Sign up for our newsletter
Contact

Charters Not Designed to Be Responsive to Parents. Right.

January 16, 2013 By

January 16, 2013

Huh? There are lots of ridiculously inaccurate things said about charters but this one takes the cake.

“…charters are often not designed with the focus of being responsive to parents…”

That’s funny. I’m not sure how one attracts parents if they are not responsive, but apparently an academic at NYU — and a member of the NY State Board of Regents — thinks otherwise.

Down in Tennessee, The Cornerstone charter school has been in a struggle with the district where it is also running a failed charter. There are rumors about behaviorable tactics being used in the school, including one teacher who took away kids shoes because they were playing with them.

That’s a pretty stupid thing to do under any circumstance, but it hardly has to do with responsiveness to parents, a hallmark of the charter school concept and for which most schools demonstrate huge parental satisfaction.

Here’s Pedro Noguera‘s full quote:
“The kind of reaction you are seeing is not uncommon. There are many communities where that has occurred,” said Pedro Noguera, executive director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education at New York University.

“It’s more likely to happen in charters because charters are often not designed with the focus of being responsive to parents, the community or the culture of
the children.”

Right.

Filed Under: Commentary, Edspresso Tagged With:

Annual Charter School Law Report Card Issued

January 16, 2013 By

Most states only making satisfactory progress. Strong laws in 13 states.

CER Press Release
Washington, D.C.
January 16, 2012

With fewer than half of the U.S.’s state charter school laws earning a satisfactory grade, policymakers this year are faced with enormous challenges. The success of these new public schools is unparalleled, with more than 2 million students today attending in excess of 6,000 public charter schools. Yet, with fewer than half of the states able to meet the demands of parents and educators who want the freedom to choose charter schools, state laws simply must improve to ensure growth and sustainability.

This is the conclusion of the 14th annual Charter School Laws Across the States Ranking and Scorecard produced by The Center for Education Reform. Among the nation’s 43 charter school laws, there are only four As, nine Bs, 19 Cs and the remaining 11 states earned Ds and Fs.

“At 21 years old, the national charter school movement is only making satisfactory progress,” said CER president Jeanne Allen. “Satisfactory progress is not good enough for our students’ report cards and it shouldn’t be good enough for our state report cards. In the past two years, we’ve seen two new charter laws but both are average in their construction, unlikely to yield large numbers of successful charter schools, and only minimal state improvements. Many states failed to advance substantive reform in 2012, a fact we hope to see change this year.”

Only four states improved their laws since the Center’s report card was issued last year, but nowhere near the trends of the late 1990s era when 17 states created or amended charter school laws.

Since 1996 the Center has studied and evaluated charter school laws based on their construction and implementation, and whether they yield the intended result of charter school policy, which is to ensure the creation of numerous quality learning opportunities for children.

The annual charter school rankings are a critical component of The Center for Education Reform’s Parent Power Index©, which together with the other key elements of reform make up the complete index. Many states will see changes in their scores on the Parent Power Index as a result of the Charter School Laws Across the States Ranking and Scorecard, which will be available to the public January 22.

“As policymakers consider changes to their charter school laws, they also need to be mindful of what it takes to have truly great education reform policies across all issues.” Allen said. “If a charter school law isn’t strong, school choice options minimal or non-existent, digital learning exists for the few over the many, and teacher quality measures are not assured, students will not have opportunities they need and deserve.”

CER’s 2013 Charter School Laws Across the States Ranking and Scorecard are reflected at https://2024.edreform.com/in-the-states. The revised Parent Power Index© for States, 2013, will be available January 22.

Filed Under: Press Releases Tagged With: , ,

The Last Eight States Without Charter School Laws

January 15, 2013 By

Download or print your PDF copy of Last 8 States Without Charter School Laws

Filed Under: Choice & Charter Schools

2013 Charter Law Ranking Chart

January 15, 2013 By

Click on a state name to get detailed information about the charter school law and the rating.

