Public charter schools enroll about 5 percent of the nation’s public-school students. More than 2.3 million students attend 6,000 charter schools, and more than 600,000 students are on waitlists for seats in charter schools that are oversubscribed. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) anticipates that 400 to 500 new charter schools will open in 2013. The authorizing environment can directly determine whether the charter seats that are created and maintained are of high quality. While authorizers are not the operators, they set the standards and measure operators against those standards.

The work of authorizers is central to the charter compact: granting autonomy in exchange for accountability. What entity decides if the compact has been honored? The authorizer decides. As Lou Erste, charter schools division director at the Georgia State Department of Education, points out, “we are the guardians of the flexibility” held sacred by charter schools. While many reformers believe that market forces determine whether charter schools live or die, charter authorizers actually sign the charter renewal and school closure orders.

One would think that, given the authorizer’s central role in the charter sector, authorizing would be a permanent item in local and state budgets, but support for authorizers often reflects the political whims of lawmakers and education officials. While some authorizers charge a fee to the schools in their portfolio, these fees rarely cover costs. Most authorizers must rely for basic funding on the year-to-year spending decisions of governments, universities, or philanthropies.

The Authorizing Landscape

With charter schools numbering in the thousands and the sector’s continual growth, one might expect that the authorizer world had developed a solid infrastructure. This is hardly the case. Instead, one finds a scattered and largely underfunded set of regulators, most of them within the traditional public-education system. As of 2011–12, 957 agencies serve as authorizers, and fewer than 80 are entities other than school districts or state education departments (see Table 1). This means that 92 percent of all authorizers are “within the educational establishment,” and that 72 percent of all charter schools are authorized by these two types of organizations.

What does the typical authorizer look like? Most authorizers are tiny shops, typically consisting of about one-half of a staffer’s time up to the equivalent of two full-time staffers. Many school districts and state education departments do authorizing work via committee, whereby authorizing responsibilities are divided among various departments (authorizing is added to the normal workload of staffers hired to do something else). Only a few large authorizers have as many as 20 or 30 staff members. Due to this disparity between large and small authorizers, the average authorizer employs about 4 staff members; authorizers with few schools average about 2; and for authorizers with more than 10 schools, 7.5 staff members is the average.

Some 86 percent of all authorizing is done by authorizers that have fewer than five charters in their portfolios. Out of the non-school-district authorizers, a significant portion (38 percent) has more than 10 charter schools. Only 7 percent of school district authorizers have more than 10 charter schools.

There is, then, no typical authorizer. But there are good odds that a charter school has been authorized by a school district that has only a few charter schools, and that the district has about two staff members dedicated to chartering responsibilities.

What Determines Authorizer Quality?

Does the type of authorizer influence the quality of the schools? Maybe. Greg Richmond, president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), suggests that most of the school districts that authorize a small number of charter schools understand the charter concept differently than does the charter community at large. Instead of viewing charters as independently operated public schools, school districts open these schools to add innovative programs to the district. In these cases, the charters likely meet a particular need of the district, which employs the charter staff. Many of these schools have been converted from traditional schools to charters. Conversions are often referred to as “charter in name only,” since they do not usually have the full set of charter autonomies, such as freedom from the teachers union contract.

For the rest of the charter world, is there an ideal type of authorizer? Richmond explains that K–12 education is not the core business of several types of authorizers (such as universities and nonprofits). K–12 education is the core business of school districts, but they have a multitude of priorities besides charter schools, and authorizing is a sideline activity. For example, they may have a conflict of interest if they are competing for the same students. State education departments may have the most difficulty as authorizers because their purpose is to enforce regulations, not to offer autonomy in exchange for performance. The structure of independent chartering boards likely affords the least resistance to high-quality authorizing, but structure alone does not ensure quality. Factors such as targeted training, consistent resources (especially human resources), and the scale of the enterprise seem to matter more.

Does the size of the portfolio matter? We know that authorizers with fewer than 10 charter schools are less likely to implement national best practices, as enumerated by NACSA. It may be that authorizers that have less authorizing to do fail to receive appropriate training and support. They may also lack the resources required to adopt best practices like external reviewers, performance management systems, or a rigorous application process.

Susan Miller Barker, executive director of SUNY’s Charter Schools Institute, contends that in order for authorizing quality to be maximized, education stakeholders, including schools, policymakers, and the public, all need a better understanding of what authorizers do: “We are not evil regulators…. We are ‘venture bureaucrats,’ safely utilizing public funds for the best offerings of education, but also managing risk in a way that most people overseeing government funds don’t usually have to. Many people in public education don’t talk about loss of funds or funds not being spent in a way that leads to the highest level of quality education for those funds.”

Are policymakers ready for “venture bureaucrats” to conduct regular assessments of school quality and then to act on their findings? And are the same policymakers ready to provide consistent funding to those who “ruffle feathers” for the sake of accountability? Let’s hope so, because the accountability compact relies on it.

The Money Question

Is it too simple to suggest that authorizers may be underresourced and that this is an obstacle to authorizing quality? Richmond notes that “good authorizing does not cost a lot of money, but it is not free.” This sentiment is echoed by authorizers. One points out that a charter management organization in its state has five lawyers while the authorizer has two.

Authorizing is a labor-intensive business. According to NACSA, a good authorizer needs at least five to six staff members for a portfolio of 50 to 70 schools. But the accuracy of this formula depends on the type of authorizer organization. If the authorizer can rely on a special education department, for example, or an IT department, or other infrastructure assets of a larger organization, this level of staffing is appropriate. If not, the authorizer will need additional expert staffing and may need to invest in large systems such as data management on its own. The budgetary requirements of authorizers also vary depending on the particulars of the charter state law (e.g., special monitoring requirements, the quality of the student performance measurements, and other criteria). But even by this staffing formula, it is clear that most authorizers have too few staff members.

Providing an extreme example of need, with approximately 515 schools under its purview (with 18 that opened in 2012), the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools has a staff of eight. Executive director DeAnna Rowe must rely on Arizona’s state attorney general for legal support. Another authorizer notes that as the office has added more schools, the staffing level, already inadequate, has stayed the same. Many authorizers rely on staff funded by grants. Authorizers even have voluntary boards that oversee their work. This chronically inadequate and unstable funding makes it hard to become a great authorizer.

Barker of SUNY believes that the real challenge of authorizing is establishing long-term stability. SUNY’s Charter Schools Institute’s budget (like that of many other authorizers) is a stand-alone line item in each year’s state budget. Barker explains that if budgets could be stabilized, then authorizers could assess how much capacity it takes to be an innovative authorizer, one that conducts research internally, not just a “check the boxes” kind of authorizer. Erste agrees. “The technical aspects [of authorizing] are straightforward. It is the strategic aspects that make the difference between a good and great authorizer.”

Why not fund authorizers for the long term as we do local districts (based on a per-pupil rate)? Why not have a minimal funding threshold based on a number of schools and simply add this into state laws? Why not provide start-up funding for authorizers to support the creation of their major systems?

The Right People

Lou Erste of Georgia points out that a strong authorizer must assemble a staff that has the right combination of skills and knowledge: people who understand how to operate a successful charter school, who understand how to measure school performance, who can think strategically, who understand legal and fiscal issues, who have experience in the public sector, who have worked with large foundations and the federal government, and most importantly, who are skilled in relationship management. Relationship management may be the essential authorizing skill because of the complex working relationships an agency has with the state education department, state charter-school association, districts, schools, funders, and the legislature.

The need for long-term stability of expert staff is echoed by Rowe of Arizona. She notes that while she has a small team, several members have been there since the early 1990s, and this has enabled her team to handle the oversight load. She also explains that technology and transparency have contributed greatly to their efforts (e.g., online applications and a metric-driven accountability framework), but people are still the key. Rowe does hope for more staffing in the future, as it will allow for greater speed in authorizing good charter schools to open in her state.

Who provides support for authorizer development? NACSA, state charter-school associations, and a few consultants do. The National Charter School Resource Center offers professional development and networking for a group of state education department authorizers. Is this enough support for authorizers? Not by a long shot. Maine recently passed what is considered to be one of the best charter-school laws in the country, and its newly formed statewide commission was given no start-up funds to facilitate learning about authorizing from others around the country before it had to begin its work. Despite some philanthropic support, there is not enough investment in the training organizations that could consistently assist authorizers that lack funds for development. The lack of training and ongoing support for authorizers is especially acute for authorizers with only a few schools.

Remarkably, most authorizers do not complain much about the high caseload of schools and the small numbers of people to do the work. Members of the Los Angeles Unified School District explained that as can happen with students in a classroom, a few “troubled schools” require 80 percent of authorizer time. Authorizers do worry that being understaffed may become a larger problem as larger charter networks continue to expand. In this case, risks become more serious, and a small authorizing mistake may have enormous rippling implications due to network scale.

Changing Charter Laws

Each state’s charter law can create an environment that either supports professional charter-school operations and high-quality authorizing or does not. And every year, states pass comprehensive school-reform laws and make simple tweaks to charter laws that have an impact on authorizing. Since 2011, several states have lifted caps on charter school growth, and 14 states have moved to strengthen charter school authorizing and accountability (see Table 2). Four states created independent statewide charter authorizers. Three states—Hawaii, New Mexico, and Rhode Island—passed charter school quality-control measures. In Georgia, where in 2011 the state supreme court abolished the statewide charter authorizer, the state’s legislature proposed a constitutional amendment that would allow the authorizer’s reinstatement. Voters approved the amendment in November 2012.

State-level charter school–law developments are closely monitored by Todd Ziebarth, senior vice president at NAPCS. Ziebarth believes that the ideal scenario is for charter laws to require at least two authorizers in the state (preferably one statewide authorizer and one large district that is interested in authorizing). In the past several years, there has been a significant advocacy push to create “multiple” authorizers in each state. But the policy of having dozens of low-quality authorizers has turned out to be a mistake for several states. In theory, having more than one authorizer should raise charter quality, but the magic number of authorizers depends on the state’s particulars (size, political dynamics, strength of charter law, among other factors).

Ziebarth contends that the real public-policy issue is how to hold authorizers accountable: Should there be several regional charter commissions created in each state instead of one statewide commission? Should state laws and regulations require that each authorizer apply to do this work and be reviewed for its own performance? Should there be provisions in state laws that allow authorizers to be closed for shoddy performance? (Minnesota recently shut down 40 of its 70 authorizers, and Ohio has closed one.) Should there be requirements regarding an authorizer-staff-to-school ratio or other authorizing practices? Should state laws put an end to schools “shopping for a new authorizer” as is allowed in certain states? And who has authority over authorizers (state departments of education, state legislatures, the courts, state ballot initiatives)? Do the regulators need to be regulated to improve their practice?

Moving Forward

Experimentation with different authorizing structures and resources will be needed, as no silver bullet approach has emerged thus far. But there are clear signs of progress. Minnesota’s education department has created an authorizer application and continues to improve the state’s authorizing capabilities. Another attempt at improving authorizer quality via state law that deserves attention is an effort in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, to create authorizer standards. As a result of a school reform law (the Cleveland Plan), experts recently created a set of regulatory authorizing standards that will be rolled out in 2013.

Carolyn Bridges, senior director of the Office of Magnet, Choice, and Charter Schools in Polk County, Florida, is a founder of the Florida Association of Charter School Authorizers (FACSA), whose members include 36 of the state’s 42 authorizers. The association has created a shared renewal process, application process, and model contract, and has built a best practices website, all with a series of federal grants. The federal resources permitted the authorizers to have product retreats and to create uniformity in practices, despite many different authorizing structures and levels of expertise. The funds also permitted Bridges to hire staff to create these best practices and products for Florida authorizers. Michigan and Ohio also have created state-level associations of authorizers in order to pool resources and talent and to focus on authorizer quality.

Peer-to-peer networks of authorizers seem to be filling some of the gap between support and need. In each of these examples, success has come from individuals working in small teams determined to improve authorizing. The teams had a vision and spent time and found resources to deliver it. The problem with these stories of authorizer accomplishments is that they are not the norm.

Richmond explains that good authorizing has relevance for public education as a whole: “Authorizing is a small R&D activity within public education that is helping us explore how we can organize public schools better. On a macro-level, authorizing is helping us to understand how to give schools autonomy, what is the [best] way to hold schools accountable in meaningful ways, and how do we promote innovation and offer families more variety for differentiation for kids.”

For choice and deregulation advocates, some of the findings about charter authorizing have been difficult to absorb. The assumption that local and state policymakers will naturally understand what quality authorizing looks like or costs has proved incorrect. If we want poorly performing charter schools to be closed, we have to ensure more than subsistence funding for authorizers; taking strong action requires adequate staffing and legal support, to name some of the costs.

If charter school accountability is to exist as intended, we have to fund authorizers on a secure and permanent basis. If local and state policymakers decide how much to fund authorizing bodies on an ad hoc basis instead, then we will continue to get accountability that is hit or miss. Only high-quality authorizing will ensure that only high-quality charter schools open and grow.

Joey Gustafson is CEO of Manchester, Massachusetts-based JM Consulting, Inc., which specializes in charter diagnostics, growth planning, and evaluation.

Peterson and Matthew Chingos published a study in the Summer 2013 issue of Education Next, “The Impact of School Vouchers on College Enrollment,” that found that African-American students benefited the most from receiving vouchers.

—Education Next

I love this thing—great data on a critically important part of our field. If you’re interested in chartering, school-level accountability, or The Urban School System of the Future, you definitely want to check it out.

Almost a decade ago, NACSA produced the equivalent of industry standards—the stuff a high-quality authorizer ought to do. These relate to assessing charter applications, monitoring school performance, helping grow high-performers, revoking the charters of low-performers, etc.

This report assesses authorizers against what NACSA deems the 12 “essential practices” of the industry.

Overall, authorizers’ scores improved over last year’s, and large authorizers (those with 10+ schools) scored better than small ones.

