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Incomplete: How Middle Class Schools Aren't Making the Grade is a new report from Third Way, a Washington, D.C.-based policy think tank. The report aims to convince parents, taxpayers and policymakers that they should be as concerned about middle-class schools not making the grade as they are about the failures of the nation's large, poor, urban school districts. But, the report suffers from egregious methodological flaws invalidating nearly every bold conclusion drawn by its authors. First, the report classifies as middle class any school or district where the share of children qualifying for free or reduced-priced lunch falls between 25% and 75%. Seemingly unknown to the authors, this classification includes as middle class some of the poorest urban centers in the country, such as Detroit and Philadelphia. But, even setting aside the crude classification of middle class, none of the report's major conclusions are actually supported by the data tables provided. The report concludes, for instance, that middle-class schools perform much less well than the general public, parents and taxpayers believe they do. But, the tables throughout the report invariably show that the schools they classify as "middle class" fall precisely where one would expect them to-in the middle-between higher- and lower-income schools. 

Recent quasi-experimental and experimental studies have found that KIPP middle schools-part of a nationwide network of charter schools-have large, positive impacts on academic achievement. In light of these findings,  skeptics have  asked whether KIPP schools benefit from unusually selective student attrition and replacement patterns. We investigate this question using longitudinal, student-level data covering 19 KIPP middle schools. On average, we find that  KIPP schools generally admit students who are disadvantaged in ways similar to their peers in local public schools. Rates of exit from KIPP schools are typically no different than rates at nearby district schools, and students exiting KIPP schools have characteristics similar to those of students exiting local district schools. To replace students who exit through attrition, KIPP schools admit a substantial number of new students in grade 6 but admit fewer students in grades 7 and 8 than do nearby public schools. Unlike local district schools, KIPP's late entrants also tend to have higher prior achievement levels and fewer males than the rest of the KIPP student body. Although it is difficult to gauge the size of any resulting peer effects at KIPP, the  existing peer effects  literature indicates  that the range of possibilities is limited. Overall, we find that KIPP's impacts do not appear to be explained by advantages in the prior achievement of KIPP students, even when attrition and replacement throughout the middle school years are taken into account.

This report details how charter schools are increasingly run by private, nonprofit management organizations called charter school management organizations (CMOs). The researchers find that most CMOs serve urban students from low-income families, operate small schools that offer more instructional time, and attract teachers loyal to each school's mission, based on survey data and site visits. The authors conducted an impact analysis focused only on middle school grades, finding that a small fraction of CMO-run middle schools boosted achievement growth at notable levels. But on average, student performance in the CMO-run schools did not outpace achievement growth in other charters or in host districts for a statistically matched set of students. This review finds that the report offers an objective assessment of the comparative benefits for middle-school students of a highly select set of CMOs. It also helps to identify organizational features that operate in successful CMO-run schools that are modestly associated with stronger student growth in the middle grades. However, the authors downplay aspects of their methodology that resulted in significant selectivity concerning which CMOs were studied, raising questions regarding the population of charter schools to which they hope to generalize.

Education reform proposals are often based on high-profile or dramatic policy changes, many of which are expensive, politically controversial, or both.  In this paper, we argue that the debates over these "flashy" policies have obscured a potentially important direction for raising student performance-namely, reforms to the management or organization of schools. By making sure the "trains run on time" and focusing on the day-to-day decisions involved in managing the instructional process, school and district administrators may be able to substantially increase student learning at modest cost.In this paper, we describe three organizational reforms that recent evidence suggests have the potential to increase K-12 student performance at modest costs: (1) Starting school later in the day for middle and high school students; (2) Shifting from a system with separate elementary and middle schools to one with schools that serve students in kindergarten through grade eight; (3) Managing teacher assignments with an eye toward maximizing student achievement (e.g. allowing teachers to gain experience by teaching the same grade level for multiple years or having teachers specializing in the subject where they appear most effective). We conservatively estimate that the ratio of benefits to costs is 9 to 1 for later school start times and 40 to 1 for middle school reform. A precise benefit-cost calculation is not feasible for the set of teacher assignment reforms we describe, but we argue that the cost of such proposals is likely to be quite small relative to the benefits for students. While we recognize that these specific reforms may not be appropriate or feasible for every district, we encourage school, district, and state education leaders to make the management, organization, and operation of schools a more prominent part of the conversation on how to raise student achievement.

