t afford to ignore, however. The unions set out to create a standard of fairness for all teachers. The end result, in many cases, is a system that doesn’t allow itself to view great teachers any differently than it does mediocre teachers. Evaluations rate teachers as merely “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.” As long as excellence is irrelevant in our schools, we will continue to be stuck in this holding pattern. Wouldn’t it be something if we could strive for systems filled with “excellent” teachers, where excellence actually means something? We’re going to need a lot of help from the NEA and AFT in getting there, since they are holding the keys right now.

PN: Addressing the effectiveness of teachers must be an essential part of education reform in this country. However, judging teachers and awarding bonuses simply on the basis of test scores is problematic. We have already witnessed a large number of schools that have adopted scripted curricula and a narrow focus on test preparation as one way to raise test scores. This tendency will undoubtedly increase if teachers are evaluated exclusively on that basis. Such an approach is likely to discourage good teachers from working in high-need schools and to widen the gap between poor and affluent students. A narrow focus on raising test scores is also likely to deny poor students access to an enriched curriculum that encourages the development of higher-order thinking skills.

It makes more sense to devise incentives, including increased pay, to attract teachers with a track record of effectiveness, to high-need schools and classrooms. Such teachers can be identified through systematic evaluations carried out by principals and peers. If we could combine such a strategy with lower class sizes and extended learning opportunities after school, we could see major gains for struggling students.

In many cities, unions have resisted giving districts greater flexibility in how teachers are assigned, and in too many cases they have made it difficult to remove teachers who are ineffective and inept. Since it seems likely that teachers unions will be around for many years to come, it would be wise to find ways to collaborate with them to devise peer review programs like those that have shown promise in districts such as Toledo, Ohio, and Rochester, New York. In these districts, ineffective teachers are removed in greater numbers than in districts that rely on principal evaluation. Districts should also be encouraged to use the negotiation process to push for greater flexibility in how teachers are assigned to schools.

EN: The president has touted the $5 billion for preschool in the stimulus bill. How can we be confident that the money will fund difference-making programs?

PN: Most of the nations that outperform the United States in educational outcomes provide universal access to quality preschool. Research in child development has shown that the learning that occurs during infancy establishes a foundation for learning throughout life. It is cost effective and in our national interest to expand access to quality early-childhood education for all children.

We know two important things about early childhood education: 1) children who have access to quality programs generally outperform children who do not, and 2) the benefits of quality preschool can be further enhanced if quality of education is maintained in the K–12 system. The situation is similar for elementary schools. Throughout the country we have seen a growing number of successful primary schools and increases in test scores. However, these gains often are not sustained in middle school. This should not be used as a justification to question the value of elementary school nor should similar logic be used to limit expansion of early childhood education.

JW: If high-quality pre-K isn’t such a good idea, why are rich people in my neighborhood running around thinking that the Earth will implode (and their kid won’t get into Harvard someday) if they don’t get a slot in the most sought-after preschool programs? Providing access to high-quality preschool opportunities to the have-nots is an important part of the overall reform effort, as long as those programs successfully help students prepare for the world that awaits them in kindergarten and beyond.

Critics note that finding “high-quality” early-childhood programs, just like finding high-quality K–12 schools, is where the proposition gets iffy. My organization, Democrats for Education Reform, has been pushing to extend state charter-school laws so that charter schools can offer pre-K while being held accountable for their results. Connecting pre-K to early childhood programs that run through 3rd grade would close the gap that exists between what is taught in pre-K and what students need to be able to do in the later grades.

This is about making sure that all students are starting off on as close to a level playing field as possible, whether or not they can afford to make a $100,000 contribution to get a leg up on preschool enrollment.

EN: The Broader, Bolder Approach has made the case that school reform must attend to the “physical health, character, social development, and non-academic skills” of students. Should schools and educators be tasked with this? At what point can or should we start to hold educators responsible for student outcomes?

JW: Students clearly have needs that extend beyond merely learning to read and do math. In the most successful schools serving low-income students, we see a wide range of child development activities, including sports, dance, art, chess, and citizenship enrichment activities. The notion that these activities are distractions from academic instruction assumes this is an either/or proposition. The best schools out there today seem to nail both.

This is where issues like better use of time come into play. Many educators decided long ago (seemingly correctly) that it is not possible to meet the complex needs of their students with a school day that ends at 3 p.m. This is particularly true for students who are two and three years behind where they are supposed to be academically.

PN: It is impossible and undesirable to separate academic performance from physical health, character development, and a variety of nonacademic skills. Sick and unhealthy children generally don’t do as well in school as healthy ones, and children who have trouble getting along with others typically don’t do very well either. From their very beginning, public schools have been charged with preparing children for work and citizenship, and such preparation has never focused solely upon academic skills.

To educate the “whole child,” schools must provide students with an enriched education that includes art, music, physical education, and character development in addition to the core subjects. The fact that skills in these areas cannot be easily assessed should not trouble us since most middle-class and affluent children receive such an education already and typically no one asks for evidence that such an approach has an impact on their test scores.

The highest-performing schools never focus exclusively on student achievement. In fact, what typically distinguishes the best schools from the others is the culture—shared expectations, values, norms, and beliefs—that permeate the school environment.

EN: The president has suggested that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, especially the $5 billion in “innovation” education funds, provides an opportunity to “transform” schooling. What are a couple of developments that give you cause for optimism or pessimism? How will we know in a few years if these education funds were spent wisely?

PN: While many public schools, especially in urban areas, are in dire need of reform, I am concerned that there is a lack of clarity about why past reforms have failed and insufficient understanding about the direction change must take if we are to obtain better results. Why do we still have dropout rates of 50 percent and higher in several cities eight years after the enactment of No Child Left Behind, and why are so many schools still foundering after substantial investments of public and private funds on reform? Several studies have shown that reforms have failed because we have ignored the nonacademic needs of children, because we have ignored school culture, because we have not evaluated reforms and insisted upon accountability, and because we have been too quick to pursue fads and gimmicks (small schools, technology, testing) while ignoring more substantive issues that support teaching and learning.

More funding is needed in many districts to address the lack of resources, but given the recession, we will need to rely upon better coordination between schools, nonprofits, and local government to respond to student needs. And money alone will not solve the problems facing America’s schools. We need a new vision and a new approach. A Broader, Bolder Approach offers part of the way forward. This must be combined with strategies that improve the quality of teaching and increase the accountability and responsiveness of schools to the communities they serve.

JW: The president and Secretary Duncan seem to have figured out that the leverage that comes from insisting that $5 billion be attached to innovation is tremendous. Even before a single dime was disbursed from the “Race to the Top” fund, we saw state legislatures take actions to support things like charter school expansion: Massachusetts, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, and Rhode Island were not exactly lining up to help charter schools until Duncan made clear that it would impact these states’ applications for federal funding. For a state like Tennessee, which risked losing $100 million in Duncan’s discretionary spending, the conversation quickly changed. A charter-school expansion bill that had been declared dead and tagged by the political coroners came back to life before our very eyes.

The challenge will come when it is time to convert the leverage Duncan has discovered into ongoing federal appropriations. This will launch a dramatic transformation of the role of the federal government in education. This is where we should be optimistic.

Politically, Duncan and Obama are going to need to tell good stories about what has been unleashed here through the stimulus package. If successful school operators like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First can get help (financially and legislatively) in bringing their models to scale, and if successful education programs can be brought to more and more students, there will be a compelling story to tell. Public education will be on its way to saving itself.

EN: What does BBA’s proposed accountability system look like? How does it differ from NCLB?

PN: The BBA proposal for accountability emphasizes qualitative and quantitative evaluations of schools. That is, rather than relying exclusively on test scores to judge schools, BBA calls for the creation of an inspectorate, similar to that used in other countries with high-performing education systems, that is comprised of experienced educators, policymakers and scholars, to evaluate schools and make recommendations about how they might be improved. Such an approach could be used to provide schools with detailed feedback on how to make better use of resources and employ strategies that will enable them to become more successful in raising achievement and overcoming obstacles to learning.

Under NCLB, schools are judged largely on the basis of test scores, and many schools have figured out that the system can be gamed simply by targeting groups of students with intensive test preparation. Schools that are faced with greater challenges are simply labeled “failing” and targeted with threats and humiliation. The underlying assumption is that the educators are lazy and that pressure can be used to force them to improve. Accountability is essential if we are going to bring about school improvement on a larger scale, but it must be accompanied by real assistance and support.

In some cases, shutting down failing schools, as Secretary Duncan has suggested, may be necessary, but we must acknowledge ahead of time that the number of failing schools is simply too great for this to be the only strategy that we use. It is more constructive and effective to find out why a school has failed and to work with educators and local stakeholders to address the causes.

EN: In the context of EEP’s proposed reforms, how will an expanded federal role make a significant difference? How should new federal funds be distributed?

JW: An expanded federal role will allow our entire nation to cut through some of the political fog that has prevented good, sound ideas about how to change our schools from getting the go-ahead to proceed as part of a major systemic reform strategy. This is about using the tremendous leverage of the federal government to force some really blunt conversations at the state and district level, the kinds of conversations that make people uncomfortable and often lead to political paralysis. We have this tendency, if policy conversations make people feel uncomfortable, to sweep important issues under the rug. This is one of the reasons so little has actually changed despite waves and waves of reforms. We have an opportunity to change that dynamic, but only if President Obama holds firm on his commitment to bring change to public education.

The big battles over school vouchers in American education have focused on programs serving low-income children who live in urban areas. Milwaukee’s program, begun in 1990, is the biggest and oldest in the country, and the District of Columbia effort, funded by the federal government, has been the most carefully studied. Both have been focal points of intense, partisan disputes, and both have been threatened by legislative actions in the past several months. But, even when they are considered together, those two programs are not as large as a hardly known, originally noncontroversial voucher innovation, the special education voucher. Four states—Florida (1999), Georgia (2007), Ohio (2003), and Utah (2005)—have special education voucher programs that together serve more than 22,000 students.

Special education voucher laws are very simple. The parents of any child found in need of a special education (in Ohio, only students with autism) can ask the school district to pay for their child’s education at a school the parent has identified as appropriate.

Special education vouchers have a political advantage that vouchers for low-income students lack: they can benefit not only the poverty-stricken disadvantaged, almost never a politically potent interest group, but also anyone who has a child with disabilities, a population that crosses all social and economic boundaries. The concept also stands on particularly strong constitutional grounds, inasmuch as special education vouchers add nothing in principle to the rights established by federal law in 1974. Part of the historic extension of equal educational opportunity rights to the disabled, Public Law 94-142, the Education of All-Handicapped Children Act, now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), was one of the most popular pieces of federal education legislation ever enacted.

That law has four key provisions: 1) every child, no matter how disabled, has a right to a free and appropriate education, which can take place in either a public or private setting; 2) an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) must be designed for each child in consultation with his or her parents; 3) the child should be educated in the “least restrictive environment”; and 4) parents can object to the educational provisions for their child by requesting a “due process” hearing with an independent hearing officer, whose decisions can be appealed to the courts (see sidebar). But schools tend to win most legal challenges brought by parents. Given the long odds and financial and psychological toll of suing the same people who take care of their child each day, most parents tend to accept whatever services are offered, even if the services fall well short of those required by law.

As special education has evolved over the decades since IDEA was enacted, public school districts have provided most of the special education services students have required. But a small percentage of students are educated at private schools, most often because the district has deemed that facility to be the most appropriate and to provide the least restrictive environment, given the nature and severity of the child’s disability. Many of the private schools serving the disabled have a religious affiliation, but that has not proven to be a barrier to government funding of student placements under IDEA.

As of 2007, there were 5,978,081 students in special education nationwide, with fewer than 100,000 in private placements. Only 67,729 were being served by private schools at parental initiative, a mere 1.1 percent of disabled students, and a trivial 0.14 percent of the 49.6 million students in public education. Students placed in private schools are more likely to be autistic, have multiple disabilities, or suffer from emotional disturbances than those students who receive services in the public schools (see “Debunking a Special Education Myth,” check the facts).