Continuing a long-term trend, authorizers are increasingly picky shoppers—they approve far fewer applications than they did back in the day. The average approval rate is now 33 percent.

But many authorizers are still falling short on the back end of accountability: 34 percent of authorizers lack a clear, established policy to close underperforming schools.

Some of the report’s most interesting findings relate to the different types of authorizers (there are six kinds nowadays). The vast majority (more than 90 percent) are local school districts, but they generally authorize few schools apiece; their portfolios combine for only 53 percent of all charters.

Districts score lower than non-district authorizers overall, and their policies are far less friendly to replication than non-district authorizers, meaning they are less likely to help great charters create more high-quality seats.

I strongly oppose permitting districts—especially failing urban districts—to authorize charters. In fact, I believe giving districts the power to authorize was the biggest charter-policy mistake made during this sector’s two decades of existence.

Why?

Charter laws broke the district’s monopoly over public school operation. But some state laws only allowed districts to authorize. This regrettably continued the district-centered era of public schooling; that is, in a geographic area, every public school must either be run or authorized by the district.

Fortunately, most states have since created non-district authorizers, but this legacy mistake continues to this day in a number of places, for example, Baltimore.

The major other problem is that giving districts authorizing power blurs the essential line between these two very different functions: running schools and overseeing others running schools.

We should see districts as school operators only. Authorizing—that is, umpiring, not playing, not coaching—is much, much different work. Districts are built to run schools; they are not designed to oversee from arms-length others doing so. In fact, many of their policies, habits, beliefs, and practices run counter to the essential charter bargain of freedom for tough accountability. And many district authorizers remain hostile to charters to this very day.

(Think I’m being too pessimistic about charter-district relations? How about Chicago’s district—the only charter authorizer for the nation’s third-largest city—which recently declared that buildings no longer needed by the district are off-limits to charters for 40 years.)

The report’s findings on other types of authorizers are really quite interesting. They have much to teach policymakers and practitioners. How are independent charter boards, like the one in Washington, D.C., doing? What about Indy’s mayor’s office or nonprofits?

Read the report and find out!

Two other thoughts: New research demonstrates that charters that struggle early on seldom improve significantly. It might be the case that NACSA’s (and the charter community’s) support for five-year contracts needs reassessing.

Second, as we move to a sector-agnostic approach in urban schooling and rely on a continuous improvement process based on new starts, expansions, and closures, we must develop rigorous, transparent systems for these activities. Successfully managing a portfolio of schools demands it.

It is troubling that many authorizers still don’t have high-quality practices in place for this work. We should prioritize improvement in these areas.

-Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Choice Words blog.

My greatest frustration, though, has been his unwillingness to offer full-throated support for school vouchers.

Maybe he’s finally ready. In a blog post yesterday, he predicted that if current reform efforts stall, the future will bring a “low-accountability environment coupled with much more choice” and pointed to the Indiana voucher program (recently upheld by that state’s Supreme Court and hailed by Michael Gerson in the Washington Post) as a sign of things to come.

What Andy may not fully appreciate is that Indiana’s voucher program has accountability in spades. As David Stuit and Sy Doan explain in their recent report for Fordham, School Choice Regulations: Red Tape or Red Herring? , the Hoosier State has an “annual performance-accountability rating system” for participating private schools that is based on the results of state assessments—the same tests that public school pupils take. Indeed, the fact that private schools will soon be held accountable under Common Core standards and assessments has become a major issue in the Hoosier State—because it gives palpitations to the right, not the left! (Other recently enacted private-school-choice programs, including those in Louisiana and Alabama, also include significant testing and accountability requirements.)

So if the lack of accountability is Andy’s (and other reformers’) beef with voucher programs, that concern has been alleviated, at least in several states.

To be sure, I can spot at least two other plausible reasons to oppose vouchers. One is that the schools aren’t required (outside of Milwaukee) to be publicly “accessible.” (Andy, many years ago, wrote a piece saying that “accountability and accessibility” should be demanded of any voucher program.) In other words, private schools can still practice selective admissions. That’s a deal-breaker for many on the left. (And impinging on admissions policies is a deal-breaker for many private schools, the Stuit study found.) But we already have selective-admissions magnet schools (of the sort profiled recently by Checker Finn and Jessica Hockett in Exam Schools) and I don’t remember many reformers calling for their abolition.

The other argument against vouchers is on church/state grounds—a concern that the current Supreme Court doesn’t share, and one that I’ve always found utterly irrational. (Why can public funds help a poor kid attend Notre Dame University but not Notre Dame High School?)

So reformers on the left: Unite! (With those of us on the right who already support the entire range of parental choice.)

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Insitute’s Choice Words blog.

To briefly review, I admonished Ravitch for repeating inaccurate facts regarding my team’s school voucher evaluations, relying on secondary sources for her information, and mischaracterizing our scientific research methodologies, which she apparently does not understand.  Kevin Welner of the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) has been especially forceful in objecting to my post in text posted on Ravitch’s blog.  Here I respond to his charges.

First, Welner argues that I owe Ravitch and NEPC an apology because the initial version of our Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) educational attainment study was the source of one of Ravitch’s factual errors, and our error was merely repeated by the person NEPC hired to review our study.  Since Ravitch used that review to source her claim, she (and NEPC) are not responsible for the mistake.

Specifically, we are discussing the claim that 75% of the students who started in the voucher program in 9^th grade were not in the program four years later.  That was an error in the initial draft of our report which Welner points out was quickly corrected to 56% in a second and final version of the report identified as “Updated and Corrected”.  Welner claims that the initial version, with the incorrect figure, was the one sent to their reviewer of our study, Casey Cobb, and that “Nobody had thought to go back and see whether Wolf or his colleagues had changed important numbers in the SCDP report.”

Welner is obviously mistaken on that last point.  Someone did think to go back and access the updated report.  Casey Cobb did.  We know this because, after mentioning the incorrect 75% figure in his executive summary and page 2 of his review, on page 4 Cobb writes:

“Notably, more than half the students (56%) in the MPCP 9^th grade sample were not in the MPCP four years later.”

Cobb could only have gotten the correct, 56%, figure from the updated and corrected report, which means that he knew that the 75% figure was outdated and incorrect but he mentioned that number as well, even though it clearly conflicted with the 56% figure.  People make mistakes.  We made a mistake in the form of the initial 75% program attrition figure.  Welner made a mistake in claiming with certainty that “Nobody had thought to go back and see” whether our report had been updated.  Cobb made a mistake in failing to delete the incorrect program attrition figure from his review after he had taken the correct 56% figure from the “Updated and Corrected” version of our report.  And Welner and his colleagues made a further mistake in not catching the inconsistency between the 75% and 56% figures in Cobb’s review, before they published and publicized it.  The big question is whether people correct their mistakes after they recognize them.  We did because that’s what scholars do.  I expect that the NEPC will issue an “Updated and Corrected” version of Cobb’s review promptly.

While Casey Cobb is correcting his review of our report, he should also revise his charge on page 4 that, “Curiously, it [meaning the report] fails to state how many program-switchers there were, when they switched and in which direction, and how many graduated.”  True, we did not provide those details in the report, but we referred readers to yet another publication of ours that does.  It is even called “Going Public:  Who Leaves a Large, Longstanding, and Widely Available Urban Voucher Program?” It was published in the prestigious American Educational Research Journal, the flagship journal of the American Education Research Association, more than a year ago.  Its mere existence definitively refutes Diane Ravitch’s charge that “Nobody knows” what happened to the students in our study who left the voucher program.  Not only do we know, we published an entire article about it that she and her colleagues really should read.

In a sense, the dust-up over the “75% versus 56%” number and the false charge that nobody knows what happened to students who left the MPCP during our study was both avoidable and immaterial.  Obviously it could have been avoided if we hadn’t initially reported the incorrect percentage of attriters.  It also could have been avoided if Diane Ravitch had actually read our updated report or, better yet, our peer-reviewed journal article, before issuing the charge in her March 29 blog post.  Instead, it is obvious that she relied solely on Cobb’s review and never read our report before criticizing it.  My original point was that this is not something that serious scholars do.

The difference between the 75% and 56% figure is largely immaterial because our “intention-to-treat” analysis exclusively measures the effect of starting high school in the voucher program on future levels of educational attainment regardless of how long you stayed in the program.  Okay, let’s all say this together, “Program attrition has no effect on the internal validity of intention-to-treat analyses of program effects.”  None.  Period.  Anyone who doesn’t accept that doesn’t understand the basics of program evaluation and shouldn’t be discussing studies that employ such scientific methodologies.

So, these are the facts:  First, 56%, and not 75%, of MPCP 9^th graders left the program before the end of 12^th grade.  Even in the face of substantial program attrition, students who were in the MPCP in 9^th grade in 2006 graduated from high school, enrolled in college, and persisted in college at rates higher than similar students in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).  Third, at the end of the study, students who started the study in the MPCP had higher reading scores than comparable MPS students.  Fourth, the researchers carefully tracked the students who left the Milwaukee voucher program and even published an article in the top education journal about it.  Unfortunately, I worry that some people are determined to avoid acknowledging these facts.

-Patrick Wolf

Ravitch spends much of her blog post attacking my motives and credibility as an evaluator of school choice programs.  I am delighted when commentators such as Ravitch spend their time and energy attacking me as a person because that demonstrates that they don’t have the ability to critique the methodological rigor and quality of my actual research.  For the most part, the best that Diane Ravitch can do is call me names.  Fine.  Doesn’t bother me.  I keep winning the competitions to perform the most important private school choice evaluations around the country, and regularly publish my results in the very best scientific peer-reviewed policy journals (see here, here, and here), Ravitch’s ad hominem attacks notwithstanding.

But Ravitch does spend at least a few paragraphs discussing my team’s research findings regarding the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, and that part of her blog post is riddled with factual and methodological errors.  To be fair, Diane Ravitch is not a social scientist.  She has never performed a statistical evaluation of anything, so perhaps it is not surprising that she doesn’t understand the social science that she nevertheless attacks.  She is an education historian, however, and historians are supposed to care about facts — supposed to, at least.

Ravitch dismisses the findings from my DC and Milwaukee voucher evaluations that these programs increased the educational attainment of students in the form of higher rates of high school graduation, college enrollment, and persistence in college.  She ignores the finding that the DC program boosted the high school graduation rate for students offered a DC Opportunity Scholarship by 12 percentage points (and by 21 if they used one) perhaps because that is an inconvenient truth that she wishes were not so.  Instead she claims that the similar Milwaukee finding of higher educational attainment from vouchers is questionable because “75% of the students who started in a voucher school left before graduation.”  For support, she cites a review of our study performed by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC).

Now, professional historians cite original sources to make their claims, but, remember, we are talking about Diane Ravitch here.  Is the NEPC claim credible?  Let’s examine the original sources.  From page 16 of our report, “the majority of students (approximately 56 percent) who were enrolled in 9^th grade in MPCP were not enrolled there by the time they reached 12^th grade.”  Also, from page 163 of our article published in the prestigious scientific Journal of Policy Studies, “less than half (44 percent) of the original MPCP panelists examined were enrolled in a voucher school by the time they reached 12^th grade.”  I realize that Ravitch is no statistician but even she should know that 56 percent is not 75 percent and 44 percent is not 25 percent.  It doesn’t excuse Ravitch that the factual error was first promulgated by NEPC.   She should know better than to trust the accuracy of their “reviews” when primary source material clearly contradicts them.

Ravitch compounds her major factual error with a methodological one.  She says, “So of the 25% who persisted, the graduation rate was higher than the Milwaukee public schools.  But what about the 75% who dropped out and/or returned to MPS?  No one knows.”  Every element of that statement is wrong.  Our primary results regarding the higher attainment of the Milwaukee voucher students are not drawn from the students who remained in private schools for all four years.  Our conclusions are based on the graduation rate for all students in the choice program who were in 9^th grade in the fall of 2006, regardless of whether or not they left the program prior to graduation.  Scientific evaluators will recognize this approach as an “intention-to-treat” analysis which corrects for selective attrition from a program over time.  We clearly explain and justify our approach in the actual report and our peer-reviewed publication, neither of which Ravitch appears to have actually read.

Ravitch claims that “No one knows” what happened to the students who left the choice program during high school.  This is another falsehood.  We were able to track all of the students in our study into college (or not) via the National Clearinghouse of College Enrollments, regardless of whether they switched schools or school sectors during high school.  Regarding high school graduation, for the voucher students who switched to MPS later in high school, we know exactly what happened to them, because we had access to MPS enrollment and graduation data.  If they failed to graduate from high school, that fact pulled down the average graduation rate for the voucher program.  If they did graduate, that improved the average graduation rate for the voucher program.  The effect of being a 9^th grader in the MPCP in 2006 was to increase your likelihood of graduating high school, enrolling in college, and persisting in college, regardless of where you were schooled after 9^th grade.  Professional evaluators will recognize that ours is a rigorous and highly conservative estimate of the educational attainment benefits of the MPCP.

Finally, Ravitch states “Not even Wolf’s evaluations have shown any test score advantage for students who get vouchers, whether in DC or Milwaukee.”  Is she right?  The executive summary of the final report in our longitudinal achievement study of the Milwaukee voucher program states:  “The primary finding that emerges from these analyses is that, for the 2010-11 school year, the students in the MPCP sample exhibit larger growth from the base year of 2006 in reading achievement than the matched MPS sample.” Regarding the achievement impacts of the DC program, Ravitch quotes my own words that there was no conclusive evidence that the DC voucher program increased student achievement.  That achievement finding was in contrast to attainment, which clearly improved as a result of the program.  The uncertainty surrounding the achievement effects of the DC voucher program is because we set the high standard of 95% confidence to judge a voucher benefit as “statistically significant”, and we could only be 94% confident that the final-year reading gains from the DC program were statistically significant.

