The Atlantic just published a long opinion piece by Joel Klein, including a repetition of his long-standing argument that New York City’s charters perform miracles with “students who are demographically almost identical to those attending nearby community and charter schools,” and that anyone who claims differently is a blind supporter of the “status quo.” A closer look at Klein’s own numbers, however, tells a very different story. According to the progress reports released by his Department of Education just last year, New York City’s charter sector did not outperform similar district public schools. And the Harlem Success Academy — the school which he specifically holds up as “almost identical” to neighboring district schools — actually serves dramatically lower proportions of the city’s neediest students and of English Language Learners than other Harlem schools. More »

A thought-provoking article about a successful district middle school in the Bronx in a recent issue of the New York Times Magazine has led to some interesting public responses from charter advocates in New York. As the article notes, this school’s principal and teachers combine innovative teaching and learning (such as a dual-language immersion program for its high proportion of English Language Learners) with a firm commitment to serving all students who want to come — even if, unlike at charters, those students arrive in the middle of the year or as transfers in upper grades.

One of the most negative reactions to the piece has come from former Chancellor Joel Klein, who (in an email exchange with the reporter) responded defensively to the article’s implied criticism of his own administration’s support for charters:

[A]re you saying that, by dint of applying to a charter, a family is more ambitious and motivated? That suggests that, ipso facto, families who are ambitious and motivated about their kid’s education chose charters (rather than traditional public schools like 223). I doubt there is any basis to support that inference but, if you’re right, that would be quite an argument for replacing all traditional public schools with charters, including 223, because those ‘who are ambitious and motivated’ for their children want a charter.

I would argue that Klein is being somewhat disingenuous here in his shock at the idea that charters might attract more “ambitious and motivated” parents. More »

The Journal of School Choice recently published an article in which researchers Jack Buckley and Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj confirmed the UFT’s findings in 2010 that charter schools in New York City enrolled a lower proportion of limited English proficient (LEP) students than the average district school in 2007-08. Overall, they find that among the city’s charters from 2006-2008, “in the case of the LEP proportions, there is a large group of schools with very few, a handful with a larger proportion, and perhaps 1-3 schools, depending on the year, with a large share of LEP students.”

This report provides a valuable complement to our findings in Separate and Unequal, both in its examination of two additional years of data and in its use of sophisticated statistical formulas to account for possible errors in the numbers of LEP students that charters report to the state each year. As this chart from the article shows, even when the researchers controlled for that possibility, the proportion of LEP students in most charters in the city fell well below the district average (represented by the solid line on the graph).

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James Merriman just posted a very angry piece on his blog, charging that the city’s Independent Budget Office’s recent analysis of Mayor Bloomberg’s 2012 budget plan was too critical of charters. In his haste to criticize the IBO as “one-sided,” however, he stretches his argument a bit too far.

He states that charters enroll “kids that DOE does not have to pay to educate,” but the IBO report notes that the increase in the number of students in charter schools has not been matched with a corresponding decrease in the number of students in district schools, leaving the district to educate the same amount of students for less money:

In theory, the diversion of funds to charters should be offset by a reduction in the number of students being served by the department itself. No estimates exist of the path that students and families in New York follow to charter schools. Are these students who would have been attending public schools or are they students who would have enrolled in private or religious schools? The answer is unknown but is likely some combination of the two. Total enrollment in the public school system has remained relatively stable in recent years as charter enrollment has grown. Regardless of how many charter school students would otherwise have attended public schools, the fact remains that — at least for now — the public schools are being asked to educate roughly the same number of students with a reduced budget available for services to schools.

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Eva Moskowitz is deeply concerned about the education of English Language Learners, at least according to a favorable report in today’s Wall Street Journal. In a swipe at the New York City Department of Education, Moskowitz declares that “(i)t shouldn’t take six years” for students to achieve English proficiency on the state language test. English Language Learners are being left behind.

Eva talks the talk, but falls down when it is time to walk the walk. More »

This week has marked a new low for corporate charter advocates’ defense of draining tax money away from the neediest students and into the pockets of their already wealthy friends. In the case of New York, the policies that the New York Charter School Association supports could actually decrease financial resources for the charter schools they claim to support, since charter funding is based on the same district funding that Peter Murphy thinks deserves to be cut!