An organization called "The Third Way" released a report last week, in which they present descriptive data on what they call "middle class schools." The primary conclusion of their analysis is that "middle class schools" aren't "making the grade," and that they are "falling short on their most basic 21st century mission: To prepare kids to get a college degree." They also argue that "middle class schools" are largely ignored in our debate and policymaking, and we need a "second phase of school reform" in order to address this deficit. The Wall Street Journal swallowed the report whole, running a story presenting Third Way's findings under the headline "Middle class schools fail to make the grade."

Today, Rachel Monahan reported in the Daily News that the DOE is going forward with a contract for Joel Rose's new company to run the School of One in NYC public schools. Joel Rose devised and ran the "School of One" for DOE, a much-hyped online program to teach middle school math, starting in the summer of 2009.  Rose has had a pretty standard trajectory for a corporate reformer: he started as a TFA recruit, then worked for seven years at Edison charter schools under Chris Cerf, moved over to DOE as Cerf's chief of staff in 2006, and started the "School of One" as a summer school program in a few middle schools.

A national teachers union leader joined faculty at a Los Angeles middle school Friday to criticize a major school-improvement initiative within the L.A. Unified School District. Under the strategy, called Public School Choice, groups inside and outside the school system can bid for control of new and low-performing campuses. The meeting between teachers and Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, took place at Cochran Middle School in Arlington Heights, one of the campuses affected.

Elementary schools and high schools are tough enough to run, but middle schools are a problem unto themselves. Nobody quite knows what to do with students who are of age to be in what we call middle school. What we know about the developmental profile of kids from age 11 to 14 tells us that a traditional academic classroom experience is not the best option.

This paper presents findings from the first national randomized study of the impacts of charter schools on student achievement, which included 36 charter middle schools across 15 states. The paper compares students who applied and were admitted to these schools through randomized admissions lotteries with students who applied and were not admitted. It finds that, on average, charter middle schools in the study were neither more nor less successful than traditional public schools in improving student achievement. However, impacts varied significantly across schools and students, with positive impacts for more disadvantaged schools and students and negative impacts for the more advantaged. 

Much controversy has been aroused and much ink has been expended about the way in which Eva Moskowitz is now defying the original stated purpose of charter schools, and marketing her chain of Success Academies to white middle class families in Brooklyn and on the Upper West Side.  Her glossy flyers, sent to households by the truckload, with many families having already received five or six, increasingly feature the faces of little white children. There has also been much debate about the problems of NYC's demanding school "choice" process -- but not much said about how school choice may further segregate  our public schools, especially in many areas of Brownstone Brooklyn, where the last ten years or more of gradual gentrification have led to more diversity in neighborhood schools.  While the UCLA Civil Rights project has shown how charter schools contributes to more segregation nationwide, here are the observations of one Brooklyn parent who is also a high school teacher, Cindy Black, about what happened when a new elementary school of "choice" -- though not a charter -- opened up  in her community

New York City's Department of Education recently released their 'progress reports' for all the middle and elementary schools for the 2010-2011 school year. For each school they have a complicated formula that assigns up to 60 points for 'progress', up to 25 points for 'achievement', and up to 15 points for 'school environment'. The scores are tallied and out of the 1100 schools, the bottom 3%, which is around 33 are labeled as an 'F.' When a school gets an F, they are on probation and could get shut down and turned into a charter school or other sanctions. Even if it doesn't get shut down, it is pretty embarrassing when schools get this grade, particularly when they know that they don't deserve this label.

The goal of our recent report "Incomplete: How Middle-Class Schools Aren't Making the Grade" was to jumpstart a national conversation around the state of middle-class schools. Given the response, it looks like we're off to a good start. We've received a wide range of feedback from educators, policymakers, and thought leaders who share a common purpose-getting our kids ready to succeed in the 21st century. Since a portion of the response has focused on our definition of "middle-class" or our approach to school-by-school data, we wanted to take a moment to tackle some of the issues that have been raised.

