Oregon Takes First Steps Towards Reform

June 22, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Longtime readers of the Jayblog may recall that I have, from time to time, asked exactly what is going on in K-12 in Oregon, which is very Anglo, relatively wealthy and sports bad NAEP scores.

When the Urban District NAEP came out, I noticed that several big city districts beat the statewide average in Oregon as well.

Oregon had an interesting election in 2010, splitting control of the House evenly between Democrats and Republicans. Earlier this year I had the opportunity to testify before the House Education committee on the Florida reforms, which was an interesting experience as the committee had co-chairs.

Once I was finished, the lobbyist from the Oregon Education Association testified that she had done some “homework” over the weekend, and had calculated A-F grades for Oregon schools. She claimed that (gasp) many Oregon charter schools would get a grade of F.

I found this very interesting, as she had no access to student learning gain data for any of these schools, and learning gains make up half of a school’s grade under the Florida formula. Oh well, why let your credibility get in the way of a good  story?

Representative Matt Wingard, the Republican co-chair of the House Education committee, is a dogged supporter of education reform. Rep. Wingard discussed the Florida reforms on this newscast:

Rep. Wingard introduced the Florida reforms, and encountered the predictable wave of opposition. Rep. Wingard’s efforts were rewarded this session, however, as Oregon passed an open enrollment law, an improvement to their charter authorization process, and an improvement in their online learning laws.

While these gains are incremental rather than revolutionary, trust me when I tell you that they were not easily achieved. Many people take open enrollment laws for granted or think of them as weak tea while failing to appreciate the huge impact they have had in shrinking dysfunctional districts such as Detroit and Tucson.

Congratulations to Rep. Wingard for getting the reform ball rolling in Oregon.

1 Comment | charter schools | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Sell Outs

June 13, 2011

(Guest Post by Brian Kisida)

It’s truly a sad situation when once respectable organizations become so intertwined with the corrupting influence of party politics and the ulterior motives of other interest groups that they abandon their core principles.  Last week Matt referenced the newly invigorated war against charter schools in New York undertaken by the NAACP.  Also last week in Milwaukee the ACLU filed yet another lawsuit against a school choice program.

On the surface, the NAACP’s ongoing opposition to school choice just seems bizarre.  The overwhelming majority of school choice programs in the U.S., whether it be in the form of urban charter schools or means-tested voucher programs like those found in Milwaukee and D.C., serve distinctly minority and disadvantaged populations by design.  If there’s a rational argument out there that can explain why the NAACP, according to its own principles, should stand in opposition to school choice, I haven’t heard it.  And I’ve done plenty of searching.

But the NAACP supported rally that was held down in Harlem last week does provide the necessary connect-able dots to at least consider their motives.  Who was there?  Well, New York City Council member Robert Jackson spoke out against charter schools, and he invoked the long hard plight of the NAACP’s battle against discrimination in the process:

“NAACP has stood for over 100 years to fight discrimination. And we stand united, right here on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue and Malcolm X Boulevard to say we will fight all people, all people, that want to discriminate against us or our children.”

Of course, he failed to mention that before he became a council member in 2001, he was a Director of Field Services for the New York State Public Employees Federation.  And, while it may be unfair for me to insinuate that his close ties to public employee unions motivate his opposition to school choice, it isn’t unfair to say that his claims are fundamentally false.  Charter schools are open to all students, regardless of residential location.  By definition, freely chosen charter schools are less discriminatory than residentially-assigned schools.  Unless, somehow, you think a randomly chosen lottery ball is capable of discriminating.

Also in attendance was United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew.  He also played the equity card:

“The children from the charter school will get the science labs, and not the children from the public school…the children from the charter school will get the playground, and not the children from the public school.”

Of course, charter schools are public schools, and they are open to all students who apply.  Moreover, if Mulgrew really thinks that charter schools are so superior to “public” schools, then wouldn’t the proper thing to do–if one really cared about giving every child the best education possible–be to make every school a charter school?  Then they’d all get the science labs and new playgrounds, right?

I imagine this is how organizations like the NAACP will inevitably die.  They become so resistant to change and so corrupted by bad influences that eventually they become irrelevant.  The NAACP is squandering what little credibility it has left by opposing policies that are near and dear to the hearts of the people who should be their core constituents.  So it goes.