Diane Ravitch’s claim that school voucher programs have failed is based on ignoring much of the scientific evidence of their success, misreporting the facts regarding the studies that she does discuss, and the 1 percent difference between 95% confidence and 94% confidence.  It takes a lot of doing for a person to mislead so many about so much, but apparently Diane Ravitch is up to the job.

-Patrick Wolf

As reviewed by Michael McShane

For years, I’ve had a kind of morbid curiosity about conspiracy theories. Maybe that’s because Wikipedia has granted such easy access to descriptions of them. Or maybe it’s because I enjoy watching Mythbusters so much. Perhaps there is some part of me that wants to believe that there is more to the world than meets the eye.

In education policy circles, the “charter schools are a plan by ultra-conservatives to privatize the public school system” is a conspiracy theory that is quite popular. It’s no Chupacabra, but prominent education commentators like Diane Ravitch have publicized such sentiments in some form or fashion for several years now.

Ember Reichgott Junge’s book Zero Chance of Passage: The Pioneering Charter School Story, like Jaime and Adam of Mythbusters, puts that theory to rest. Sorry folks, but the idea of charter schools came from educators and civic leaders of all stripes.

Reichgott Junge, an 18-year Democrat-Farm-Labor (DFL) representative in the Minnesota State Legislature, was the author of America’s first charter school bill. Inspired by a lecture from Albert Shanker, the longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers (whom Reichgott Junge heard describe charter schools as “the best answer so far” to the ills of the American education system) she worked with civic leaders and fellow representatives to draft and implement a bill granting greater autonomy for a subset of the North Star state’s schools.

After Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas at the time, saw what was going on and called charter schools a “New Democrat Idea,” they were off and running. Reichgott Junge’s work has been replicated in states all across the country in a movement that now enrolls more than 2 million students in over 5,600 schools all across America.

For those interested in the politics of charter schools, Reichgott Junge’s description of her fraught relationship with her state’s teachers unions was fascinating. She was and is an unapologetic liberal, but that in no way stopped the local, state, and national wings of teachers unions from attempting to block her plans and opposing her candidacy, first at the state level in 1992, and later in her quest for a congressional seat in 2006.

Reichgott Junge marshals private correspondences, flyers and mail pieces, and conversations with union lobbyists to demonstrate that teachers unions opposed charter schools–and the non-unionized teachers that they could employ–the moment the schools started to become a real threat to the unions’ power. In fact, in a letter she quotes from Shanker to Ted Kolderie, a fellow architect of the charter bill, Shanker complained that “the architects of the bill had [not] worked out the collective bargaining issues with the teachers unions” which he said was “certainly not an approach designed to make friends” (pg. 167-68).  The local chapter of the AFT was even more direct, telling her that they would not support any bill that allowed charter schools to “contract out teaching services to agencies or groups which are not part of the teachers’ bargaining unit” (pg. 114).

Watching a lifetime DFL’er respond to such obstructionism offers an interesting perspective on the cleavages in the generally center-left, Democratic Leadership Council-driven coalition that built support around charter schools.  For a long time, Reichgott Junge genuinely believed that she would be able to get unions on her side and she was shocked each time unions devised a new tactic to oppose the expansion of charter schools.

A grain of salt is called for when reading the account of a highly politicized event through the lens of one of the participants. For all of the upsides of an insider account—the whispered conversations, the exact wording of communiques between key parties, the personal backstories—there is the risk that we are getting a particular slant on the story. For the vast majority of the account, Ms. Reichgott Junge avoids such problems, but it was clear in several parts of the book that she was (and is) a politician.

One such example is an incongruous tirade against school vouchers. Reichgott Junge includes a chapter about two thirds of the way through the book explaining why charter schools are not “vouchers lite.”  This chapter includes the phrase “Chartering gives incentive to strengthen our public schools. Private school vouchers give incentive to abandon them” (pg. 200). For someone who spent so much time excoriating her opponents for giving short shrift to the complexities of the arguments that she was making for charter schools, I was quite surprised to see such a glib denunciation of vouchers. It read like a politician trying to score points.

Moreover, her criticisms of voucher programs are often off the mark. Her claim that, “private schools neither abide by state regulations nor are required to commit to performance standards or outcomes” (pg. 201) is not true. The three largest non-special needs school voucher programs (Milwaukee, Indiana, and Louisiana) all require participating schools to take the same standardized tests as the public schools.

Similarly, when she says that charter schools are more “inclusive” because private school tuition is higher than most voucher amounts and “families receiving vouchers must still raise the remainder of the tuition” (pg. 202) she incorrectly characterizes almost every voucher program in America. Only the Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Ohio EdChoice scholarships require parents to meet the difference between the voucher amount and tuition, and that only applies to families with incomes more than 200% higher than the federal poverty line.

This foray into voucher-bashing seriously detracts from what otherwise was an informative and engaging read.  Those interested in the origins of charter schooling would be well served to read it.

Michael McShane is a research fellow at AEI and co-author of President Obama and Education Reform: The Personal and the Political.

Born to Rise: A Story of Children and Teachers Reaching Their Highest Potential
by Deborah Kenny
Harper, 2012, $25.99; 256 pages.

Mission Possible: How the Secrets of the Success Academies Can Work in Any School
by Eva Moskowitz and Arin Lavinia
Jossey-Bass, 2012, $27.95; 176 pages.

As reviewed by David Steiner

On page 87 of Mission Possible, the account by Eva Moskowitz and Arin Lavinia of the work of their charter schools, the reader is invited to watch a video of a book discussion in 1st grade. A detour to the included DVD is instructive: in this Harlem-based, lottery-selected public charter school, we see a 1st-grade classroom that challenges any in the country for the intellectual engagement of its students without any reliance on the regimented, direct instruction that the clichéd objections imagine dominate all successful charter schools. Faced with such examples, and the academic record of Moskowitz’s Success Academies, one’s first reaction should simply be applause. Having served (briefly) as a board member for one of the Success Academies, I know that such video clips are not cherry-picked: teachers in every classroom in every Academy school are expected to create such spaces of intense and demanding thinking and learning.

A different but equally positive reaction is evoked by Deborah Kenny’s intensely personal account of the grit, resolve, and courage that led her to take the opportunity offered by the charter school movement and create a model school that her students were immensely lucky to attend. Her passion for bringing out the best in all who worked with her, her disarming throwaways (“it was the first five minutes of our first day, and already I’d made a mistake”), and her candid directness about necessary conditions for her work (“it is impossible to nurture a positive culture without the right to hire and fire at will”) make this an inspiring story.

Sharing boundless drive and self-discipline, and an equal commitment to proving that a child’s past is not her or his predetermined destination, Moskowitz and Kenny take justified pride in being mission-driven realists who, along with their handpicked colleagues, have radically recast the life chances of their students. But they have produced quite different books. Kenny’s more personal memoir does not reach her charter school until late in the narrative, and even then, the focus is squarely on forging a human culture, building a team whose members will go to the wall for their students, and for each other. For her, the disaster of American education is summed up by the line “we got here by disrespecting teachers.”

What Kenny means by respect is creating a culture of accountability for children’s learning that “enables freedom” and a freedom that “unleashes teacher passion.” Kenny explicitly eschews the cookbook vision of school reform: “Schools,” she writes, “are not products to be designed and replicated.” She goes on: “Every school in America has access to the same pedagogical ideas and methods we use. The problem is not lack of information but a lack of motivation engendered by the low accountability/low empowerment culture of our public schools.” Many of her sources of inspiration—Maxime Greene, Peter Drucker, Dennis Littky—are not your typical charter-school heroes. What connects them is not a method but a conviction that successful outcomes are all about people learning together, creating spaces of continual mutual feedback, encouragement, and empowerment. Kenny’s book is not and does not purport to be a how-to manual; it is a moving work about the power of well-placed determination matched to a political opportunity: the freedom through accountability that is the charter school.

Moskowitz and Lavinia set themselves a different task. Theirs is a self-proclaimed “how-to book.” As a result, the bar is in some sense higher: we expect to learn what the secrets are and how they can work. The answers in the book will enlighten readers who have heard about charter schools on the news but want to learn more. Moskowitz and Lavinia write at a relatively high level about effective techniques like the push to challenge students with the most rigorous and demanding material and instruction; the immediacy and constancy of granular feedback; the sharing of best practices; the focus on literacy instruction; the long school day and school year, including summer professional development for teachers; the constant coaching; and the agonizing care taken to choose each teacher from a vast pool of applicants. Each of these practices is standard at high-performing charters including KIPP, Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First, to take just three networks of such schools with which I am somewhat familiar.

What well-read educators and policymakers will want to know, and will not find in this book, is how it is that in New York City, in multiple instances, Success Academies, despite its astonishingly rapid growth as a school network, gets stronger academic results than even the top next-rung charter schools. Is it just that Moskowitz pushes even harder with even more rigor with even better-selected teachers on the good practices that the other charters are engaged in? If there are true secrets to the results from Success Academies, they are not on show here. A useful contrast in this respect is Paul Bambrik-Santoyo’s recently published Leverage Leadership: A Practical Guide to Building Exceptional Schools. The tools he lays out may or may not produce results at the level of the Success Academies, but those tools are in plain sight, in such unsecret forms as his “Observation Tracker.”

At the same time, these books will do nothing to silence the critics. There are, for example, no statistics on the percentage of ELL students in the schools, no numbers on the privately raised funds the schools put to use, and only cursory gestures, in Kenny’s book, to the controversy over students counseled out of or removed from these charter-school classrooms and to their teacher turnover rate.

In the end, the real contribution of these books lies neither in their appeals to the heart nor in the practices they catalogue, but in the moral condemnation each makes of our current education system. When Moskowitz argues that her practices can be adopted in any school, we are immediately tempted to say, Come on! Nine-hour days? Weeks of summer professional development? Responsiveness 24/7 to breakdowns in the classrooms, be it from noisy pipes or a single underwhelming lesson? Show me a public school system that could get there anytime soon.

But then we have to ask, why not? We have seen urban public schools successfully adopt many charter school “secrets,” including the nine-hour school day (e.g., United for Success Academies in Oakland); a rigorous, standard curriculum (e.g., the more than a dozen Chicago public schools that offer the International Baccalaureate); merit pay (e.g., the Washington, D.C., system); and the regular use of teacher video in professional development and evaluation (e.g., the Houston system, which was using video in this way as early as the 1980s).

Why have the results of the best-performing charter schools consistently eluded public school systems? The answer, unsurprisingly, has to do with the structures underlying public K–12 education. To bring to regular public schools the full panoply of successful charter-school practices we would need to rethink our labor practices, funding structures, reluctance to embrace a rigorous and specific curriculum, and all the other bêtes noires the national education conversation avoids or reduces to partisan caricatures.

If, rightly, we want to reject a zero-sum trade-off between our values, if what we need are a highly attractive long-term profession for successful teachers, accountability for student results, and a far more rigorous curriculum driving far higher learning outcomes for our students, are we willing to rethink the system from scratch and put everything on the table? If we cannot build a public school system on heroic individuals (and we surely cannot), how do we remake our school systems to make the standards Kenny and Moskowitz demand, and have largely achieved, the baseline of our public education? These books do not tackle these hard questions.

But no matter. One is left with the indictment and an urgent call to action, captured on page 136 of Kenny’s book: “‘This school’s a blessing!,’ exclaimed Jasmine’s grandmother when she found out they’d won the lottery. We hadn’t even opened our doors yet.”

David Steiner is dean of the School of Education at Hunter College and former commissioner of education for the State of New York.

John White, Kaya Henderson, and Mike Casserly participated in the panel discussion, which was hosted by Andy Rotherham.

Smarick first wrote about this topic in “Wave of the Future,” which appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Ed Next.

—Education Next

The only problem is that the cited commentary says precisely the opposite. Describing Indiana’s heavily regulated voucher program, Schaeffer writes: “Because participating schools will have a significant financial advantage over non-participating schools, lightly regulated [non-participating] schools will face increasing financial pressure to participate.” This captures Schaeffer’s concern as well as my own (which I expressed over a decade ago in the political economy journal Independent Review): The problem is not that private schools won’t participate in heavily regulated school choice programs. The problem is that they will. Hold-outs will be in the minority, and will gradually be driven out of business by their subsidized counterparts due to the uneven fiscal playing field (much as America’s once-dominant private schools were marginalized by the spread of “free” state-run schools).

We know this because there is extensive evidence to that effect from all over the world and across history. Everywhere that private elementary and secondary schools are eligible for government subsidies, the share of unsubsidized school enrollment falls. The higher the subsidy and the longer it has been in place, the more the unsubsidized sector is generally diminished. The Dutch enacted a heavily regulated nationwide voucher program nearly a century ago. Unsubsidized private schooling remains legal, but has been reduced to a statistical asterisk—now making up less than one percent of enrollment, compared to roughly 70 percent for subsidized private schools.

Our reason for concern over this pattern is also grounded in empirical evidence: it is the least regulated, most market-like private schools that do the best job of serving families. That is the consensus of the worldwide within-country research, which I reviewed and tabulated for a 2009 paper in the Journal of School Choice. The new Fordham paper does not discuss this evidence—nor has any other Fordham paper ever discussed it, to my knowledge.

Despite imputing to Cato scholars the exact opposite of the view we hold, the “Red Herring” paper does include some interesting data. In particular, it offers a new corroboration that voucher programs are more heavily regulated than tax credit programs (a difference whose magnitude and statistical significance was previously established here). This will make it even harder for objective observers to cling to the notion that vouchers and credits are functionally equivalent (though there are of course other important differences beyond this one). And it points the way to a solution to the problem of market-suffocating regulation under school choice programs: pursue school choice through education tax credits rather than vouchers or charter schools.

—Andrew Coulson

This commentary was adapted from one that originally appeared on Cato-at-Liberty.org.