Although few and far between, private placements nonetheless are an important constitutional precedent for special education vouchers, as the latter constitute only an extension of a long-standing practice that dates back to the civil-rights revolution. But unlike the procedures established under IDEA, school-voucher laws give parents the right to select a private placement without having to convince public school officials of the need for such services, to say nothing of the legal costs of proving to a hearing officer, or a state court judge, that the decision of the school district was in error. The rights of parents are seemingly identical under IDEA and under special education voucher laws, but the ease with which parents can exercise those rights is profoundly different.

The Debate

Almost 15 percent of students in the United States are said to have a disability under the procedures established by IDEA, so in states with special education vouchers, the potential for program growth is considerable. As the opportunity for private placement with a special education voucher becomes better known to parents, and as private providers become aware of the possibility of a larger clientele, one can anticipate an inexorable growth in the size and popularity of these programs.

Further expansion is likely to face some obstacles, however, as the programs become large enough to threaten vested interests. Arizona’s special education voucher law was struck down by the state courts after a challenge from the teachers union and civil liberties groups, which claimed that the law violated a state constitutional provision barring any public funds from flowing to religious institutions. Whether these state “Blaine Amendments,” named after the 19th-century presidential candidate who promoted anti-Catholic bigotry nationwide, will survive federal constitutional muster is not yet known. And whether other states of the 37 that have Blaine Amendments will interpret them as restrictively as Arizona or will follow Wisconsin’s example and still permit vouchers to be used at religiously affiliated schools is also not yet known.

In addition to legal challenges, opponents of special education vouchers are beginning to advance political and educational arguments against the idea as new programs are being considered in states such as Texas, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and South Carolina, and the existing Ohio program is poised to expand.

Opponents raise several arguments to which answers can be given from recent studies of existing special education voucher programs. A number of the studies were carried out by research teams in which Jay Greene participated; in the remainder of this essay we will refer to those studies as “our” research.

1. Is Current Law Adequate?

One of the most frequently heard claims is that such vouchers are unnecessary, as disabled students already have the right, under IDEA, to private placement, if that is the appropriate setting for their education. Andrew Rotherham, the well-known blogger for Education Sector, dismisses the need for such vouchers on the grounds that “many (in real numbers not percentage terms) special education students attend private schools at public expense as a result” of a provision in the “Individuals With Disabilities Education Act…for students with exceptional needs that the public schools cannot meet,” and this existing provision is “adequate to the task.”

But this claim ignores the complex procedures that must be followed in order to arrange for a private placement, a primary reason such placement is quite rare. As the United States Supreme Court noted in its recent Forest Grove School District decision, pursuing private placement through the legal system is “‘ponderous’ and therefore inadequate to ensure that a school’s failure to provide a [free and appropriate public education] is remedied with the speed necessary to avoid detriment to the child’s education.” And school districts win most legal struggles with parents over private placement. According to Thomas Mayes and Perry Zirkel’s empirical analysis of this type of case, “school districts won the clear majority (62.5%) of the decisions.”

Given the low probability of victory as well as the considerable time, expense, and psychological discomfort involved in waging a legal battle, it isn’t surprising that private placements are rare, especially among families who lack the wealth and sophistication required to navigate the legal system successfully.

Special education vouchers essentially use public funds to democratize access to private placement by reducing legal and financial barriers. In Florida, where the McKay Scholarship for Students with Disabilities program has offered vouchers to disabled students since 1999, vouchers allow 6.7 percent of special education students to be educated in private schools at public expense. That is six times the nationwide average for private placement. Current practices for securing private placement elsewhere are hardly “adequate to the task,” that is, if the task is helping disabled students find an appropriate alternative to their assigned public school.

2. Will Costs Rise?

Won’t expanding access to private schools for disabled students impose significantly greater costs on the public? The People for the American Way and the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (PFAW/DREDF) expressed this fear as fact in their joint 2003 report on Florida’s McKay Scholarship program: “The costs of the McKay voucher program have escalated rapidly and have financially punished public schools around the Sunshine State.”

Fortunately, the facts don’t support the PFAW/DREDF claim. It is true that the overall cost of special education has become a significant financial issue for school districts nationwide as enrollments have steadily grown over the years, although our previous research found that the cost has been widely exaggerated in the media. However, vouchers are unlikely to increase the burden on districts: Special education voucher laws stipulate that the voucher amount should reflect the severity of the disability, that is, students who have more severe disabilities receive more generous vouchers, and that the cost to the district may not exceed the average cost the state pays for the education of children with similar conditions.

In Florida, eligible students are provided with a voucher equivalent to the lesser of the amount the assigned public school would have spent on the child and the tuition at the accepting private school. According to the Florida Department of Education, the value of McKay scholarships in 2006–07 ranged from $5,039 to $21,907, with an average of $7,206. Given that Florida public schools spend close to $17,000 per disabled student and that the McKay program contains a roughly representative distribution of disability types, taxpayers are actually saving quite a bit of money with special education vouchers, and public school districts are certainly not being “financially punished.”

3. Will Enrollments Rise?

Former Florida senator John McKay, for whom the McKay Scholarship is named, speaks at the Save Our Students rally.

Even if special education vouchers lower the public expenditure for each disabled student who receives a voucher, the vouchers might contribute to higher total costs if they increase the likelihood that students would be classified as disabled. Andrew Rotherham and Sara Mead expressed this concern in a paper for the Progressive Policy Institute in 2003: “Special education vouchers may actually exacerbate the over-identification problem by creating a new incentive for parents to have children diagnosed with a disability in order to obtain a voucher.”

Again, the facts do not support the fear. Though no one disputes that disabilities are real and that disabled students are more expensive to educate, it is not true that vouchers will necessarily increase the identification of disabilities, thereby raising overall education costs. It is current government funding policies that generate incentives for over-identification of disabilities. A number of studies have found a higher incidence of identified disabilities in those states that provide districts with additional dollars for each student diagnosed as disabled. Other states award a special education grant to each district, based on past numbers of disabled students, thereby reducing any incentive to over-identify students with disabilities. Our research has shown that when a state shifts away from paying for each incidence of disability to a “census” approach, the growth in special education enrollments slows. Other research confirms the pattern: Using district-level data, Julie Cullen finds that financial incentives explained 40 percent of the growth in special education in Texas during the early 1990s, and Sally Kwak finds a similar result in California.

Special education vouchers provide a different incentive. They discourage school districts from over-identifying disabled students, because any student identified as disabled becomes a potential choice student who might leave the district for a private school, reducing district revenue received from the state.

Our research has shown that vouchers have in fact slowed growth in special education enrollments in Florida. In a new study, we examined the impact of vouchers on the likelihood that Florida students would be placed in special education. We looked at whether the probability that a student would be identified as having a specific learning disability in Florida changed as more private schools that accepted McKay scholarships opened near the student’s public school. With more such schools nearby, students would have greater opportunities to leave if they were classified as disabled and therefore became eligible for a voucher. The willingness of public schools to put students into special education might be constrained if those schools feared that students would walk out the door with a voucher and all of their funding.

In fact, that is exactly what we found. The addition of 7.6 private schools that accept McKay funding within five miles of a public school, which is the average, reduces the probability that a student will be identified as having a specific learning disability by 15 percent. The evidence suggests that, rather than expanding special education, as Rotherham and Mead feared, introducing special education vouchers places some constraint on the rapid growth in students placed in special education.

4. Will Sufficient Services Be Provided?

If special education vouchers don’t increase costs, critics allege, then providers must skimp on services. Emory University professor Ann Abramowitz warned Georgians against adopting a special education voucher program that ultimately was enacted in that state, arguing that it “risks depriving many special needs students of services that they vitally need. Federal law requires public schools to provide appropriate services to children with special needs…. Parents would surrender these rights when they opt for a voucher under the proposed legislation.”

This is inaccurate. Parents don’t lose rights with special education vouchers; they only gain an additional mechanism for making the rights of their disabled children a reality. Even where special education vouchers are adopted, families can always choose to pursue their right to appropriate services in public schools through the legal system. Vouchers simply offer those families an alternative to engaging in a legal struggle or accepting subpar services. Instead, they can use their voucher-derived market power to purchase the services their disabled children need. If the market doesn’t provide satisfactory outcomes, parents can always return to the public schools with their relatively impotent legal rights.

The empirical research shows that when parents are empowered with vouchers, they are actually more likely to obtain necessary services. In another study, we surveyed participants in Florida’s McKay voucher program to see how likely they were to get services in their private school relative to their previous public school. Only 30.2 percent of voucher participants said they received all services required under federal law from their public school, while 86 percent reported their McKay school provided all the services they promised to provide. In addition, Virginia Weidner and Carolyn Herrington found through a large survey that “almost 90% of McKay respondents…were satisfied or very satisfied with the school their child attends, whereas only 71.4% of public school respondents were satisfied or very satisfied with the school their child attends.”

These families were more likely to get what they needed from private schools, even though they had no legal rights to specific services from those schools; they were less likely to get what they needed from the public schools, where they were legally entitled to those services. Market power can sometimes deliver better results than procedural rights. With special education vouchers, families get both: the right to an appropriate education from public schools and the option to purchase that appropriate education from private schools.

5. Will Some Students Be Left Behind?

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush presents findings of a review of the state’s education reform efforts.

But might the departure from public schools of some special education students and the revenue they generate undermine the ability of the remaining disabled students to get an appropriate education? Vouchers could drain resources and talent from the public schools, making it harder for them to serve their special education students. On the other hand, options for disabled students to leave and take resources with them might motivate public schools to attend to the needs of their students more closely and serve them better.

The latter seems to be the case. In a 2008 study, we examined whether the academic achievement of special education students was affected by the number of options they had to leave their public school with a voucher. In Florida, as more private schools that accept McKay funding opened near each public school, the standardized test scores of disabled students who remained in public schools significantly increased. The addition of about seven public schools with McKay funding within five miles of a public school improved the academic achievement of special education students by about .05 of a standard deviation. Contrary to common misconceptions, virtually all disabled students in public schools take the state-mandated test in Florida, so improvement in test results suggests that schools were serving those students better when they faced more competition from the McKay program. Vouchers do not drain public schools of their ability to serve disabled students; instead, schools are pushed to serve those students better.

6. Are Private Schools Accountable?

Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, Jr., who signed the nation’s first-ever universal school voucher program into law, speaks to a 4th-grade class.

Special education vouchers appear to improve access to desired services for the students who use them, while also improving outcomes for the disabled students who remain in public schools. But the country’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, still frets that the program lacks sufficient accountability for results: “Voucher students are not included in state assessments, so taxpayers have no way of knowing how the voucher funds have been spent, and how students have fared.”

The simplest solution is to add a testing requirement to special education voucher programs similar to the testing requirements found in a number of other voucher programs. It might be best, however, not to require state accountability testing in a special education voucher program. With the difficulties disabled students face and the highly varied goals and criteria for success that may be appropriate for each student, state accountability testing is not always helpful in assessing the academic progress of individual special education students. Educational goals and assessments often need to be customized to individual circumstances.

Even when disabled students are in public schools with Individual Education Plans, accountability for progress on the goals contained in those IEPs rests primarily with the parents. If schools fall short, the public and policymakers would never know. Parents would have to detect the shortcomings and do something about it. The situation is no different in private schools that accept a special education voucher. If the private schools fall short, parents would have to detect it and do something about it. The only difference is that without vouchers the only thing that could be done is to pursue an expensive and time-consuming legal process; with vouchers, the parents would have the option of finding better services somewhere else.

It’s also important to note that we do not always require accountability by measuring outcomes whenever public funds are distributed, even in education. For example, large public sums are devoted to higher education in both public and private universities and yet no one is required to take accountability tests. Preschool is increasingly subsidized directly and indirectly by the government and still we do not make preschoolers take accountability tests.

Despite the frequency with which public programs rely on beneficiaries to hold the quality of services accountable, Sara Mead asserts in an Education Sector report that, “accountability to parents alone is insufficient to protect the public interest or ensure taxpayer money is used well.” It is unclear why these critics find parents of disabled 5th graders unreliable for accountability purposes, but find parents of students in preschool or university sufficiently competent.