Up in Milwaukee, the ACLU is also doing its best to betray its own principles by fighting the expansion of Milwaukee’s Parental Choice Program (MPCP).  Like the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union is no friend of school choice.  Their own director, way back in 1994, agreed that school vouchers, if properly administered, were no more a violation of the First Amendment than were Pell Grants (which means they aren’t a violation at all).  But in the ensuing years, the ACLU has become one of the most vocal opponents of expanding individual liberty through school choice.  And it’s not exactly clear why.  At the very least, it’s worth noting that the word “liberty” doesn’t regularly appear in any of the ACLU’s public statements against school choice.

Last week, the ACLU filed a lawsuit claiming that the MPCP discriminates against children with disabilities and asked the Department of Justice to delay Governor Walker’s planned expansion of the program.  To make their case, they cite flawed statistics generated by the politically minded state Department of Public Instruction (DPI) that claim that nearly 20% of students in Milwaukee’s public schools have a disability, but only 1.6% of the students in the MPCP have the same condition.

Of course, the claim is misguided in multiple ways.  Independent research by Patrick Wolf from the University of Arkansas and John Witte from the University of Wisconsin does confirm an asymmetry with regard to disabled students, but not nearly as high as the one claimed by DPI and the ACLU.  In their analysis, they concluded that:

“Public schools have both strong incentives to classify students as requiring exceptional education, because they receive extra funding to teach such students and well-established protocols for doing so. Private schools have neither. A student with the same educational needs often will be classified as exceptional education in MPS but not so classified in the choice program.”

“Nine percent of choice parents said their child has a learning disability, compared to 18% of the parents of the carefully matched public school students in our sample. The proportion of students with learning disabilities in the choice program is about half that of MPS, but it is certainly not less than 1%, as the state Department of Public Instruction recently reported.”

In addition, the lawsuit brought by the ACLU completely ignores the funding disparity that exists between Milwaukee public schools and the voucher program.  Currently, students in Milwaukee’s public schools receive more than $15,000 in per-pupil funding, while students in the choice program receive $6,442.  If the ACLU were truly concerned about the liberties of disabled students and their families, wouldn’t it make the most sense to argue for an increase in the voucher amount for disabled students?  Wouldn’t that be the most liberty-maximizing course of action?

Like the NAACP, the ACLU has veered far from its own principles as an organization whose stated purpose is to “defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country.”  And, like the NAACP, it’s largely because they’ve sold out.  They’ve gone from being an organization founded on certain principles to being simply another political hack-unit heavily influenced by party politics and the agendas of other interest groups.  Unless they can find a way to change, they’ll continue to slide towards complete and total irrelevance.

36 Comments | charter schools, residential school choice, school funding, teacher union, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Brian Kisida

NY NAACP’s War on Charter Schools and Their Own Credibility

June 8, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

This is so misguided that I don’t even know where to start, so just go watch the video yourself.

Very sad.

Leave a Comment » | charter schools | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

The Limits and Dangers of Philanthropy in Education

June 6, 2011

It’s hard to criticize people who generously give away money in the hopes of improving outcomes for other people.  But it is also important to recognize the limits and dangers of philanthropic activity.  Non-profits can help alleviate particular suffering and they can help promote beneficial ideas, but they cannot effectively substitute for markets.  Foundations, like the government, may try to engage in central planning, picking winners and losers in the market, but quite often they may end up perpetually subsidizing losers.  The only difference is that at least foundations do not back losers with money they have forcibly taken from others. Even so, a common pitfall for foundations is to fantasize that they know what works and what doesn’t rather than encouraging market forces to sort that out.  

This point is nicely illustrated by a new report released by Andrew Coulson at Cato today.  Andrew examines academic progress by students in different charter school networks in California.  He then looks at which charter networks receive the most financial backing from philanthropies.  He finds:

The results are discouraging. There is effectively no correlation between grant funding and charter network performance, after controlling for individual student characteristics and peer effects, and addressing the problem of selection bias.