“It was the first time I had ever received a grade lower than a B, and it was upsetting,” admits Mercado, a biochemistry and cell biology major at the University of California, San Diego. The first in her family to attend a four-year college, Mercado was a strong student dating all the way back to her days in middle school at San Diego’s KIPP Adelante Preparatory Academy. Perhaps as a result, she was “a little more cocky than I should have been” when arriving on campus for freshman year. Like many freshmen, Mercado experienced the distraction of being on her own for the first time, which took a toll on her grades. Holding down a job while taking more classes than she could handle didn’t help. “It all came crashing down on top of me,” Mercado says. Freshman year was “a big dose of reality,” she says.

Here’s another one: statistically speaking, Mercado might have been voted “Least Likely to Succeed” at birth. Low-income black and Hispanic students are by far the least likely U.S. students to graduate from high school and attend a four-year college. Those who are accepted to college are least likely to stick around and earn a degree. For each one who earns a bachelor’s degree, 11 fall short somewhere along the line, giving students like Mercado a mere 8 percent chance of graduating from college.

Mercado persists. Reenergized after a summer internship with the KIPP Foundation in Chicago, she is back on campus for the fall semester of 2012. She credits the habits of mind and encouragement she received in middle school, and the contacts she maintains five years later with KIPP teachers and administrators, for propelling her forward. “This year I’m coming in with a clear head. I’m more focused on my classes and what I want to accomplish. I’m going to do better,” she says. Her delivery communicates not hope or aspiration but conviction. “Nothing is going to keep me from graduating,” she insists, adding for emphasis, “nothing.”

Mercado’s story—both her struggle and her determination— will be repeated over the next several years on college campuses across the U.S. At one level, she’s just one more kid trying to pass biology, graduate, and make something of herself. But as the product of a KIPP school, Mercado is at the vanguard of a rapidly growing class of students whose success or failure could make or break the reputation of a closely watched group of charter schools and the sometimes-controversial, muscular brand of education they have pioneered. In 2015, more than 10,000 students from KIPP and other major charter-school highfliers will be on college campuses across the United States.

The Coming KIPP Bubble

You can’t play the ingenue forever.

For much of its brief history, there has been something of a halo over the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). Founded in Houston in 1994 by Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, a pair of Teach For America corps members, KIPP now has more than 100 schools in 20 states and Washington, D.C. It is the largest and best known of a class of charter-management organizations (CMOs) that includes Achievement First, YES Prep, Uncommon Schools, Mastery, Aspire, and others. This group shares a set of familiar characteristics: more and longer school days, with a college preparatory curriculum for all students; strict behavioral and disciplinary codes; and a strong focus on building a common, high-intensity school culture. Classrooms and halls are awash in motivational quotations and college banners, typically from the alma maters of the inevitably young, hard-charging teachers who staff the schools. The signature feature is high behavioral and academic expectations for all students, the vast majority of whom are low-income, urban black and Hispanic kids. It’s this last feature that led KIPP and the others to be branded “No Excuses” schools, a label not universally embraced within the category.

The reputation of the No Excuses model is complicated and often divisive among professional educators. Outside the education bubble in the broader public mind, however, these high-flying charters are much-adored, attractive young upstarts, and the antidote to the dark, dispiriting “dropout factories” of media caricature. For years, a central motif of the feel-good narrative surrounding No Excuses charter schools has been their college acceptance rates. Houston-based YES Prep, for example, has made much of the fact that 100 percent of their graduating seniors have been accepted to college; more than 90 percent are the first in their family to attend a four-year college. The original cohort of KIPP students attended college at more than double the rate of their demographic peers: bracing, affirming, “It’s Being Done” data points to warm the gap-closing hearts of ed reform hawks.

The April 2011 release of KIPP’s College Completion Report changed the No Excuses narrative almost instantly from “college acceptance” to “college completion.” A bold and laudable exercise in transparency, the report gave ammunition to KIPP’s boosters and critics alike. Thirty-three percent of the earliest cohorts of KIPP middle-school students were found to have graduated college within six years, four times the average rate of students from underserved communities and slightly higher than the figure (31 percent) for all U.S. students. It was a clear and unambiguous accomplishment. Yet two out of three former KIPP students were failing to reach the bar, however audacious, that KIPP itself had established as “the essential stepping stone to rewarding work, a steady income, self-sufficiency and success.” The affirming image of smiling, cap-and-gown–bedecked ghetto kids graduating high school and heading off to college and bright horizons beyond lost a bit of its luster.

KIPP has held fast to the idea that college is indispensable. The goal remains to see 75 percent of graduates earn a four-year college degree, comparable to the rate at which top-income-quartile students graduate. The bar has been set not by its critics but by KIPP itself: if KIPP and other No Excuses schools are to fulfill their promise as game changers in American education, and rewrite the script on reaching and teaching underserved kids, their graduates must not merely be accepted to college; they must demonstrate success once they get there.

KIPP has identified a number of factors it believes are critical to raising its students’ college-completion rates, including enhanced academic preparedness; a set of “character strengths,” like “grit,” self-control, and optimism; matching each student with the right college; social and academic integration once they arrive on campus; and college affordability. The organization is making an increasingly aggressive effort to exercise some measure of control over each of these factors through partnerships with at least 20 colleges nationwide designed to create a pipeline to four-year colleges able to offer the greatest possible commitment and support to KIPP alumni.

While there is broad general agreement on what makes “first-generation” college-goers stay in school and take a degree, less clear is what it takes to create those characteristics and conditions in the first place, and how much accountability for college completion should be attributed to a student’s K–12 education, his or her college, and the students themselves. KIPP’s rapidly growing “KIPP Through College” program offers support programs and services stretching from middle school through college and beyond, including high school and college placement, financial literacy, mentorships, college and career advisement, and one-to-one support from some of the 100 full-time KIPP staff doing college counseling and support work throughout its network.

KIPP’s recipe for getting students “to and through college” is about to be put to the test, if not quite at scale then in unprecedented numbers. In the 2012–13 school year, just over 1,000 former KIPP students are in college. Three years from now that figure will explode, with 10,000 KIPP alumni on America’s campuses. KIPP chief executive officer Richard Barth takes care to manage expectations for how this “KIPP bubble” cohort will perform. The 75 percent figure is a “long-term play” and does not apply yet. Fifty percent is “an aspiration.” Regardless, by staking their reputations on college completion, KIPP and other No Excuses schools are rapidly approaching something of a “put up or shut up” moment. The attempt to write the playbook on what it takes to get first-generation low-income black and Hispanic kids into the world with college degrees in hand will offer something of a referendum on KIPP and the No Excuses model.

“All Hands on Deck”

To see KIPP’s effort to steer its alumni to “right match” colleges, visit Pennsylvania’s Franklin & Marshall College (F&M). A private liberal arts college with 2,200 undergraduate students, F&M was the first college to enter into a formal partnership with KIPP aimed at improving college persistence and graduation rates of KIPP alumni. In 2011, the school launched “F&M College Prep” and welcomed 23 KIPP students to the precollege summer-immersion program. The following year, the program tripled in size, adding students from Uncommon Schools, Mastery Charter Schools, Achievement First, and others. The three-week program is intended to give rising seniors from these schools their first taste of college life. Students take two classes a day taught by F&M professors, and attend workshops on college admissions, financial aid, and other topics—all intended to demystify college life.

The students from KIPP and the other schools “leave F&M and go into their senior year thinking, ‘I can go to college. It’s gonna be tough, but it’ll be fine. I know what my resources are. I know how to talk to professors and upperclassmen. I know how to navigate the system,’” says Shawn Jenkins, who runs F&M College Prep as special assistant to the dean of the college for strategic projects.

F&M’s approach to retaining and graduating minority students is modeled directly on the work of the Posse Foundation, a New York City–based nonprofit that sends group of students, a posse, to college together to act as a support system for one another. According to the Education Trust, F&M graduates more than 87 percent of its students within six years, but only 70 percent of its black and Hispanic undergraduates. F&M staff had long observed that students who came to the Lancaster campus through Posse tended to graduate at a much higher rate than other minority students. Jenkins states the challenge succinctly: “How do we create a support structure that can mimic the same outcomes for KIPP students, for Mastery students, for Cristo Rey students?”

Once admitted to F&M, students from KIPP and other “first gens” are placed into a newly created mentoring program, based on the Posse approach. Students meet in groups of 8 to 10 with a campus-based mentor one to two hours each week. The mentor, who is the students’ academic advisor, also meets one-on-one with each student at least every other week.

It is not an easy or natural transition to college for the students urban charters serve. Feeling comfortable enough to go to professors’ office hours and not feeling out of place among other students are challenges to be overcome. “If students become academically integrated and socially integrated, their probabilities of being retained and graduated go up enormously,” observes Kent Trachte, dean of the college.

Jenkins, himself an F&M alum (Class of 2010) and former Posse Scholar, describes the college’s approach as “all hands on deck.” But when it works, it is nearly invisible to the students. Indeed, Jenkins only recently came to see and appreciate “the intentionality” that made possible his own journey from a Harlem public school to a top liberal arts college and a career as a young college administrator. “I had no idea. I didn’t know that when the doors were closed, people were sitting around talking about strategies to engage me to do better. That’s what we’re doing. There are certain students who need a little more attention,” he says.

KIPP’s partnership with Franklin & Marshall has clear benefits to all parties. A high percentage of F&M College Prep participants apply to the school, thus creating a pipeline of highly qualified, diverse students. KIPP sends its graduates to the kind of small private college that is statistically most likely to be successful with first-generation students. The students themselves get a “high-touch” approach from professors and advisors, keeping them in place and on track. F&M president Dan Porterfield knows them by name.

The 20 partnerships KIPP has entered into with colleges, including the University of Houston, Tulane, Morehouse, Spelman, Syracuse, Duke, and New York City’s Hunter College, will improve KIPP’s graduation rates by 7 to 8 percent “even if we did nothing else,” says Barth. In a parallel effort, F&M convened a group of a dozen liberal arts colleges and CMOs that will form “the nucleus for a larger effort to connect some of the leading high performing charters to some of the leading liberal arts colleges,” promises Trachte. Founding members of the coalition include Dickinson, Gettysburg, Bard, and Trinity.

No Excuses 2.0

No Excuses schools as a class have advanced our understanding of what it takes to get kids to college. The unresolved question is whether the students have what it takes to thrive once they get there. That question has some within charter networks openly questioning elements of the No Excuses orthodoxy.

At KIPP, at least part of the answer is more KIPP. “We’ve made a commitment to start earlier with our kids and stay longer,” says Barth. As KIPP has expanded from 2 schools to more than 100, it has broadened its focus to include elementary and high schools. “Fifth to eighth grade, it’s amazing what we’ve done,” he says, “but we see the impact of being able to have them starting in kindergarten.”

As of 2011, KIPP students’ average SAT score was 1426; the average ACT score was 20. For the colleges KIPP is targeting for its alumni, “a 20 ACT ain’t gonna cut it,” Barth candidly admits. Increasing a student’s odds of admission inevitably leads to a hard look at “backward mapping” curriculum and formative experiences from the earliest moment. “This is high stakes,” says Barth. “As a 2nd-grade teacher, you are making this happen. What happens in your year ties to where they’re going to be [in college]…everyone owns this chain. Everyone has a link.”

Within the No Excuses world, a strong case can be made that YES Prep graduates are as academically ready for college as anybody. In 2011, the average SAT combined score for YES Prep African American students in reading, writing, and mathematics was 1556, far above the national average of 1273 for African Americans, and significantly higher than the 1500 national average for all students. Every student is required to take and pass at least one AP class in high school; most take two or more. Less than 5 percent of YES Prep grads require remediation in college. Getting admitted to a four-year college is a graduation requirement at YES Prep, which, like KIPP, has been admirably transparent about its college-completion rate, currently at 41 percent within six years.

“It wasn’t the academic piece that was holding our kids back,” notes senior director of college initiatives at YES Prep Donald Kamentz. “What we found hands down was it was the noncognitive piece—that tenacity, that grit—that allowed kids to harness those skills and persist when they faced difficulty.” Kamentz and Laura Keane of Mastery Charter Schools have been at the center of an effort, along with Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania, to design and test interventions aimed at enhancing student perseverance and improving college enrollment and graduation outcomes. Kamentz cites the work of Stanford University’s Carol Dweck as a key: students must be able to develop a “growth mindset” that creates motivation and productivity rather than seeing intelligence as fixed and immutable. “If they can work through that, their persistence through and graduation from college is off the charts,” he observes.

This is not an entirely new development at No Excuses schools. Nearly fetishized, “grit” is as much a part of the culture of KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, and the rest as the college banners and teachers reminding students to “correct your SLANT” (Sit up straight, Listen, Ask and answer questions, Nod if you understand, and Track the teacher). The idea that character traits like perseverance, zest, and optimism have more to do with long-term success than even academics gained mainstream traction with the recent publication of Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed. Within No Excuses schools, some are starting to question some of their fundamental assumptions about what makes kids successful. When asked, Barth does not disagree with the observation that KIPP is “doubling down on grit.”

“What we’ve found with the ‘whatever it takes’ or ‘no excuses’ mentality is that it was very teacher-driven and less student-driven,” says Kametz, acknowledging this is a controversial line of thought in his own halls. A typical No Excuses approach might involve giving demerits or detention for missed assignments or turning in work that’s not “neat and complete.” Kamentz questions whether this tough-love approach helps create the self-advocacy in students they will need to be successful in college. “It’s the largest gaping hole with our kids in college,” he says. “They will constantly say, ‘You structured my life so much that I had to do very little thinking and structuring myself.’”

“Academic preparation is absolutely foundational,” says Jeremy Chiappetta, executive director of Blackstone Valley Prep in Cumberland, Rhode Island. “But what education looks like, to be truly prepared for college, probably is not the routinized learning that makes many of these schools, including us, really successful on standardized tests. I don’t think that’s the academic rigor that any of us want for college prep. I think it’s much deeper, much bigger,” he says.