Trista Kutcher shows her little sister, Samantha, her Special Olympics gold medals.

Besides, the research evidence suggests that special education vouchers are benefiting both students and taxpayers. They improve the ability of disabled students to find appropriate services. They save taxpayers money, because the average voucher ends up costing less than educating the same student in public school and because the voucher curbs public-school financial incentives to inflate the special education rolls. And special education vouchers even improve the quality of services for the disabled students who remain in public schools because those schools risk losing students to the voucher program if they do not serve the students well. This all sounds like real accountability for results.

Most important, special education vouchers change the mechanism by which we ensure services for disabled students. Rather than forcing dissatisfied families to accept subpar services or to pursue legal action for relief, vouchers permit a lower-conflict, lower-cost method for resolving disagreements about the adequacy of public school efforts.

Jay Greene is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Stuart Buck is a doctoral student in education reform at the University of Arkansas and author of Acting White: An Ironic Effect of Desegregation (forthcoming, Yale University Press).

But we can only hope their similarities don’t extend to education policy. Patrick calls education his “singular pursuit.” Yet after winning election in a 2006 landslide fueled by strong support from the Bay State’s powerful teachers unions—including $3 million in contributions—he has pursued the systematic dismantling of reforms that have made Massachusetts the national leader in public education.

The Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 dramatically increased school funding in return for high academic standards, accountability, and enhanced school choice. In the years following, the Commonwealth’s independent board of education, founded in 1837 with Horace Mann at the helm, implemented a set of reforms that have unquestionably been the nation’s most successful.

In 2005, Massachusetts became the first state ever to finish first in four categories of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP): 4th-grade reading and math and 8th-grade reading and math. The next time the test was administered, Bay State students did it again. Late last year, results from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) demonstrated that Massachusetts students are not only the best in the country, they are globally competitive as well. The Commonwealth’s 8th graders tied for first in the world in science and were sixth in math; 4th graders scored second in science and third in math.

Despite the clear success of more than a decade of education reform in Massachusetts, Governor Patrick’s administration has turned its back on the very forces behind that success: it is wavering on standards, choice is under continual fire, and the board of education has been stripped of the independence that for 170 years was Horace Mann’s legacy and had allowed the board to implement reform with a singular focus on improving student achievement.

In June 2008, Governor Patrick released the recommendations of his “Readiness Project,” an unwieldy 168-member, 13-subcommittee behemoth charged with developing a long-term “action agenda” for education. The plan calls for full-day kindergarten, universal pre-K, consolidation of school districts, and differentiated pay for teachers—all worthy goals. But the report maintains Patrick’s steadfast resistance to raising caps on charter schools. (Charter schools have the same effect on some of his supporters in the education establishment as Nancy Pelosi has on Rush Limbaugh.) Although the governor claimed during his campaign that he would open more charter schools once he “fixed” the formula by which they are funded, the Readiness Project is virtually silent on charters and their funding.

The Boston Globe, which enthusiastically endorsed the governor in both the Democratic primary and the general election, was not impressed. An editorial titled “Adrift in the edu-sphere” noted, “It’s nice to explore the educational cosmos. But taxpayers can’t be expected to pay for such a trip…when the likely cost of implementing Patrick’s full-blown plans could exceed $2 billion per year.”

Yet another commission, this one tasked with determining how to pay for Patrick’s action agenda, was appointed in June 2008. By the time its report was released, in the midst of a snowstorm on New Year’s Eve, the bottom had fallen out of the economy. Instead of identifying revenues to support new programs, the report focused mostly on cost-saving measures designed to preserve the current level of quality, although a majority of the commission’s 23 members did endorse raising the Commonwealth’s sales tax from 5 to 6 percent.

Success Story

All of this is particularly bizarre in light of the dramatic strides the state has made in improving its schools. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce published a state-by-state report card on educational effectiveness in 2007 that rated the Commonwealth’s public schools number one in the nation. The combination of funding, standards, accountability, and choice has brought real, measurable gains in student achievement (see Figure 1). A look at the condition of public education prior to reform shows just how far Massachusetts has come. During the 1980s, the Commonwealth’s verbal SAT scores were below the national average; math scores were below average as late as 1992. A funding system that was overly reliant on local property tax revenue created vast discrepancies from district to district in student achievement, class size, and the availability of resources like textbooks, libraries, and technology.

Since 1993 the Commonwealth has pumped more than $40 billion in new state money into public education, matched by $40 billion-plus in new local funding. Each district’s foundation budget, the minimum expenditure needed to provide an adequate education, is determined by formula, along with the amount each city and town can afford to contribute. The Commonwealth fills in the gap between the local contribution and the foundation budget. The result is a funding formula in which the vast majority of state education aid goes to the poorer school districts, making Massachusetts one of the national leaders in this respect as well (see Figure 2).

To ensure high academic standards and school-level accountability, state curriculum frameworks provide a subject-by-subject outline of the material that should form the basis of local curricula. To ensure implementation of the frameworks, students are tested each spring. Since 2003, passing the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests (based on the liberal arts-rich content of the frameworks) has been a high school graduation requirement. High-stakes testing also extends to new teachers, who must pass tests that measure communication and literacy skills as well as subject-area knowledge.

The state’s NAEP scores shot up after the curriculum frameworks were completed and the MCAS test was first administered in 1998. By 2007, the average Massachusetts 4th grader was performing at a higher level in math than the average 6th grader had been in 1996. Achieve, Inc., a national education organization established by governors and business leaders, found in 2001 that Massachusetts was the only state among the 10 it examined that had both strong standards and strong assessments. A 2007 study by the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education confirmed the tests’ validity, finding a strong correlation between MCAS results and college performance.

Noted educator and developer of the Core Knowledge curriculum E. D. Hirsch lauded the Massachusetts approach in a February 2008 op-ed in the Washington Post. “Consider the eighth grade NAEP results from Massachusetts, which are a stunning exception to the nationwide pattern of stagnation and decline,” he wrote. “That is because Massachusetts decided…students (and teachers) should learn explicit, substantive things about history, science and literature, and that students should be tested on such knowledge.”

Choice and Charters

In Massachusetts, public charter schools are the principal vehicle for offering educational choice, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has described the Commonwealth’s charter-school approval process as the nation’s most rigorous. Today, roughly 25,000 students (about 2.6 percent of the total public school population) attend Massachusetts charter schools, and another 21,000 are on wait-lists. Admission to an oversubscribed school is by lottery. When a student chooses to transfer to a charter school, funding follows from the district to the charter school. Despite the fact that districts are reimbursed for three years after a student leaves (100 percent the first year, 60 percent the second, and 40 percent in the third) and despite the 2004 adoption of district-friendly changes to the charter-funding formula, the flow of money has made charter schools controversial.

That controversy has fueled a one-step-forward, two-steps-back treatment of charters over the years. Caps on the number of schools have been raised just twice and now stand at 72 for the original type (known as Commonwealth charter schools) and at 48 for Horace Mann charters (a unionized, in-district model sanctioned after Commonwealth charters were established). Other limitations have been placed on both types of charter schools. The statewide share of public school students who can attend charters is capped at 4 percent. In any year in which a new charter school is approved, at least three of the newly approved charters must be located in low-performing districts. The law limits to 9 percent the portion of district spending that can be transferred to charter schools. More than 150 communities, mostly in poorer areas with low-performing schools, are bumping up against that cap, which places a de facto moratorium on charters.

Charter school results have been strong. A 2006 Massachusetts Department of Education study found that 90 percent of charter schools performed as well as or better than the districts from which their students came and 30 percent outperformed sending districts by a substantial margin. Their success has been particularly striking in urban areas, where most charters are located. Several urban charter schools, like Community Day in Lawrence, and MATCH, Boston Prep, and Excel Academy in Boston, serve overwhelmingly low-income and minority populations, yet outscore even the best suburban schools on MCAS tests.

SABIS International Charter School in Springfield is among the schools that have had remarkable success in narrowing achievement gaps based on race and economic status, a clear priority for the next phase of education reform. By 10th grade, Hispanic and African American students, who together make up 60 percent of the school’s student body, outperform white students statewide on the MCAS English exam and are virtually even with statewide averages for white students in math. More than 2,500 students sit on the school’s waiting list. Every member of all seven graduating classes has been accepted to college.

A study conducted by a team of Harvard and MIT researchers and published in January by the Boston Foundation showed that Boston charter schools dramatically outperform both district and pilot schools (semi-autonomous district schools created in response to charters). It found that the academic impact from a year spent in a Boston charter is comparable to that of a year spent in one of the city’s elite exam schools and, in middle school math, equivalent to one-half of the achievement gap between black and white students (see Figure 3).

One might expect the governor would support schools that the state’s own analysis and others have found to be successful. Indeed, prior to release of the Readiness Project recommendations, Governor Patrick said, “Everything is on the table because our future is at stake.” Everything, it seems, except expanding the kind of educational choice that transformed the governor’s own life.

Patrick earned a scholarship from A Better Chance, an organization that provides educational opportunities to young people of color. The scholarship transported him from the South Side of Chicago to Milton Academy, an elite Massachusetts preparatory school, and put him on a trajectory that led to Harvard, a top position in the U.S. Department of Justice, the corporate world, and ultimately the governor’s office.

But the Readiness Project includes precious little that would give others the opportunity to choose their school. The Readiness Project proposes “readiness schools,” which would have some of the autonomy of charter schools and some of the features of pilot schools. Teachers in a district school could come together and vote to convert to a readiness school, or districts could initiate the conversion. As an inducement to adopt the newly proposed schools, S. Paul Reville, whom Patrick appointed first to chair the state board of education and then as secretary of education, floated the possibility of a freeze on charter schools in districts that embrace readiness schools. When the trial balloon became public, he quickly backpedaled in the face of a torrent of opposition.

The administration’s current position on the charter freeze is unclear. When questioned, Patrick said the charter school debate had reached “stalemate” and his plan includes new ways to achieve the same goals.

Dismantling Success

In 2000, the Commonwealth created the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability (EQA) as an independent state agency to measure the effectiveness of school-district managers at implementing reform. Beginning in 2002, EQA conducted comprehensive audits of more than 175 school districts. The audits scrutinized MCAS performance, district leadership, curriculum and instruction, teacher and student assessment and evaluation, and business and financial operations. All findings were made public.

Soon after taking office, Patrick moved to eliminate the EQA. Opponents particularly disliked the agency because it did its job so well—auditing school districts and reporting when they came up short. Two studies by Boston-based think tank Pioneer Institute analyzed agency data and found that low-performing urban districts in particular were not aligning curricula with state frameworks and not using MCAS data effectively to improve achievement by tailoring lessons to student weaknesses.

More than a year after the EQA was scuttled, the co-chairs of the state legislature’s Joint Committee on Education filed a bill, later enacted, creating a new Advisory Council on District Accountability and Assistance. The new agency amounts to the fox guarding the accountability henhouse, replacing the EQA’s independent 5-person board with a 13-member panel that includes representatives of the very people it’s supposed to audit: the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents; American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts; Massachusetts Teachers Association; Massachusetts Association of School Committees; Massachusetts Secondary School Administrators Association; and the Massachusetts Elementary School Principals Association.

The administration’s proposal to overhaul the Commonwealth’s education governance structure gained legislative approval in February 2008. An education commissioner who reported to the board of education, not the governor, had long directed primary and secondary public education in Massachusetts. The Patrick proposal resurrected the state secretary of education post, which had been created and abolished twice since the 1970s.

Reville, who then chaired the board of education, claimed Governor Patrick’s plan kept appropriate distance between politics and education policy. But when a far weaker education secretariat had been proposed in 2003, Reville testified before the legislature in opposition to the plan, saying, “No matter how well constituted, an education secretariat creates a competing center of power that vies with and against the state’s chief school officer, the Commissioner of Education and the state education agency.”

Governor Patrick himself contradicted Reville’s claim that the new proposal was more respectful of independent education policymaking. At its unveiling, the governor said his plan “will be different in that (the secretary) will have real authority.”