Over at the blog of the New York Charter School Association, Peter Murphy has the audacity to claim that since a “billion dollars doesn’t buy what it once did in New York,” the state’s teachers unions should end their call for Governor Cuomo to keep the millionaires’ tax in place to help offset the devastating education cuts that would occur if the state loses that tax revenue next year. Sorry, Mr. Murphy, but for most New Yorkers, a billion dollars (or $4 billion!) isn’t just some change you find under a rock: More »

The debate over charter schools’ performance in New Jersey is heating up, as state officials resist calls to release data about the demographics of charter students. Over the past few months, former NYC Department of Education Deputy Chancellor (and for-profit Edison Schools President) Christopher Cerf, Governor Chris Christie’s Acting School Commissioner, has repeatedly claimed that charters in the state were more effective than district schools and should be expanded. However, when reporters from the Newark Star-Ledger requested data that would allow them to check whether charters were serving the same students as district schools, Cerf and other officials refused: More »

An action alert from the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff:

Negotiate with Teachers Now!

Sulejman F. Dizdarevic — attorney with Belongia, Shapiro & Franklin, LLP — and his fellow Board members at Chicago Mathematics and Science Academy are subverting the rights of their teachers and violating Illinois labor law by refusing to negotiate a contract.

In June, teachers freely chose to form a union to improve their working conditions and the learning environment of their students. They followed Illinois labor law and have been recognized as the legal bargaining representatives for the school’s teachers.

It’s time Mr. Dizdarevic — attorney and CMSA Board member — followed the law too.

Send Sulejman Dizdarevic an e-mail telling him to respect teacher’s rights >>

When Governor Cuomo announced cuts of $2.85 billion in state education aid in his recent budget address, he suggested one way in which economies could be made by local school districts — the downsizing of the extraordinary salaries of district superintendents in the wealthier suburban school districts. While the returns from slashing superintendent salaries will fill only a small portion of the prospective holes in state education aid, we find ourselves in agreement with the governor that public school educators paid with the taxes of New Yorkers should not be earning the sort of bloated salaries which are prevalent among the greedy Wall Street crowd which brought us this great recession. There is something wrong when a superintendent of a school district serving 6600 students receives an annual salary more than double that of the governor himself, who leads a 19.4 million person state.

But if Governor Cuomo is going to take a consistent and principled stand on this question, he needs to address the fact that the salaries of suburban school superintendents are not the only egregious cases of living high on the education hog, at the expense of students, teachers and the public. In recent years, charter school boards have approved increasingly large and exorbitant salaries for the leaders of relatively small charter school networks in New York City, compensation packages which often dwarf those received by their district school counterparts. More »

Another interesting post just appeared from Halley Potter (who also wrote this excellent piece on charter teacher turnover), noting that the Obama administration has failed to replicate the Clinton administration’s official support for making student diversity a charter school priority.

The next step in ensuring diversity in charter schools should come from the federal government. In 2000, under the Clinton administration, the Office of Civil Rights issued a statement outlining charter schools’ responsibility to recruit students from diverse backgrounds. While the statement was a nonbinding expression of the opinion of the Department of Education, it at least provided guidance for states and individual charter schools. When Bush came into office, the statement was archived and no longer represented the Department of Education’s official stance. It has remained that way under the Obama Administration. Erica Frankenberg, an assistant professor at Penn State University, told Miller-McCune that “the Obama administration has done nothing since coming to office to try to clarify the responsibilities that charter schools have in complying with federal civil rights laws. Giving new guidance is important.”

Policy expert Matthew DiCarlo has been posting some terrific analyses of education policy research and news over at the Shanker Institute’s new blog.  Two of my favorites this month were his overview of the “Year in Research on Market-Based Reform” and this week’s commentary on the Christie administration’s recent claims that the New Jersey’s charters are doing a better job than their district schools, which the governor used to justify a significant expansion of the number of charter schools in the state.

As Matt notes, the media coverage of the latter story has completely missed the point that the Christie administration’s latest report made no effort to consider whether the state’s charter schools were enrolling the same kinds of students (in terms of students with special needs and students eligible for free lunch) as their local district schools.

In contrast, education researcher Bruce Baker has pointed out that as of 2008-09, the state’s own data showed that:

1. New Jersey charter schools generally serve smaller shares of children qualifying for free lunch than schools in their host district and schools in their immediate surroundings.
2. New Jersey charter schools serve very few children with disabilities.
3. New Jersey charter school performance, like charter school performance elsewhere, is a mixed bag. Some of the highest performers are simply not comparable to traditional public schools in their districts because they serve such different student populations (far fewer low income children and few or no special education students). So, even if we found that these schools produced greater gains for their students than similar students would have achieved in the traditional public schools, we could not sort out whether that effect came from school quality differences or from peer group differences (which doesn’t matter from the parent perspective, but does from the policy perspective).

