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Jeff Bernstein

Update of "Failed Promises: Assessing Charter Schools in the Twin Cities" - 0 views

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    The Institute on Race and Poverty's 2008 analysis of charter schools in the Twin Cities metro found that charter schools have failed to deliver on the promises made by charter school proponents. The study showed that charter schools were far more segregated than traditional public schools in the metro, even in school districts where traditional public schools already have high levels of racial segregation. The analysis also showed that charter schools performed worse than traditional public schools. The findings made it clear that, at that time, charter schools offered a poor choice to low-income students and students of color-one between low-performing public schools and charters that fared even worse. Compared to charter schools, other public school choice programs such as the Choice is Yours program offered much better schools to low-income students and students of color. Finally, the report found that charter schools hurt public education in the metro by encouraging racial segregation in the traditional public school system.  This work updates the 2008 study with more recent data-updating the work from the 2007-08 school year to 2010-11 in most cases. The results show that, despite significant changes to the state's charter law during the period, little has changed in the comparison between charters and traditional schools. Charter school students of all races are still much more likely to be attending a segregated school than traditional school students and the trends are largely negative. Charter schools are also still outperformed by their traditional equivalents. Analysis of 2010-11 test score data which controls for other school characteristics shows that charters still lag behind traditional schools, including especially the schools available to Choice is Yours participants.  
Jeff Bernstein

Explaining Charter School Effectiveness - 0 views

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    Estimates using admissions lotteries suggest that urban charter schools boost student achievement, while charter schools in other settings do not. We explore student-level and school-level explanations for these differences using a large sample of Massachusetts charter schools. Our results show that urban charter schools boost achievement well beyond ambient non-charter levels (that is, the average achievement level for urban non-charter students), and beyond non-urban achievement in math. Student demographics explain some of these gains since urban charters are most effective for non-whites and low-baseline achievers. At the same time, non-urban charter schools are uniformly ineffective. Our estimates also reveal important school-level heterogeneity in the urban charter sample. A non-lottery analysis suggests that urban schools with binding, well-documented admissions lotteries generate larger score gains than under-subscribed urban charter schools with poor lottery records. We link the magnitude of charter impacts to distinctive pedagogical features of urban charters such as the length of the school day and school philosophy. The relative effectiveness of urban lottery-sample charters is accounted for by over-subscribed urban schools' embrace of the No Excuses approach to education.
Jeff Bernstein

Explaining Charter School Effectiveness - 0 views

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    Estimates using admissions lotteries suggest that urban charter schools boost student achievement, while charter schools in other settings do not. We explore student-level and school-level explanations for these differences using a large sample of Massachusetts charter schools. Our results show that urban charter schools boost achievement well beyond ambient non-charter levels (that is, the average achievement level for urban non-charter students), and beyond non-urban achievement in math. Student demographics explain some of these gains since urban charters are most effective for non-whites and low-baseline achievers. At the same time, non-urban charter schools are uniformly ineffective. Our estimates also reveal important school-level heterogeneity in the urban charter sample. A non-lottery analysis suggests that urban schools with binding, well-documented admissions lotteries generate larger score gains than under-subscribed urban charter schools with poor lottery records. We link the magnitude of charter impacts to distinctive pedagogical features of urban charters such as the length of the school day and school philosophy. The relative effectiveness of urban lottery-sample charters is accounted for by over-subscribed urban schools' embrace of the No Excuses approach to education.
Jeff Bernstein

[H.R. 2218] Empowering Parents Through Quality Charter Schools Act | TheMiddleClass.org - 0 views

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    [Passed by the House 9/13/11 365-54] This legislation would amend the section of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 that governs federal financial support for charter schools, creating a program that would award grants to charter school developers via state educational agencies, state charter school boards, or governors to open new charter schools and expand and replicate existing charter schools. Priority funding would go to states that take specific steps in support of charter schools, including removing limitations on the number or percentage of charter schools that may exist or the number or percentage of students that may attend charter schools, and ensuring equitable financing for charter schools when compared to funding for public schools. The bill creates a "credit enhancement grant program" that would provide funds to public and private nonprofit entities to help charter schools secure private sector capital to buy, construct, renovate, or lease appropriate school facilities. The legislation also allows charter schools to serve prekindergarten or postsecondary school students.
Jeff Bernstein

GAO: Charter Schools - Additional Federal Attention Needed to Help Protect Access for S... - 0 views

