Mid-Riffs on Arkansas Charters

December 1, 2009

Brian Kisida and Josh McGee, who blog at Mid-Riffs, had an op-ed in the Sunday Arkansas Democrat Gazette on the State Board of Education’s rejection of all six new charter applications.  Here is the money quote:

The Board often cited the same tired reason for denying charter applicants: The proposed charter wasn’t innovative enough. Arkansas Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell echoed this sentiment after the Board’s meeting, summarizing that he thought the Board was looking for “something different and innovative that students can’t get in a normal public school.” Likewise, a Springdale representative in attendance said that “if a charter school is going to go in, it should offer something better or do something we can’t.” Board member Brenda Gullett, at a Democratic luncheon last week, confirmed that demonstrating innovation was the standard to which she held charter applicants. Some version of this reasoning seems to show up in state and local school board discussions every time a charter school is opposed in Arkansas.

It is an undue burden to force charter applicants to demonstrate radically new techniques before they open their doors. Imagine that Taco Bueno had to get permission from Taco Bell to open a store in the same town. You might hear the same anti-competitive argument from Taco Bell: “Why should Taco Bueno be allowed to open? They’re just going to offer the same things that we do. They have tacos; we have tacos. They have burritos; we have burritos.” But of course, the whole point of choice and competition is that a competitor will offer essentially the same goods or services. If the goods or services are too different, it isn’t really competition after all. It’s up to the customer-not Taco Bell-to decide whose tacos are, in fact, “better.”

Moreover, the question regarding whether charter applicants must demonstrate innovation is a legal one. The state legislature has the power to make laws. The Board, as an arm of the executive branch, has a duty to execute the law. And nothing in Arkansas’ charter school law can reasonably be construed to empower the Board to reject charter applicants solely for not demonstrating innovation. The word “innovation” doesn’t even appear in the Arkansas Department ofEducation’s rules and regulations that govern the requirements for charter school applicants.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Unions Have Lost Nick Kristoff

October 15, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Read it and weep K-12 reactionaries.

P.S.

Somewhere, John Rawls is smiling.

3 Comments | charter schools, politics, teacher union | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

EdWize’s Racial Libel

September 28, 2009

Race Card w watermark

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

On EdWize, Jonathan Gyurko finds himself forced to acknowledge that Caroline Hoxby’s recent blockbuster study is good news for charter schools. He then starts desperately groping for any excuse he can find to neutralize the good news.

Most of his claims will be familiar to those who have seen the teachers’ unions try to spin away gold-standard empirical evidence that their positions are wrong. We’ve read all these cue cards before.

But one of his claims deserves more attention. Like many before him, Gyurko tries his hand at racial demagoguery to make parental choice seem like a scary throwback to Jim Crow:

Such a dramatically-presented conclusion is sure to feature prominently in charter advocates’ efforts to expand the number of charter schools across the city and state. And if it’s true, then why shouldn’t we? The answer actually depends on how policymakers weigh the goal of improved student achievement against other worthy goals, such as greater educational equity and meaningful diversity. And on these other objectives, nagging questions dog the charter sector.

For example, Hoxby finds that 92 percent of charter students are black or Hispanic, compared to 72 percent in district schools and concludes that “the existence of charter schools in the city therefore leaves the traditional public schools less black, more white, and more Asian.” Such racial segregation is consistent with research on charter schools in other states including North Carolina, Texas and elsewhere.

Although this statistic is likely to be a function of charter schools’ location in largely black and Hispanic neighborhoods, Hoxby also reports that fewer white students are applying to the charters; although 14 percent of residents in the charter school neighborhoods are white non-Hispanic, only 4 percent are applying.

There are two claims made here:

1) If the citywide aggregate population of all charter school students is more heavily minority than the citywide aggregate population of district school students, charters must be increasing segregation.

2) If charter school applicants who live near the charter schools are disproportionately minority, charters must be increasing segregation.

Both claims are transparently bogus.

On the first claim: citywide aggregate figures tell us nothing whatsoever about the impact charters are having on segregation, for the simple reason that citywide aggregate figures can tell us nothing whatsoever about segregation in any context, even aside from the whole charter question.

Imagine for a moment that New York is made up of 50% green children and 50% purple children. Let’s look at two scenarios:

Perfect segregation scenrio: All the green children go to fully segregated schools made up exclusively of green children, and all the purple children go to fully segregated schools made up exclusively of purple children.

Perfect integration scenario: All children attend perfectly integrated schools made up of half green children and half purple children.