Kamentz concedes that much more is known about what successful college students should look like than how to create them. “It’s the inevitable practitioner question,” he says. “I know all this stuff. Now what do I do?” Michael Goldstein, founder of Boston’s Match School agrees. “We don’t really know of many interventions that change grit significantly. It may be harder to change grit than other things like knowledge,” he observes.

In Loco Helicopter Parentis

Not every college is prepared, interested, or has the resources to go the extra mile for low-income kids of color. The idea that once you arrive at college that you’re here and should make your own way and figure it out “is still the dominant culture,” says Barth, who compares colleges to joining a gym: “You get the money, and if the kids leave, they don’t take the money with them.” At present, he believes, the U.S. higher-education system simply isn’t designed for the kinds of students KIPP and other No Excuses charters serve.

There is also at least a bit of cognitive dissonance that must be acknowledged: if KIPP and others are successful in turning out academically prepared, resilient, and optimistic graduates, shouldn’t they need less support, not more, on college campuses? If students need an army of college advisors and KIPP staff to act in loco helicopter parentis, just how gritty can they be?

Barth sees no disconnect. If KIPP kids get “X” support on their journeys to and through college, he says, “middle-class kids get 50X,” much of it simply baked into their lives in the form of educated parents who are not intimidated by college and financial aid applications. College tours, SAT test-prep help, and tutors? Been there, done that. There are siblings, relatives, and even consultants to advise kids on where to apply and what classes to take. The safety net is deep and broad. Perhaps most importantly, there is a baseline expectation among the children of the well-off and well-educated: they grew up simply assuming they would go to college. Middle-class kids, says Barth, get all this “without consciousness of it. It just gets done.”

Back at UC San Diego, Rebecca Mercado acknowledges she was embarrassed to tell anyone she was struggling in school. “I felt that my teachers and even people from KIPP might be disappointed that I had allowed my grades to slip as much as they had.” So just how hard has college been? After some mild prodding, Mercado sheepishly confesses her freshman-year GPA: 2.4. But this year it will be a 3.5 she insists. It’s hard not to be convinced by the self-assured, confident-sounding college sophomore. Her commitment is admirable, earnest, and understandable. Gritty.

And if she struggles, there are any number of people who will be there to lend an ear, give advice, or point to resources. And why not? A lot of people, many of whom she’s never met, have as much riding on Mercado’s success as she does.

Maybe even more.

Robert Pondiscio is a former South Bronx 5th-grade teacher and executive director of CitizenshipFirst.

In the following essays, we identify some of the key findings from the sixth annual Education Next-PEPG Survey, a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens interviewed during April and May of 2012 (for survey methodology, see sidebar). Highlights include

• the Republican tilt of the education views of independents

• the especially high marks that Hispanics give their public schools

• strong support among the general public for using test-score information to hold teachers accountable

• lower confidence in teachers than has previously been reported

• the public’s (and teachers’) growing uneasiness with teachers unions

• the shaky foundations of public support for increased spending

• majority support for a broad range of school choice initiatives.

In addition to the views of the public as a whole, in this year’s survey special attention is paid to Hispanics, African Americans, parents, and teachers, all of whom were oversampled in order to obtain a sufficient number of observations. And in an effort to assess the sensitivity of respondents’ opinions to information and question wording, we embedded in this survey, as we have done in previous ones, various experiments. Responses to all questions are posted on our website, educationnext.org.

Independents lean Republican in their views of teachers unions and school spending—and support private school choice.

With Barack Obama and Mitt Romney running neck and neck, the nation’s eyes are trained on independent voters, who will likely decide the presidential election. And in the days leading up to the national conventions, education policy, though hardly at the top of the public agenda, did assume a more prominent role in both campaigns. Which candidate is best positioned to use education to bring undecided voters into the fold? The answer may be surprising.

Just one-third of independents report that President Obama has done an “excellent” or “good” job of handling education issues, while the rest assign him a “fair” or “poor” rating. And on the education policy issues that most clearly divide the parties—the role of teachers unions and support for school spending—the views of independents hew closer to those of Republicans than of Democrats. Moreover, independents are more supportive than members of either party of expanding private school choice for disadvantaged students, the centerpiece of Governor Romney’s proposals for K–12 education reform.

Whereas 25 percent of respondents to the EdNext-PEPG survey report that they are Republicans and 34 percent say that they are Democrats, fully 41 percent claim no affiliation with either major party. Of this group, 52 percent claim that they lean Democratic, while just 40 percent lean Republican. On key education issues, however, these independents express views that better align with Republicans.

No single education issue divides Republicans and Democrats more sharply than the role of teachers unions (see Figure 1). Seventy-one percent of Republicans report that the teachers unions have a generally negative effect on schools, as compared to just 29 percent of Democrats. Though independents come down in between, a majority of them (56 percent) agree with Republicans that unions have a negative effect.

Republican and Democratic voters also diverge in their preferences on school spending and teacher salaries. Figure 2 shows that when not provided with information about current spending levels, 79 percent of Democrats say that spending on public schools in their local district should increase, as compared with 50 percent of Republicans. Among independents, 57 percent support increased spending, again placing them closer to Republicans in their view of the issue. And when respondents are informed about current spending levels, the gap between Republicans and independents vanishes: 39 percent of both groups support spending increases, compared to just 51 percent of Democrats.

The same pattern holds for teacher salaries: when respondents are not provided with information about current salary levels, 60 percent of independents support increasing teacher salaries, placing them closer to Republicans (54 percent of whom support increases) than to Democrats (75 percent). Providing information on current teacher salaries in their state reduces support for salary increases among independents to 34 percent—exactly the same as among Republicans. Information also shrinks the share of Democrats supporting salary increases to 41 percent.

Governor Romney has made the expansion of school choice for disadvantaged students central to his campaign, calling for the expansion of the Washington, D.C., voucher program and for allowing low-income and special education students to use federal funds to enroll in private schools. It is perhaps surprising, then, to find that Republicans are less supportive of this concept than are Democrats (see Figure 3). Just 42 percent of Republicans express support for the idea, compared to 52 percent of Democrats. Voucher support among independents appears to be as high as (or greater than) it is among Democrats, at 54 percent.

Hispanics like public schools but not all union demands in contract negotiations.

Increasingly, both the Republican and Democratic parties have sought ways to court Hispanics. Though they lean Democratic—63 percent of Hispanic adults approve of the way President Barack Obama is handling his job as president—they are not as blue as is the African American community, 92 percent of whom give Obama a thumbs-up.

Those seeking the Hispanic vote in 2012 should know that education is an issue that resonates with the Latino community. Almost 60 percent of those we surveyed say they are “very” or “quite a bit” interested in education issues, as compared to less than 40 percent of African American and white voters.

On many topics—including school vouchers, charter schools, digital learning, student and school accountability, common core standards, and teacher recruitment and retention policies—the views of Hispanic adults do not differ noticeably from those of either whites or African Americans.

But in certain domains—estimates of school costs and school quality, support for teachers unions, teacher tenure, and teacher pensions—the views of Hispanics differ rather substantially. Their judgment of the American school is generous, perhaps because they compare public schools in the United States to much less effective institutions in Mexico, Cuba, and other parts of Latin America. They also underestimate the costs of running public schools, though they revise their thinking rather substantially about the merits of spending increases once they learn the facts. They are less supportive of unions and union demands than are African Americans.

Nearly 40 percent of Hispanic adults give the nation’s public schools a grade of an “A” or a “B” on the traditional scale used to evaluate schools (see Figure 4). When asked about the public schools in their community, no less than 55 percent give such favorable assessments. By comparison, whites and African Americans express significantly less enthusiasm about the nation’s schools. Less than 20 percent of whites and African Americans accord the nation’s schools an “A” or a “B,” and only around 40 percent give the schools in their community one of these two top grades.

Hispanic respondents think American students perform better academically than is actually the case. American 15-year-olds ranked no better than 25th among the 34 developed democracies participating in the latest round of international tests. Yet nearly 45 percent of Hispanics say student math performance in the United States ranks among the top 15 countries in the world in math. Only 30 percent of white and African American respondents place the United States that high.

Hispanic respondents also think the public schools cost a lot less than they actually do. While annual per-pupil expenditures run around $12,500, Hispanics, on average, estimate their cost at less than $5,000. Whites and African Americans estimate the costs to be more than $7,000.

The same goes for teacher salaries, which average about $56,000 a year. On average, Hispanics think teachers are paid little more than $25,000 a year; blacks, on average, think they are paid around $30,000 a year; and whites estimate salaries at $35,000.

When told just how much schools cost, however, Hispanic respondents adjust their thinking quite dramatically. When informed about actual per-pupil expenditures, Hispanics’ support for higher taxes to fund spending increases drops from 46 percent to 25 percent. When given the actual amount teachers receive, their support for higher salaries plummets nearly in half—from over 60 percent to little more than 30 percent.

Although learning the truth about costs and salaries has a similar impact on white opinion, African Americans remain more committed to higher spending. Thirty-seven percent of African Americans favor higher taxes, even when told how much is currently being spent, only a slight dip from the 42 percent favorable when that information is withheld. When given the facts about teacher salaries, African American support for higher salaries drops 20 percentage points—from 74 percent to 54 percent.

Like other ethnic groups, Hispanics do not appear especially sympathetic to teachers union demands in collective bargaining negotiations. Sixty-two percent of Hispanic adults think teachers should pay 20 percent of their pension and health care costs, as do 56 percent of African Americans.

By an overwhelming margin (87 percent), Hispanic respondents favor proposals to condition teacher tenure on their students’ making adequate progress on state tests. Whites and African Americans also favor such proposals but not to the same degree (75 percent and 80 percent, respectively). When it comes to whether teachers unions are playing a more positive or a more negative role in their local community, Hispanic adults come out in the middle—at 59 percent in support, they are more supportive than whites (45 percent) but less supportive than African Americans (75 percent).

Use test scores for evaluations, says the public (but not the teachers).

Teachers have long been paid primarily on the basis of their academic credentials and years of experience, creating in most parts of the country a lockstep pay scale that does not account for a teacher’s classroom performance. This approach is often justified on the grounds that it precludes favoritism on the part of principals, school board members, and other administrative officials.

As teacher effectiveness has become an increasingly visible policy issue, standard approaches to salary and tenure decisions are undergoing substantial change. More than 20 states now require that student test-score gains be used in key personnel decisions, often including tenure and salary determinations. Four states go so far as to prohibit a teacher from receiving a top rating if students do not exceed a certain level of accomplishment, while another 10 require that achievement gains constitute at least 50 percent of each teacher’s evaluation.

Is the public onboard with these changes? And what do teachers think about them? To find out, we randomly divided those interviewed into two groups (see Figure 5). The first group was given a stark choice: How much weight should be given to test scores and how much should be given to principal recommendations?

Given this simple dichotomy, the public says test-score gains should be given more than half the weight (62 percent) in making salary and tenure decisions. Teachers, by contrast, are prepared to place only a quarter of the weight (24 percent) on this information, with the other three-fourths of the weight being given to principal recommendations.

The second half of the sample was asked a more complex question, which required giving weights to test scores and evaluations from four different sources: principals, parents, students, and fellow teachers.

When the question was posed this way, the public and the teachers once again disagree. The public would place about one-third of the weight (32 percent) on test scores, but teachers would assign them less than one-fifth (19 percent). Conversely, teachers would give principal recommendations nearly half the weight (44 percent), while the public would give their recommendations less than one-quarter (23 percent).

Perhaps surprisingly, teachers are unenthusiastic about being evaluated by their fellow teachers. Like the rest of the public, they divide up the remaining weight more or less equally among the three remaining sources of evidence (students, parents, and fellow teachers).

An even bigger gap between teachers and the public emerges on the desirability of releasing information about teacher performance to the public at large. In both New York City and Los Angeles, newspapers have published such information, provoking an outcry among teachers, who felt their privacy had been invaded. When we asked respondents about this as a general practice, 78 percent of the public expresses support, compared to just 33 percent of teachers (see Figure 6).

When given the option of expressing neutrality on the issue (as another randomly chosen half of the sample was), 60 percent of the public still says it supports the publication of information about teacher performance, while only 13 percent is opposed, the remaining 27 percent taking the neutral position. Teacher opinion is almost the mirror image. Fifty-four percent oppose making information on test-score impacts publicly available, 30 percent express support, with the remaining 16 percent not taking a clear position either way.

Are teachers unions undermining teacher popularity?

Teachers have long held a cherished place in American popular culture. In such films as Blackboard Jungle, Stand and Deliver, and Dead Poets Society, Hollywood has highlighted the power of teachers to utterly transform the lives of their students.

But is this now changing? Are Waiting for Superman, Bad Teacher, and Won’t Back Down (forthcoming “A Takeover Tale,” cultured, Winter 2013) harbingers of a new, more skeptical depiction of teachers? At first, it would seem that public trust in teachers is widespread. When we asked half of the respondents in our survey whether they “have trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in the public schools,” no less than 72 percent say “yes” (see Figure 7). This is almost exactly what Phi Delta Kappan (PDK), a publication sympathetic to teachers unions, found in its 2012 poll and about the same as in PDK polls in previous years.

When we expand the possible response categories, however, a somewhat different picture emerges. Only 4 percent of the American public has “complete” trust and confidence in teachers, and just 38 percent has “a lot” of trust and confidence in them. Meanwhile, 49 percent has “some” trust and confidence, and 9 percent has “little” trust and confidence. In other words, 58 percent of those surveyed express less than “a lot of trust and confidence” in the teaching force.

Since this is the first time the public has been asked to break its assessment of teachers into four categories, we cannot document any trends over time. But we do know that public opinion toward teachers unions—and teachers’ opinions of them, too—has turned in a negative direction. The portion who thinks that teachers unions have had a positive effect on their local schools has dropped by 7 percentage points over the past year. Among teachers, the downward shift is no less than 16 percentage points.