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    While the number of charter schools is growing rapidly, questions have been raised about whether charter schools are appropriately serving students with disabilities. GAO was asked: (1) How do enrollment levels of students with disabilities in charter schools and  traditional public schools compare, and what is known about the factors that may contribute to any differences? (2) How do charter schools reach out to students with disabilities and what special education services do charter schools provide? (3) What role do  Education, state educational agencies, and other entities that oversee charter schools play in ensuring students with disabilities have access to charter schools? GAO analyzed federal data on the number and characteristics of students with disabilities; visited  charter schools and school districts int hree states selected on the basis of the number of charter schools in the state, among other things; and interviewed representatives of federal, state, and other agencies that oversee charter schools.
Jeff Bernstein

Effects of Charter Enrollment on Newark District Enrollment « School Finance 101 - 0 views

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    "In numerous previous posts I have summarized New Jersey charter school enrollment data, frequently pointing out that the highest performing charter schools in New Jersey tend to be demographically very different from schools in their surrounding neighborhoods and similar grade level schools throughout their host districts or cities. I have tried to explain over and over that the reason these differences are important is because they constrain the scalability of charter schooling as a replicable model of "success." Again, to the extent that charter successes are built on serving vastly different student populations, we can simply never know (even with the best statistical analyses attempting to sort out peer factors, control for attrition, etc.) whether the charter schools themselves, their instructional strategies/models are effective and/or would be effective with larger numbers of more representative students. Here, I take a quick look at the other side of the picture, again focusing on the city of Newark. Specifically, I thought it would be interesting to evaluate the effect on Newark schools enrollment of the shift in students to charter schools, now that charters have taken on a substantial portion of students in the city. If charter enrollments are - as they seem to be - substantively different from district schools enrollments, then as those charter populations grow and remain different from district schools, we can expect the district schools population to change.  In particular, given the demography of charter schools in Newark, we would expect those schools to be leaving behind a district of escalating disadvantage - but still a district serving the vast majority of kids in the city."
Jeff Bernstein

Chartering Equity: Using Charter School Legislation and Policy to Advance Equal Educati... - 0 views

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    Guided by the assumptions that charter schools will be part of our public educational system for the foreseeable future; that charter schools are neither inherently good, nor inherently bad; and that charter schools should be employed to further goals of equal educational opportunity, including racial diversity and school success, this policy brief addresses the challenge of using charter school policy to enhance equal opportunity.  Part I of the brief provides an overview of equal educational opportunity and its legal foundations and offers a review of prior research documenting issues concerning charter schools and their impact on equity and diversity. Part II presents detailed recommendations for charter school authorizers, as well as state and federal policymakers, for using charter schools to advance equal educational opportunity. The accompanying legal brief offers model language designed to augment existing charter school laws by adding language particularly aimed at ensuring that charter schools serve as a vehicle of reform consistent with the value of equal educational opportunity. 
Jeff Bernstein

Education Week: Reclaiming the Origins of Chartered Schools - 0 views

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    This month, nearly 4,000 educators and friends will come to Minnesota-the birthplace of chartered schools-to celebrate a few months early the 20th anniversary of the opening of the first chartered school in the nation, on Sept. 7, 1992. As the state Senate author of Minnesota's 1991 legislation that authorized the first chartered schools (or charter schools, as most people call them), I am in awe of the number of young lives touched by chartering today: 2 million students in an estimated 5,600 schools across the country. In September 2011, the Kappan/Gallup Poll recorded-for the first time-a 70 percent public approval rating for chartered schools. We have come a long way. And yet, I know that some charters are not delivering the quality education we envisioned 20 years ago. Accountability is a keystone of the original legislation, and we must, together, make that happen as part of our stand for quality chartered schools in the next decade. One thing we've learned is the importance of developing strong authorizers to hold chartered schools accountable. As we look to the future of chartering, it is important to revisit the origins and set the historical record straight. Here are some key facts that may surprise you and dispel a few common myths.
Jeff Bernstein

Charter Schools: The Promise and the Peril - In These Times - 0 views

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    "Since the first charter school was established in 1992 in St. Paul, Minn., the model has rapidly taken hold in cities across the United States. As of December 2011, about 5 percent of U.S. students attended the nation's 5,300 charter schools. A charter school is a public school governed by a nonprofit organization under a contract-or charter-with a state or local government. This charter exempts the school from selected rules and regulations. In return for funding and autonomy, the charter school must meet the accountability standards as defined by its charter. There are as many types of charter schools as there are educational approaches. But a common difference between charter schools and traditional schools is that charter school teachers are not typically unionized. Another is that their day-to-day administration is sometimes managed by a for-profit corporation."
Jeff Bernstein