For example, the three highest-performing charter school networks perform dramatically above the level of conventional public schools on the California Standards Tests, but rank 21st, 27th, and 39th in terms of the grant funding they have received, out of 68 charter networks. The AP results are worse; the correlations between charter networks’ AP performance and their grant funding are negative, though negligible in magnitude.

The problem is not that foundations need to be smarter in their giving, although I have written a book chapter on how they could be smarter.  The problem is that foundations are no substitute for market forces in identifying what works and what doesn’t for kids.  Rather than focusing on picking winners and losers, foundations should focus on pushing the idea that we need stronger market forces.  In particular, foundations could back the idea that we need a broader set of options for students (including charters); that whatever public subsidies exist for schools should be equal across all schools in this market; and that schools should be allowed to compete on price as well as quality.  The last item could be achieved with something like educational savings accounts that were recently passed in Arizona, where families could keep any savings between the state subsidy and school costs in an account to be used for future educational needs.  Another option is to allow families to top-off the state subsidy with their own funds.

The point is that foundations need to beware of the corruption that frequently follows the concentration of wealth and power, just like governments.  There is a danger that foundation officials will begin to imagine that they know what people should want, just like government officials, academics, and D.C. pundicrats often do, rather than allowing people to figure out what works for them.  Foundations, like government, can play a useful role by trying to create sensible rules for markets so that they can function efficiently.  They can also alleviate particular suffering and misfortune.  But if they start focusing the bulk of their money on picking winners and losers in the educational marketplace, they are very likely to get it wrong.  Central planning doesn’t work any better for foundations than it does for governments.

I should add that profit-seeking corporations are as prone to corruption as they concentrate wealth and power as are non-profits and governments.  The difference is that, absent government protection, corporations suffer the consequences of this hubris.  If they stray from their mission and become swollen with power-seeking administrative bloat, they tend to lose in the marketplace to leaner, more focused organizations.

The danger for non-profits (and governments) is that there is no similar mechanism of accountability.  If they back foolish ideas or suffer from administrative bloat, they never have to stop as long as they can continue to extract funds without demonstrating effectiveness.

Gigantism in the foundation world is a real problem.  Organizations, including Gates, Ford, Carnegie have the funds to keep foisting foolish ideas on people for a long, long time without any accountability.  And as they get big financially, they get even bigger in their staffing so that they become a self-perpetuating power-seeking bureaucracy, much like the government (except without taking funds by force).

For example, it is interesting to note that over the last decade the Gates Foundation doubled its assets, but it increased its staffing by almost ten-fold.  Empire building afflicts the non-profit and university world almost as much as government.  Wise foundations avoid building empires and focus on promoting sensible rules for efficient market operation as well as the alleviation of misfortune that occurs within markets.

3 Comments | charter schools, economics | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Alter and Duncan demolish Ravitch

June 3, 2011

 

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Jonathan Alter calls out Little Ramona. Money quote from Ed Sec. Arne Duncan:

Arne Duncan, President Barack Obama’s normally mild-mannered education secretary, has finally had enough. “Diane Ravitch is in denial and she is insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving her wrong every day,” he said when I asked about Ravitch this week.

 

 

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Posted by matthewladner

School Choice Yearbook

February 10, 2011

The Alliance for School Choice has released their annual school choice yearbook.  It is filled with a ton of useful facts, figures, and other resources.  Be sure to check it out.  Here are some of the highlights from the press release:

• More than 190,000 students are enrolled in school choice programs in the United
States, a growth of nearly 100 percent since 2004-05.
• Seven of the 20 school choice programs in America are specifically tailored to
serve children with special needs, benefiting more than 26,000 students.
• Nearly all of America’s school choice programs provide assistance primarily to
children in low- to middle-income families or to children with special needs.
• Florida is home to the greatest number of students who benefit from school
choice, with 54,000 student participants in the state’s two existing programs.
Two states—Arizona and Ohio—have three school choice programs each.
• All 20 school choice programs are non-discriminatory and feature levels of
administrative, financial, and/or academic accountability.
• Despite a turbulent economy, no existing programs saw funding cuts in 2010.
Two new programs—one for students with disabilities in Oklahoma and another
for students with special needs in Louisiana—were enacted last year with
bipartisan support.

