Group items tagged

To date, the education policy and philanthropy communities have placed a premium on funding charter schools that have high concentrations of poverty and large numbers of minority students. While it makes sense that charter schools have focused on high-needs students, thus far this focus has resulted in prioritizing high-poverty charter schools over other models, which research suggests may not be the most effective way of serving at-risk students. There is a large body of evidence suggesting that socioeconomic and racial integration provide educational benefits for all students, especially at-risk students. Today, some innovative charter schools are pursuing efforts to integrate students from different racial and economic backgrounds in their classrooms. A new report,  Diverse Charter Schools: Can Racial and Socioeconomic Integration Promote Better Outcomes for Students? by Richard D. Kahlenberg and Halley Potter explores this topic.

This post is about a for-profit charter management organization, Imagine Schools, and real estate/facilities. I'm using the dataset ImagineSchools posted here. Imagine is one of the largest charter operators in the country. The company currently operates 70-something schools. A common challenge for charter schools is access to facilities. Some districts give charters access to entire schools, some allow district schools and charter schools to operate out of the same building ("co-location"), and some charters secure facilities through non-profit or for-profit organization in the private sector. To the best of my knowledge, Imagine does not have any schools in district facilities. Instead, Imagine either owns the schools through the company's real estate arm, SchoolHouse Finance, LLC, or partners with one of two real estate investment trusts ("REITs"), Entertainment Properties Trust and Inland Public Properties Development. As of right now, EPT owns 27 facilities used by Imagine and IPPD owns seven facilities used by Imagine. To gather financial information I collected data from IRS 990 forms for the years 2008 through 20101. I pulled the following information

I've got to hand it to charter school authorizer and former lobbyist, Greg Richmond for coming up with this great hustle. A law recently pass by the Illinois state legislature created his new charter school agency called the Illinois State Charter School Commission which has the power to create new charter schools even when local school districts oppose them. The commission also has the power to monitor the same charters it authorizes. Richmond is the commission's chairman.

Most of the coverage about the Department of Education's role as a charter authorizer in recent weeks has focused on the management scandals at the Believe Network and the decision to close Peninsula Prep after three years of C's (although interestingly enough, the role of for-profit charter manager Victory Schools has mostly been left out of the Peninsula Prep story, despite quotes from current Victory executive and past DOE Charter Office head Michael Duffy in the Times coverage of the school's closing). Equally important, however, was the DOE's decision to grant a two-year renewal to the third school it had placed on the closure list this year - Opportunity Charter School, a charter founded to serve students with special education needs. The DOE's threat to close Opportunity had inspired a passionate response from the school's community, including powerful presentations of evidence from the district's own progress reports showing its success in helping students with intense special education needs achieve academically and graduate from high school at rates well above other schools in the city.

In nearly two decades, only 3 percent of charter schools have ever been closed for underperforming, according to a new report released Tuesday. The Center for Education Reform, a pro-charter advocacy group, traced charter-school closures since 1992 in what it called the "first-ever national analysis" of its kind. It found that 15 percent of 6,700 charter schools have been shuttered, and 18 percent of those closures were attributed to academic underperformance. Other prevalent reasons charter schools were closed include financial deficiencies (41.7 percent), mismanagement (24 percent), district-related issues and facilities problems.

A prominent academic has resigned from the State University of New York Board of Trustees, one of two groups with the power to approve charter schools, saying the university is approving charters that increase inequality and needlessly divide the community. The resignation of Pedro Noguera, a professor at New York University, comes as the debate about the role of charter schools heats up in suburbs and wealthier neighborhoods in the New York City area. In an interview, Noguera said he sees a lack of political leadership about the role of charters and the deep divisions that occur when charter schools move into the same buildings as traditional public schools, a controversial policy known as co-location.

There may be a mini-trend emerging in certain types of charter school analyses, one that seems a bit trivial but has interesting implications that bear on the debate about charter schools in general. It pertains to how charter effects are presented. Usually, when researchers estimate the effect of some intervention, the main finding is the overall impact, perhaps accompanied by a breakdown by subgroups and supplemental analyses. In the case of charter schools, this would be the estimated overall difference in performance (usually testing gains) between students attending charters versus their counterparts in comparable regular public schools. Two relatively recent charter school reports, however - both generally well-done given their scope and available data - have taken a somewhat different approach, at least in the "public roll-out" of their results.

As I read this stuff, I started to see some patterns within the charter school model. Despite the claims of advocates, it looked to me like, charter schools lacked public oversight and accountability; It looked to me like charter schools were about the massive deregulation of a democratically run, public institution; It looked to me like the charter model viewed public education through the anarchy of free market competition, paying little regard to the human costs and consequences; It looked to me like parents were being treated as consumers, not as democratic citizens; It looked to me like charter school advocates had their eye on the $600 billion dollar business of public education.

