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Yvonne Chan’s charter school empire flourishes in Pacoima

October 15, 2012 By

by Barbara Jones
Los Angeles Daily News
October 10, 2012

Her empire stretches from the aging Vaughn Elementary School at one end to the state-of-the-art Global and Green Generation campus at the other.

In between lies a primary center, a middle school, a campus for senior high students and a half-dozen lots where Yvonne Chan dreams of building high-tech learning academies.

It’s been nearly 20 years since Chan transformed LAUSD’s failing Vaughn Elementary into the nation’s first independent conversion charter, a move she parlayed into a thriving network of charter campuses serving 2,400 students in preschool through 12th grade.

Chan envisions her schools, known collectively as the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center, as a hub for the Pacoima community and the anchors of an education and economic corridor stretching along six blocks of Herrick Avenue. It’s a dream she is pursuing with the same single-minded determination that has won her acclaim and brought her students academic success.
“Never allow `no’ to get in the way,” she said during a recent tour of the campuses.

Chan’s newest enterprise is the so-called 3G campus, an architectural wonder that opened this fall and serves 500 second- and third-graders.

Small clusters of students are taught in sprawling classrooms without walls – “These have `me space’ and `we space,” Chan said – with arts and technology integrated into the curriculum. The lessons are taught by teams of teachers and are infused with elements from countries and cultures from around the world.

Off the front lobby is a well-equipped auditorium/theater and space where a library and a coffee shop will soon be completed – all to be open to the Pacoima community.

“Yvonne has completely transformed the neighborhood,” said LAUSD board member Nury Martinez, who grew up in Pacoima and now represents the area.

“She is a pioneer of education reform in Los Angeles. More importantly, she did it with very little help and support from folks at the district who didn’t think she could do it.”

At Vaughn, youngsters begin learning computer skills at the primary center, while those in high school take college-prep classes and study Mandarin – Chan’s native language and one of four in which she’s fluent.

She wants her graduates to be able to compete on the global economic stage, to be supervisors in the factories where all of those “Made in China” products originate.

She’s also established an exchange program with dozens of high-ranking civic and government leaders in China. About 50 Chinese students come to Pacoima for two, two-month periods each year, living with Vaughn’s teachers and bonding with its students in exchange for what Chan termed a “donation” to the school.
Those same Chinese leaders then play host when Chan takes all of her teachers and a select group of high school students on an annual expense-paid trip to Asia.

“She’s one of our most important pioneers,” said Jed Wallace, president of the California Charter Schools Association. “Yvonne has brought a great spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship that is contagious. When you look at Vaughn, you see what’s possible.”

Chan is known in educational circles for being forward-thinking yet practical, such as establishing school-based health clinics and performance-based pay for teachers long before those issues became part of the national dialogue.

She bargained and bartered for materials and services, then plowed the savings back into her operation, which now has assets of nearly $100 million.

She used cash prizes from the Milken Educator Award and other honors she received to leverage grants and bonds, invested in Wall Street, and snapped up neighboring properties when the housing crisis hit.

It’s on these lots where Chan plans to expand her enterprise even further.

While Los Angeles Unified and other districts plan to create STEM centers for science, technology, engineering and math studies, Chan has proposed facilities that incorporate those subjects and an arts component. What she’s dubbed STEAM academies are included in the application she’s compiling for the renewal of her five-year charter in 2013.

The application also includes a track record of her progress at Vaughn, which draws its students from the impoverished neighborhoods of Pacoima, San Fernando and Sylmar.

The school’s Academic Performance Index has climbed nearly 200 points over the last decade and is expected to top 800 for the first time this year. The learning academy’s attendance rate averages 98 percent, while its high school graduation rate is just shy of its 90 percent goal.

“Yvonne is an example of what’s possible in terms of trying to serve all students,” said Jose Cole-Gutierrez, who heads the district’s Charter Schools Division.

“Whether you agree or disagree with her, she’s always trying to be creative and solution-oriented. She’s always trying to push the envelope.”

Chan, now 68, shows no sign of slowing down. She’s tapped into her pension as an LAUSD employee, and is working for $1 a year as founding principal of the learning center and chief of its nonprofit fundraising arm.

She’s a regular visitor to the classrooms of the various campuses, urging preschoolers to dream of college, encouraging second-graders to think creatively, imploring high schoolers to work for a better life.

“If you put kids first,” she said, “miracles happen.”

Filed Under: Choice & Charter Schools Tagged With:

Rocketship Redefines Teaching, Gets Top Results

October 15, 2012 By

“Futuristic Rocketship schools redefine teaching”
by Greg Toppo
USA Today
October 14, 2012

So far the results are promising: Rocketship students score among the top performers on standardized tests.

Luis Zepeda is relentless.