Leave a Comment » | charter schools, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Reason TV

January 24, 2011

I don’t find much on regular TV that I want to watch, especially since Lost went off the air.  But there is almost always new, exciting stuff on Reason TV, especially when I’m on it.

2 Comments | charter schools, competitive effects, vouchers | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Jeb Kicks Off the New Year Right

January 3, 2011

Jeb Bush has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal that gets the new year off to the right start.  Here’s a taste:

For the last decade, Florida has graded schools on a scale of A to F, based solely on standardized test scores. When we started, many complained that “labeling” a school with an F would demoralize students and do more harm than good. Instead, it energized parents and the community to demand change from the adults running the system. School leadership responded with innovation and a sense of urgency. The number of F schools has since plummeted while the number of A and B schools has quadrupled.

Another reform: Florida ended automatic, “social” promotion for third-grade students who couldn’t read. Again, the opposition to this hard-edged policy was fierce. Holding back illiterate students seemed to generate a far greater outcry than did the disturbing reality that more than 25% of students couldn’t read by the time they entered fourth grade. But today? According to Florida state reading tests, illiteracy in the third grade is down to 16%.

Rewards and consequences work. Florida schools that earn an A or improve by a letter grade are rewarded with cash—up to $100 per pupil annually. If a public school doesn’t measure up, families have an unprecedented array of other options: public school choice, charter schools, vouchers for pre-K students, virtual schools, tax-credit scholarships, and vouchers for students with disabilities.

Choice is the catalytic converter here, accelerating the benefits of other education reforms. Almost 300,000 students opt for one of these alternatives, and research from the Manhattan Institute, Cornell and Harvard shows that Florida’s public schools have improved in the face of competition provided by the many school-choice programs.

Florida’s experience busts the myth that poverty, language barriers, absent parents and broken homes explain failure in school. It is simply not true. Our experience also proves that leadership, courage and an unwavering commitment to reform—not demographics or demagoguery—will determine our destiny as a nation.

6 Comments | charter schools, competitive effects, school accountability, social promotion, special ed, vouchers | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Does Parent Trigger Cut the Gordian Knot?

December 8, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The editorial in yesterday’s Journal covering the “parent trigger” earthquake in Los Angeles – at McKinley Elementary in Compton – argues that this could be a revolutionary new mechanism for advancing parental control of schools:

The biggest obstacle to education reform has long been overcoming the inertial forces of unionized bureaucracy. Parent trigger is a revolutionary shortcut, and bravo to the parents in Compton for making the leap.

The model is set to spread, argue the editors:

Parent trigger has support from Democrats including Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, former Washington, D.C., schools chief Michelle Rhee and even Rahm Emanuel now that he’s running for mayor of Chicago. Legislators in Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, West Virginia and Maryland tell us they will introduce versions of parent trigger in the coming months.

Last time I looked in on the state of school governance reform in LA, I was skeptical. But that was more than a year ago, when the parent trigger mechanism wasn’t yet a part of the reform package. Last fall they were setting themselves up to have the public system hire private managers – which hasn’t worked in the past.

The parent trigger model is different. At a school that hasn’t made Adequate Yearly Progress ™ four years running, get a majority of parents to sign a petition and you can close the school, change administrators, or turn over the school to charter operators. The key difference is that the parents signing the petition decide what happens.

The district will fight them in court, of course, and they may win on a bogus technicality. As we learned in Florida in 2006, when the unions demand obeisance from their slaves you can’t count on a court to follow even the most tranparently clear meaning of the letter and spirit of the law.

But that’s not really relevant to the real policy question. All school reform policies are exposed to the naked assertion of thuggish power from union-bootlicking judges, and I don’t see much reason to think this one is more exposed (at least in principle) than any others.

So, that aside, is the Journal right that parent trigger is a way to cut the Gordian knot? Here are the advantages and disadvantages as I see them.

Advantages:

  1. School choice as a consequence of school failure is a proven way to improve public school performance. Even where the threat is never actualized, the mere threat produces clear gains.
  2. The parent trigger system may overcome the serious procedural obstacles that have dogged other “failing schools” models. The system for activating choice is (with an exception I’ll discuss below) simple, clear and not under the control of the government bureaucracy – and informing parents about their choices is easier because the system for creating choices involves getting parents informed and involved.
  3. The system is politically attractive, and partly for the right reasons. If a majority of the actual parents in the school want the school handed over, it’s really hard to be the people who say it shouldn’t be handed over.