But the administration’s main target was the state board of education. In a move reminiscent of FDR’s court-packing plan, the overhaul added two seats to the board, opened up two more slots by removing the commissioner of early childhood education and the chancellor of higher education, made the new secretary a voting member, and truncated the terms of members least likely to agree with the administration.

Even more importantly, it stripped the renamed Board of Elementary and Secondary Education of its independence, placing it firmly under the governor’s control by giving the new secretary final say over budget requests and veto power over its selection of future commissioners of education. The board had just selected Mitchell Chester, an Ohio education official, to be the next commissioner. Chester beat out Karla Baehr, who was superintendent of schools in the city of Lowell, had gained some prominence among urban superintendents (see sidebar), and was widely seen as the choice of the education establishment and the governor. Baehr was later hired as a deputy commissioner.

The usually affable Patrick also used the unveiling of his governance proposal to send a message to those concerned about charter schools, saying they should “grow up.” Later, after release of the Boston Foundation study, Patrick called the debate about raising charter caps “a red herring because we’re not at the cap,” despite the fact that Boston is among the urban communities bumping up against the 9 percent of school district spending limitation, with only 111 charter seats remaining and about 7,000 students languishing on wait lists.

In February 2008, the board, still chaired by Reville (he assumed the new secretary of education post on July 1), became the first to reject a charter school recommended for approval by the commissioner of education. The focus of the board’s discussion about the proposed SABIS regional charter school in the city of Brockton was a 2005 state department of education (DOE) report that identified problems at the Springfield SABIS charter school. Days after the new school’s application was rejected, a 2006 DOE letter surfaced that said the Springfield school had successfully addressed all the major issues raised in the earlier report. Company officials who attended the board meeting were not allowed to respond to Reville’s criticisms.

A Boston Globe editorial noted that the “rejection raises thorny questions about just how hard the Patrick administration is willing to push to achieve equity in education.” Like SABIS’s successful Springfield charter school, the proposed school would have served troubled communities. The most current data available prior to the proposed school’s rejection showed that 20 of Brockton’s 23 schools failed to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) under federal law, and all 6 failed to make AYP in nearby Randolph, where the schools are in such bad shape the district was required to submit a plan to stave off state receivership. During the board’s debate over the proposed charter school, Patrick appointee and board PTA representative Ruth Kaplan commented that charter schools are too focused on sending students to college, saying “families…don’t always know what’s best for their children.”

During the spring of 2008, Reville charged a “21st Century Skills Task Force” with rewriting curricula and ensuring that Massachusetts students are prepared to succeed in a fast-changing economy. The task force’s report, published in November, proposes revamping MCAS and using the U.S. History test to try out project-based assessments that require students to demonstrate skills like “global awareness,” a change likely to crowd out topics like the Constitution or causes of the Civil War. It calls on the teachers unions, school committees, and superintendents that have fought education reform for 15 years to determine how to integrate 21st-century skills in our schools.

In a sad irony, the task force report claims that “Massachusetts can learn from the experience of West Virginia” on ways to incorporate the needed skills. West Virginia students score below the national average on the NAEP tests, and the state was among the seven that saw the largest declines in reading scores between 1998 and 2005.

A month after release of the task force report, former state senate president Thomas Birmingham, one of the architects of education reform, delivered an address in which said he was “discomforted” by the direction of the Readiness Project and that the 21st Century Skills Task Force “may threaten to…drive us back in the direction of vague expectations and fuzzy standards.”

Teacher testing has also come under fire. In April 2008, the state senate voted to allow some teachers to be licensed even if they failed the required exam three times. The administration announced that it was looking at alternative criteria for aspiring teachers, even though most of the tests are at a high-school level of difficulty. Reville told the Globe the test “isn’t necessarily the best venue for everyone to demonstrate their competency.”

The move to back away from teacher testing sparked another firestorm of opposition. In a Boston Globe op-ed, Charles Glenn, then dean ad interim of Boston University’s School of Education, wrote, “It would be a gross disservice for our public school children to be taught by teachers who do not meet the standards set by our current teacher tests.” Reville later said the administration didn’t support the senate vote after all.

With the pillars of reform under attack, Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, wrote in the Globe, “You have to wonder why Massachusetts seems intent on retreating from its own nationally recognized success. The backward slide is already evident.”

The Wrong Path

The Commonwealth’s 15-year track record of successful education reform gave Governor Patrick a clear path ahead on education policy. Instead of undoing the reforms of his predecessors, the governor could have built on the state’s success by carrying on the commitment to high standards, fine-tuning a successful accountability system, and maintaining the governance structure that had successfully insulated critical education policy decisions from special-interest pressure. He could extend to others the educational opportunity that transformed his own life by raising from 9 to 20 percent the cap on the amount of money that can be transferred from school districts to charter schools in districts whose MCAS scores are in the bottom 10 percent statewide.

So far, he has chosen instead to dismantle reform and replace the singular focus on student achievement that was the key to education reform’s success with a wish list that would likely cost taxpayers an additional $2 billion per year. With the new Board of Elementary and Secondary Education stripped of independence, there is no entity left that can operate outside the political arena with the sole mission of improving academic performance.

Results released in September 2008 showed a sharp drop in MCAS pass rates and flat or declining scores in the elementary and middle school grades and in many urban districts. While 15 years of progress will not be undone overnight, as the Patrick administration’s efforts to dismantle reform continue, such drops are likely to become the rule. It is the price we will pay for Massachusetts policymakers snatching defeat from the jaws of the Commonwealth’s historic education-reform victory.

As for President Obama, during the primaries he played to the teachers unions that are a critical Democratic Party constituency by assailing the evils of forcing teachers to “teach to the test.” But once the nomination was secured, he moved to the center, unveiling proposals that included merit pay for teachers and doubling federal charter-school funding. His selection of Arne Duncan, Chicago’s charter-friendly school superintendent, as education secretary also bodes well. Let’s hope that as president he continues down that path rather than the one Governor Patrick has chosen, and that he applies the lessons from the successful reforms in Massachusetts to federal education policy.

Charles Chieppo is a senior fellow and James Gass is director of the Center for School Reform at Pioneer Institute, a Massachusetts public-policy think tank.

CORRECTION: The printed version of this article contains two errors, which have been corrected here. The number of students on waiting lists for charter schools in Boston is about 7,000. The Readiness Finance Commission reportedly favored raising the state sales tax rather than the income tax from 5 to 6 percent.

We address two main questions about charter schools in the city. First, who enrolls in New York City’s charter schools? And, second, how well are the schools educating students? What we found is that, compared with other students in the traditional public schools, charter school applicants are more likely to be black and poor but are otherwise fairly similar. We also found that charter school students benefit academically from their charter school education. Charter school students in grades 3 through 8 perform better than we would expect, based on the performance of comparable students in traditional public schools, on both the math and reading portions of New York’s statewide achievement tests. There is not yet a sufficient number of charter school students in grades 9 through 12 for us to report achievement effects for this group.

Data Collection

Forty-seven charter schools were operating in New York City in the 2005–06 school year, the most recent for which we have test-score results, and all but five are included in the analysis presented here. Two schools, Manhattan Charter School and South Bronx Charter School for International Cultures and the Arts, are participating in our ongoing study but are not included in the analysis because they do not yet have any students in test-taking grades. One school, ReadNet Bronx Charter School, was in the process of closing in 2005–06. The absence of ReadNet Bronx from our evaluation is likely to have only a small impact on our assessment of student achievement because the school had only two years of test-taking students before it closed. The New York Center for Autism Charter School is not included in the study because it serves a very special population and is not compatible with many elements of the study. The United Federation of Teachers Elementary Charter School has declined to participate in the study so far, but it does not yet have any students in test-taking grades.

Charter schools must advertise their availability to all students eligible to attend public schools and are not allowed to select their students from among applicants. Instead, if a charter school in New York receives more applicants than it has places, it must enroll students based on a random lottery. Each spring, charter schools that are oversubscribed hold admissions lotteries.

Our study data are collected as follows: First, the information from each charter school application is sent to the New York City Department of Education for inclusion in its administrative database. This database contains entries for all students who attend New York City’s traditional public schools and for all students who attend New York City’s charter schools. A contractor for the department uses the maximum amount of information possible—for example, the student’s name, birth date, and Social Security number, if available—to match each applicant to a corresponding existing entry in the department’s database. The contractor then extracts information on each student’s demographic characteristics, enrollment, test scores, and certification for and participation in various programs such as free and reduced-price lunch, special education, and English-language services. This information is gathered from both the years before and the years after the application to a charter school and sent to us with an encrypted student identification number.

We first obtained application data on the lottery conducted in the spring of 2005 for the 2005–06 school year, and we requested application data from earlier years as well. Not all schools had archived this information or had requested all of the elements that would prove helpful in matching up their applicants. The 2005–06 application data therefore have the most complete coverage of schools and the most information on which to match. In order to be as representative as possible, the analysis of the characteristics of charter school applicants described below is based on the data from that year. In our achievement analysis, however, we use data from all lotteries for which we have application data.

The Applicants

Who applies to New York City’s charter schools? In answering this question, it is important to recognize that the charter schools are located in neighborhoods that are substantially poorer than and almost twice as black as the average New York City neighborhood. Charter school neighborhoods contain only one-third as many whites and Asians as the average New York City neighborhood. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that if the charter schools draw from their neighborhoods, they will draw students who are 90 to 95 percent black or Hispanic. The charter schools are thus in a situation that people sometimes find confusing. Normally, if we say that a traditional public school is “more black” or “more Hispanic,” we mean to imply that the school has fewer white students. However, for New York City’s charter schools, “more black” or “more Hispanic” cannot imply “less white” because there are hardly any whites (or Asians) to be displaced. Instead, when we say a New York City charter school is “more black” than surrounding schools, it is automatically “less Hispanic” (and vice versa). Any school that disproportionately serves black students will disproportionately not serve Hispanic students. These are not two independent comments: they are the same comment!

As one might predict based on their neighborhoods, applicants to New York City’s charter schools are twice as likely to be black (64 percent versus 32 percent) and much less likely to be white or Asian (7 percent versus 28 percent) than the average public school student in New York City. Because charter school students are disproportionately likely to be black, they are somewhat less likely to be Hispanic (27 percent versus 39 percent). About half of charter school applicants are female, just like students in the traditional public schools (see Figure 2).

There is no simple explanation for the disproportionate appeal of charter schools to blacks. While a couple of charter schools—Harriet Tubman and Sisulu-Walker—are named after a black person, most of the charter schools, not a few, disproportionately draw black students. Nor does the explanation seem to involve strong language barriers for Hispanics. Traditional public schools and charter schools located in areas with significant Hispanic populations provide the same level of Spanish-language translation for school materials. In both sets of schools, key materials, such as applications, school calendars, and school descriptions are usually available in Spanish. A more complex story is needed. For instance, black parents may feel more comfortable “disagreeing” with their regular school assignment than Hispanic parents do, particularly if the parents in question are recent immigrants.

A common proxy for poverty is a student being certified to receive a free or reduced-price lunch. (To get certified, a student’s household income must be less than 185 percent of the federal poverty line.) Using this proxy, we find that the applicants to charter schools are much more likely to be poor than is the average New York City student (93 percent versus 74 percent).

Unfortunately, charter schools and regular public schools have some information recorded differently in the New York City database, and these differences cause charter schools’ numbers of special education and English language learner students to be understated. Nevertheless, the data that we have suggest that, at the time they applied, 11.1 percent of charter school applicants were participating in special education. This is about the same percentage as in the New York City schools overall (12.5 percent). The data we have also suggest that, at the time they applied, 4.2 percent of charter school applicants were classified as English language learners, while 13.6 percent of New York City’s students were classified as such. Because of our concerns about the differences in the recording of English proficiency status, we cannot draw the conclusion that charter schools appeal disproportionately to students who are proficient in English. But the fact that charter schools appeal disproportionately to black students is probably reflected in applicants being more likely to be English speakers.