The fourth-grader, his dark hair cropped close, has been staring at a computer screen for close to 20 minutes, trying again and again to solve a devilish little puzzle built around rectangles’ axes of symmetry.

Two friends appear, offering unsolicited advice and urging him to try their solutions. Nothing works, and their teacher, who could offer help, is nowhere in sight.

“This one’s hard,” classmate Brian Aguilera says. Zepeda keeps trying. Finally, after 15 minutes’ more work, he cracks the puzzle. His reward: another, harder puzzle.

Another morning in Learning Lab at Rocketship Si Se Puede Academy, a 3-year-old charter school built on a sliver of city-owned land in the shadow of the I-680 off-ramp. Si Se Puede — Spanish for “Yes It’s Possible” or “Yes We Can” — is part of a tiny chain of schools set to expand nationwide.

While it shares a lot in common with many privately run, but publicly funded, charter schools, Rocketship defies nearly all the conventional wisdom about how an urban elementary school should operate. For one thing, students spend as much as two hours a day one-on-one with a computer, learning virtually all of their basic skills through games.

Most Rocketship teachers are young and inexperienced, and the vast majority attended Ivy League or other top colleges. Rocketship recruits heavily from Teach For America — a high-profile program that matches college graduates with high-needs schools — and pushes teachers to become principals after just a few years in the classroom.

But perhaps the most striking difference is what’s about to happen: The chain is small, with only seven schools, but by the end of the decade, its founders want about 2,000 schools in 50 cities, serving 1 million students. That would make Rocketship nearly as large as New York City schools, the USA’s largest district.

Rows of desktop computers

At a time when standardized testing is as contentious as ever, Rocketship has doubled-down on testing, using it as a signpost for teachers, not a Scarlet Letter. Guided by test scores, teachers outsource basic skills instruction to a series of computer programs, most of which are digital games.

As students log on in the computer lab, they access what amounts to an individualized skills plan, the day’s instruction based on assessments that adjust to their performance.

“You lose kids when either they don’t understand or (say), ‘I know this,'” said Andrea Chrisman, a fourth-grade math and literacy teacher.

The Learning Lab holds 130 students and it’s nearly always full. Once students squeeze into their chairs and pint-sized headphones, the room takes on the hushed air of a study hall during final exams, with each student working at his or her own pace.

Most kids seem smitten with ST Math — it’s what Luis Zepeda was playing as he worked through the axes-of-symmetry puzzle. Developed by a Santa Ana, Calif., non-profit called the MIND Research Institute, the series of games is widely known by its mascot, JiJi the penguin. When kids get a correct answer, the program quickly builds a roadway or removes an obstacle, letting JiJi pass wordlessly across the screen. There are no prizes, no fanfares, no cheers. It’s just JiJi appearing and disappearing. “It’s almost Zen-like in its simplicity,” said Principal Andrew Elliot-Chandler.

The game grew out of MIND co-founder Matthew Peterson’s ideas around “math without words” for kids with language deficits. “Your reward is that you solved the puzzle,” he said.

That’s key to the school’s success, teachers say, because improving basic skills here leaves teachers to do what they love best: Teach big ideas.

As her students clicked away on games one recent morning, Chrisman strolled into the Learning Lab with a paperback copy of the children’s novel Island of the Blue Dolphins under her arm. “I don’t have to spend my time teaching homophones,” she said. “If a computer can do that, I can talk about themes in books.”

Training ground for students, principals

So far the results are promising: Rocketship students score among the top performers on standardized tests. Learning Lab also helps Rocketship balance its books in an unusual way. By hiring non-certified instructors to supervise lab sessions at about $15-$16 per hour, each school saves about $500,000 per year.

A school might have four first-grade classes but need only three rotating certified teachers. The savings go into higher teacher salaries, training, a longer school day, an assistant principal and academic dean — luxuries for schools whose students are virtually all low-income.

Rocketship’s ambitious expansion plans also dovetail with co-founder John Danner’s ideas on career paths. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur who made his fortune with NetGravity, a company that pioneered Internet advertising, Danner, 45, taught high school briefly in Nashville while his wife taught at Vanderbilt Law School.

After a year, he asked his principal what he’d need to do to become a principal, too. “She said, ‘You need to work really hard for 10 years and then do this-and-that,’ and I was like, ‘Wow, that’s not really aligned to what I want to do.'”

Now running what amounts to his own school district, Danner envisions a “big farm system” for Rocketship principals. He wants to grow it quickly so that it will push its best young teachers into administrative roles at new start-up schools.

Jeffrey Henig, who studies school choice, privatization and the politics of urban education reform at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said it’s an open question whether Rocketship can sustain such a model over the long haul.