Even strong charter advocates such as the policy-makers at the New York City Department of Education take some student demographics into account in assigning performance grades to local charter schools — the Christie administration’s deliberate decision not to do so reflects poorly on how seriously they take their claims that they only want to do what’s best for the state’s neediest students.

UPDATE (Jan. 24, 2011): Bruce Baker just updated the statistics about NJ charter school demographics on his blog.

Seth Andrew

In an Edwize post earlier this year I suggested that Seth Andrew should not quit and leave New York to help run a new charter school in Rhode Island. As it turns out, Andrew will be coming back — last week it was announced that Democracy Prep’s contract with the Rhode Island Mayoral Academies to operate Democracy Prep Blackstone Valley had been terminated. In other words, Seth Andrew was fired. Andrew, who paid himself an annual salary of $168,000 for his job as head of the single Democracy Prep school in New York in 2008, had decided to request higher management fees (apparently taking a cue from for-profit operators such as Victory Schools) — and the board called his bluff.

Oddly enough, this came right after Michelle Rhee’s visit to Democracy Prep’s New York location, where she praised the school and its leadership. Rhee also charged that Democracy Prep’s schools in New York were underfunded, even though due to recent increases in charter funding in New York, it seems likely that Democracy Prep is now getting more base funding than the district schools in its buildings. She also failed to acknowledge that those district schools served higher proportions of students who were eligible for free lunch and who needed the highest level of special education services than Democracy Prep:

Apparently this experience is something Rhee should be getting used to — since earlier this month a principal hand-picked by Rhee to take over a failing school in D.C. was also fired — by Rhee’s own former deputy chancellor. Hopefully these two education “reformers” will pay attention to the fact that even their colleagues feel they’ve made some poor decisions, and will use this as an opportunity for soul searching rather than pushing for more of the same.

The University of Washington’s National Charter School Research Project recently released a new report examining the impact of the high rates of principal turnover at charter schools in six states. This multi-year project found that as of 2007, 71% of charter school leaders planned to leave their schools within the next five years, and came to this troubling conclusion:

While the rate of leadership turnover is similar in both charter and traditional public schools, the impact of turnover is potentially higher for charter schools.

The researchers point out several reasons for this greater impact:

Many charter schools are still led by their original founders, and when they leave, the transition can be tricky.

Charter schools are often starting from scratch when it comes to finding a leader’s replacement.

Many charter schools are in denial when it comes to leadership turnover — half have no transition plan.

More »

Although the New York City Charter School Center’s website still claims that charters “do more with less,” recent increases to charter funding in New York could mean that as of this fall, most charters in the city may now be getting hundreds of dollars more in per-student base funding than district schools.

According to information being distributed by the state and by the Charter School Center, NYC charter schools will receive a base rate of $13,527 in per-student support in 2010-11 (this base rate does not include items such categorical funding linked to individual student characteristics, such as special education status). This represents an increase of $1,084 per student (8.7%) from their per-student funding of $12,443 in 2009-10 and 2008-09. Based on a formula developed by the city’s Independent Budget Office (IBO), if district schools see no budget increase this year, this means charters in shared space will now be getting $492 more per student than the district school they share a building with. More »

And why do they keep bashing public schools and unions?

[Editor's note: This story first appeared in the Dec. 16 issue of the New York Teacher.]

There’s a political action committee called Democrats for Education Reform. A great name, but I heard that they only support nonunion charter schools, bash unions and get subsidized by Wall Street hedge-fund managers. What’s up with that?

You heard right. They’re like other public school bashers, except they call themselves Democrats. Democrats for Education Reform claims that it “leads efforts to frame the fight that is playing out within the Democratic Party on education issues.” It tries to accomplish that by pushing aside teacher unions as education spokespeople or even as informed practitioners. The organization advocates for nonunion charter schools, vouchers, merit pay, test-based teacher evaluations, curbs on tenure and removing teacher unions from almost any role in shaping curriculum or determining working conditions.

In just three years, DFER directed more than $17 million into political and grassroots advocacy for its version of education reform and for what Joe Williams, the group’s executive director and a former Daily News education reporter, credits as “creating momentum which has the potential to dominate education policymaking for years to come.” More »