Louisiana's "School Performance Score" (SPS) is the state's primary accountability measure, and it determines whether schools are subject to high-stakes decisions, most notably state takeover. For elementary and middle schools, 90 percent of the SPS is based on testing outcomes. For secondary schools, it is 70 percent (and 30 percent graduation rates).* The SPS is largely calculated using absolute performance measures - specifically, the proportion of students falling into the state's cutpoint-based categories (e.g., advanced, mastery, basic, etc.). This means that it is mostly measuring student performance, rather than school performance. That is, insofar as the SPS only tells you how high students score on the test, rather than how much they have improved, schools serving more advantaged populations will tend to do better (since their students tend to perform well when they entered the school) while those in impoverished neighborhoods will tend to do worse (even those whose students have made the largest testing gains). One rough way to assess this bias is to check the association between SPS and student characteristics, such as poverty.

A new national study on the effectiveness of the networks that operate charter schools finds that their students' test scores in math, science, and social studies improve after they have spent a year or two at the school, but not by much. Overall, the report out today finds that middle school student achievement varies widely at schools run by charter-management organizations, which are the groups that establish and operate multiple charter schools. Most networks seem to produce a positive effect on student achievement, compared with results for students in district-run schools in the same area that are not run by CMOs. Some actually have a negative effect. The overall impact, however, tends not to be statistically significant, according to the report by from Mathematica and the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington.

When it released the 2011 Progress Reports to the public last month, the DOE made a point of noting that charter schools received more A's than did their regular public school counterparts. Technically that's true, but technically is about as far as it goes. When we compare the charter middle school A's to the public middle school A's for example, we see that the Progress Reports offer little evidence of better student achievement. In fact, in spite of an uneven playing field that should have tilted the scores in favor of the charters, the Progress Reports actually indicate that when it comes to academics, the middle school charters that got A's did not do that well.

I've already beaten the issue of the various flaws, misrepresentations and outright data abuse in the Third Way middle class report into the ground on this blog. And it's really about time for that to end. Time to move on. But here is one simple illustration which draws on the same NAEP data compiled and aggregated in the Middle Class report. For anyone reading this post who has not already read my others on the problems with the definition of "Middle Class," and related data abuse & misuse please start there

State Superintendent for Public Instruction Tony Bennett will recommend state takeover of four Indianapolis Public Schools. Under Bennett's plan, each would be run by an outside organization beginning with the 2012-13 school year. They are: Emma Donnan Middle School, Manual High School and T.C. Howe High School, all of which would be managed by Charter Schools USA. The Florida-based company operates 29 charter schools in Florida, Georgia and Louisiana.

My public middle school in South Los Angeles was labeled as a "failing school" almost 12 months ago making what is already a tough job even more difficult due to the Los Angeles Unified School District corporate inspired reform program called Public School Choice.  In short, if you are deemed a failing school, any organized group can submit a plan to take over your school and as a result, many public schools have been converted to charters in the last two years.  Brand new multi-million dollar buildings were handed over to corporations such as Green Dot and ICEF, and my school is on this dread list.

"This brief describes the prevalence of highest-performing teachers in ten purposely selected districts across seven states. The overall patterns indicate that low-income students have unequal access, on average, to the district's highest-performing teachers at the middle school level but not at the elementary level. However, there is evidence of variation in the distribution of highest-performing teachers within and among the ten districts studied. Some have an under-representation of the highest-performing teachers in high-poverty elementary and middle schools. Others have such under-representation only at the middle school level, and one district has a disproportionate share of the district's highest-performing teachers in its high-poverty elementary schools."

To date, however, there has not been a comprehensive resource that addresses central questions related to New York City middle school teacher turnover and identifies important avenues for future research. The Research Alliance of New York City Schools aims to fill this gap through a three-year, mixed-methods study of New York City middle school teacher turnover.