Innovative groups such as Rocketship and Teach For America “have proven that they can attract a lot of young, eager people when they’re young and eager,” he said. “But one of the big question marks is whether this is creating a professional structure that will hold people and satisfy people, where they can stay in it once they themselves decide to have families and kids.”

Henig said Rocketship’s fast-track career ladder is attractive to Teach For America, which for two decades has wrestled with retention problems. Many of their young teachers “don’t necessarily want to stay in teaching” after their two-year, Peace Corps-like assignment in a struggling urban or rural school, he said.

“This gives them the chance to say, ‘Come do the Peace Corps in the trenches, but then there’s another step if you want to move up the ladder,'” he said. “So I think it’s potentially a marriage of convenience for the two of them — whether it’s good for the rest of us is the big question mark.”

Rocketship’s expansion also is wrankling a few neighbors, who say its local growth is coming at the expense of neighborhood public schools. The push is generating “a grass-roots uprising of the community,” said Brett Bymaster, who lives near a San Jose elementary school slated to compete with Rocketship. “They have engaged in very aggressive recruiting, which has broken a lot of relationships in the community,” he said.

Santa Clara County school board president Joseph DiSalvo said Rocketship’s well-organized parent group has made for raucous school board meetings. “I can see how others see it (as) less than positive,” he said.

A former teacher and principal, DiSalvo said he supports the expansion, but isn’t sure if Danner’s “farm system” is sustainable over time. “It’s brilliant, and it’s something the traditional public world, where I came from, could learn from,” he said. “We put a lot of leaders in positions that fail because it’s so difficult.”

He supports Rocketship’s overall approach, calling it “an exceptional learning environment” for low-income kids. But he said he’s concerned that the chain gives short shrift to foreign languages and the arts.

He also worries that children’s gains might not stick once they get to middle school. “I want to know how they’re functioning once they leave the Rocketship environment.”

Filed Under: Teacher Quality Tagged With:

Charter School Success

October 15, 2012 By

Throughout the media, a statistic is often repeated that suggests charter school achievement is “mixed” and that only 1 in 5 charter schools actually perform well. This started in June 2009, when The New York Times published a report on a study by a small research center out at Stanford University, whose press releases for each of the 15 states studied said that charter schools usually did no better or worse than traditional public schools. It’s been repeated by everyone from Joe Scarborough to Education Secretary Arne Duncan. The problem is that it’s not even remotely true.

Here are some resources that indicate charter schools are succeeding:
—Fact-Checking Charter School Achievement:
Fact-Checking Charter School Achievement documents the true achievement of charter schools, a reform celebrated daily in more than 5,000 schools in 40 states around the country.

— How NYC Charter Schools Affect Achievement
This report shows that NYC charter school students will learn more over time than those students who remain in conventional public schools.

—DC Charter Scores Prove Success
Results from an accountability system fashioned by the DC Public Charter School Board show superior gains in charters versus traditional public schools. The system also notes schools that, according to the data, either need to buck up or be closed, which is something that this independent authorizer is willing to do.

—Democracy Prep Wins Big:
The U.S. Department of Education awarded Democracy Prep Charter School a $9.1M dollar expansion grant to open and turnaround 15 new schools across Harlem, NY, Camden, NJ, and other high-need communities. The most recent NY progress reports affirm Democracy Prep’s place as the highest performing charter management organization in NYC over the past 5 years.

You can find more on school choice and charter school success on the Choice & Charter School Achievement page and the Choice & Charter School Research page.

Filed Under: Choice & Charter Schools Tagged With: ,

Model Legislation for States Grounded in Experience and Practice

October 15, 2012 By

Report Reveals Need for Improved Education Laws

CER Press Release
Washington, D.C.
October 15, 2012

Today the Center for Education Reform (CER) released its much anticipated Model Legislation for States which illustrates a need by a majority of states to overhaul their laws governing charter schools.

More than half of states received a C or below on CER’s annual report card of charter school laws in April 2012, indicating a critical need for a clear and concise definition of what constitutes an effective charter school law. The Essential Guide to Charter School Lawmaking – Model Legislation for States is based on 20 years of experience working with charter school leaders, policymakers and legal experts and reflects what actually works – and what doesn’t – when it comes to ensuring sound charter school policy. This roadmap for advocates and policymakers focuses on the four critical components of strong charter laws: Independent and Multiple Authorizers, Number of Schools Allowed, Operations and Equity.

“Charter schools – public schools, open by choice, accountable for results and free from most rules and regulations that stifle progress in traditional schools – are permitted in 41 states and the District. This model legislation is not just for the nine states that have yet to adopt a charter school law, but for all states to use to amend weaknesses in their laws that limit these important educational options for kids,” said Alison Consoletti, CER’s vice president of research.

In addition to language that states can adopt when strengthening their charter school law, the report also highlights the work of several “exemplary states” including Michigan, New York, Indiana, Minnesota, Arizona, Florida, Missouri and the District of Columbia whose laws have created robust and highly accountable charter school options for parents and children.