Press Release
Download or print your PDF copy of 2013 Charter School Law Ranking & Scorecard

Filed Under: Choice & Charter Schools

Newswire: January 15, 2013

January 15, 2013 By

Vol. 15, No. 2

OHIO’S ON IT. Thanks to Governor John Kasich and his state board of education, the Buckeye state is moving on substantive education reform, including a teacher evaluation program that ties performance to clear state standards. While it remains to be seen whether the implementation will be as strong as the policy adopted (an issue we’ve seen elsewhere), according to news reports, “by next school year, each teacher will be rated based on students’ academic growth, usually measured on standardized tests, and on how teachers do in the classroom observations.” Accountability for schools being measured on an A-F scale so it’s clear to parents, money being driven to the school level, and a focus on making sure the performance evaluations result in consequences are on policymakers’ agenda.

Additional states are considering making more substantive changes in evaluation for all school players — from students to adults — including North Carolina and Tennessee. Who else is taking a serious look at real accountability? Tell us here.

HELP DC STUDENTS. Only 17 shopping days left to get a DC Opportunity Scholarship! One of the many choices available to students in the District that are most in need and whose families might be considering a private school choice, the DC OSP has helped thousands get out of their failed schools, achieve in school and improve their lives. Politics, as usual, has plagued the program since it’s inception, which has resulted in many people in the community not knowing whether or not the program is even available to them! The organizers are now trying hard to reach out to the community to notify people that this scholarship exists. Help people you may reach in your work or community learn about this great opportunity.

MICHIGAN SUCCESS. A new study finds that Michigan Charter Schools Outperform Traditional Public School Students. This is from CREDO, and we’ve been very critical before about their data. After close analysis of their work in New Jersey and Michigan, CER concludes that the state level reports more closely approximate ‘good research’ and employ better use and understanding of data than their flawed national study. As we say in our statement today, “Where the approach and data used in CREDO’s national study remains flawed, we believe that the current methodology used in the Michigan and New Jersey studies is more sound, and more closely approximates the level of research expertise we should be using to judge charter school achievement. In these studies, it appears that more and better demographic and school level data were used to identify and compare individual students to their ‘traditional public school’ counterparts, providing a more realistic view of students, and therefore, more credible results.” Read the report here. Read the debate over the methodology here and here.

ADVOCACY DAY, 2013. If you’re in New York and support charter schools, you can do more than honk; you can join the literally tens of thousands of happy parents and successful students who the Charter Parents Action Network are taking to Albany to tell legislators what they need to know — the truth, not the bloggers fantasies — about having the power to transform their own children’s lives. To RSVP or to follow up with questions, call 212-437-8394 or go to nyccharterschools.org/advocacyday. If you’re not in New York, you may want to learn how they do this, and take it to your own capital, or find out who already does. Get active!

HELP A LEGISLATOR. Or help thousands. This month new and veteran lawmakers started getting organized for the annual rite of legislative passage — the legislative session. Most of these people are just like you and me — they live in homes or apartments, sleep in beds, drive cars, have kids or dogs or cats or problems or debts, and they have a few ideas and they decided to run for office, and won. So they now have a vote, and guess what? Most of them don’t know where to start to learn about how – and why — to make education reform part of their program this year. Let’s all help out a legislator. First, make sure they know how their states actually work with regard to online learning, school choice, charters, teacher evaluations etc. Their state is ranked on these and other measures. Help them get into the top ten! They may need model legislation or talking points. Use these here, or create your own. But call, visit, educate and push. You know the Blob is.

LOOKING GOOD FOR LOUISIANA. A preliminary review of the state’s voucher program looks good for parents and children who most need options. While the full court hearing has yet to occur, this week an “appellate court panel ruled that the state has a ‘strong likelihood’ of winning its appeal on those grounds and granted a stay of [the court’s initial] ruling, pending a final determination in the case.” The program has continued to operate and that the unions may suffer another blow to their well-funded, but poorly-contrived challenge to school choice. Let’s hope.

Filed Under: Newswire Weekly

Michigan Charter Schools Outperform Traditional Public School Students

January 15, 2013 By

New state-level studies demonstrate more rigorous standard of research than national study

CER Press Release
Washington, D.C.
January 15, 2013

A recent report by CREDO, a Stanford University based organization, finds that Michigan charter school students are seeing two-month gains in learning over traditional schools in one year. The study also found that 35 percent of charters in Michigan have significantly more positive gains in reading and 42 percent of charters have more gains in math than their traditional school counterparts. Continuing a trend CREDO has found in other states in which they’ve conducted studies of state-level public school student achievement data.