In this year’s survey, as we have done in the past, we asked the following question: “Some people say teachers unions are a stumbling block to school reform. Others say that unions fight for better schools and better teachers. What is your opinion? Do you think teachers unions have a generally positive view on your local schools, or do you think they have a generally negative effect?” Respondents could choose among five options: very positive, somewhat positive, neither positive nor negative, somewhat negative, and very negative.

In our polls from 2009 to 2011, we saw little change in public opinion. Around 40 percent of respondents took the neutral position, saying that unions had neither a positive nor a negative impact. The remainder were divided almost evenly, with the negative share just barely exceeding the positive.

This year, however, the teachers unions lost ground. While 41 percent of the public still takes the neutral position, the portion with a positive view of unions dropped 7 percentage points in the last year, from 29 percent to 22 percent.

The drop is even greater, in both magnitude and significance, among our nationally representative sample of teachers. At a time when, according to education journalist and union watchdog Mike Antonucci, the National Education Association has lost 150,000 members over the past two years, and projects to lose 200,000 more members by 2014, teacher discontent appears to be rising. Whereas 58 percent of teachers had a positive view of unions in 2011, only 43 percent do so in 2012. Meanwhile, the percentage of teachers holding negative views of unions nearly doubled during this period, from 17 percent to 32 percent.

But when that same question was posed in either/or terms to the public as a whole, respondents split down the middle: 51 percent say unions had a negative impact, while 49 percent say their effect was positive. Teachers, meanwhile, offered a more positive assessment. When forced to choose between just two options, 71 percent of teachers claim that unions are a force for good, whereas 29 percent see them as a stumbling block to reform.

Support for school spending is shaky.

With the U.S. economy trying to crawl back to recovery, an unemployment rate above 8 percent, and state and local governments facing the prospect of insolvency, many school districts have found it necessary to cut expenditures and personnel. In California, the cities of Stockton and San Bernardino have declared bankruptcy. In Michigan, the financially bankrupt Muskegon schools have been handed over to a for-profit charter organization. Cuts in arts programs and extracurricular activities are becoming commonplace. Nationwide, the number of school employees has drifted downward by as much as 5 percent in the past few years.

Still, the American public continues to support increasing spending on local public schools. Or at least it appears to do so (see Figure 8). Sixty-three percent of the general public says it prefers an increase in school expenditures in the local district, well up from levels in 2007 when only 51 percent of the public called for expenditure increases. Not surprisingly, teachers are even more enthusiastic about increasing expenditures, 68 percent of whom like the idea.

When one investigates the issue just a bit further, however, fractures can be detected in the public’s willingness to spend more on public schools. Though most Americans still offer their support for spending increases in the abstract, their enthusiasm ebbs rather substantially when the taxes needed to pay for the increased expenditures are broached and when information about actual expenditures and salaries is provided.

Part of the explanation for this is the widespread ignorance on the part of the general public about just how much already is spent on public schools. When asked to estimate per-pupil expenditure in their district, Americans guess that expenditures are about $6,500 annually, when in fact they are around $12,500. That is only a slightly better set of estimates than the ones given in 2009, when Americans thought $4,231 was being spent per pupil and the reality was closer to $10,000 (see “Educating the Public,” features, Summer 2009).

When respondents are told the correct figure, support for spending on public schools shifts sharply downward. Support for increased spending on our standard question drops by 20 percentage points, a much bigger drop than what was observed in 2009, when support for increased spending fell only 8 percentage points (from 46 percent to 38 percent).

In another sign of less-than-wholehearted support for an education spending spree, only 35 percent of the public says taxes should increase to fund the schools. Support drops by another 11 percentage points—to just 24 percent—when those interviewed were first told how much was currently being spent.

Teachers, who stand to benefit from increased expenditure, remain committed to more spending when told the realities of the expenditure situation in their district. Their support slips only 8 percentage points from the high of 68 percent when no information is supplied about current expenditures. But even teachers are 17 percentage points less likely to support higher taxes to fund increases in education spending.

When the subject turns from per-pupil expenditures to teacher salaries, the same pattern emerges (see Figure 9). When asked without any accompanying information, nearly two out of three Americans think that teacher salaries should go up. Among teachers, support for a salary boost registers at no less than 85 percent.

As they do on per-pupil expenditures, however, Americans hold markedly inaccurate views about actual teacher salaries. When asked to hazard a guess, Americans estimate that public school teachers in their states receive, on average, about $36,000 in salary annually. The true figure, even without accounting for benefits, pensions, and the like, sits at about $56,000 nationwide.

Support for higher salaries plummets, however, when Americans are told how much teachers actually make in their states. Of those given the facts, only 36 percent favor an increase, which amounts to a whopping 28-percentage-point decline from the 64 percent favoring an increase when no information is supplied.

When teachers were given accurate information about salary levels in their state, their support slips by only 10 percentage points, probably because they are thinking about their own paycheck. Also, they have a better sense of teacher salaries in their state than the public has, estimating them to be about $44,000 annually.

Is public support for charters really that much higher than for vouchers and tax credits?

As a policy reform, school choice shows no signs of slowing. The number of states with school-voucher and tax-credit programs has escalated since 2010, the number of students attending charter schools climbs steadily year by year, and new technologies for online learning are being promoted by a cascade of new entrepreneurs.

The contours of elite debate about school choice, however, are not replicated in the larger public. While charter schools and digital learning are thought to be the safest choice options for political elites to promote, tax credits are even more popular than charters, and vouchers, the most controversial proposal, also command the support of half the population when the idea is posed in an inviting way.

Vouchers and tax credits. When it comes to school vouchers, apparent levels of public support turn on the wording of the question. For the past two years, PDK has asked whether respondents “favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense.” Even with the rather loaded “at public expense” phrasing, PDK reported that support shifted upward from 34 percent to 44 percent between 2011 and 2012.

If one asks the question in a more inviting manner, as we have, support jumps further still (see Figure 10). Told about a proposal “that would give low-income families with children in public schools a wider choice, by allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition,” 50 percent of the American public comes out in support and 50 percent expresses opposition.

Still, support for vouchers does not match public willingness to back tax credits, even though most economists think the difference between vouchers and tax credits more a matter of style than substance. Nearly three-fourths (72 percent) of the public favors a “tax credit for individual and corporate donations that pay for scholarships to help low-income parents send their children to private schools.” We find little evidence that support for tax credits has changed significantly since 2011.

Charters. Figure 11 shows that when given a choice of supporting or opposing charter schools, 62 percent of the public says it favors ”the formation of charter schools,” nearly identical to what PDK finds (66 percent favoring ”the idea of charter schools”). Support for charters, however, is softer than it might seem. When respondents are given the opportunity to take a neutral position that neither supports nor opposes charters, no less than 41 percent choose that option. Among the remainder, the split is nearly three to one in favor of charters.

Meanwhile, public knowledge about charters remains as impoverished as ever. As our survey did two years ago, we asked respondents a variety of factual questions: whether charter schools can hold religious services, charge tuition, receive more or less per-pupil funding than traditional public schools, and are legally obligated to admit students randomly when oversubscribed. We found little change in the level of public information over the past two years. Large percentages of respondents still say they don’t know the answers to these questions. Among those who hazard a guess, they are as likely to give the wrong answer as the correct one. Although teachers do a better job of accurately identifying the characteristics of charter schools, even a majority of teachers get many of the answers wrong or say they don’t know.

Online education. As major universities—Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and others—are joining community colleges and state universities in a nationwide dash toward online learning in higher education, many states are exploring ways of incorporating new digital technologies into secondary schools.

A substantial share of both the public and the teaching force seems ready to consider the expansion of online learning. When asked if high school students should be allowed to take “approved classes either online or in school,” opinion splits down the middle, with a bare majority (53 percent to 47 percent) favoring the idea. Teachers are more enthusiastic, among whom no less than 61 percent feel students should be given an online option.

The public, however, is not equally enthusiastic about all uses of the online tool, nor is support for the idea gaining strength. The most popular uses are for rural education and advanced course taking. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed think students in rural areas should have online opportunities, with only 14 percent opposing the idea. That is down modestly from the 64 percent who supported this use in 2008. Similar percentages of support and opposition are expressed for advanced courses taken online for college credit. But once again, levels of support have slipped since 2008 (from 68 percent to 57 percent in 2012).

Less popular are online courses for dropouts and home schoolers. Only 44 percent favor, and 30 percent oppose, using public funding to help dropouts take courses online. Many home schoolers find online courses to be a valuable tool, but the public remains dubious. Only 28 percent favors public funding for such uses, and 38 percent opposes it. Those percentages have not changed materially since 2008.

William G. Howell is professor of American politics at the University of Chicago. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and deputy director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. Paul E. Peterson is the director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

The National Education Policy Center has just released a critique of our study by Sara Goldrick-Rab of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Several of the issues raised by Goldrick-Rab have no merit and none undermine the primary conclusion of our study: The voucher intervention in New York City increased the college enrollment rates of African-American students.  Below are responses to the primary criticisms raised in the review:

1. The review questions the equivalence of the treatment and control groups by pointing to a modest difference between the treatment and control groups in the share of African-American students’ parents who completed a bachelor’s degree.  This difference is only marginally statistically significant and, as the review notes, there are other differences that favor the control group.  For example, control group families are less likely to have a father absent.  Because chance differences can appear for any one characteristic, statisticians have developed a test that uses information on all background characteristics to ascertain whether two groups are equivalent.  The overall treatment and control groups and the African-American and Hispanic subgroups all survive this test.

2. The review says that an interpretation of the results for African-American students is not appropriate because they do not differ significantly from those observed for Hispanic students. As stated in our report, it is true that the effects for African Americans and Hispanics are both positive and do not differ from one another by an amount that is statistically significant.  But we can confidently say that the effect for African-American students is positive (i.e. greater than zero), whereas we cannot say the same for Hispanic students.

3. The review asks for an interpretation of the results for the small number of white and Asian students.  But the treatment and control groups for this small number of students do not survive the equivalence test mentioned in item one; interpreting the results is therefore inappropriate.

4. The review raises a technical issue related to measurement error that is incorrect.  It is correct that our college attendance measure is not perfect because the process used to match students to college enrollment records is not precise.  But those errors appear as part of the standard error currently reported and no further adjustment is appropriate.

5. The review makes an error in its interpretation of a null finding.  It concludes that our report “convincingly demonstrates that in New York City a private voucher program failed to increase the college enrollment rates of students from low-income families.”  That statement is false.  The overall impact estimate is not estimated with enough precision to conclude that the voucher intervention had no effect.  The overall impact is not statistically significant from zero, but it is also not statistically significant from a negative impact of 3 percentage points or a positive impact of 4 percentage points.

6. The one result that can be reached with confidence is that the impact of vouchers for African Americans was positive.  None of the issues raised in this commentary compromise that conclusion.

- Matthew M. Chingos and Paul E. Peterson

Many charter schools tout attributes similar to those offered by the church’s schools, such as disciplined environments, an emphasis on personal responsibility and character development, and distinctive instructional and curricular approaches.

And Buddin, whose report is more broadly aimed at measuring the impact of charters on all private schools, says,

[C]harter schools are pulling large numbers of students from the private education market and present a potentially dev­astating impact on the private education market, as well as a serious increase in the financial burden on taxpayers.

As both Adam Emerson and Kathleen Porter-Magee have already pointed out, Catholic schools were in decline long before charters came on the scene. Between 1960, when Catholics educated one out of every eight American school-age children (5.2 million) and 1990, when charter schools first came on the scene, 30 percent of the 13,000 Catholic schools in the U.S. closed (with enrollment plummeting to 2.5 million). In fact, since the pace of the enrollment decline has slackened in the charter era (2,000 of 9,000 schools—22 percent—have closed in the last 20 years) one might argue that charters have served as a wakeup call for Catholics. As Fordham’s 2008 report on Catholic schools showed, the nation’s largest religious denomination was taking steps to slow the decline; borrowing many of the tricks of the trade from charters, religious orders were forming the equivalent of CMOs, operating networks of schools, and doing sophisticated fundraising. And, as Cavanagh points out, the jury is still out on the benefits of voucher programs to Catholic schools.

As a Catholic, a former seminarian, and a journalist who has written about Catholic schools (here, here, and here), I must admit to being of two minds on the question of whether Catholic schools can be saved and whether their fate should be a public-policy issue. As to the latter, the argument that the public benefits from private schools by educating students that the taxpayer doesn’t have to is compelling. Lackman estimates that Catholic students moving to publicly financed charters in New York cost taxpayers an extra $320 million a year. Buddin says that, nationwide, the exodus costs $1.8 billion. Those are significant numbers. Does that mean the public should be subsidizing Catholic schools? Vouchers offer the cleaner—and Constitutional—public-policy option.

The question of what really ails Catholic schools is the one I would hope Catholics themselves continue to consider. Here, I would offer a couple avenues worth exploring. First, there’s the pedagogical and curricular problem. Here, John Dewey, no fan of the Catholics or their schools, which he pronounced “inimical to democracy,” may have had the last laugh: Once known for their rigorous academic and organizational structure, Catholic schools now implement many of the instructional theories and practices that predominate in Dewey-inspired progressive-education schools (the dominant principle of our public schools for most of the last fifty years). The other irony, as Tony Bryck and the co-authors of the now-classic 1992 study, Catholic Schools and the Common Good, discovered, is that by virtue of their rigor Catholic schools (once) did a better job educating ordinary kids, including the poor, than did public schools. As I wrote in my 2008 Ed Next story (referenced above),

According to the Common Good authors, Catholic high schools—and many believe that this applies to elementary schools as well—“manage simultaneously to achieve relatively high levels of student learning, distribute this learning more equitably with regard to race and class than in the public sector, and sustain high levels of teacher commitment and student engagement.” One of the keys, they concluded, is the organization of Catholic schools. Parochial schools are less likely to fall into the public-school habit of “structuring inequities”: public schools offer students the chance to take weaker academic courses while Catholic school courses are “largely determined by the school.” The irony, say Bryk et al., is that such a “constrained academic structure” contributes more to “the common school effect” than the potluck served by the public schools. Catholic schools give less weight to “background differences” of their students and thus do not allow those background differences to be “transformed into achievement differences.”