“Having a law on the books just for the sake of saying ‘we have a charter law’ is no longer acceptable,” said Consoletti. “We know from decades of analysis that great charter schools come from strong laws. Demand is high. Lawmakers need to act to meet the needs of their students.”

Additional state-by-state research and analysis can be found at the Parent Power Index©.

**Get the Model Legislation for States report here**

Filed Under: Press Releases

The new US visa rush: Build a charter school, get a green card

October 12, 2012 By

by Stephanie Simon
Reuters
October 12, 2012

It’s been a turbulent period for charter schools in the United States, with financial analysts raising concerns about their stability and regulators in several states shutting down schools for poor performance.

The volatility has made it tough for startup schools to get financing.

But an unlikely source of new capital has emerged to fill the gap: foreign investors.

Wealthy individuals from as far away as China, Nigeria, Russia and Australia are spending tens of millions of dollars to build classrooms, libraries, basketball courts and science labs for American charter schools.

In Buffalo, New York, foreign funds paid for the Health Sciences Charter School to renovate a 19th-century orphanage into modern classrooms and computer labs. In Florence, Arizona, overseas investment is expected to finance a sixth campus for the booming chain of American Leadership Academy charter schools.

And in Florida, state business development officials say foreign investment in charter schools is poised to triple next year, to $90 million.

The reason? Under a federal program known as EB-5, wealthy foreigners can in effect buy U.S. immigration visas for themselves and their families by investing at least $500,000 in certain development projects. In the past two decades, much of the investment has gone into commercial real-estate projects, like luxury hotels, ski resorts and even gas stations.

Lately, however, enterprising brokers have seen a golden opportunity to match cash-starved charter schools with cash-flush foreigners in investment deals that benefit both.

“The demand is massive – massive – on the school side,” said Greg Wing, an investment advisor. “On the investor side, it’s massive, too.”

Two years ago, Wing set up a venture called the Education Fund of America specifically to connect international investors with charter schools. He is currently arranging EB-5 funding for 11 schools across North Carolina, Utah and Arizona and says he has four more deals in the works.

And that’s just the start, Wing says: “It’s going to be explosive.”

CREDIT CRUNCH

The charter school movement is somewhat controversial. Critics – led by teachers’ unions – contend they divert much-needed funds from traditional public schools. Still, they have proved quite popular and now educate more than 2 million children in the United States.

Charter schools are publicly funded but privately run, sometimes by for-profit companies. They receive taxpayer dollars to educate each child who enrolls. Yet in most states, they get little or no public money to build classrooms, libraries and other facilities.

Well-established and successful chains of charter schools, such as KIPP, Green Dot or Achievement First, receive hefty support from philanthropic foundations and private donors. The chains can also tap into financing provided by an array of for-profit and non-profit investment funds created for that purpose.

But the charter school movement also includes hundreds of small, one-of-a-kind schools, often started by parents seeking a different educational environment for their children. Those mom-and-pop startups have always had a hard time securing funding to build their schools. Many have had to make do with makeshift classrooms in strip malls or church basements.

And lately, experts say, the credit crunch has worsened.

“It’s a hard go,” said Eric Hall, an attorney in Colorado Springs who advises charter school boards.

Last month, Fitch Ratings warned it was likely to downgrade bonds backed by charter schools because the sector is volatile and the schools are highly leveraged. Such risks mean charter-school debt is typically considered speculative, rather than investment grade, said Eric Kim, a director at Fitch Ratings.

Meanwhile, the IRS has signaled it plans closer scrutiny of charter schools’ tax-exempt status if they rely on for-profit management companies to provide their classroom space and run their academic programs, Hall said. He sent his clients a long memo this summer warning that the stepped-up IRS oversight could put some at “significant risk.”

If that weren’t enough to make investors wary, several well-known charter schools have run into significant legal and fiscal hurdles in recent months.

Missouri regulators shut down six campuses run by Imagine Schools, one of the nation’s largest for-profit charter chains, because of poor academic performance. A judge in California ruled that Aspire Public Schools, a large non-profit chain, hadn’t secured the proper approval for six of its schools and would have to get permission from local boards of education to continue running them. Local officials yanked the charter of a high-achieving middle school in Georgia over concerns about mismanagement.

All told, about 15 percent of the 6,700 charter schools that have been launched in the United States in the past two decades have since closed, primarily because of financial troubles, according to the Center for Education Reform, which supports charter schools.

This fall alone, more than 150 established charter schools didn’t open their doors to students.

Such volatility “will spook people, no doubt about it,” said David Brain, chief executive officer of Entertainment Properties Trust, which has historically owned movie theaters but branched out to invest in charter schools, including the six that were shuttered in St. Louis.

Brain said the closures did not affect his company’s bottom line and he remains convinced charter schools are a profitable sector. But even he’s not ready to start backing untested startup schools.

Charter school administrators say they know that wariness all too well.

“Until you get that charter renewal that says you’re doing good things” – typically after five years in operation – “banks won’t even talk to you,” said Hank Stopinski, principal of the Health Sciences Charter School in Buffalo. Without foreign investment, he said, “we would not have been able to do this project.”

RECESSION-PROOF

The EB-5 program has drawn sharp criticism in the past. Some immigrant investors have lost both their money and their shot at U.S. citizenship when their American partners proved inept or corrupt. In the United States, critics have questioned the value of trading visas for scattershot investment.

Yet interest is surging. In the first nine months of this year, the government approved 3,000 petitions from foreigners seeking to participate in the program – nearly twice as many as were approved all last year, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Charter schools have become particularly trendy because they are pitched as recession-proof.

An investor forum in China last spring, for instance, touted U.S. charter schools as a nearly fool-proof investment because they can count on a steady stream of government funding to stay afloat, according to a transcript posted on a Chinese website.

Arizona educator Holly Johnson, who runs three charter schools and plans to open a fourth next year, said she couldn’t believe how easy it was to secure $4.5 million in funding from abroad.

“We didn’t have to do anything at all,” she said, other than open her schools to potential investors. They didn’t ask many questions, she said. Their concern was more basic: “They wanted to come over and make sure it was real.”

INNER SATISFACTION

Eager to join the rush, Ali Faisal devoted a day this week to touring charter schools in Arizona.

Faisal, 37, is a Pakistani citizen who now lives in Calgary, Canada. He runs a technology consulting business that works with oil and gas companies and says he is eager to expand to the United States. He figures the best way to do that is to get a green card.

And the best way to do that, he said, is the EB-5 program.

Participants can get a temporary visa by investing $500,000 to $1 million in a federally approved business. If the business creates or preserves at least 10 jobs in two years, the investor and his immediate family are eligible for permanent residency in the United States.

“It’s a much easier path,” Faisal said.

He decided to put his money in a charter school, he said, because that way he felt he’d be serving society as well as helping himself. The schools he saw impressed him with their rigorous science curriculum and he said he hoped his investment would help nurture a new generation of American entrepreneurs.

“Investing in some type of hotel,” Faisal said, “will not give me that inner satisfaction.”

Filed Under: CER in the News

Experts’ views about Obama and Romney on Education

October 12, 2012 By

by Howard Blume
Los Angels Times
October 12, 2012

The following are edited excerpts from telephone interviews and email exchanges with leading education analysts, writers and researchers regarding the policies and positions of the presidential candidates.

Michelle Rhee

Chief executive, StudentsFirst; former chancellor, District of Columbia Public Schools

Both support expanding educational options for families. President Obama did this, for example, by encouraging states to get rid of unnecessary caps on public charter schools through Race to the Top [grants]. At the same time, Gov. Romney supports dramatically expanding choices parents can make about where to send their kids to school. But he doesn’t tie that increased flexibility to strong rules ensuring any school — private or public — that takes the public funds will be held accountable for student learning.

Jonathan Kozol

Author whose books about education include “Death at an Early Age” (1967) and “Savage Inequalities” (1991). His new book is “Fire in the Ashes.”

As we saw in Wisconsin, there is a constituency out there that would like to do away with public-sector unions. The teachers are the loudest of those unions. Romney could not do away with teachers unions, but I think he will do his very best to move us in that direction.

President Obama simply wants to challenge the teachers unions to be more flexible in their demands but obviously recognizes they have a useful role in our society.

I regret the President’s apparent willingness to continue relying on standardized exams in evaluating teachers because I think it’s a simplistic way of judging what happens in the classroom and excludes so many aspects of a good education that are not reduceable to numbers.

The President recognizes that a demoralized teaching force is not going to bring passionate determination to the education of children — no matter how you measure them, castigate them or properly criticize them.

Jeanne Allen

President, Center for Education Reform, based in Washington, D.C.

A Romney administration would likely leave the regulating to the states, where it belongs. This becomes the huge distinction between the candidates—on charters, on teacher issues, on testing. Obama believes government should lead, and if the states aren’t doing something he’ll step in.

Romney’s impact would be felt much bigger and broader than the current administration’s impact. Today you can get more money by promising to behave. Romney’s approach would likely be very different: his incentives for choice…; his fight with labor; his attempt to reopen the higher education lending market.

Obama should be calling the unions to the carpet, and instead [Education Secretary Arne] Duncan is sending platitudes about getting along and collaborating. That’s because they promised the unions they would work with them and need the unions. Romney has no such allegiance.