The Center for Education Reform has been critical of the work CREDO performed in the past, specifically in its first, national study, which used incongruous state data about students to make conclusions about charter school performance in selected states. This national “study” on 16 states resulted in an inaccurate but often quoted characterization among lawmakers and in the press that charter schools in general are not performing as well as other public schools when in reality, that report did not make meaningful comparisons on students within states or nationally.

A review of CREDO’s recent state level reports shows an improved approach to handling data.

According to CER President, Jeanne Allen: “Where the approach and data used in CREDO’s national study remains flawed, we believe that the current methodology used in the Michigan and New Jersey studies is more sound, and more closely approximates the level of research expertise we should be using to judge charter school achievement. In these studies, it appears that more and better demographic and school level data were used to identify and compare individual students to their ‘traditional public school’ counterparts, providing a more realistic view of students, and therefore, more credible results.”

Many researchers, including Stanford Economist Caroline Hoxby, argued about the original CREDO study that because of flawed methodology in analyzing student achievement, there was a bias against charter schools, one that the press and opponents immediately seized upon to suggest that fewer charters are making the grade. As Hoxby points out in her analysis of that 2009 study:

“The achievement of charter school students is measured with much more error than the achievement of the controls, which are not individual students but are group averages of students in the traditional public schools. By using the achievement data as both the dependent variable and (lagged) an independent variable, the CREDO study forces the estimated effect of charter schools to be biased, and the bias is negative …This paper also notes that the CREDO study violates four rules for the empirically sound use of matching methods to evaluate charter schools’ effects.”

Among the flaws in the original study:

“The CREDO study does not match individual charter school students to individual traditional public school (TPS) students with similar demographic characteristics. Instead, it matches each charter school student to a group of students in traditional public schools. A charter school student can potentially be matched to a group that contains many students. The study then computes average achievement and other average characteristics of each group. Thereafter, the study treats these group
averages as though they were students.1 The group for each charter school student is selected according to the following procedure. Each charter school is associated with a set of traditional public schools based on which schools their students attended before they applied to the charter school. Naturally, this information is not available for many
charter school students because they applied as kindergarteners, previously attended a school outside the local area, previously attended a private school, or simply do not have this information recorded. Nevertheless, a set of traditional public schools is picked for each charter school.” In short, matching methods involve substantial judgment, and the judgments focus on unobserved variables.

Says Allen: “We have known from multiple measures over the years that the majority of charter schools, particularly those serving children least likely to succeed, outperform, on average their traditional public school counterparts. The gold standard to which researchers aspire requires that we utilize real, individual, data over time, to ensure we are making accurate judgments about their progress in their respective schools. Until then we believe that attempts to make conclusions about the effects of charter schools must be cautiously viewed We welcome any new research that uses accurate data to make its conclusions and to that, believe that the CREDO reports on charter school achievement in New Jersey and Michigan provide a strong case that most charter schools are fulfilling their intended mission.”

Filed Under: Press Releases Tagged With:

MD Schools Rank #1 in Nation

January 11, 2013 By

Fox45 Baltimore
January 10, 2013
 

CER President Jeanne Allen cautions against the high rating, pointing out over half of the students in the state cannot read and write at proficient levels.
 

Watch the video here.

 
Learn more about these ratings here.

Filed Under: CER in the News

Maryland Still Isn’t Number One

January 10, 2013 By

January 10, 2013

This year’s report from an education news publisher ranks Maryland as number one yet again , and yet again we feel like screaming at the top of our lungs “Wake Up, Maryland! Your schools aren’t No.1!”

In the “Wake Up!” piece, CER President Jeanne Allen points out how the ratings that put Maryland at No. 1 are based on inputs, like funding, and fail to consider student outputs. Last year, the Nation’s Report card “revealed that average proficiency is only 50 percent in math and reading — hardly an achievement.”

Not only that, but “even the federal government knows Maryland isn’t No. 1. Last [year], the state’s application for charter school funding was rejected because its law is not strong enough.”

Maryland’s ranking on the Parent Power Index, which rates states based on cumulative progress on all reforms and lets parents know how much power they have when it comes to their child’s education, is 38 out of the 50 states and DC — hardly near the top!