Disadvantages:

  1. For the moment, the system is only promoting management change, at best involving charter operators, which is an improvement but is inadequate. But that’s less important because you could always use a parent trigger to activate vouchers.
  2. Petitions carry some problematic issues as a vehicle. Phrasing can be unclear, and/or people may not understand what they’re signing. Worse, the blob could organize its own counter-petitions to create confusion. It’s unlikely they could actually seize control of a school this way, but they could disrupt the process.
  3. More seriously, the system is only available at a small number of schools (those that don’t make AYP four years running). You could always fight to expand that, but the question is how far you could expand it. In theory you could do a parent trigger everywhere, but it’s not clear whether that would be politically viable. Maybe it would be if you did it in the right state. The larger question here is how wedded we are to a “failing schools” model that assumes schools are only failing if they’re populated by kids who are poor and dark-skinned. It’s an important question whether the parent trigger could be used to transition to a “failing schools” model that says any school repudiated by its parents is a failing school, or if it only reinforces the worst of our existing prejudices about what constitutes educational failure.
  4. Along a smiliar line, in its current form the parent trigger (like all previous “failing schools” models) reinforces government’s right to decide what constitutes a good education, because it relies on state testing as a parent-choice gatekeeper. In addition to my recent movement toward stronger critique of accountability testing for what are essentially pedagogical reasons, on an even more basic level it’s imperative that we not validate the idea that a good education is what government says it is. This, and #3 above, are what I meant when I said that parent trigger is politically attractive “partly” for the right reason. 
  5. Carrying on the theme of #3 and #4, most Americans wrongly believe there’s nothing wrong with their own schools; after all, the kids are middle-class whites and the schools are run by the government – nice, clean suburban government, not those icky urban machines – so how bad could they be? So suppose you give everyone a parent trigger and don’t get enough schools where you overcome all the obstacles of perception (to say nothing of the logistics) and get a majority to sign off. That would only validate the illusion that the status quo in the great suburban Middle America is A-OK.

So color me ambivalent. Parent trigger is certainly an improvement over Florida’s A+ model, where near-insuperable bureaucratic obstacles stood between parents and the actual excercise of choice. And I see some potential to use this as a path to making parents’ judgments the standard for what counts as a good school. But there are serious dangers here as well, if we don’t take seriously the omnipresent temptation to slide back toward liberal paternalism.

5 Comments | charter schools, competitive effects, politics, school accountability, teacher union, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Klein’s Lessons

December 6, 2010

*** Joel Klein tells us in the pages of the WSJ what he learned as Chancellor of NYC schools.  Here’s a highlight:

First, it is wrong to assert that students’ poverty and family circumstances severely limit their educational potential. It’s now proven that a child who does poorly with one teacher could have done very well with another. Take Harlem Success Academy, a charter school with all minority, mostly high-poverty students admitted by lottery. It performs as well as our gifted and talented schools that admit kids based solely on demanding tests. We also have many new small high schools that replaced large failing ones, and are now getting outsized results for poor children.

Second, traditional proposals for improving education—more money, better curriculum, smaller classes, etc.—aren’t going to get the job done. Public education is a service-delivery challenge, and it must be operated as such.

Klein raises an excellent point.  Diane Ravitch, Sol Stern, and others who claim that they have grown frustrated with choice and other incentive-based reforms because they haven’t yet produced the miracles they expected ought to be 1,000 times more frustrated with the failure of more money, higher teacher certification requirements, curricular and pedagogical reform, etc…  We’ve tried those kinds of reforms more than 1,000 times more on a much grander scale and yet we still wait for the miracles.

To judge the effectiveness of reform strategies we can’t use miraculous improvement as the standard.  And we certainly need more fine-grained analyses than looking at whether cities or states that have tried something have improved.  And finally, we can work on various types of reforms simultaneously, so pitting incentives versus instruction is a false conflict that serves only to inflate the ego-starved reformer rather than the cause of reform.

Leave a Comment » | charter schools, instructional reform | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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