We do not have good data that would help answer the question of whether charter schools disproportionately draw high or low achievers. Because most students enter charter schools before the 3rd grade when state-mandated testing begins, only 36 percent of applicants in our study have prior test scores on record and this group is not representative of all applicants.

Student Achievement

The basic strategy we use to evaluate the effect of charter schools on student achievement is to compare students who are awarded a seat in a charter school through a lottery with students who enter the lottery but are not awarded a seat. About 91 percent of all charter school applicants participated in lotteries. The random assignment to the two separate groups of students who are otherwise similar—in their measured characteristics and the fact that they expressed a desire to attend a charter school—enables us to isolate the impact of attending a charter school.

We first wanted to confirm that the two groups contained similar students. As expected, when we compared students who were awarded a seat in a charter school to those who were not, we found no statistically significant differences on any of the demographic or predetermined program eligibility characteristics we could measure.

We use common statistical procedures to estimate the effect on math and reading test scores of each additional year of actual attendance at a charter school. Our results therefore reflect the performance of students who, if offered a seat in a charter school, choose to enroll—that is, those who comply with the experimental treatment. In some applications, having an estimate of a program effect that is valid only for compliers is problematic, because it would be useful to know what would happen if the program were expanded to other populations. In the case of charter schools, however, an estimate of their effect on students who enroll is exactly what we want, as the basic idea behind charter school reform is that only students who want to should attend them. Our present approach also assumes that each year of charter schooling has the same effect on student achievement. When we investigated whether each year of attendance at a charter school had a different effect, we found no evidence to support the idea of different effects in different years. However, we plan to return to the question in subsequent analyses when we will have more variation in the number of years students attend charter schools.

We use test-score data from the years 2000–01 to 2005–06 from the 36 charter schools that enroll students in grades 3 through 12. However, because the number of students in grades 9 through 12 is too small to produce statistically significant results at this time, our discussion will focus on the results for the 32 schools that enrolled 3rd through 8th graders in the relevant years. For them, the number of test-score observations included in the analysis ranges from almost 7,800 in grade 5 to 3,000 in grade 8.

We first present our results in the way most often used by researchers: standard scores. These scores, which are generated by dividing a scale score by its standard deviation, are helpful because they allow researchers to compare the effects of charter schools to the effects of other interventions, like class-size reductions. Our results indicate that, on average, New York City’s charter schools raise their 3rd through 8th graders’ math achievement by 0.09 of a standard score and reading achievement by 0.04 of a standard score, compared with what would have happened had they remained in traditional public schools (see Figure 3). We find no evidence that the improvement in achievement differs between boys and girls or between blacks and Hispanics.

To put these results in context, consider the Tennessee STAR Experiment, which produced some of the literature’s highest estimated effects for class-size reduction. The Tennessee experiment suggested that a 10 percent reduction in class size in grades K–3 raised students’ standard scores by 0.06. Furthermore, this was a one-time effect: even if students stayed in smaller classes for multiple years, their achievement rose only once, by 0.06. In contrast, the average charter school student improved by 0.09 in math and 0.04 in reading for each year of charter school attendance.

Another way to present the results is in terms of New York State’s performance levels. In 2005–06, depending on the grade, a student’s math scale score had to rise by an average of 32 points to go from the top of the Performance Level 1 range (“failing” or not meeting learning standards) to the bottom of the Performance Level 3 range (“proficient” or meeting learning standards). The equivalent required rise in a student’s reading score was 44 points.

We estimate that, depending on the grade, students’ math scale scores rise by 3.75 to 3.98 points and their reading scale scores rise by 1.53 to 1.61 points for every year they spend in charter schools. Again, these improvements are measured relative to what would have happened to the same students in traditional public schools. Another way to think about these gains is to understand that, for every year they spend in a charter school, students make up 12 percent of the distance from failing to proficient in math. They make up 3.5 percent of the distance from failing to proficient in reading.

There are several possible explanations for the effects of charter schools being larger in math than in reading. The most likely explanation, we believe, is that schools largely control math education, but that both families and schools exert strong influence over reading skills. If, for instance, the families of students who were and were not awarded a seat through a lottery had the same effect on reading and families controlled half the gains in reading, then the difference between the estimated math and reading effects would be fully explained.

Keep in mind, these annual gains are relative to whatever gains the students would have been expected to make in the traditional public schools had they not been awarded a seat through the lottery. Because most of the students in our study have been attending a charter school for between one and three years and no student has attended for more than six years, we are uncomfortable extrapolating our finding beyond four years of enrollment in a charter school.

We also estimated a separate effect on achievement for each of the 32 charter schools with students in grades 3 through 8. The results for about one-third of these schools are very imprecise, usually because they had very few students in test-taking grades during the analysis years. Based on the remaining schools for which we have reasonably precise estimates, however, we found a good deal of variation in achievement effects. About 19 percent of charter school students attend a school that is estimated to have a positive effect on math that is very large: greater than 0.3 of a standard score per year. Another 56 percent attend a school that is estimated to have a positive effect that is large: between 0.1 and 0.3 of a standard score. 18 percent attend a school with a positive but small to moderate effect. Only 6 percent attend a school that is estimated to have a negative effect on math, and these estimated effects are all small. The effects on reading are similarly distributed across a range, with 80 percent being positive and only 8 percent being negative.

School Policies

The variation in achievement effects among charter schools raises the question of whether one can identify specific policies that are associated with charter school success (see sidebar, “New York City Charter Basics”). To provide hints at possible answers, we conducted some preliminary analysis on the question using the math and reading results from the 32 schools that enrolled elementary and middle school students.

We want to be clear that our analysis cannot establish definitively whether the policies of charter schools cause changes in student achievement. We can describe only associations between policies and achievement effects, and the distinction between association and causation is very important in practice in the charter school context. Charter schools may adopt policies for reasons that we do not observe and it may be that it is these unobserved reasons that actually affect achievement. For instance, suppose that charismatic school leaders were a key cause of positive achievement effects, and suppose that charismatic leaders just happened to like long school years. We cannot measure charisma, but we can measure the length of the school year. Therefore, we might find an association between a long school year and positive achievement effects, even if the charisma, and not the long school year, caused higher achievement. A school that lengthened its school year would be disappointed in the results, not realizing that what it had really needed to do was to hire a charismatic leader.

That caution given, there are a few clear and interesting associations to be noted. We find no relationship between how long a charter school has been in operation and student achievement after controlling for school policies. However, if we do not control for school policies and look at the simple correlation between a charter school’s years in operation and student achievement, we find that older schools have more positive achievement effects. The fact that this correlation disappears when we include such policies in our analysis suggests that the reason older schools have more positive achievement effects is that they adopt more effective policies.

A long school year is associated with positive achievement effects, and we estimate that schools with years that are 10 days longer are associated with average student achievement that is 0.2 standard deviations greater. This is a large effect, and a 10-day difference among school calendars is quite common. In fact, 12 days is the standard deviation in the length of the school year among charter schools. We should note, however, that a long school year tends to go part and parcel with several other policies, such as a longer school day and Saturday school, and this should make us cautious about assigning too much importance to a longer school year in and of itself. A more conservative conclusion would be to think of the package of the three policies having a positive association with student achievement.

We also find that class size, optional afterschool programs, and most math and reading curricula seem to have no relationship to student achievement. Everyday Math and Open Court reading curricula did have negative and statistically significant associations with achievement effects. We discourage readers from interpreting these as causal effects, however, since an equally plausible interpretation is that these are curricula that schools adopt when their students are struggling.

New York City Charter Basics New York City has three charter school authorizers. Of the schools covered in this report, the State University of New York authorized 20 , the chancellor of the New York City schools authorized 19, and the New York State Board of Regents authorized 3. Three types of organizations operate charter schools in New York City: nonprofit community-grown organizations (CGOs), nonprofit charter management organizations (CMOs), and for-profit education management organizations (EMOs). CMOs and EMOs are formal organizations that exist to manage charter schools, and they function somewhat like firms that have a strong brand and that establish fairly independent branches or franchises (see “Brand-Name Charters,” features). CMOs and EMOs typically make overarching curricular and policy decisions, conduct back-office activities, and provide something of a career ladder for teachers and administrators within their network of schools. The CMO with the most schools in New York City in 2005–06 was the KIPP Foundation, and the EMO with the most schools was Victory Schools. CGO schools may be founded by a group of parents, a group of teachers, a community organization that provides local social services, one or more philanthropists, or the teachers union. More often than not, the founding group combines people from a few of the groups listed above. Fifty-six percent of the charter school students covered by this report attend 23 schools operated by CGOs; 19 percent attend 12 schools that are affiliated with CMOs; and 25 percent attend 7 schools run by EMOs. As these percentages suggest, the average school operated by an EMO has considerably larger enrollment than the average school operated by a CGO or a CMO. Missions and Policies Every charter school describes itself in a carefully crafted mission statement that sets out its vision, educational philosophy, and focus. Based on these statements, we can categorize the schools roughly into five groups: those that have a child-centered or progressive educational philosophy and typically seek to develop students’ love of learning, respect for others, and creativity (29 percent of students); those with a general or traditional educational mission and a focus on students’ core skills (28 percent of students); those with a rigorous academic emphasis, which have mission statements that focus almost exclusively on academic goals such as excelling in school and going to college (25 percent of students); those that target a particular population of students, such as low-income students, special needs students, likely dropouts, male students, and female students (11 percent of students); and those in which a certain aspect of the curriculum, such as science or the arts, is paramount (7 percent of students). There are a number of reasons to expect that charter schools will choose different policies and practices: They are independent and fairly autonomous. Their operating agencies have a variety of histories and priorities. All are young schools and more likely to experiment with new policies than are established schools. At the same time, there are reasons to think that New York City’s charter schools will share certain policies. They commonly serve disadvantaged students; they are all under pressure to attract parents and to satisfy a small number of authorizers; one school may deliberately imitate another by adopting a policy that seems to be working in the other school; schools may also imitate one another unconsciously (as when teachers who have worked at one school are hired by another and bring their knowledge with them). The common characteristics of charter schools reveal which innovations seem most promising to urban school leaders empowered to set their own policies (see Figure 4). About 64 percent of students attend a charter school with a school year of 190 days or longer, and 20 percent attend a school with a school year of 200 days or longer. By way of comparison, the modal school year in the United States is 180 days or 36 weeks. About 55 percent of students attend a charter school with a day that lasts eight hours or longer, 67 percent attend one with an optional afterschool program, and about 57 percent attend one with Saturday school that is mandatory for all or at least some students (for instance, students who are struggling academically). About 49 percent of students attend a charter school that has a system of bonuses for successful teachers, and 17 percent of students attend a charter school whose teachers are unionized. Most of the students in charter schools whose teachers are unionized attend one of the five charter schools that were formerly traditional public schools but converted to charter status. In addition, about 91 percent of charter school students attend schools that require uniforms, and about 95 percent attend schools that voluntarily administer standardized exams on a regular basis for diagnostic purposes. The advisory system is used by nearly all the charter schools that serve middle or high school grades. In an advisory system, a teacher or pair of teachers is assigned to a group of students for an entire school year. Teachers meet frequently (often daily) with their students and are responsible for tracking their progress and preventing them from “falling through the cracks.” Because students in elementary grades are assigned to one teacher for most of the school day, advisory systems would be duplicative and are therefore not used by elementary schools. About 52 percent of students attend charter schools that ask their parents to sign “contracts.” Because these contracts are not enforceable, it is best to think of them as a method of trying to ensure that parents know about the school’s policies and expectations. Some parents may also feel morally bound to abide by the contract. Just over half the students attend a charter school that reserves one or more seats on its board for parents. About 21 percent attend one with a disciplinary policy that fits the “no broken windows” school of thinking, which holds that encouraging small courtesies and punishing small infractions (usually at the classroom level) are important. This is in contrast to disciplinary strategies that focus more on preventing or punishing large infractions (often at an administrative level above the classroom). The charter schools employ a variety of math and reading curricula, with no curriculum being dominant. The most popular are Saxon Math (41 percent of students) and Core Knowledge (38 percent of students.) Fifty-four percent of students have an extended English or language arts period of 90 minutes or more, and the same percentage have an extended math period. While the Children First initiative in New York City mandates a daily “literacy block” of 90 minutes for elementary school grades, the city requires that traditional public elementary schools have between 60 and 75 minutes of math instruction daily, depending on the grade.