Gary Orfield

Professor, UCLA Graduate School of Education; co-director, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA

The Obama administration should have fought harder to continue the economic stimulus in education for at least another year or two. Without it things in schools and colleges would have been far worse.

My reading is that Romney is profoundly skeptical about the value of federal funds and thinks they do no good.

A Romney administration would obviously bring deep cutbacks in virtually all areas of domestic spending.

The Chicago teachers strike is a reflection of the fact that teachers have been pushed too far for too long and are particularly incensed on the overly assertive (and intellectually indefensible) use of test scores to evaluate individual teachers. Romney’s very hostile reaction toward the teachers and the Obama Administration’s straddle show the difference.

Diane Ravitch

Education historian and blogger whose books include “Death and Life of the Great American School System” (2010).

Both support charters, which is privatization, and which do not get better test scores than public schools.

Both support test-based evaluation of teachers, which has never been shown to accomplish anything other than to demoralize teachers.

Both support carrots (merit pay) and sticks (closing schools like shoe stores that don’t make a profit). Merit pay has been tried again and again for nearly a century. It never works.

Both emphasize test scores as the measure of good education, which they are not.

Neither talks about the impact that poverty has on children’s readiness to learn.

Three big differences:

1. Romney supports vouchers; Obama does not.

2. Romney embraces privatization; Obama has offered only half-hearted support via privately managed charters.

3. Romney wants to give the student loans back to the banks and provide no help for college students drowning in debt. Obama took the program away from the banks and understands that students need financial aid. All the talk about boosting college-going rates is hollow, if students can’t pay for it.

Filed Under: CER in the News Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Dream Vice Presidential Debate Questions from Education Reformers

October 11, 2012 By

by Jeanne Allen
October 11, 2012

As I wrote last week, the first Presidential debate was a pleasant surprise from my perspective as a veteran education reformer accustomed to sitting through years of debates, listening to candidates talk about important issues like the economy, jobs, and national security with barely a mention of the building block for the solution to all of those problems – EDUCATION.  It would be wonderful to hear from the Vice Presidential candidates on the issue, since both have had occasion to vote or otherwise stake out positions on education reform, and it would be helpful to hear their positions laid out more specifically.

Below are a few of the questions we would ask the Vice Presidential candidates, as well as some additional information that might provide context for debate viewers in the event these questions are raised.

Question 1: FOR VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN.  Governor Romney has proposed allowing federal money allocated for students most in need, students who are typically stuck in failing schools, to follow them to schools of choice where those programs currently exist at the state level. What is your position on this and in general, how do you now feel about providing poor children the choices you and the other candidates have been afforded?

Once upon a time Vice President Biden parted company with his party to vote to authorize a school choice program for the District of Columbia, twice, a program President Clinton vetoed.  Others, such as Senators Lieberman and Landrieu were also early supporters.  In this Administration, however, the same program was zeroed of the budget — twice — and only restored after pushing and no-holes barred deal making by the House leadership.  It would be worth knowing how the VP could explain why he let this happen.

Question 2: FOR CONGRESSMAN RYAN. You voted for HR 1, The No Child Left Behind Act, which authorized a federal accountability system that has had a strong impact on states and local community behaviors, much of which you support. Today the Obama Administration has issued waivers to the program in the absence of it lacking renewed authorization or changes that both sides may want. What is your view of the House’s position today on NCLB?

The Congressman’s support for NCLB is well known, and Governor Romney has been positive in the past as well.  But the leaders of today’s House of Representatives have taken the position that the act was too top heavy, and they’d prefer local control again. That kind of control — in which school boards, school districts and teachers unions dictated local policy that protected their own interests and masked school failure behind bad data and no transparency — was the root cause of NCLB being enacted.  The Rs have shifted. Wonder how Congressman Ryan squares his previous support with his colleagues — and with the Duncan waivers.

Question 3: FOR VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN.  In the first presidential debate President Obama seemed to be reading off the latest poll results when he offered smaller class sizes and said he’d invest more in education to solve its problems. What is the Administration’s evidence for smaller class size impact and how much money is your administration planning to spend on helping schools lower class size? Where is the evidence that additional spending on more programs will result in student achievement gains?

The notion of class size reduction really does contradict other policies the President and his education leadership team endorse. The structural changes in education that have been created by NCLB or incentivized for some states by Race to the Top are about choice and accountability, which are outputs, not inputs. In fact the only group that pushes lower class sizes are the teachers unions, as they see it as a labor issue, not as an education issue.  Will anyone in the media ever be brave enough to tackle that sacred cow with the current Administration?

Question 4: FOR CONGRESSMAN RYAN.  You and others in your camp have said that there are not many fundamental differences on education between Romney-Ryan and Obama-Biden.  What are the similarities and what are the differences?

Reformers are split on this issue. On one hand, President Obama and many of his colleagues talk about charter schools, performance pay and other long-time reforms that teachers unions are against. On the other hand, the level and intensity of such laws is rarely discussed. There are good charter laws and bad ones, there are very small pilots aimed at helping pay teachers for performance and then there are whole, state-wide laws.  It’s hard to believe that a Romney-Ryan ticket would see enormous similarities. Are the differences there, or is it a matter of not wanting to look like they are against a popular set of initiatives if they started splitting hairs?

Question 5: FOR VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN.  You and the president boast about your signature education program, Race to the Top, and suggest it had a major impact on state and local reform, including the comment made at the last debate that RtTT led to adoption of 43 new laws.  What are those laws — can you name them? — and what do we know today about their impact on student achievement?

While RtTT created a lot of noise, the jury is still out on its impact.  Many of the states that adopted reforms and applied for funds were well on their way to doing so before the Administration created the program. Even a few states that used the carrot of more federal money in a recession and ended up adopting programs (Delaware and Tennessee, for example) are not sure of the impact yet.  But 43? That’s a stretch. Let’s find out. Will Biden be able to name the states or their reforms? How about just a few?

Question 6: FOR BOTH.  How do you distinguish between the work of rank and file teachers, and the work of the teachers unions? What would you say to the union leadership about their positions on school choice, charter schools, performance pay, online learning? What would you say to teachers individually about your respective Administrations?

Congressman Ryan hails from the state where the teachers unions were in the lead in attempting to recall Governor Scott Walker. Doing so would have caused a roll back not only of collective bargaining reforms but of charter school and school choice programs.  Is he willing to say boldly that he believes unions are a problem and risk offending teachers who might be discouraged by such comments? VP Biden has always been endorsed by the teachers unions but has supported charter schools and even a modest school choice program (see Question 1). With a few minutes of questioning, we might get to the heart of whether he believes the teachers unions are making a positive impact — or are obstructionist.

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For more on where Romney and Obama camps stand on critical education issues, head over to our Education and the Presidential Candidates page.

Filed Under: Opinions

Is Common Core about to Melt Down?

October 11, 2012 By

by Neal McCluskey
Cato@Liberty
October 11, 2012

Is the national curriculum standards debate about to go nuclear?

Proponents of national standards, as I’ve pointed out many times, have made a concerted effort to avoid attention as they’ve insidiously—and successfully—pushed the so-called Common Core on states. They’ve insisted the effort is “state led,” even though states didn’t create the standards and Washington coerced adoption through Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind waivers. They’ve called adoption “voluntary,” even with the heavy hand of the Feds behind them. And they’ve assiduously avoided what blew up past efforts to impose national standards: concrete content such as required readings or history lessons that were guaranteed to make people angry.

Well, with a recent unveiling of sample items for federally funded tests that go with the standards, all that might be about to change, and the whole thing could become radioactive to the public.

A couple of days ago the HechingerEd blog—from the education-centric Hechinger Report—published a post looking at preliminary testing items from the two consortia hand-picked by the Obama administration to create the national tests. Included in the post were links to sample items. I didn’t hit every one, but those I did check out contained, among other things,  confusing readings, poor questions, and lame functionality (in some cases the reading material on which questions were based didn’t even show up). And here’s one for the grammarians: A video-based item about the effect of weightlessness on astronauts’ bodies asked how weightlessness is like “lying” on a bed. The astronaut being interviewed, however, said it’s like “laying on a bed.” A small matter, perhaps, but one among many matters both small and big.

And here’s a really big one:

Smarter Balanced officials gave an example of a multi-part question in which high school students are asked to imagine they are the chief of staff for a congresswoman. Before they start working on the test, their teacher is supposed to lead a classroom activity about nuclear power. The students are then asked to come up with a list of pros and cons about nuclear power. Finally, they must write up a presentation for the congresswoman to give at a press conference later that day…. Questions like the one about nuclear power are more expensive, because they will likely require a trained evaluator to score them.

So much for avoiding controversy! Not only do we discover that the tests will have students take on hot-button topics like nuclear power, but scores will be meted out by human evaluators.

The fears and problems are clear: What should students be told about nuclear power—or any other contentious issue—that the tests address? Who decides? Will evaluators really just grade students on the structure of their presentations, or whether students write things with which the evaluators agree?  How will scoring be consistent among evaluators? Even if consistent, how will students and parents be assured of that?

This day had to arrive sooner or later. Eventually, something substantive had to come from the Common Core crowd. The question now is whether it will cause the whole, dubious undertaking to suddenly melt down.

Filed Under: Standards & Testing Tagged With:

The New Letter to Friends of The Center for Education Reform No. 103

October 11, 2012 By

NEW LETTER TO FRIENDS OF THE CENTER FOR EDUCATION REFORM
NO. 103
OCTOBER 2012

Dear Friend:

Who comes up with this stuff?