Until we start thinking in terms of outputs, as today’s Wall Street Journal piece on grading schools addresses, parents and lawmakers will continue to go on believing that their schools are just fine, when the reality is that schools and the system at large could be doing so much more for our kids.

Filed Under: Commentary, Edspresso

Posse Scholarships Awarded to Friendship Charter Students

January 9, 2013 By

Washington Informer
January 8, 2013

Three students from Friendship Public Charter School have been awarded Posse Scholarships. This year’s winnersn — Kendra Spruill, Phillip Pride, and Kirk Murphy — will receive full four-year tuition scholarships from colleges that partner with the Posse Foundation.

Spruill will attend Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., while Pride and Murphy are will enroll at Sewanee: The University of the South, located in Tennessee.

Since 1989, the Foundation has identified, recruited and trained 4,237 public high school students with extraordinary academic and leadership potential to become Posse Scholars. Posse Scholars graduate at a rate of 90 percent and make a visible difference on campus and throughout their professional careers.

In 2011, the Foundation received more than 14,000 nominations for 560 scholarship slots nationally.

Filed Under: Choice & Charter Schools Tagged With: ,

Yes, Effective Teaching Can Be Identified

January 9, 2013 By

“Good Teachers Linked to Test Success”
by Stephanie Banchero
Wall Street Journal
January 9, 2013

A study found that effective teachers can boost the test scores of students who had struggled under low-performing instructors, marking a new salvo in the national debate over teacher performance.

The three-year study by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, published Tuesday, is the first large-scale research to show, using random student assignment, that some teachers can produce test-score gains regardless of the past performance of their students, according to foundation officials.

Tom Kane, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and leader of the research project, said the data provide the best evidence yet that some teachers can “cause student achievement to happen, and this is a really big deal.”

Education officials increasingly emphasize the need to evaluate, pay and fire teachers based on performance. More than two dozen states have passed laws to evaluate teachers, in part, on test scores, prodded by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top education initiative, which offered money to states that began the process.

The Gates Foundation said its study found that a combination of student surveys of teacher quality, well-crafted observations of classroom teaching and test scores is the best predictor of teacher effectiveness. Mr. Kane said combining all three is the best predictor of teacher quality.

Critics say the Gates effort is flawed because it begins in part with the assumption that test scores are a good measure of teacher effectiveness, and then seeks to prove it by using test scores. Some teachers unions and parents say tests are a crude measure of teacher effectiveness.

Jay P. Green, a professor of education policy at the University of Arkansas, called the Gates research a “political document and not a research document.” He said the research doesn’t support that classroom observations are a strong predictor of quality teaching.

“But the Gates Foundation knows that teachers and others are resistant to a system that is based too heavily on student test scores, so they combined them with other measures to find something that was more agreeable to them,” he said.

Critics of the study also say the formulas used to adjust student scores for race and poverty are problematic because they cause teachers’ scores to jump around too much.

The three-year Gates study videotaped 3,000 teachers and their students in Charlotte, N.C.; Dallas; Denver; Hillsborough County, Fla.; Memphis, Tenn.; New York City and Pittsburgh. Dozens of researchers studied the results.

In the most recent update to the study, the Gates Foundation analyzed students’ 2010 test scores for about 1,600 of the 3,000 teachers and ranked the instructors using a formula, known as value added, that adjusts scores based on students’ race, family income and past performance on state exams. The ranking also included scores from student surveys and classroom observations.

The next year, students were randomly assigned to classrooms. The study found that the teachers who were ranked the highest on average produced the highest student achievement the following year. These students also scored well on other exams that measured deeper, conceptual knowledge of math and reading, the report said.

Ryan Kinser, who participated in the study and teaches eighth grade English at Walker Middle School in the Hillsborough district, said he watched videos of himself in the classroom and noticed he “looked wooden” and “talked too much.” Once, he spent 10 minutes teaching his students the meaning of “hierarchy” and saw on the video that students appeared bored, and one remarked, “This is stupid, man.”

“It forced me to reflect and better prepare for my kids,” said Mr. Kinser, who is rated highly effective by his district.

Filed Under: Breaking News
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »