New Study Says Charter Schools Only Improve Education

By The Heartland Institute

A new study by the RAND Corporation found charter schools do not harm conventional public schools and charter students are more likely to graduate high school and go on to college than other public school children.

The study took a closer examination of the topic than any previously released, according to its authors. Researchers mapped the test scores and post-graduation achievement of millions of students at thousands of schools.

“Charter Schools in Eight States: Effects on Achievement, Attainment, Integration, and Competition,” released in March, examines the charter school movement in Florida, Ohio, and Texas, plus individual districts in Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and San Diego.

“We got together a group of researchers so we could put together data from all these different sites and examine them in a consistent and rigorous way,” said Brian Gill, study coauthor and a senior social scientist at Mathematica Policy Research, an education research group based in Princeton, New Jersey.

Not Skimming Best Students
Gill said the research led to four conclusions.

* Charter schools are not “skimming the cream” of students, as some critics have worried. Students’ academic achievement was comparable to that of students at traditional public schools. Furthermore, demographics and racial/ethnic compositions also were comparable between the charter schools and the public schools the students had left.

* Test scores did not significantly differ between charter and public middle schools and high schools. “One thing we learned, though, was that the jury is still out on charter elementary schools,” Gill said. The academic achievement for kindergartners, in particular, was difficult to determine because no data from the previous year is available, so researchers cannot compare the trajectory as they would for other grades, he explained.

* Traditional public schools are unharmed by charter growth. The research showed no effect, either positive or negative, on the academic achievement of nearby public school students’ performance as charter schools expanded into their districts.

* Greater percentages of charter school students graduate from high school and attend college than those in traditional public schools.....

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Charter School lawsuit may set precedent

A lawsuit filed by the Hidden Springs Charter School against the state Department of Education was not affected when the Boise School District assumed responsibility for the school, said Joe Saucerman, chairman of the board for the school.

The outcome of the suit is pending, Saucerman said. The court's decision could impact charter school funding around the state.

The charter school filed suit in November, saying the Idaho law that allows public schools to use a previous year's attendance figures to offset declines in enrollment also applied to charter schools.

If student daily enrollment drops significantly from one year to the next, schools can collect, for one year, 99 percent of the money they received from the state the previous year.

Hidden Springs had a significant drop in enrollment but was only paid for the number of students who were enrolled that year.

"We were short last year $250,000," Saucerman said. "We need to get that money to get things squared away.".....

Click here to read the rest of the article.

A Money Saving Virtual Vision for Education

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — New research at the University of Florida predicts more public school students in kindergarten through 12th grade will take classes online, have longer school days and more of them in the next decade. Academic performance should improve and schools could save money.

While distance education over the Internet is already widespread at colleges and universities, UF educational technology researchers are offering some of the first hard evidence documenting the potential cost-savings of virtual schooling in K-12 schools.

“Policymakers and educators have proposed expanding learning time in elementary through high school grades as a way to improve students’ academic performance, but online coursework hasn’t been on their radar. This should change as we make school and school district leaders more aware of the potential cost savings that virtual schooling offers,” said Catherine Cavanaugh, associate professor at the University of Florida’s College of Education. “Over the next decade, we expect an explosion in the use of virtual schooling as a seamless synthesis between the traditional classroom and online learning.”

Based on a 2008 survey of 20 virtual schools in 14 states, UF researchers found that the average yearly cost of online learning per full-time pupil was about $4,300. This compared with a national average cost per pupil of more than $9,100 for a traditional public school in 2006 (the most recent year in which such data was available). Their cost estimates covered course development and teaching, and administrative and technical expenses.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Fighting for Students in St. Louis

St. Louis — One recent Saturday morning, the leader of a school not yet open began knocking on doors, searching for his future students.

Jeremy Esposito stopped everyone he saw there on Pennsylvania Avenue in south St. Louis — children playing with hoses, teens on bikes, a man with a flask.

Esposito, incoming principal of KIPP Inspire Academy, knows that dozens of schools in St. Louis are fighting for just such children. His meetings with families, then, often end with a hard sell, a contract and a request: Sign here.

St. Louis schools, both public and private, have long fought to capture city students. But never quite like this.


"There's more competition for city school kids, for all kids, than ever before," said Sue Brown, director of marketing and community relations for the Catholic Education Office at the St. Louis Archdiocese. "We're fighting for every one."

A rise in the number of charter schools, such as KIPP, has put new schools or their billboards in nearly every neighborhood and stolen thousands of students from the public district. And for that matter, even Catholic schools have had to compete to not lose students to charter schools...

Public schools fight back:

By the start of this school year, charters enrolled nearly 10,000 students, about one-third as many as are enrolled in St. Louis Public Schools.

The district, now with an appointed board and a new superintendent, is seeking to turn that tide. The first moves this year streamlined a scattered district budget, with leaders agreeing two months ago to close 14 of the district's 85 schools this summer, and, last week, budgeting to cut $53 million from the $342 million spent this year.

At the same time, and with much less public debate, leaders have begun to focus on improving schools and singing their praises.

In February, Superintendent Kelvin Adams asked the board to approve $1 million for marketing.

The first $100,000 would probably go to area firm TOKY Branding + Design — now in negotiations with the district — to recreate the St. Louis Public Schools' image.

It would be an expensive, high-class project for a public district — TOKY designed a recruiting book for the $21,000-a-year Whitfield School in Creve Coeur, for instance, that won a national award.

The contract would include reworking logos, developing scientific surveys, building advertising strategies and redesigning letterhead, posters, newsletters and recruiting brochures.

District communications director Patrick Wallace said TOKY would find out why families did not enroll in district schools and what it would take to get them to. Then the firm would recommend how to get the message out...

Read the rest of the article here.

Obama to fix failing schools?

President Obama is planning to use a special $5 billion federal school turnaround program to prod local officials to reshape—and in some cases close and reopen—failing schools. The changes could consist of replacing teachers and principals or turning schools into charter school programs.

The goal is to take the nation's 5,000 lowest-performing schools—the bottom 5 percent—and transform 1,000 of them per year, over the next five years, into robust institutions of learning, Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently said. He was speaking at the Brookings Institution in Washington, a leading education think tank. Department of Education officials say that closing and reopening schools is not the purpose of the intervention, but it may be deemed necessary for some schools, especially "dropout factories" where 2 in 5 kids don't make it to graduation.

Obama's focus on failing schools comes on the heels of a historic injection of federal education funding courtesy of his economic stimulus package, which doubles what the education budget had been under President Bush.

The 5,000 schools that will be targeted for the makeover will be determined by the states and local districts based on criteria they set themselves under the guidance of the federal Education Department. The criteria might include dropout rates, test scores, and the number of graduates going on to attend college. In determining which schools are "the most in need of help," the Department of Education says that local and state officials should take student achievement growth into account and should consider intervention for only the lowest-performing schools that are not making progress....

click here to read the rest of the article.

Jimi Hendrix, the face of an education role model?

Oh San Francisco, you never fail to amaze us!

The San Francisco school district has chosen a highly unusual role model to grace the cover of its new education guide, and some residents are questioning whether the choice sends a good message to the city's youth.

On the cover of the new district guidebook – aimed at changing the educational “experiences for every child in each of our schools” – is a portrait of 1960s rock legend Jimi Hendrix, known as much for his fatal drug habit as his revolutionary take on rock music

The image of Hendrix -- who didn't make it through high school -- is not limited to the cover. Indeed, Hendrix's face appears on nearly every page of the manual, which also comes with a Hendrix poster and canvas tote, all distributed to hundreds of administrators in Superintendent Carlos Garcia’s district.

When in Rome?

Garcia told the Chronicle that he was simply trying to “revolutionize” the district and felt comfortable with Hendrix’s controversial image because, “Hey, we’re in San Francisco.”

What's next, Amy Winehouse for Secretary of Education?

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Secretary Duncan doesn't think vouchers are the answer

They will continue the vouchers....only for the kids currently enrolled...

President Obama will ask Congress to temporarily extend the school voucher program in the District of Columbia until students now attending private high schools with taxpayer dollars graduate...

If it's working, why keep it?

"It's the President and Arne's belief that we should fund them all the way through their high school education," says Education Department spokesman Peter Cunningham. But he adds that neither Duncan nor Obama is seeking to continue the program further. Democrats have pushed to end it, saying vouchers take needed funds from public schools.

And Duncan continues:

"At the end of the day, I don't think vouchers are the answer." He added, "We have to be much more ambitious for ourselves and have higher expectations. We have to help every child in D.C. … The answer is not vouchers for few. It's massive change, massive reform for all, absolutely as quickly as possible."

I just have one question...where would Secretary Duncan send his kids? We already know where the president does...


Click here to see entire article.

Can Both Sides Work Together on Education Reform?

An Unlikely Duo Pushes for Entrepreneurship in Schools
by Seyward Darby

An "odd couple" of think tanks have combined forces on education reform. This morning, the Center for American Progress (CAP), the organization that spawned numerous Obama administration officials and policy ideas, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), considered a leading architect of Bush administration policy, unveiled a joint report on innovation and entrepreneurship in education. Seated on a panel at the swanky Hotel Monaco on F Street, representatives of the two groups shared friendly jabs--literally, they were nudging each other behind the microphones--about how unlikely it had seemed that the two groups would ever find common ground. But they found it, and the fruits of their labors are detailed in the report "Stimulating Excellence: Unleashing the Power of Innovation in Education."

In sum, the report calls for education systems at all levels--national, state, and local--to welcome private, inventive partners as they seek to improve in areas ranging from student achievement to teacher quality, technology procurement to after-school activities. "The minute we stop thinking like entrepreneurs," said D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who kicked off the event, "we should call it a day."

The panel was heavy on business-speak--"customers," "providers," "capital," "catalyze"-- that's sure to disgruntle traditional Democratic supporters of education, who tend to be wary of what I once heard a teacher describe angrily as a "corporate privatization agenda." But the report presented today is dead-on. It supports, among other things, using better data systems "to create a performance culture" (which I discussed in another blog post this morning); opening public education "to a diverse set of providers" (Teach for America and other alternative teacher certification programs, for instance); loosening procurement restrictions so that schools can spend more flexibly on services provided by private enterprises; and, via new government policy, directing more public funds toward innovative programs.

Admittedly, CAP and AEI don't see eye to eye on everything in education...

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Education debate in black and white

Do African American teachers, teach African American kids better than white teachers?

You decide.....

Somebody named Terry Saskin had taken issue with a Philadelphia Daily News article that detailed the shortage of black teachers in city public schools and lauded Cheyney University's Call Me MISTER program, which trains African American teachers for elementary school classrooms.

Saskin's letter to the editor a few weeks ago brimmed with defiance. Under the headline "As a white teacher, I'm not good enough?" it read:

"I'm white and have been teaching in the district for 12 years. Most of my students are minorities. . . . They have achieved academic excellence. If my ethnicity were different, not a thing would change."

It went on: "The Call Me MISTER program seems solid, but playing the race card is just another example of how weak-minded some people are."

Uh-oh. There's the dreaded accusation of the race card again. Now my back was up.

But Saskin's letter did get me thinking about whether a teacher's race had any correlation to the success of an African American student. Especially as we see so few black teachers.

My own experience says yes. Sure, I had a string of white teachers I absolutely adored. But in sixth grade, Mrs. Corley, my first African American teacher, had the most profound impact.

She was the first black person I had seen who was a professional and looked like me - tall and brown-skinned. And she talked to me like my mother, affectionately and sometimes with no compromise. Plus, she was a great teacher.

Still, I couldn't dismiss this letter. The first of my many questions: Just who is this Saskin character, who previously had taken on everybody from the Ku Klux Klan to indifferent parents in his letter-writing campaigns, who, in all of his letters, mentioned the well-being of children?

Who also once challenged his students to write letters chronicling life in the inner city, and who gave $25 out of his own pocket to the 10 whose letters were published in the newspaper.

For somebody who seemed so in tune, could he really not understand the need for more black teachers in a district that's 62 percent African American?

Turns out, the 39-year-old Saskin is one of those rare teachers you don't see every day, whose passion goes way beyond the classroom.

Jewish by birth only, he says - "I married a shiksa and have tattoos all over my shoulders" - the Bensalem native has spent his entire career in public elementary education.

He taught for 10 years at Muñoz Marin School in Kensington, where the majority of his students were Latino. Spent two years at Frederick Douglass School in North Philly, where the student population was overwhelmingly African American.

Click here to read the rest of the article by Annette John-Hall