Thus, Catholic schools are simply not the academic hothouses they once were.

And Catholic schools may not be so Catholic anymore either. We know that the nuns, on whose back the system was built, according to Bryck et al, are largely gone, taking with them not just their free labor, but a zealous loyalty to “the faith.” The God gene has been modified. I recall an interview with a teacher at a Chicago charter school, started and run by the Christian Brothers, an ancient Catholic order, during which the teacher complained that the school’s problem was that it could not teach about God. He had a point. The seven pillars of character that hang from pretty banners in the hallway just don’t have the same resonance as the image of Moses coming down from the mountain with the ten commandments that God had just etched in stone tablets. (There is the old Catholic joke about the delinquent public school kid whose father transferred him to a Catholic school, where his misbehavior ceased. “I got there and saw this guy hanging from a tree with nails in his hands and feet,” the boy told his father, “and I figured they meant business.”)

The point is not that charters, which are public schools of course, need more religion—it’s that Catholic schools do. In their struggle to survive, parochial schools have opened their doors to students of all faiths and have, not surprisingly, watered down their evangelism. And while this has helped stem the tide of decline—as well as reinvigorate the church’s missionary zeal (the famous line from Cardinal Hickey of Washington, quoted by Kathleen, “we don’t education [urban] students because THEY are Catholic, but because WE are”)—it has also dampened the Church’s once-powerful religious belief system. It’s now hard to tell whether Church’s new ecumenical bent caused the decline in its schools or if the secularizing of the Catholic schools has made them less relevant—and less competitive. It may not be the Catholic school system that is in trouble, but the Church.

It may be well to ponder some history here and recall that the same 1884 conclave of Bishops (in Baltimore) that gave American Catholics a detailed “catechism” of belief was the same one that ordered each parish to build a school and each Catholic kid to attend it. Is it time for another such meeting?

-Peter Meyer

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View blog.

You can read the study here.

A Wall Street Journal op-ed on the study is here.

And a blog entry about how the study came about is here.

Behind the Headline
How Vouchers Came to D.C.
Education Next | Fall 2004

Nearly three hundred new students have been awarded vouchers in D.C. as part of a controversial federally-funded program. As Emma Brown notes in the Washington Post, the Obama administration has repeatedly tried to shut down the voucher program, while House Majority Leader John Boehner has fought to maintain the program “as a beachhead in the school-choice movement.”

Spencer Hsu wrote about the origins of the D.C. voucher program in “How Vouchers Came to D.C.: The Inside Story,” which appeared in the Fall 2004 issue of Education Next.

In the Fall 2009 issue of Ed Next, Patrick Wolf described the battles over the program and looked at evidence that students who participated in the program were outperforming peers who did not receive vouchers.

-Education Next

“Disruptive innovation” is his seminal insight, perhaps better summarized in Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile than in the education book itself. “How was it,” he started wondering, “that big, rich companies, admired and emulated by everyone, could one year be at the peak of their power and, just a few years later, be struggling in the middle of the pack or just plain gone?”

He figured it out by closely observing the steel industry. The huge American steel firms (U.S. Steel, Bethlehem, etc.) were challenged and gradually undone by small, nimble producers that Christensen calls “mini mills,” which began by producing low-end products (“rebar”) that the big companies were glad to quit making because they weren’t very profitable anyway. Now bear with this long quote from the profile.

In the world of steel, the “mini mills” were the disruptive innovation that transformed the industry—and put many of the big old firms out of business. (Once-mighty Bethlehem Steel, for example, went bankrupt in 2001.)

Christensen tells similar tales of transistor radios sinking Zenith and RCA, of low-price Toyotas nearly doing the same to GM, Ford, and Chrysler, and many more. The disruptive innovator was able to do things that, at the time, didn’t make sense to the traditional operator—and eventually stole its market.

Back to our K-12 education system. Christensen and colleagues don’t suggest that it’s going out of business but they do say it will be transformed by a pair of disruptive innovations: technology (online learning, in particular) and a shift to “student-centric” learning.

You can already see this starting to happen, if perhaps a bit more slowly than they forecast, and it’s mostly a good thing (though some of today’s online products are shoddy and being used in questionable ways).

But something else is happening, too, that is apt to be just as profound, and it’s something that Christensen sort of pooh-poohed. It’s the emergence of K-12’s own version of mini mills in the form of independent public schools of choice. These could turn out to be as disruptive, and ultimately as devastating, to traditional education systems as those crummy little Sony radios turned out to be to the vacuum-tube behemoths and as Honda was to Detroit. These upstarts may not put the districts out of business but they’re definitely capturing market share and, in some places, hollowing out the enrollments (and revenues) of the “legacy” operators.

Charter schools (5,000-strong and growing) are the most obvious examples but they’re not the whole story. Think, too, of STEM schools. “Outsourced” schools within “portfolio” districts. Parent-trigger schools. The more radical forms of site-managed schools. Technical-vocational schools. Lab schools. Sometimes alternative and magnet schools. The list can be extended.

They’re no longer just one-offs, either. They’re networking—CMOs, EMOs, “recovery school districts,” “chancellor’s districts”—and they’re being systematically replicated by a growing number of organizations, both local and national. A dozen or more cities already find the aggregate enrollment of these education mini mills nearing (or even exceeding) that of the traditional school system. (Think of D.C., New Orleans, Albany, Dayton…)

The authors of Disrupting Class were well aware of this phenomenon and saw it as useful but not central to the key innovations they had identified. “As we approached the study of education through the lenses of our research on innovation,” they wrote, “our instinct was to frame chartered schools as disruptive innovations, but upon reflection that was not correct.” Rather, they said, charters are “sustaining” innovations, in that they may do things somewhat differently but “their intent is to do a better job educating the same students that districts educate.”

It’s not clear to me why this disqualified them as disruptive innovators, particularly if they’re successfully invading the markets of traditional providers and capturing more and more customers (and usually doing it at lower cost to the taxpayer, though this also makes their job harder). If, in essence, they’re functioning much as mini mills did within the steel industry.

They have another similarity, too: they started with “rebar,” i.e., mostly with the kids that the traditional providers (education’s “big steel”) weren’t much profiting from—poor and minority kids, hard-to-educate kids, fussy kids, dropouts and would-be dropouts, kids with low scores on state proficiency tests, sometimes youngsters with special needs. And while the districts weren’t exactly glad to see those students leave—they took money with them and eventually cost jobs—they were somewhat relieved, too. In places with fast-growing enrollments, the independent public schools also eased pressure on facilities and capital budgets.

That’s not to say the traditional providers welcomed competition. They (and their employee groups) much preferred quasi-monopolies and almost everywhere did all they could to make life difficult for these new rivals. Sometimes, however, they were shrewd enough to compete back, trying to offer their clients the kinds of programs the innovators were offering, and in a few cases (e.g., Joel Klein’s New York, Tom Boasberg’s Denver) even endeavoring to harness the power of this disruptive model to prod their own systems to do a better job of serving their customers.

Education’s mini mills haven’t always done a great job. Lots of charters, for example, need to improve their services and their products—and, if they do, they will almost certainly go “up-market,” too. The implications for education’s “big steel” could be profound.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry originally appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

It was no small task. The headline cried “vouchers”  even while acknowledging that the word was unspoken: “Vouchers Unspoken, Romney Hails School Choice.”The first word of the story was “voucher” but followed with an acknowledgment that Governor Romney never actually uses the word. Rhetorically the damage was already done. Readers knew right up front the Romney plan must somehow be all about this polarizing idea. The story went on to explain the Romney proposal for school choice in some detail. But by the end, it casually labeled federal funding for disadvantaged and disabled students, “vouchers.”

The story is a disservice. The nation needs both presidential candidates to step up to the challenge of improving education achievement, especially for our most disadvantaged students. Neither candidate has given the issue the attention it deserves. In the long run, education is the key to our troubled economy. But, if new ideas are immediately subject to caricature and politicization, we won’t be hearing many of them.

For some time I have been part of a group of education scholars assembled by the Hoover Institution, which issued a detailed analysis of federal education policy last February. We concluded, among other things, that the federal government’s role in education needed to be rethought. Not because we have some Tea Party inspired aversion to federal power, but because we believe the last decade has revealed the limits of the ability of Washington to fix failing schools, from a distance. In this recommendation, we are not far from the Obama administration, which has offered the states waivers from NCLB to experiment with their own methods of school improvement, among other encouraged innovations.

Our analysis goes on to highlight a long tradition in formal economics, known as fiscal federalism. That body of work has established the theoretical and actual benefits of competition among states and cities in the delivery of certain public services. Research provides considerable evidence that such effects are significant in public education—among small public school districts, between public schools and Catholic schools, and between traditional public schools and charter schools.

Our analysis also examines and endorses portable student-weighted funding, more popularly known as “backpack” funding, and already being implemented in some major school districts. The surest way to have students receive the education services to which they are entitled is to have every dollar of funding provided for them go wherever they go to school. For example, a disadvantaged student who enrolls in a more advantaged school should bring with him the money policymakers intended to serve him.

Fiscal federalism and backpack funding are just two examples of ideas with deep research traditions—not political motivations—discussed in our analysis.

The Romney proposal (to which I had some input as an initial member of his education advisory team, but in which I have no investment today, having stepped aside to avoid any appearance of analytical bias) is hardly identical to the work that my colleagues and I produced at Hoover. It does not, for example, include testing requirements that we considered crucial.

The Romney proposal does include ideas that would be genuinely new for federal education policy—like portable student-weighted funding. The proposal has little to say about private schools, and adds that private school participation would be a state option, not a federal mandate. In the end, it is a proposal about giving our neediest students more choice among public schools.

Whatever its other virtues or defects, the plan should be debated on the basis of what it actually proposes—and not a politically-colored version thereof. The nation desperately needs fresh thinking in education. It will never happen if new ideas cannot receive impartial hearings.

-John Chubb

This post originally appeared on The Quick and the Ed

While responses to the speech are just beginning, it is predictable that the governor’s mention of private schools will prompt the most heated—and negative reactions. The governor not only endorsed private school choice in concept, he promised to maintain DC Opportunity Scholarships, which opponents of private school choice have made their top priority to kill.

As a long-time student of school choice (and, full disclosure, an adviser to Romney’s education team) I anticipate the governor is in for a bit of moral outrage—for undermining, threatening, jeopardizing, disrespecting—or, insert verb of offense here—our nation’s public schools. This is really unfortunate. Not for Governor Romney, but for our most disadvantaged students. The fact of the matter is, low income students desperately need better schools, whether the ones they now attend or options that might be made available to them. Most of those options are now and will be public schools. Two million students now attend some 5,000 public charter schools in forty or so states. Millions more choose schools within their public school districts. Of course, many millions choose public schools by choosing their residence.

The Obama administration has advocated for school choice. Its signature competitive grant programs require states to ease restrictions on charter schools. So do its stipulations for states who want waivers from NCLB regulations. The Obama administration recognizes that a vigorous charter sector is important for providing choices, especially in low income neighborhoods. Charters are important for stimulating improvement in all public schools—and providing even more quality choices—as research has clearly shown that they do. I applaud President Obama for his pro-charter measures.

Governor Romney has taken a step further, arguing that private options ought to be available, too. More competition is likely to be a good thing. But private schools are not the main thing. Most of the choices and most of the competition under any presidential administration will be among public schools. This is an idea, a long time in coming and now well established throughout the country, especially in inner cities, which is widely embraced by the public. Let’s not be distracted by the political bogeyman of private schools. Let’s not politicize the debate over school reform to find wedge issues or accentuate divisions. Let’s give credit to Governor Romney for recognizing that choice cannot be effective without ample choices. But let’s not be distracted by the issue of private schools. Let us discuss how best to give our neediest school children excellent options, recognizing that under any scenario those schools will be mostly public.

My colleague at Education Sector, Anne Hyslop, attempts to do just that, in the accompanying post. Based on her ongoing research, Anne offers her perspective on Governor Romney’s proposal, written as Education Sector always tries to write—based on the facts and not on the politics.

-John Chubb

This blog entry originally appeared on the Quick and the Ed.

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.

School districts held an exclusive franchise on public education services until 1991, when Minnesota passed the first law permitting public charter schools. Charter schools are publicly funded, authorized by various agencies designated in public law, but independently managed. They operate outside district control, and most can draw students from all across town, not just those who live within neighborhood boundaries. Virtual charter schools can attract students from all around the state, without regard to any traditional school-district boundary. Parents have a choice, competition has arrived, and innovation can flourish.

But there’s a catch: traditional public-school districts still own the great majority of school buildings, and with rare exceptions, public charter schools have no legal claim to them. If charters want to build their own facilities, they face enormous obstacles. They have no taxing power, no access to state capital budgets, and, ordinarily, no bonding authority—they are shut off from the prevailing public sources of revenue for school construction. Distressingly often, they are denied access even to school buildings that the district no longer uses. Charter schools must take a wide detour around this enormous fiscal pothole. They have won credit enhancements to sweeten private lending and federal incentives to encourage states to create charter-specific facilities programs, and they must conduct ongoing campaigns to raise funds from private donors.

The lack of available facilities is a direct and pressing constraint on the growth of high-quality charter schools. According to a recent survey by the National Charter School Research Project, scarcity of facilities was listed first among all reported external barriers to growth of charter management organizations, mentioned in 89 percent of responses.

Let’s explore the sources and consequences of the iron grip school districts typically enjoy over the financing, development, ownership, and deployment of public school facilities—and some promising strategies for breaking it.