Conclusion

In sum, in the largest lottery-based evaluation of charter schools to date, we find that charter schools in New York City are having positive effects on the academic progress of the students who attend them. These effects are largest in charter schools that have extended the length of the school year, though we cannot establish definitively that this is the reason for their exceptional performance. We also find that the students applying to charter schools in New York City are more likely to be black and eligible for a free or reduced-price lunch program than students in the public schools in the district.

While it is reasonable to extrapolate the findings to other urban students who are similar to New York City applicants, we would argue against these results being applied to students who differ substantially from applicants to the charter schools. In particular, the results should not be applied to students who are substantially more advantaged or to students who would not be interested in applying to the types of charter schools available in New York City, even if they were conveniently located in the students’ area.

That said, our results provide a strong basis for recommending the continued expansion of charter schooling in the Big Apple and in other large cities with similar student populations.

Caroline M. Hoxby is professor of economics at Stanford University and director of the Economics of Education program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Sonali Murarka is a project manager at the National Bureau of Economic Research. They are, respectively, principal investigator and project manager of the New York City Charter Schools Evaluation Project.

For more on this topic by Jay Greene, please see the article he co-wrote with Stuart Buck, The Case for Special Education Vouchers.

The city’s Public Charter School Board reported Thursday that the city’s 57 charter schools enrolled 27,953 students this fall, or about 38% of total public school enrollment.  The Washington Post, in a story on the charter-board statement Friday, said the city’s traditional schools enrolled 45,772 when a preliminary count was taken in October.  Both numbers will be audited by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education and could change substantially in the coming months.

Both numbers also require a longer look.

The state office’s audited enrollment in the traditional schools in 2008 was 45,200, a drop from 49,500 in 2007, the year Rhee arrived.  Rhee this summer estimated 2009 enrollment at 45,000, far more than an estimate of 41,500 set by the D.C. city council.  So, compared to 2008 enrollment, Rhee’s estimate and the council’s projection, attendance may be up slightly.

The state office’s audited enrollment in the charters was 27,700 in 2008, up from 22,000 in 2007, when there were fewer schools.  The Public Charter School Board projected 2009 enrollment of 28,066.  So, charter enrollment is up over the previous two years, but may have fallen short of projections for this year by 113 youngsters.

There will be plenty else to look at when the audited results are released.  In 2008, for example, 38% of public school students were in charters, but 48% of sixth graders were in charters.  That would seem to be a pretty clear public vote on the quality of the district’s middle schools.  And then there’s this: Based on those preliminary numbers, school enrollment actually grew this year by about 800 youngsters, and the traditional schools got a slightly larger slice of the increase.

Auditors:  Start your calculators.

The CREDO study assessed the performance of charter schools compared to traditional public schools across 15 states and the District of Columbia.  It used an innovative matching technique to create control students in the traditional schools who were similar to those who chose charters.  The results from this study showed a number of charters (17%) doing significantly better (at the 95% level) than the traditional public schools that fed the charters, but there was an even larger group of charters (37%) doing significantly worse in terms of reading and math.  The remainder did not do significantly better or worse.  These results were greeted with mixed emotions.  The majority of researchers and policy makers were not overly surprised.  They saw that there were success stories but that further work would need to be done to ensure that more of the good charters flourished and fewer of the bad charters remained (just as the case with traditional public schools).  [Full disclosure: Macke Raymond, the lead author on the CREDO study, is my wife, so I know more about these studies than the random reader].

The study of New York City charters offered a different conclusion.  The analysis by Hoxby, Murarka, and Kang (HMK) employed a different methodology.  With sufficient popularity among parents so as to attract excess demand for enrollment, NYC charters are required to use a lottery to decide who is chosen to enroll (with exceptions for siblings and some other circumstances).  HMK traced students who were “lotteried out” into the traditional public schools and compared their subsequent performance to those who had entered the charter schools.  They found that the majority of students (86%) attended schools that had a positive effect (although it is not reported what this means for the number of schools or the statistical significance.)  Thus, in New York City the charter experience appears notably more favorable than that for the rest of the nation.

Some people believe that the results for these two studies should be the same.  If not, one of the studies must be wrong.  The media were further confused by a memo that Caroline Hoxby released that suggested an error in the statistical estimation used by CREDO and that this error would significantly bias downward the impact of charter schools.  This memo, by implication, suggested that the rest of the country might actually look like the NYC results.  The CREDO response to this points out, however, that the Hoxby memo is built upon an incorrect statement of the estimation approach by CREDO and an incorrect derivation of the statistical results – thus leaving the difference in results intact.  (Both sides of the exchange can be found here.)

In reality, expecting the results of the two studies to be the same is not the right way to look at them.  The studies ask very different questions, and there is no reason to expect them to provide the same results.  The CREDO study asks how well a typical charter school student across the sixteen separate state policy environments does compared to the counterfactual of attending a traditional public school.  The HMK study investigates how well charter school students do when attending schools popular enough with parents to be oversubscribed compared to attending a traditional NYC  public school.  Thus, the NYC study can be thought of as proof that the best charter schools, as judged by parents, can dramatically outperform the alternative traditional school.  That is important information, but it is impossible to know how to generalize it to other environments with different state laws, different union contracts, different district governance, different financing arrangements, and the like.   Just on the surface, nobody would think that it was possible to generalize from NYC (one million students) to LA (700,000 students), let alone to Kansas City (20,000 students).

Understanding the factors that make NYC charter schools perform so well relative to their traditional schools is an extraordinarily important research and policy question.    It should clearly be at the top of the research agenda.  Indeed, those charter school advocates who believe that there are important differences in state laws or that there is something special about KIPP schools already know that differences exist, even if the details are not well-understood.

Unfortunately, this is also a subtle issue that the media and the policy community have trouble understanding.  To many in the media, both studies sound like they are estimating the effectiveness of charter schools or maybe even the impact of school choice – so shouldn’t the answer be the same?

While we have learned a lot from the new studies, we still remain in a situation with an unresolved key question about what policies, laws, and incentives lead some charters to flourish and others not.

For Immediate Release: October 7, 2009

Contact: Jay P. Greene, University of Arkansas, (479) 575-3162

STANFORD — While the recent debate in Washington, D.C. over the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which serves low-income children, has highlighted a sharp political divide in our nation’s capital over school choice, outside the beltway special education voucher programs tell a different story.  Now serving more than 22,000 students in four states — Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Utah — these programs, which serve families from all social and economic boundaries, reveal the kind of broad support that vouchers can generate.

Special education voucher laws are very straightforward: The parents of any child found in need of a special education can ask the school district to pay for their child’s education at a school the parent has identified as appropriate. In a feature article for the winter 2010 issue of Education Next, education researchers Jay P. Greene and Stuart Buck of the University of Arkansas, drawing on extensive previous research on the effects of special education vouchers, dispel several common myths about these programs and show how they have benefited handicapped children in states where they have been enacted, including those not in private placements.

Myth #1: Special Education Vouchers Are Unnecessary

Some claim that special education vouchers are unnecessary because disabled students already have the right to private placement under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).  Greene and Buck, however, point out that this ignores the complex procedures parents must follow in order to obtain a private placement, a primary reason such placement is quite rare. And when parents challenge districts over private placement for their children, school districts win more than 62 percent of the court decisions.

As of 2007, there were 5,978,081 students in special education nationwide, with fewer than 100,000 in private placements. Only 67,729 were being served by private schools at parental initiative, a mere 1 percent of disabled students.  Greene and Buck note that in Florida, where the McKay Scholarship for Students with Disabilities program has offered vouchers to disabled students since 1999, vouchers allow nearly 7 percent of special education students to be educated in private schools at public expense, six times the national average for private placement.

Myth #2: Special Education Vouchers Raise Public Education Costs

As enrollments have steadily grown, the overall cost of special education has become a significant financial issue for school districts nationwide. However, Greene and Buck find that vouchers are unlikely to increase the burden on districts: Special education voucher laws typically stipulate that the voucher amount should reflect the severity of the disability and that the cost to the district may not exceed the average cost the state pays for the education of children with similar conditions.

For example, the value of McKay scholarships in 2006-07 ranged from $5,039 to $21,907, with an average of $7,206.  In contrast, Florida public schools spend close to $17,000 per disabled student.

Myth #3: Special Education Vouchers Cause Disability Enrollments to Rise

The opposite is true: Special education vouchers discourage school districts from over-identifying disabled students, because any student identified as disabled might leave the district for a private school, reducing district revenue received from the state.

Greene’s research has shown that vouchers slowed growth in special education enrollments in Florida. In another study, Greene found that the addition of seven private schools that accept McKay funding within five miles of a public school reduces the probability that a student will be identified as having a learning disability by 15 percent.

Myth #4: Special Education Vouchers Won’t Ensure Students Receive Needed Services

In a previous study, Greene found that parents who use vouchers are actually more likely to obtain necessary services for their child. When participants in Florida’s McKay voucher program were surveyed, only 30 percent reported they had received all services required under federal law from their previous public school, while 86 percent reported their McKay school provided all the services they promised to provide.

In addition, parent satisfaction at McKay schools is high:  90 percent of McKay respondents reported being satisfied or very satisfied with the school their child attends compared to 71 percent of public school respondents.

Read “The Case for Special Education Vouchers” available online at www.EducationNext.org.

Jay Greene is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Stuart Buck is a doctoral student in education reform at the University of Arkansas.

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
Caleb Offley (585) 319-4541
Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6010
www.hoover.org

Indeed, in a certain sense, special ed vouchers have already existed nationwide for some 35 years under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, which allows special ed students to attend private school at public expense.  A Sept. 30 report showed that New York City alone spent over $100 million last year on private school tuition for special ed students.

But the problem with existing special ed vouchers under IDEA is that they are available only when parents prove that the public school is inadequate.  Needless to say, it turns out to be difficult and expensive for parents to do this, which is why a mere 67,729 special ed students nationwide — out of nearly 6 million — are able to take advantage of their right to obtain private school tuition.

A broader special ed voucher program with no veto power for public school officials would dramatically level the playing field.  No longer would funding be limited to the most sophisticated and aggressive parents, who are more likely to spend years battling with an intransigent public school bureaucracy.  Instead, special ed vouchers would let more parents and children receive the services they need, at the time and place that they choose.

Moreover, broadly available special ed vouchers could save money for financially strapped public schools, given that special ed vouchers are typically limited to the lower of the amount the public school would have spent or the private school tuition.

For further discussion of these points — and several other reasons to support special ed vouchers — see our new article, as well as this video interview of Jay Greene by Paul Peterson.

In “Dick Durbin and D.C. School Vouchers” (editorial, September 30), you suggest that “Mr. Durbin deserves the benefit of the doubt” as to whether he is proceeding “in good faith” about reauthorization of the DC Scholarship Program.

A September 30 Washington Post news story (“More Oversight Urged For Voucher Schools”) provides detail as to the “good faith” intentions of Senator Durbin, who is quoted as follows: “We’ve got to demand the same standards [for voucher schools] as we do [for] our public and our charter schools.”

This is the same rationale used earlier this year by voucher opponents in the Wisconsin legislature, which cut funding for private schools in Milwaukee’s school choice program and enacted a public school-style regulatory regime for those schools.  School choice opponents long have understood that a regulatory barrage is the first step in the ultimate goal of killing such programs.

Click here to get to the podcast.

Listen to the Podcast

Peterson and Finn’s previous podcasts:
Charter Schools, Unions, and Linking Teachers with Student Achievement Data
What Congress Is Not Working On

In 1994, fresh from a two-year stint with Teach For America, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin inaugurated the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) in Houston with an enrollment of 49 5th graders. By this Fall, 75 KIPP schools will be up and running, setting children from poor and minority families on a path to college through a combination of hard work, long hours, innovative teaching, and a “no excuses” school culture.