An Insider's Look at the Origins of Charter Schools - Education Week - 0 views

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    It's been two decades since the first charter schools took hold within the American education system. Ember Reichgott Junge was there at the day of creation. Reichgott Junge, as a Minnesota state senator in the early 1990s, was one of the chief sponsors of the nation's first charter school law, a legislative victory that presaged the expansion of charters across the country. Today, there are about 5,700 charters in operation in the United States, according to the Center for Education Reform. Reichgott Junge, a Democrat, has written an account of her experience trying to marshal support for the charter school measure, published by the Charter Schools Development Corporation and Beaver's Pond Press, to be released next month. The book is titled "Zero Chance of Passage: The Pioneering Charter School Story," a reference to one Minnesota lawmaker's assessment of the proposal's chances. The book's release is meant to coincide with National Charter Schools Week, next month, which marks the 20th anniversary of charters.
Jeff Bernstein

Higher Standards for Charters, Fewer Stragglers? - Charters & Choice - Education Week - 0 views

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    A recent report found that California charter schools' performance is "U-shaped"-meaning there are relatively large numbers of charters clumped among the state's highest and lowest performers. But what would it take to remove a substantial number of charters from the ranks of the stragglers? The second annual "Portrait of the Movement," report from the California Charter Schools Association concludes that if the state were to adopt higher standards for charter renewal, it could eliminate the overrepresentation of charters from the bottom rung, and do it in seven years. As it now stands, about 19 percent of charters in the state, or 150 out of 789, ranked within the bottom 10 percent of performance in California. Just 9 percent of non-charters fell in that category.
Jeff Bernstein

Tackling Teacher Turnover at Charter Schools - Charters & Choice - Education Week - 0 views

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    There's some research that shows charter schools suffer from higher teacher turnover than traditional public schools do. One recent estimate put turnover in charters at 25 percent per year, compared with just 14 percent in traditional public schools. Several explanations have been offered for this attrition. Charter school teachers, for instance, tend to be relatively young, and more susceptible to making quick exits from the profession, some studies suggest. Dissatisfaction with working conditions, and lack of administrative support have also been cited as reasons why charter teachers tend to head for the door. A new paper, based on research as well as a survey of charter school teachers, offers school leaders and charter management organizations advice on how they can keep more charter school teachers in the fold. Released by a Boston nonprofit called Teach Plus, the paper says charter schools can reduce teacher turnover by taking four steps.
Jeff Bernstein

Review of Chartering and Choice as an Achievement Gap-Closing Reform | National Educati... - 0 views

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    In this report, the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) claims that California charter schools are reversing the trend of low academic achievement among African American students and effectively closing the Black-White achievement gap. After a review of CCSA's analyses and findings, however, it becomes clear that the claims are misrepresented or exaggerated. In the years under study, African American students enrolled in traditional public schools outgained those enrolled in charter schools by a small margin, although the charter school students started and ended higher. In addition, the authors present a regression model, with Academic Performance Index (API) scores as the outcome variable, that accounts for only 3-6% of overall variance. Based on this model, the percentage of African American enrollment is negatively related to API scores in both charter and traditional public schools, a trend that will not reverse the academic standing for African American students. In fact, the gap continues to grow, albeit at a slightly slower rate in charter schools. Finally, the report's claim that charter schools are centers of innovation does not hold. Rather, as the authors eventually conclude themselves, there were no instructional practices observed in California charter schools that are not also present in traditional public schools.
Jeff Bernstein

Fiscal Impacts of Charter Schools: Lessons From New York - 0 views

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    "Given the budgetary strain that school districts have been facing in recent years and the impetus to increase the number of charter schools, concerns about the fiscal impacts of charter schools are more salient than ever. However, very little research has addressed this issue. Using the city school districts of Albany and Buffalo in New York, this brief addresses this gap in the literature by demonstrating how fiscal impacts on local school districts can be estimated and offering a way to conceptualize fiscal impacts that is useful for framing charter school policy objectives. We find that charter schools have had negative fiscal impacts on these two school districts, and argue that there are two reasons for these impacts. First, operating two systems of public schools under separate governance arrangements can create excess costs. Second, charter school financing policies can distribute resources to or away from districts. We argue that charter schools policies should seek to minimize any avoidable excess costs created by charter schools and ensure that the burden of any unavoidable excess costs is equitably distributed across traditional public schools, charter schools, and the state. We offer concrete policy recommendations that may help to achieve these objectives."
Jeff Bernstein

Charter School Performance in Pennsylvania - 0 views

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    Expanding on the 2009 CREDO National Charter School Study  Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States, this report examines the performance of Pennsylvania charter schools for the period 2007 - 2010.  Compared to the educational gains the charter students would have had in their traditional public schools, the analysis shows that students in Pennsylvania charter schools on average make smaller learning gains.  More than one quarter of the charter schools have significantly more positive learning gains than their traditional public school counterparts in reading, but their performance is eclipsed by the nearly half of charter schools that have significantly lower learning gains.  In math, again nearly half of the charter schools studied perform worse than their traditional public school peers and one quarter outperform them.
Jeff Bernstein