Now, let’s take a look at the citywide aggregate figures we would get under these two scenarios.

Perfect segregation scenario: Citywide aggregate 50% green, 50% purple.

Perfect integration scenario: Citywide aggregate 50% green, 50% purple.

You see? Aggregate figures are intrinsically incapable of providing any information about school segregation. To find out whether schools are segregated, you must look at the individual schools.

Let’s apply that principle to the real world. Hoxby finds that the citywide aggregate population of district school students is 72% minority. But does that mean every individual school is 72% minority? Of course not. You could very well have all the white children going to perfectly segregated exclusively all-white schools, all the black children to perfectly segregated exclusively all-black schools, all the Hispanic children going to perfectly segregated exclusively all-Hispanic schools, etc., and the citywide aggregate figure would remain unchanged.

And, in fact, the reality on the ground is a lot closer to that dystopian hypothetical than it is to the utopian scenario of ideal racial balance. But Gyurko’s argument relies on the unspoken assumption that the reality on the ground in district schools is utopian.

Meanwhile, the citywide aggregate for charter schools is 92%. As with district schools, the aggregate figure tells us nothing about the actual racial balance in any individual school. Supposing for a moment that New York’s district schools are very heavily segregated – which they are – it is quite possible that the actual charter schools on the ground are better integrated than the district schools even though their aggregate population figure is disproportionately minority.

And, in fact, given that the primary cause of school segregation is housing segregation, the fact that charters can break down neighborhood barriers and draw students from other neighborhoods with different demographics makes it highly likely that they are, in fact, better integrated. That’s the reality in voucher programs, where the empirical evidence unanimously shows parent choice improves integration.

But at any rate, the data to which Gyurko appeals don’t tell us either way.

Once the essential sham behind the first claim is exposed, the second claim is much easier to refute. What counts is not how the local applicant pool differs from the local resident population, but how the final makeup of each charter school differs from the final makeup of each district school. Once the process of parents making choices is completed, are the individual charter schools more segregated? This datum tells us nothing about that.

Ironically, Gyurko’s argument on this second claim really implies that he wants charter schools to represent the racial balance of their local neighborhoods. That would imply endless racial segregation, given that neighborhoods are so racially homogeneous. Any serious attempt to break down racial segregation in schools must begin by acknowledging that schools representing their neighborhoods is the problem.

That’s why hyper-arrogant courts forced us to go through the disastrous failed experiment with forced busing. That was a terrible idea, just like anything that robs parents of their freedom. But at least those tyrannical judges understood the source of the problem correctly.

If parents want to send their children to their local neighborhood schools, they should be allowed. But anything we do that forces them to send their children to school locally is – among so many other evils – going to increase racial segregation. Assigning students to schools by ZIP code is not only educationally bankrupt, it’s racially poisonous.

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Posted by Greg Forster

More Charter Evidence

September 22, 2009

Diane Ravitch has declared that the Obama administration’s policy of expanding the number of charter schools has “no credible basis in research.”  This is just plain wrong.  And a new study coming out today from Stanford’s Caroline Hoxby demonstrates that she is even more wrong.

I’ve already noted that the highest quality studies — those that avoid bias from the self-selection of students into charter schools either with random-assignment or rigorous instrumental variable research designs — show significant academic benefits for students who attend charter schools instead of traditional public schools.  These studies examine the effect of charter schools in Massachusetts, Florida, Chicago, and New York City. 

And now add to that pile an updated study from Caroline Hoxby mentioned in today’s WSJ and NYT on New York City charter effects.  Students accepted by lottery into one of NYC’s charter schools in kindergarten and remained in a charter school through grade 8 closed the achievement gap with wealthy kids attending schools in Scarsdale entirely in math and two-thirds of the way in reading.

Critics are clinging to a study by Margaret Raymond at CREDO, which shows more mixed results.  While that study has the benefit of covering 15 states and DC, it can’t correct for the self-selection of students into charter schools like the highest quality studies linked above.  On average, students appear to be drawn to switching to charter schools because they are having trouble in their traditional public school.  Simply controlling for those students’ prior achievement and other observed demographic factors doesn’t quite correct for whatever negative factors may have caused students to switch to charters and that may continue to hinder their academic progress.  The CREDO study is as good as it can be given its approach, but I would have greater confidence in the consistent findings from several studies in different locations that do control for self-selection into charter schools.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

July 17, 2009

Normally solid education reporter, Rob Tomsho, has fallen for the Arne Duncan mania by writing an article in today’s WSJ that attributes expansions of charter school laws to Duncan and the $5 billion “race to the top” stimulus money.

As a graph in the print version of the article shows, charters have been expanding steadily for the last several years — all of which was before Arne Duncan and the stimulus money.  The question is whether charters are growing faster than they otherwise would have.  I doubt it.  The progress of charters doesn’t seem any faster to me now than it has been.  After we get all of the numbers in a year or two we can check to confirm my hunch.

I’m afraid that this is just another example of post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this).  Duncan made some speeches and conditioned some fraction of a modest sum on policy changes.  There were some policy changes.  So people are attributing the policy changes to his speeches and tiny financial leverage.

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

The Negative De-Sarcasticizer

May 14, 2009

Kevin Carey ran my post from yesterday through a “negative de-sarcasticizer”  and wants to take issue with the suggestion that D.C. vouchers were adopted democratically. 

First, I should warn Kevin that a negative de-sarcasticizer actually makes things more sarcastic.  I know because I bought one on Ebay and I use it to help make my posts as sarcastic as they are.  The negative de-sarcasticizer comes with a large, yellow label warning about the hazards of double negatives.

Second, the suggestion that DC vouchers were not democratically created because they affected DC and DC does not have a vote in Congress wouldn’t just call into question the legitimacy of DC vouchers.  All federal laws affecting DC would be undemocratic by this standard.  This would include NCLB and other federal education legislation that Kevin praises charter schools for more strictly obeying.

Third, I am glad that Kevin believes that “giving parents educational choices and opening up public education to competition and innovation will improve outcomes for students.”  And I agree with him that charters would be one way of expanding choices and competition.  But I continue to be puzzled by the argument that vouchers are bad because they are less accountable than charters.  Whatever regulation you believe is desirable for schools could be applied to vouchers as well as to charters.

Finally, I continue to be troubled by Kevin’s need to dismiss vouchers by labeling the idea as “unworkable” or “not serious.”  This is just argumentation by name-calling rather than addressing the substance of the issue.  When I hear this kind of argument it makes me want to turn my negative de-sarcasticizer up to full power.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Growing Charter School Consensus

January 15, 2009

A string of high quality studies is finding that students benefit academically from attending a charter school rather than a traditional public school. 

First we had a random-assignment study of Chicago charter schools by Caroline Hoxby and Jonah Rockoff that found “that students in charter schools outperformed a comparable group of lotteried-out students who remained in regular Chicago public schools by 5 to 6 percentile points in math and about 5 percentile points in reading.” 

Then Hoxby conducted a random-assignment study of charter schools in New York City and found: “that the average effect of the charter schools on math is 0.09 standard deviations for every year that a student spends in his or her charter school. The average effect on reading is 0.04 standard deviations for every year that a student spends in his or her charter school.” 

Then Kevin Booker (Mathematica), Tim Sass (Florida State), Brian Gill (Mathematica), and Ron Zimmer (Rand)used a well-designed instrumental variable analysis to see whether charter middle-schoolers who continue to charter high schools are more likely to graduate.  They are. 

And most recently a random-assignment analysis of charter schools in Massachusetts led by Tom Kane at Harvard and Josh Angrist at MIT found that charter school students accepted by lotteries significantly outperformed their counterparts in traditional public schools, unless the charter school was operated by the teacher unions.

In light of these high quality studies, it is harder to oppose charter schools on a scholarly basis.  And with the clear support of charters from the incoming Obama administration, it is getting harder to opposed charter schools on a political basis — at least at the national level.

But don’t expect to see the teacher unions waving a white flag despite their losses in research and national politics.  They don’t need facts or the support of the US Department of Education so long as they continue to dominate local school politics. 

And that is exactly why they have focused on organizing local charter schools to neutralize the threat to their grip on local school politics.  As my colleague Marcus Winters writes today in the New York Post, the unions managed to organize two successful charter schools in New York City.  The fact that union-run charter schools in Massachusetts trailed the non-union charters in performance is not of concern to the unions.  It isn’t about student achievement; it’s about keeping their hold on power even as the facts pile up against them.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Charters Work, Unions Don’t

January 7, 2009

building_unions

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

On Monday the Boston Foundation released a study by researchers from Harvard, MIT and Duke, examining Boston’s charter schools and “pilot” schools using a random assignment method (HT Joanne Jacobs).

Pilot schools were created in Massachusetts in 1995 as a union-sponsored alternative to charter schools, which came to the state a year earlier. Pilot schools are owned and operated by the school district. Like charter schools, pilot schools serve students who choose to be there (though it’s easier to get into a charter school than a pilot school; see below). Like charter schools, pilot schools have some autonomy over budget, staffing, governance, curriculum, assessment, and calendar. Like charter schools, pilot schools are regularly reviewed and can be shut down for poor performance.

There are two main differences between charter schools and pilot schools. First, the teachers’ unions. Pilot schools have them, and all the shackles on effective school management that come with them. Charter schools don’t.

Second, some pilot schools are only nominally schools of choice, not real schools of choice like charter schools. Elementary and middle pilot schools – which make up a slender majority of the total – participate in the city’s so-called “choice” program for public schools, and thus have an attendance zone where students are guaranteed admission, and admit by lottery for the spaces left over.  So while on paper everyone who goes to a pilot school “chooses” to be there, some of them will be there only because the city’s so-called “choice” system has frozen them out of other schools. The students compared in the study are all lottery applicants and are thus genuinely “choice students” – they are really there by choice, not because they had no practical alternatives elsewhere. However, the elementary and middle pilot schools are not “choice schools.” (Pilot high schools do not have guaranteed attendance zones and are thus real schools of choice.)

The Boston Foundation examined two treatment groups: students who were admitted by lottery to charter schools and students who were admitted by lottery to pilot schools. The control groups are made up of students who applied to the same schools in the same lotteries, but did not recieve admission and returned to traditional public schools.

As readers of Jay P. Greene’s Blog probably know already, random assignment is the gold standard for empirical research because it ensures that the treatment and control groups are very similar. The impact of the treatment (in this case, charter and pilot schools) is isolated from unobserved variables like family background.

The results? Charter schools produce bigger academic gains than regular public schools, pilot schools don’t.

The two perennial fatal flaws of “public school choice” would both seem to be at work here. First, public school choice is always a choice among schools that all partake of the same systemic deficiencies (read: unions). Choice is not choice if it doesn’t include a real variety of options. And second, public school choice typically offers a theoretical choice but makes it impossible to exercise that choice in practice. In this particular case, if each school has a guaranteed-admission attendance zone, the practical result will be fewer open slots in each school available for choice. (Other kinds of public school choice have other ways of blocking parents from effectively using choice, such as giving districts a veto over transfers.)

Charter schools are only an imperfect improvement on “public school choice” in both of these respects. Charters have more autonomy and thus can offer more variety of choice, but not nearly as much as real freedom of choice would provide. And with charters, as with public school choice, government controls and limits the admissions process.

But charters are an improvement over the status quo, even if only a modest one, as a large body of research has consistently shown.

There are some limitations to the Boston Foundation study, as with all studies. Pilot high schools are not required to admit by lottery if they are oversubscribed, while charter schools are. (Funny how the union-sponsored alternative gets this special treatment – random admission is apparently demanded by the conscience of the community when independent operators are involved, but not for the unions.) Of the city’s pilot high schools, two admit by lottery, five do not, and one admits by lottery for some students but not others. Thus, the lottery comparison doesn’t include five of the pilot high schools. It does include three high schools and all of the elementary and middle schools.

As always, we shouldn’t allow the limitations to negate the evidence we do have. Insofar as we have evidence to address the question, more freedom consistently produces better results, and more unionization consistently doesn’t.

3 Comments | charter schools, competitive effects, research reports, teacher union | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Ohio Charters Save Money for Public Schools and Taxpayers

November 14, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

It’s raining studies! After this one and then this one comes a study out today from Matthew Carr and Beth Lear of the Buckeye Institute. It’s a fiscal analysis of how charter schools impact the finances of regular public schools in Ohio’s “Big 8” cities.

When a student leaves a regular public school for a charter school (or a private school for that matter), the district loses the state revenue stream associated with that student, but it gains on the local revenue side because local revenues don’t go down, allowing the district to take that student’s share of local funds and redirect it to funding the education of the students who remain behind. The net fiscal impact depends on which is bigger, the state revenue stream per student or the local property taxes per student.

Carr and Lear find that in Ohio’s Big 8, the regular public schools are fiscal winners when students leave for charter schools. The biggest savings are in Cincinnati, where the net gain is $4,030 per student; the lowest is in Canton, where the net gain is $918 per student.

Charters in Ohio’s Big 8 also keep overall educational costs down by providing a better education (as Carr’s previous work in Ohio has shown) for less money per student.

Leave a Comment » | charter schools, research reports, school funding | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Charter School Students More Likely to Graduate High School, Attend College

November 13, 2008

The National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College has posted a new study on charter schools by Kevin Booker (Mathematica), Tim Sass (Florida State), Brian Gill (Mathematica), and Ron Zimmer (Rand).  The researchers look at whether attending a charter high school in Chicago and Florida increases the likelihood that students would graduate high school and go on to college.  The short answer is that it does.

The paper’s abstract states:

“We find that charter high schools in Florida and in Chicago have substantial positive effects on both high school completion and college attendance. Controlling for observed student characteristics and test scores, univariate probit estimates indicate that among students who attended a charter middle school, those who went on to attend a charter high school were 7 to 15 percentage points more likely to earn a standard diploma than students who transitioned to a traditional public high school. Similarly, those attending a charter high school were 8 to 10 percentage points more likely to attend college. Using the proximity of charters and other types of high schools as exogenous instruments for charter high school attendance, we find even stronger effects in bivariate probit models of charter attendance and educational attainment. While large, our estimates are in line with previous studies of the impact of Catholic high schools on educational attainment.”

But I can already hear doubters wondering how you could compare students in charter schools to other students when the kinds of students who self-select into charter schools could be very different from those who do not. 

But never fear.  These researchers are pretty bright and they worried about this problem as well.  So they came up with three novel strategies to address the possibility of selection bias.  First they try the usual (and not entirely persuasive) technique of controlling statistically for any observed differences between the charter and non-charter students, including race/ethnicity, gender, disability status, family income, and — most importantly — 8th grade student test scores. 

But what about the unobserved (and uncontrollable) qualities of students who choose charters?  Well, their second technique to address potential selection bias is that they compare students who were all in charter schools in 8th grade.  The treatment group went on to a charter high school while the control group went to a traditional public high school.  Since both groups began as charter-choosers, the unobserved qualities of people who choose charters should be present in both groups.  As the authors describe it, “If there are unmeasured student/family characteristics that lead to the selection of charter high schools, these unmeasured characteristics ought to also lead to the choice of a charter school at the middle school level.”

But wait, they did one more thing that really nails the potential problem of selection bias.  They took advantage of the fact that not all students who attend charter middle schools live within a reasonable distance of charter high schools (especially in Florida) to create an “exogeneous” instrument for predicting whether students would attend a charter high school.  That is, they could obtain an unbiased estimate of attending charter high school based on geographic distances and then use that unbiased estimate of charter attendance to obtain an unbiased estimate of the effect of attending a charter high school on graduation and college-attendance.  If you don’t trust me that this technique works to correct for selection bias, you can trust the Nobel prize in economics, which was awarded to James Heckman at the University of Chicago for having developed this technique.

This study comes on the heels of positive results from Caroline Hoxby’s random-assignment evaluation of charter schools in New York City.  Random-assignment corrects for potential selection bias because the students accepted into the charter schools by lottery.  Only chance distinguishes the students in the treatment group (charters) from those in the control group (traditional public).  Hoxby’s analysis finds:

“What is the main result or the bottom line for the grade 3-8 tests? New York City’s charter schools raise their third through eighth graders’ math scores by 0.09 standard deviations for every year they spend in the school. Remember, these gains are in addition to whatever gains the students would have been expected to make in the traditional public schools, had they been lotteried-out. This result is statistically significant with a high level of confidence. (The p-value, shown in parentheses, is less than 0.001.) That means that we are very confident, more than 99% confident, that the effects of New York City’s charter schools on math achievement are not zero or negative…. New York City’s Charter Schools raise their third through eighth graders’ reading scores by 0.04 standard deviations for every year they spend in the school. Remember, these gains are in addition to whatever gains the students would have been expected to make in the traditional public schools, had they been lotteried-out. This result is statistically significant with a high level of confidence. (The p-value, shown in parentheses, is 0.016.) That means that we are very confident (98% confident) that the effects of New York City’s Charter Schools on reading achievement are not zero or negative…. What is a standard deviation? A standard deviation or “effect size” is a conventional way of expressing test scores that works for all tests. If students’ scores rise by one standard deviation, it is a large change in achievement. On most tests it corresponds to more than a grade’s worth of learning and more than a performance level.”

So we now have some very well-designed studies to address selection concerns and they are finding significant benefits from attending charter schools.

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

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