Jay Mathews, education columnist at the Washington Post, has written for more than two decades about schools where children from low-income families succeed academically. His articles about mathematics teacher Jaime Escalante, whose disadvantaged East L.A. students regularly aced the AP calculus exam, inspired the film Stand and Deliver. Mathews also developed the Challenge Index for rating high schools according to their success in encouraging students to take college-level Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses.

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Mathews’ latest book, Work Hard. Be Nice: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America was published by Algonquin Books in January 2009 and chronicles how two young teachers created the most talked-about school reform in the U.S. today. The excerpts below tell the story of how the KIPP network began and reveal why the KIPP model works so well.

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The Seeds of KIPP

In January 1992, as Levin and Feinberg were writing up their applications for Teach For America, a tall, dark-haired former U.S. Education Department policy aide named Scott Hamilton was showing up for his first day at a new job. He had been hired by the Washington office of the Edison project, an effort to improve inner-city schools and make a profit. The only person Hamilton found there was a talkative red-haired 23-year-old researcher named Stacey Boyd, in whom he took an immediate interest.

In the annals of the charter school movement, the meeting of Hamilton and Boyd would take on considerable significance, particularly in the history of KIPP. By the time they married in 1997, as Feinberg and Levin were completing the second year of their new schools, Hamilton was the chief charter school official for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and Boyd was establishing what would be a successful Boston charter school as she completed her MBA at Harvard. By 1999, the couple was in San Francisco, where Boyd had started a new company, Project Achieve, developing a way to assess the progress of every child in a classroom. She was also working with schools in Chicago and had hired Colleen Dippel to help there. Hamilton was working in San Francisco for two of the richest people in the country, Don and Doris Fisher, founders of the GAP clothing stores. They wanted him to find education projects where money from their new Fisher Foundation could make a difference.

Boyd, Hamilton, and the Fishers were too busy to watch much television. None of them had seen the “60 Minutes” report on KIPP in September 1999. But several city mayors and state governors had, and were enthralled. Some called Feinberg and Levin, asking if they could open another 15 or 20 KIPP schools right away. Such calls were naive, but they intrigued Feinberg. He urged Levin to join him in the effort to take KIPP national. Levin agreed that something had to be done. He liked the idea of teaching successful inner-city teachers how they might start their own schools. Feinberg looked for people who, unlike them, knew something about building large organizations. One of his first calls was to Boyd. She was an entrepreneur. She was very familiar with how his school worked and what it could do. She was thrilled with the idea and called Hamilton right away.

Hamilton promised to check it out. In the back of his mind, though, was the memory of the Fishers’ cautionary note when they hired him. They said they did not want to start anything new. They were too old to launch another GAP. They wanted Hamilton to find worthwhile projects to support and help grow, but no start-ups. Hamilton visited KIPP Houston, observed Feinberg at full speed, and saw what Boyd was talking about. He visited KIPP New York and got a dose of Levin’s wily charm. Hamilton hadn’t discussed KIPP in any detail with the Fishers. At the end of 1999, Hamilton popped a tape of the “60 Minutes” report into the VCR in Don Fisher’s office. When the segment ended, Fisher’s comment was, “What the hell am I supposed to do with that?”

“I don’t know yet, but something,” Hamilton said. “This is worth something.”

Dining at their favorite San Francisco restaurant, Plump Jack, Hamilton asked Boyd what she thought of an idea forming in his mind—business training for charter school founders, focused on what made KIPP work. Boyd liked it. Hamilton got moving, still not telling the Fishers what he was up to. They did not want to do anything new. What he was thinking was very new, and very big. He invited Feinberg and Levin to meet him in Chicago in late January 2000 to conceive a KIPP master plan. Each of them could bring one other person. Hamilton asked Boyd to come. Levin selected his sister Jessica. Feinberg brought one of his most innovative reading teachers, Elliott Witney, who would eventually become principal of the original KIPP school in Houston.

The conversation in a suite on the 37th floor of the Fairmont Hotel lasted eight hours. Hamilton began with a PowerPoint presentation. He predicted that by the third or fourth year they could be training 150 school leaders. What would the KIPP schools have in common? Hamilton brought in a large easel, flipping over each page as it filled with ideas. The big points seemed obvious: high expectations for all students, a longer school day, a principal totally in charge, an emphasis on finding the best teachers, rewards for student success, close contact with parents, a focus on results, a commitment to prepare every child for a great high school, and, most importantly, college. They decided to call the main principles the Six Pillars, later whittled down to five. Some people said it sounded too Islamic, too T. E. Lawrence. But the Five Pillars stuck.

Boyd thought the meeting was going too well. New organizations were breeding grounds for dissent. They had to talk about that. By afternoon she was at the easel, picking at scabs in the Levin-Feinberg relationship, looking for unresolved issues in what had been their surprising and exciting but largely unexamined success.

She saw the three big men at the table. (At 6-foot-4, her husband was taller than even the KIPP founders. Witney, aware he was the least prominent person present, was 5-foot-4.) They had plenty of youth and energy and big ideas, but how were they going to make decisions together? If two of them thought an applicant for the leadership program should be accepted, and the other disagreed, how would they resolve that? If one of them thought that corporate human relations training should have two full days in the leadership course, and the others thought it only needed a couple of hours, how would they work that out?

They nodded patiently and said they could handle that. The idea was to give each school leader the same freedom to innovate that Levin and Feinberg had enjoyed, just so they showed good results. They had the confidence of youth. Three of the six people in the room, Levin, Feinberg, and Witney, had not yet reached their 30th birthdays. The oldest person was Jessica Levin, about to turn 35.

Hamilton still had to persuade two members of a very different generation, Don Fisher, 71, and Doris Fisher, 68, to give a large chunk of their money to these kids. He took the Fishers to see Levin’s school, starting the tour in the P.S. 31 portion of the building so they could contrast the noise and disorder with the quiet intensity of KIPP’s fourth-floor sanctum. (Doris Fisher was pleased to discover that one of Levin’s grandmothers was the daughter of her father’s law partner.)

Hamilton spent several weeks writing and rewriting a business plan. It was going to cost at least $15 million. He did not think the Fishers were going to react very well. It was a start-up, and it wasn’t going to be a certain success. He confessed to Boyd a sense of doom, and a pugnacious willingness, if the Fishers said no, to quit and find some other backer for the KIPP expansion. He sent one copy of the business plan to each of the Fishers. Despite his apprehensions, the Fishers loved the idea.

Don said he had never thought of running schools in the same way he ran a company. But as he considered the KIPP plan, it dawned on him that schools were a business, and charter schools in particular were a business. They needed principals who were trained in management fundamentals and could make their own decisions. He might have sounded gruff after he saw the “60 Minutes” video, but he had actually been moved by it. He wanted to get going right away. He welcomed Feinberg and Levin to a meeting at his office overlooking San Francisco Bay.

“So Mike and Dave, you’re really thinking you can pull this off, huh?”

“Well, Mr. Fisher, I don’t know,” Levin said, “but we’d be more than happy to use your money to find out.”

It was eventually decided that Feinberg, with Dippel, would move to San Francisco to be the chief executive officer of the new KIPP Foundation. No one was surprised. Feinberg told friends, including Levin, that Levin would be content to raise enough money to fully endow his school, sign an agreement that would guarantee KIPP New York enough space for the next 100 years, keep teaching fifth-grade math, and be as happy as a pig in a barnyard. For a while they amused themselves by pretending the decision was up in the air. If they were in a bar with a dartboard, Levin would declare that the first to hit the bulls-eye would go to San Francisco.

Feinberg moved west and discovered that Don Fisher was even more impatient than he and Hamilton were. Laura D’Andrea Tyson, the former chief economic advisor to President Clinton and the dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, quickly said yes when Fisher, chair of her school’s board, asked if she could provide space and faculty experts for the business training part of what they were going to call the Fisher Fellowship leadership course. Feinberg, Hamilton, and Levin were pleased that Tyson, unlike other business school deans they contacted, did not suggest they involve education school faculty in the project. All three of them distrusted education schools. Feinberg and Levin planned to do most of their recruiting among Teach For America veterans like themselves. They thought such people would have the most drive and imagination, and the most experience improvising in difficult circumstances.

But it seemed to Hamilton they were rushing it. The original plan was to start that summer. The principals in training would take classes at Haas for two months, while they completed the paperwork that would launch their schools. In the fall they would work at one or both of the KIPP schools. By the new year, they would be in the cities they had chosen for their schools, recruiting teachers and students and finding a space for 70 to 80 fifth graders in the summer of 2001. Like Levin and Feinberg, they would add a new grade every year until they had fifth-through-eighth-grade middle schools of about 300 students.

It was already May. Hamilton felt they did not have enough time. They had selected four Fisher fellows. One dropped out, and the other three looked good, although headstrong. Susan Schaeffler, who would start the KEY Academy in D.C., and North Carolina teacher Caleb Dolan had rejected Feinberg and Levin’s request that they start schools in Atlanta, where Governor Roy Barnes was drooling over the KIPP results. The third fellow, a teacher at KIPP Houston named Dan Caesar, was happy to start a second school in Houston, as he was asked to do.

Hamilton went to see Don Fisher. “We’ve got to pull the plug,” he said. “We’ve got to take a breath and then do all this next year so we have time to plan it and do it well. I think we are just throwing stuff together here too fast.”

Fisher smiled. Feinberg, Hamilton, and Levin had no business training. He figured they would make mistakes. He explained to Hamilton, based on a half century of experience, that it was much better to get started and address problems as they came up, rather than sit at a desk and try to plan for everything that could go wrong. “Let’s keep throwing stuff together,” he said. “You are going to learn more by just getting started than you are going to learn over the next year studying this. Even if it is imperfect, I promise you it will be better this way.”

It’s the Teaching

By October 2005, a crisis had developed at one of Levin’s new schools, the KIPP STAR College Prep Charter School in Harlem. The sixth-grade math class was not going well. The new teacher was not performing up to the school’s standard. At almost any other public school, the problem would have been considered minor, and the solution long term. But Levin and KIPP STAR leader Maggie Runyan-Shefa were considering getting rid of the teacher right away, only three months into the school year.

The soft-spoken young man had come well recommended. He appeared to know his subject. He loved children. But he was a poor classroom manager and motivator. The aisles of his classroom were cluttered. His students were inattentive. A look at their work showed they were falling behind where KIPP wanted them to be.

In most urban schools such failings would have been difficult to detect because the standards were so low, a result of the widespread feeling that not much could be expected from such disadvantaged children. If a teacher’s flaws were enough to catch the attention of a principal, she would talk to him and ask that he observe some of the school’s veteran instructors. She would encourage him to borrow their techniques. She would never consider firing him in the middle of the term. Anyone she might be able to replace him with would almost certainly be worse.

In the normal course of events, the teacher’s disappointing performance might earn him a bad mark on his end-of-year evaluation, and a request that he take more courses and try harder. At the end of his probationary period, if he made no significant improvement, he might be let go. But by that point he would have been in the classroom for three years. The several dozen students he taught during that time would have had to settle for less than adequate instruction. Their chances of success in math in seventh grade, and beyond, would have been sacrificed to administrative inertia and no ready alternatives to bad hiring decisions.

KIPP schools were different. The longer school day made class schedules more flexible. The intense recruiting of the best available educators meant the administrators, including principals like Levin, Feinberg, and Runyan-Shefa, often had exceptional classroom skills and could take over a class if needed. If the sixth-grade teacher at KIPP STAR did not improve, Levin and Runyan-Shefa planned to turn the class over to the school’s vice principal, who had a master’s degree from Columbia University Teachers College. Runyan-Shefa, as well as Levin’s trouble-shooter Jerry Myers, had been working with the math teacher. Levin had stepped in one day, toward the end of the teacher’s lesson, to show him some techniques. He showed up the next morning to teach a complete class.

In the little world of KIPP math instructors, Levin was a legendary figure, the best math teacher many of them had ever seen. Runyan-Shefa hoped his reputation would help the young teacher see how much better he could be. Levin had observed the sixth-grade class. He had talked to the teacher and to Runyan-Shefa. He knew that one of the teacher’s stumbling blocks was one disruptive student. Levin had this in mind when he walked up the stairs of the five-story brick school on a residential Harlem street, and approached room 433, where the young teacher taught three classes of sixth-grade math every day.