Are Charter Schools Public Schools? - Bridging Differences - Education Week - 0 views

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    I noted in my blog last week that the visionaries of the charter school idea-Raymond Budde of the University of Massachusetts and Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers-never intended that charter schools would compete with public schools. Budde saw charters as a way to reorganize public school districts and to provide more freedom for teachers. He envisioned teams of teachers asking for a charter for three to five years, during which time they would operate with full autonomy over curriculum and instruction, with no interference from the superintendent or the principal. Shanker thought that charter schools should be created by teams of teachers who would explore new ways to reach unmotivated students. He envisioned charter schools as self-governing, as schools that encouraged faculty decisionmaking and participatory governance. He imagined schools that taught by coaching rather than lecturing, that strived for creativity and problem-solving rather than mastery of standardized tests or regurgitation of facts. He never thought of charters as non-union schools where teachers would work 70-hour weeks and be subject to dismissal based on the scores of their students. Today, charter schools are very far from the original visions of Budde and Shanker.
Jeff Bernstein

Shanker Blog » The Evidence On Charter Schools - 0 views

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    In our fruitless, deadlocked debate over whether charter schools "work," charter opponents frequently cite the so-called CREDO study (discussed here), a 2009 analysis of charter school performance in 16 states. The results indicated that overall charter effects on student achievement were negative and statistically significant in both math and reading, but both effects sizes were tiny. Given the scope of the study, it's perhaps more appropriate to say that it found wide variation in charter performance within and between states - some charters did better, others did worse and most were no different. On the whole, the size of the aggregate effects, both positive and negative, tended to be rather small. Recently, charter opponents' tendency to cite this paper has been called "cherrypicking." Steve Brill sometimes levels this accusation, as do others. It is supposed to imply that CREDO is an exception - that most of the evidence out there finds positive effects of charter schools relative to comparable regular public schools.
Jeff Bernstein

Teacher Turnover in Charter Schools - 0 views

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    This study examines how teacher turnover differs between charter and traditional public schools and seeks to identify factors that explain these differences. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics' (NCES) 2003-2004 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and Teacher Follow-Up Survey (TFS), we found that 25% of charter school teachers turned over during the 2003-2004 school year, compared to 14% of traditional public school teachers. Fourteen percent of charter school teachers left the profession outright and 11% moved to a different school, while 7% of traditional public school teachers left the profession and 7% moved schools. Using multi-nomial logistic regression, we found the odds of a charter school teacher leaving the profession versus staying in the same school are 132% greater than those of a traditional public school teacher. The odds of a charter school teacher moving schools are 76% greater. Our analysis confirms that much of the explanation of this "turnover gap" lies in differences in the types of teachers that charter schools and traditional public schools hire. The data lend minimal support to the claim that turnover is higher in charter schools because they are leveraging their flexibility in personnel policies to get rid of underperforming teachers. Rather, we found most of the turnover in charter schools is voluntary and dysfunctional as compared to that of traditional public schools.
Jeff Bernstein

Report Cites High Charter Spending; KIPP Disputes Findings - Charters & Choice - Educat... - 0 views

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    Educators and policymakers have for years debated the academic performance of charter schools, when compared against traditional public schools. Now a new report focuses on charters' financial performance-and concludes that many well-known charter school networks spend more money than comparable, regular public schools. The report, released by the National Education Policy Center, examines charter schools' spending, as measured by their 990 filings through the Internal Revenue Service, and other state and local data. It focuses on charter school spending in three states: New York, Ohio, and Texas, over a three-year-period, from 2008-2010. But the findings are being strongly disputed by one of the charter operators cited in the report, KIPP, whose spokesman called its cost comparisons a "fiction" and said it does not present charter and regular public school expenses consistently, or transparently.
Jeff Bernstein

Segregation and Charter Schools: A Reader | the becoming radical - 0 views

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    "In The link between charter school expansion and increasing segregation, Iris C. Rotberg highlights that problems exist in both re-segregation of schools in the U.S. and the rise of charter schools as separate and interrelated forces. Schools in the U.S. are re-segregating, regardless of type-public, private, and charter. And charter schools are not creating the education reform charter advocates claim, with one failure of the charter movement being segregating students by race and class. Thus, it is important to focus on the evidence that shows the need to reconsider how to address segregation and the flawed support continuing for expanding charter schools."
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