Within our local Montgomery County, MD public schools — acclaimed to be the “best” in the nation —third graders and their parents have evidently been so confused by traditional grades (A, B, C, etc.) that district administrators have developed a new system. Eventually, all students in grades 3-5 will be evaluated as follows:

ES, for Exceptional
P, for Demonstrating Proficiency
I, for In Progress, or
N, for Not Yet Making Progress

The intent, according to officials, is to bring specificity to grading, as if generations of Americans have not understood what the “normal” grades are supposed to mean. Granted, not all As are As and not everyone who gets a C thinks their work was average. But we know what they are supposed to mean and we also know there’s a degree of subjectivity to it.

Proficiency and Progress are gaining traction, no doubt as a result of the new, controversial Common Core which will attempt to standardize what kids learn across the states. Though masked as voluntary measures, states are being pushed and cajoled into adopting them and education establishment types are going willingly along, for reasons that will fill another several pages but I will summarize later. But what standards set out to measure — overall mastery of subjects at the end of one’s tenure in a grade — is not the same as what one teacher seeks to measure in one class. It is possible to measure whether a student is proficient or making progress learning to read, but is it possible to use that same criteria for a particular reading lesson, or when assessing a set of history or geography lessons over a quarter or semester?

Imagine the shouts of joy when your little one comes home with one of these new grades:

Mother: “Oh honey; Look – a P! I’m so proud of you. You have demonstrated proficiency!”
Child: “What does that mean, Mom?”
Mother: “Well, clearly you’ve shown the teacher that you have mastered the lesson about the westward expansion.”
Child: “Well, actually I thought it was a little confusing but okay, that’s good.”

Subscribe now to keep reading Jeanne Allen’s musings on Measurement & Evaluation, The Strike, The Movie, The Debates and the state of the modern day education reform movement in Anchors Away.

(Please Note: Supporters of the Center for Education Reform will continue to receive complimentary issues of the Letter to Friends. Be sure to check your mailbox or let us know if you prefer to receive these communiqués electronically.)

Filed Under: Opinions

The VP Debate: Another Good Night For Ed Reform?

October 11, 2012 By

by Jeanne Allen
October 11, 2012

Last week’s Presidential debate was a pleasant surprise from the perspective of this veteran education reformer accustomed to sitting through years of debates, listening to candidates talk about important issues like the economy, jobs, and national security with a barely a mention of the building block for the solution to all of those problems – EDUCATION.

President Obama and Governor Romney proactively peppered comments on education throughout their discussions, giving the American people a pretty good idea of their different positions on the topic.   As we look forward to tonight’s Vice Presidential debate, I hope that Vice President Biden and Congressman Ryan follow the lead and make education a major topic in the debate.  I want to hear more about the two tickets’ vision for education in this country.

What do they believe is the role of the federal government in education?  How will they address the skills gap and the still very present achievement gap in this country?  How should we pay, train, and retain teachers?  And of most importance to me: will the Obama/Biden ticket take the opportunity they missed last week to embrace school choice?

Once upon a time, Joe Biden voted to authorize a program of school choice for DC students. Under President Clinton, Biden was one of a few democrats who parted company with their party to authorize school choice, but the approval of the program was vetoed.

In an interesting twist of fate, Paul Ryan was the staffer for the committee overseeing DC operations chaired by then Senator Sam Brownback, and school choice and charter schools, not yet realized in the district or in most states was something the Senator explored. Many of us were called to testify and offer information and research from around the country.  The reform plan Congress first developed for the District of Columbia was a result of Paul Ryan’s work, and Joe Biden’s vote.

Ryan would go on to embrace school reform in many additional ways, while Biden has moved to the mainstream of his party and not been nearly as vocal as his early votes indicated he might someday be.  Will such distinctions show tonight?  Imagine these two gentleman, both whose records show support for school choice, both who value the role of Catholic education in solving some of our nation’s toughest education problems, embracing the same notions for the country on education!

But whether they come together or not, I hope that tonight’s debate doesn’t result in a pandering to poll-tested phrases about class size and money and teachers, but instead amplifies what the two candidates know to be true about what works in education. What works is not the status quo, but a robust ecosystem where quality-learning opportunities are available to everyone by choice and tied together with clear performance-based accountability.  They know that. Let’s hope they share that with the millions watching.

I’ll be watching – and live tweeting! – so be sure to follow @JeanneAllen and @edreform tonight for running commentary on what I hope will be another good night for ed reformers (no matter what side of the debate you fall on).

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For more on where Romney and Obama camps stand on critical education issues, head over to our Education and the Presidential Candidates page.

Filed Under: Opinions Tagged With: , , ,
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