Financing Challenges

From the Minnesota statute on, access to dedicated revenues for facility construction was the gravest omission from state charter-school laws. The gap may have seemed reasonable at first. Charters were new and untried, and most were chartered for a term of five years, sometimes less. So even friendly policymakers resisted giving them the keys to funding instruments traditionally used by districts to build and maintain impressive, permanent structures. For a few years, as charters sprung up in storefronts and church basements, the policy almost seemed plausible (see sidebar).

Today, a mere nuisance has burgeoned into the foremost hurdle to the rapid expansion of high-quality charter schools. As the number of students entering charters has grown steadily year by year, comprising in 2012 approximately 4.2 percent of public school students nationwide, the case for rethinking the capital requirements of the charter sector has become overwhelming. Today’s charter community boasts large schools, extensive networks, and impressive market share. In six major school districts (New Orleans, Louisiana; the District of Columbia; Detroit, Michigan; Kansas City, Missouri; Flint, Michigan; and Gary, Indiana), at least 30 percent of public school students are enrolled in public charter schools. Another 18 school districts enroll more than 20 percent of public school students in charter schools (see Figure 1). Charter school students represent at least 10 percent of overall enrollment in nearly 100 school districts.

Yet among the 41 states (and the District of Columbia) with charter laws, only 17 provide some kind of direct facilities aid, either capital grants or per-pupil funding, and just three of those provide annual per-pupil capital funding of more than $1,000. And while states deliver straightforward capital support to traditional school districts, their support for charter facilities is often halfhearted and ineffective. Thirty-four states have conduit bond-issuing agencies, but only a few have made the state’s credit (either general obligation or moral obligation) available to charters. Only Colorado has done so at scale (see Table 1).

School Districts Drive the Facilities Bus

The denial of facilities funding would be less problematic if charter schools had routine access to existing buildings that had been built for public school use and already paid for with tax dollars. But the laws governing school facilities were written a century or more before charters existed, when there was only one kind of “public school” in this country. Under such legacy laws, traditional districts remain the sole proprietor, able to make fairly arbitrary decisions about who else might benefit from these public goods. The disparity in legal status between district-managed public schools and chartered public schools is more acute than that of landlord and tenant; it’s more akin to that of landowner and sharecropper, since the charters have no statutory or contractual right to the property.

Documented examples of misalignment between student needs and building availability are legion. Consider only a few of the most celebrated cases on record:

• In late 2010, the Journal Sentinel reported that Milwaukee Public Schools spent more than $1 million a year to maintain 27 surplus school buildings. Yet the district refused sales to charter schools—on the grounds that they would compete with the district for students. In May 2011, the state legislature finally approved a measure allowing the City of Milwaukee to sell the buildings, despite the district’s objections.

• In December 2007, the Special Administrative Board of the St. Louis Public Schools approved terms on the sale of the old Hodgen Elementary School building that included a 100-year deed restriction prohibiting leasing of the building to medical clinics, taverns, adult entertainment facilities, and…charter schools. The restriction was removed by the board in 2009 after the measure was held up to well-deserved ridicule.

• In rural Pennsylvania, the Penns Valley Area School Board is leasing property for construction of a privately funded, $5 million community center that will house a YMCA, the county office for the aging, and other agencies. However, included in the 30-year lease is the following clause: “No groups in direct competition with the District are authorized to use the facility. Those groups in competition are defined as entities that serve the same purpose of the District at the same age level, i.e., charter schools.”

Legal End Runs

Even when there is plain statutory language giving charter schools a share of district building stock, it is too often interpreted away or just ignored.

In Ohio, state law gives charter schools first dibs on shuttered school buildings. But when a prime Columbus property went up for charter school bids in 2010, the district’s general counsel averred that “the district is under no obligation to accept any of the bids…If it rejects all bids, the district can enter into a contract sale at a negotiated price with any buyer.”

When the District of Columbia School Reform Act was passed by Congress in 1996, it included language providing that charter schools should have access to surplus public-school buildings. A succession of D.C. superintendents and mayors (as well as the Financial Control Board that oversaw city government in the late 1990s) ignored or circumvented the law’s intent. The D.C. Council subsequently strengthened the guarantee, providing charters the right of first offer on sales and leases. But there remains a lack of transparency, and much of the surplus inventory is not made available to charter schools. As charter financing expert Maria Sazon succinctly states, “On paper, the Washington, D.C., statutory provision regarding surplus buildings is one of the strongest in the country. In practice, however, the Washington, D.C., government too often ignores it.”

California is the only state that requires, as a matter of law, provision of adequate school facilities for every charter school authorized. It became the law in California in 2000 when voters passed Proposition 39, which requires that the Golden State’s public-school facilities “be shared fairly among all public school pupils, including those in charter schools.”

Initially, charter school advocates were exuberant at voter support for the new law. But they soon discovered that district compliance could hardly be taken for granted. The result has been the longest running school building soap opera in the nation. The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) had to take both the San Diego and Los Angeles school districts to court to enforce compliance. In July 2005, the California Court of Appeals affirmed that districts must consider the needs of charter students and district students equally. But L.A. Unified’s continued recalcitrance resulted in another CCSA lawsuit in 2010, this time contesting the district’s failures to comply with both Proposition 39 and a 2008 settlement agreement setting out conditions for the charter-district relationship. The association contended that in 2010, for example, the district issued just 45 final offers in response to 81 charter school requests for space. None of the offers were in compliance with the law, and fewer than half were accepted by the charter schools. Those numbers did improve in 2011, with 43 schools accepting offers. In response, CCSA agreed to stay its lawsuit in June 2011.

Positive Signs

Not every school district is hostile to charters, however. Those reporting to mayors may have added incentive to create more expansive facilities policies. Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for example, nearly three-quarters of New York City’s charter schools are located in district facilities. Some enlightened district superintendents, such as Denver’s Tom Boasberg, simply view charters and district schools as threads in the same net of support for their city’s children. Boasberg welcomed charter schools into district facilities and by 2011, “16 charter schools operated in district facilities, representing approximately 48 percent of charter schools operating in the district, with 11 of these schools operating in a shared campus partnership.” As more schools began to locate in district facilities, Boasberg requested that some of them prioritize enrollment for students living in the neighborhood. Three of the 16 charters located in Denver Public School facilities now share a boundary with adjacent DPS schools.

Cleveland has embraced the nascent Breakthrough Schools coalition, which united several high-performing charters within a common organizational structure. The district authorizes the schools, has agreed to help them expand, and recently sold them four vacant school buildings. The district’s chief operating officer, Patrick Zohn, clearly saw an opportunity for the district in the $1.5 million transaction: “There’s not really a robust aftermarket for pre-owned school buildings,” Zohn said. “Come on down. We’re dealing, dealing, dealing.”

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has brokered “compacts” between districts and charter schools in 14 cities. Each city’s agreement lists a series of steps the parties will take to ensure equity in resources, enrollment, and services; districts can apply for grants to fund implementation. Several of the compacts address facilities directly, and buildings will be provided at no or low cost for at least some charter schools in Denver; Hartford, Connecticut; Los Angeles; New Orleans; and other sites. The Nashville agreement, for example, promises to “include charter schools in the long-term strategic plans of the district including, but not limited to, student assignment planning and facility usage.”

State leadership can also change long-established attitudes and practices with respect to managing the facilities portfolio. In 2008, Louisiana used its massive post-Katrina settlement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as core funding for a $1.8 billion renovation program for public school facilities in New Orleans—and did so in a revolutionary way. In announcing the program, then state superintendent of education Paul Pastorek said, “The proposal considers all public schools in New Orleans, without regard to governance…. We’re not building schools for the OPSB [Orleans Parish School Board], we’re not building schools for the RSD [the state-run Recovery School District], nor are we building schools for charters. We are building schools for the city of New Orleans.”

Farther north, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels got it exactly right when asked whether Indianapolis Public Schools should sell 13 closed buildings to charter schools. “Sell them? They should give them away!” he said, noting that charter schools are public schools and taxpayers have already paid for the buildings. In May 2011, Daniels signed into law legislation that among other provisions, allows charters to lease or purchase for $1 any unused, closed, or unoccupied school building that is maintained by a school corporation.

Leveling the Playing Field

Whatever the original ownership or cost, surplus properties should rightly be considered a good held in trust for the future student population of the entire city. This calls for two kinds of actions:

•  State legislatures should transfer to municipal leaders authority to manage the disposition of any school space already declared “surplus” by a school district, giving right of first refusal to public charter schools for sale or lease at no cost.

• In cities with no officially declared surplus but pressing demand for charter school expansion, state governments should commission third-party building audits to determine whether there is excess space. If there is sufficient space to provide for non-district-managed schools, authority over that surplus should also transfer to the municipal authority.

State legislatures should put the full faith and credit of the state behind all kinds of public schools, as Colorado has done. Governors and state superintendents should use their own funding leverage in the way Louisiana is doing, sponsoring school projects that serve the entire public-school portfolio and deciding further down the road which kind of schools will occupy which facilities.

A few jurisdictions have modified the customary five-year charter term to make charter schools more attractive to lenders: Arizona and Washington, D.C., both have 15-year charter terms, with high-stakes reviews happening at least every five years, and Colorado charters can be granted 30-year terms. Other states are awarding 10-year charters after the first term, or experimenting with virtually automatic renewal for charters consistently meeting a high performance bar. All of these strategies make charter schools more appealing to lenders by aligning their legal life spans more closely with that of mortgages and bonds. Longer charter terms can bring wary investors to the table, provided that there is also a strong oversight and accountability system in place.

Three Management Models

With clear policy guidance from the state, and with local municipal authorities taking responsibility for implementation, there are many ways to manage the public school–facilities portfolio. Following are three possibilities, each a variation on some established or already-tried approach.

The Real Estate Trust. As with many notions that challenge the educational status quo, this one can be traced to Paul Hill, the protean researcher at the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). He consulted for the Education Commission of the States (ECS) in its 1999 report, Governing America’s Schools: Changing the Rules, which described a “public schools real estate trust” as follows: “In any locality, one or more real-estate trusts assume ownership of a community’s public school buildings, sell the surplus buildings, and build or lease additional facilities in areas with insufficient space. Such trusts help schools find space, as well as tenants for space they no longer need.” Facilities funding would flow directly to schools, which would then use it to lease from the trust.

NewSchools Venture Fund endorsed the idea of nonprofit trusts, at least within the charter sector, in a 2006 paper: “By aggregating capital from multiple sources and consolidating expertise within the organization—rather than in the principal’s office or the central office of a charter management organization—the trust would lower the financial and human cost of real estate development and enable greater access to facilities funding.”

The idea has gotten one rather bumpy road test. Portland, Oregon, created a trust as one outcome of its 2002 long-range facilities plan, initially charging it with disposition or redevelopment of its surplus properties. According to the Portland school board, the real estate trust was “a nonprofit, independent entity created by [Portland Public Schools], which could, at the board’s discretion, be given title to property deemed ‘surplus’ to either market or redevelop it on behalf of the school district.” However, the City of Portland never insisted that the trust act as an independent municipal agency with real powers over property. The trust devolved into an advisory body, and the school board finally amended its policies in early 2009 to formalize the trust’s reduced status.

Retrofitting the Construction Authority. A second approach relies on existing or modified municipal authorities, with an eye toward New York City’s experience. Its School Construction Authority is the rare local entity that has soup-to-nuts responsibility for financing, building, and overseeing public schools, largely because it is now controlled directly by the mayor.

What if cities (rather than school districts) were to create corporations, authorize them to do financing, and assign them the task of managing the public-school facilities portfolio so that both district and charter schools could be housed? These would be local bodies with local accountability.

Or cities could simply expand the portfolio of existing municipal building authorities to include schools. It’s truly curious that such authorities exist in many jurisdictions, financing and putting up municipal and county hospitals and other complexes, while the school district operates in a totally separate bubble. Wouldn’t it be far more efficient to consolidate that work?

Expanding Charter-based Models. Using a third strategy, municipalities would contract with nonprofits to take over and manage the entire school-facilities process.

The District of Columbia tiptoed up to the edge of this idea in 2005, when then superintendent Clifford Janey called for public-private partnerships to support improved school performance. One resulting project was EdBuild, sponsored by the Federal City Council (a business-based civic group). With a mission of “high-performing public schools, inside and out,” EdBuild sought to provide both facilities renovations and academic support to a group of low-performing schools in the District of Columbia, with a vision of eventually taking on a large swath of D.C. schools and creating space that could be used flexibly by both traditional district and charter schools. The venture went under after critics raised questions about the political connections of its sponsors, and the D.C. Council refused to fund its contract with the school system.

A number of strong nonprofits currently serve the national charter community, including New York–based Civic Builders, Los Angeles–based Pacific Charter School Development, and the DC-based Charter School Development Corporation. These organizations differ from traditional district construction agencies by combining financing with a broader development role, serving, in effect, as both the “facilities office” and the chief financial officer in getting projects done.

These and other nonprofits could surely serve a wider public, although there could be some trade-off between their entrepreneurial culture and the demands of fully public administration. Perhaps the charter bargain could be struck in facilities as well as operations: strong accountability for outcomes, with public reporting to a mayor or city council, but far more latitude in matters of budgeting and labor.

Start Now

The school district monopoly over public education facilities is an accident of history. The policy and practice of public education facilities would look far different today if there had been more than one choice of provider when the laws were being written. There may be 100 ways of accomplishing the transformation away from monopoly, but the best path will involve policy and finance reform at the state level; municipal rather than district oversight; and a combination of entrepreneurial energy with appropriate public accountability.

While the exact way forward may vary from one district to another, there should be no further delay in creating state laws and regulations that level the playing field between charters and other public schools. Even with existing rules of ownership, there is no excuse for bolting the doors to unused school buildings. There is no excuse for ignoring the fact that charter schools must take dollars out of classrooms to pay the rent.

Nelson Smith is a consultant on education policy and former president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

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.

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.

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The Key to Quality

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.

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.