The teacher had his 28 students lined up in the hallway, as he had been asked to do. Levin went to the front of the line and stood outside the closed classroom door. “Everyone face me, please,” he said. “Let’s go. I’m missing one person’s eyes.” He waited a moment. “Thank you. I wanted the joy of getting back with you today to finish up what we started yesterday. We need one minute in the room to finish setting up.”

Levin reached out to the 11-year-old chief miscreant, who had been asked to stand near the front of the line. He escorted the child, just him, inside the classroom. He shut the door, leaving the other members of the class, and their teacher, out in the hall while he had a private chat with the boy. He shook the sixth grader’s hand. “Hi. I’m Mr. Levin. You remember me from yesterday. You don’t know me very well, but I think you will find it a bad idea not to listen today. You will enjoy being my friend. Any other options are off the table.”

He asked the student about himself. He had the boy help him rearrange the desks and chairs, making the aisles wider and the rows straighter. He opened the classroom door and welcomed everyone in to start on their introductory problems. “Thank you. Go to your desks. We will do the first five problems. Don’t worry about putting stuff into your binders. We will all put it into our binders at the end. Directions are on the board. They are also on the sheet, to be done by yourselves. Any questions? Okay. I am missing one person’s eyes.”

He waited. It was time for the formal opening of the class. “Hi, Kippsters!” Levin said with a smile.

Just two voices said, somewhat uncertainly: “Hi, Mr. Levin.”

“How many remember when I spoke to you last? How many of you actually remember what my name is? Veronica?”

“Mr. Levins?”

“Mr. Levin. There is no ‘s’. It is like the number eleven without the e in the front.”

He tried again: “Hi, KIPP STAR!”

“Hi, Mr. Levin,” came a somewhat louder response. He asked them to try again.

“I would like everybody’s attention, and do me a favor. When you bump into someone on the street, you don’t whine their name, do you? You don’t say (he adopted a very languid tone) ‘Yo, . . . what’ssss up?’ You’ve got to deal with someone. So we are going to learn to interact normally.”

“Hi, KIPP STAR.”

“Hi, Mr. Levin!”

“Hi, KIPP STAR.”

“Hi, MR. LEVIN!!”

“Good,” he said. “Not any whining, not that long drawn-out thing.”

The students were sitting straighter than they had been when they sat down. This teacher was annoying, but he had energy. “All right! You smile, right? So we are going to go about 30, 35 minutes together. In that 30 to 35 minutes I do really want to hear from everyone, all different groups and individuals. If I know your name, I will call on you by name, but if I don’t know your name, tell me your name before you start speaking so I can kind of learn your names. With all these beautiful and handsome ladies and gentlemen in the room, I should at least know your names.”

To Levin, a class was a conversation that involved every child. He had to stay positive, and pass that feeling on to them. “This is going to be good, going to be good,” he said, pacing in front of the class. “I love this stuff. All smile. Did you all know that smiling keeps your brain awake? You didn’t know that? When you sit up, you smile. Your brain gets oxygen and when your brain gets oxygen you are smarter and it makes you better looking, and some of you really need to smile a lot more. All RIGHT!”

The problems on the board involved long division. “Shamira, how does 21 go into 42? Two. Anyone confused by that? I am missing one person. Does the two pop up? What is two times 20?”

“40!” several voices said.

“What did I do wrong, man? What did I do wrong on purpose?” he said. The intentional error on the board was an old trick for keeping everyone engaged. Tricky teachers needed close watching. Eleven-year-olds loved correcting their elders.

“I can’t hear you,” he said. A few voices identified the mistake. “Exactly, right under here. Two minus zero?”

“Two!” they said.

“Perfect. Check this out. Raise your hand if you can count by 20s. Okay, now raise your hand if you can count by 62s. Not so easy, right? But the steps are exactly the same. We are going to take a look at this one, we are going to take some notes and you are going to be able to do it on your own.” He employed a standard motivator, the reach for a challenge. Each class was a team. They were drawn to the excitement of fighting and beating a tough opponent. Smart teachers would often offer a problem that, they said, was beyond what kids in other schools were getting.

“How many of you like chicken wings?” Levin asked. “You order them mild, medium, and spicy, right? Mild, medium, and spicy.” He chose metaphors for which he had a genuine passion. His students seemed to enjoy the vibe. “Raise your hands if you want a mild problem to start? How many want medium? Spicy?”

He started with medium. He called on several different children. He needed to be reminded of some of their names, but as the minutes passed he recognized more of them. No one could avoid participating. He kept moving around the room. “Raise your hand if I lost you. Raise your hand if this is seeming easier to you. Raise your hand if you are almost ready to do it by yourself.”

Every child had to get the concept. He was not going to pull too far ahead. “Raise your hand if you got it,” he said. “Everyone check me for a second. Everyone track me for a second. This is an important number. You have to pay attention here. This number cannot be bigger than what? This number cannot be bigger than what? Fatima?”

She gave an incorrect answer. He tried a few other students who did not get it. “One step too far,” he said. “Eyes up please. Eyes up. We will give you the next one on your own again. Watch this. We said we were going to be done by nine and we are pushing up on the time. You guys are pretty close, though. So watch this.”

The period was over. Twenty-eight children had watched intently and responded to questions for more than 45 minutes. They seemed to be holding their own. The class bad boy, Levin’s special project, had been a model student. The young teacher had taken many notes. There would be several more weeks of extra work for him. Then, still unsatisfied, Runyan-Shefa with Levin’s approval would find another job for him in the school not as demanding or as important as sixth-grade math.

The New York State Assessment tests were given to the KIPP STAR sixth graders the following spring. Seventy-three percent of the 78 sixth graders scored at the proficient level or above, compared to 45 percent of all sixth graders in the same Harlem district, and 60 percent of sixth graders in New York State [see Figures 2 and 3].

Ninety-two percent of those KIPP STAR sixth graders were from low-income homes. Ninety-seven percent were black or Hispanic. They had been taught to listen, think, and respond. For most of them it had worked. Their teacher had struggled, but for them the standards had remained high. They would be ready for seventh-grade math, which at KIPP schools was beginning algebra, begun two years earlier than at most American schools.

It’s very hard to do these studies because it’s tough to disentangle peer effects from teacher effects (what if a certain teacher gets all of the highest achieving kids?) or school effects (what if the schools with the poorest or lowest achieving kids are also under-resourced?). Still, Hoxby and Hanushek (and their high-achieving peers) have been using innovative methods and are finding that peer effects do in fact exist. All else being equal, kids are better off if their classmates are high-achieving; poor, black, and low-achieving kids are particularly harmed if surrounded only by other poor, black, and low-achieving peers.

The reason I bring this up is the hullabaloo around Caroline Hoxby’s new charter school study. The news is great for charter schools and well worth celebrating: New York City charter schools are knocking the socks off of the state tests and closing the gap with their wealthy peers in the suburbs. And because it’s a gold-standard random-assignment study, we can be sure that it’s an apples to apples comparison: Hoxby examined the performance of kids who won a lottery to get into the charter schools with kids who applied to the same lottery but lost, and remained in their traditional public schools. Such a design means that the two groups of students are identical in every way, even in the intangibles like the value their parents place on education. (After all, parents of both groups of students tried to get them into charter schools.)

But in an editorial yesterday, the Wall Street Journal took this good news and went a step too far, claiming that “Caroline Hoxby has performed a public service by finally making clear that ‘creaming’ is a crock.”

Hold on, not so fast. It’s true that charter opponents can’t look at this study and claim that it unfairly compares one type of student to another. But it doesn’t prove at all that charter schools aren’t creaming. Of course they are creaming. And good for them for doing it.

Consider this: School A is a high-performing charter school with a long waiting list. School B is a crummy traditional public school with lackluster results. Mr. and Mrs. Smith enter the lottery to get their daughter Susie into the charter school, and win. Hooray! Mr. and Mrs. Jones enter the lottery to get their daughter Jill into the charter school, and lose. Boo hoo.

So what happens next? Susie Smith goes to a school filled with kids whose families entered them into the lottery. So while these parents may be poor, they are motivated, savvy, and informed enough to try to get their kids into a good school. And not surprisingly, these kids are somewhat higher-achieving than other poor kids. So now Susie is surrounded by peers who are more motivated, and possibly higher-achieving, than she had before. And these “peer effects” help her learn more.

But poor Jill Jones goes back to her traditional public school, where most of the kids are from families who didn’t even bother to try to get them into the charter school. And these peers, from less educated/savvy/motivated families, are likely dragging down Jill’s performance.

I can’t prove any of this, but I suspect that many (if not most) high flying charter schools are effectively bringing together high-potential poor and minority kids-particularly those from “striving” families-and creating an environment where they can “act smart” and succeed.

But neither can the Wall Street Journal prove that creaming isn’t happening. It’s time to put a lid on that “crock” comment, at least for now.

Update: As Eric Osberg pointed out on Flypaper yesterday, Jonathan Gyurko raised some of these same concerns too.

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To get a better sense of how research can influence the real world of policymaking, consider recent events in Massachusetts, where Boston’s longest-serving mayor (1993—present), Thomas Menino, is seeking reelection for an unprecedented sixth term. “Mumbles,” as the mayor is affectionately called, is best known for his commitment to snow removal, neighborhood parks, and symbiotic relationships with political insiders. On education matters, he appoints the school board and lets the members run the Boston schools as they please—so long as they avoid upsetting the local teachers union. But on the eve of his current campaign, Menino asked the legislature to expand charter school operations in Boston.

Why did Mayor Menino suddenly get charter school religion? Only recently, teachers unions seemed to be riding high in the saddle, enjoying for the first time in more than a decade a government unified under the union-friendly leadership of a Democratic governor and a legislature controlled by the same party. The mayor has generally distanced himself from education issues, and Boston’s best-known school reform consists of “pilot” schools, which have more than usual autonomy but are still subject to the district’s education-crushing collective bargaining agreement. Governor Deval Patrick, in a nod to the mayor, backed legislation that would expand pilot schooling throughout the state while curtailing charter school operations (see “Accountability Overboard,” features, Spring 2009).

The nail in the charter school coffin was expected to come with the release of a charter and pilot school evaluation initiated by the Boston Foundation, a reliable public school supporter. The foundation had nonetheless arranged for its evaluation to be conducted under the leadership of economist Thomas Kane of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who has considerable credibility on all sides of the charter school debate. The study was designed as a gold-standard randomized field trial, in which students were (by means of a lottery) randomly given the opportunity to go to charter schools or not. The achievement of students who won the lottery and attended charter schools was compared with the achievement of students who entered but failed to win the lottery. Ditto for pilot schools.

To the surprise of the Massachusetts education establishment, the charters won—and the pilots lost—the research contest. No matter how the data were analyzed, charter schools routinely outperformed both Boston’s pilot schools and its traditional public schools. Pilots turned out to be no improvement on the status quo whatsoever.

The research findings reinforced the pro-charter campaign led by a local think tank, the Pioneer Institute. Statewide, newspapers editorialized in favor of charters and against the governor’s so-called reforms. Even the liberal Boston Globe climbed on board the school reform train. It didn’t hurt that the state legislature was riddled by scandal and Governor Patrick’s tax, fiscal, and transportation policies were going nowhere.

Politically, it was time for Mayor Menino to separate himself from the nonsense emanating from the state capitol. The best way for a popular mayor to remain that way is to catch a changing wind before it acquires gale force, in this case a wind set in motion by the Kane evaluation. When circumstances are right, professors can be as powerful as politicians.

Well…let’s not exaggerate. Mayor Menino may have climbed out of the teachers union bed but only into a twin bed in the same room. The mayor’s call for action will need to be accompanied by well-timed use of mayoral muscle inside the state legislature if more charter schools are to come to Boston. Still, research has nudged the thinking of one of Massachusetts’s most savvy politicians—no small feat.