District 15 parents, legal advocates and other supporters from the community held a press conference outside of 284 Baltic Street, between Court and Smith Streets, Wednesday morning to announce their intention to sue founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools Eva Moskowitz, Brooklyn Success Academy III Trustees and the DOE over the alleged unlawful authorization of the charter school. The impassioned speeches were as chilly as the temperature on the sidewalk. "The Success Charter Network and Eva Moskowitz with the participation of the SUNY Board of Trustees have unlawfully co-located in this building in violation of the school's charter and charter law," said Sabrina Tann, senior staff counsel for Advocates for Justice.

"The windowless basement meeting room buzzed with excited, nervous chatter. Rival schools were about to sit down to get to know one another, rather intimately. Nine schools in the Providence School District have agreed to consider converting to charter status, by partnering with one of Rhode Island's excellent charter schools. Together they'll adapt the charter-school's educational strategy, write up their co-created new design, and apply for charter status from the state. The new joint-venture schools will remain district-run and unionized. These sorts of district-school conversions are not terribly common, but they do exist -- mainly because faculties get so frustrated with certain district policies, curriculum or labor-contract provisions that they want the flexibility that comes with charter status. In Providence's case, the district itself is encouraging the conversions."

"Almost nothing gets education arguments roiling from reasonable to rancorous like charter schools. Through one lens, charters are "aggressive and entrepreneurial…[and] loosely regulated" institutions that are ultimately a "colossal mistake" undermining traditional public education. Through another, they're transformational places "generating extraordinary academic success with the most disadvantaged children," in sharp contrast to moribund traditional public schools. Easy as it is to fall into one or the other of these positions, each contributes to paralyze discussions of charters' flaws and merits. It would be nice if we could answer the question empirically. That's a perfectly intuitive starting point: how do charters perform vis-à-vis traditional public schools? Unfortunately, national data on charter school performance is mixed at best."

"There now exists a fair amount of evidence that Charter schools in many locations, especially high performing charter schools in New Jersey and New York tend to serve much smaller shares of low income, special education and limited English proficient students (see various links that follow). And in some cases, high performing charter schools, especially charter middle schools, experience dramatic attrition between 6th and 8th grade, often the same grades over which student achievement climbs, suggesting that a "pushing out" form of attrition is partly accounting for charter achievement levels."

There are much more subtle ways to fraudulently raise test scores than tampering with student test papers.  One that I've been thinking about a lot lately is the practice by many charter schools of improving their test scores through attrition.  Up until recently, these charters have not been very upfront about this factor contributing to their success.  With everything that these charters have at stake in preserving their reputations and their rich funders, I can understand why they might try to conceal what they're doing.  Of course they have the right to portray their business in the most favorable light possible.  That's what most businesses do.  The reason that I've become so involved in uncovering the truth behind these successes is that these ruses have tricked politicians into believing that one of the big solutions in fixing education is to expand the influence of charter schools.  Only states that agree to lift caps on charters were even eligible to apply to Obama's Race To The Top initiative.

In their original conception, charter schools were to be innovative public schools, freed from the stifling bureaucracy of school districts, professionally led and directed by their teachers and organically connected to the communities they served. Charter schools would be laboratories of educational experimentation, expanding our repertoire of best educational practices. This was the vision put forward by the late UFT and AFT President Al Shanker, when he became one of the very first advocates for charter schools, and it is the vision we relied upon when we started our own UFT Charter School in East New York and partnered with Green Dot to establish a charter school in the South Bronx.

The latest report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools shows that the charter school boom is showing no signs of abating.  In six cities-New Orleans; Washington, D.C.; Detroit; Kansas City, Missouri; Flint, Michigan; and Gary, Indiana-more than 30 percent of students now attend charter schools. In New Orleans, an astounding 70 percent of students are enrolled in charters. But, when it comes down to the sheer number of students attending charters, Los Angeles takes the enrollment crown.

We compare the spending of charters to that of district schools of similar size, serving the same grade levels and similar student populations. Overall, charter spending variation is large as is the spending of traditional public schools. Comparative spending between the two sectors is mixed, with many high profile charter network schools outspending similar district schools in New York City and Texas, but other charter network schools spending less than similar district schools, particularly in Ohio. We find that in New York City, KIPP, Achievement First and Uncommon Schools charter schools spend substantially more ($2,000 to $4,300 per pupil) than similar district schools. Given that the average spending per pupil was around $12,000 to $14,000 citywide, a nearly $4,000 difference in spending amounts to an increase of some 30%. In Ohio, charters across the board spend less than district schools in the same city. And in Texas, some charter chains such as KIPP spend substantially more per pupil than district schools in the same city and serving similar populations, around 30 to 50% more in some cities (and at the middle school level) based on state reported current expenditures, and 50 to 100% more based on IRS filings. Even in New York where we have the highest degree of confidence in the match between our IRS data and Annual Financial Report Data, we remain unconvinced that we are accounting fully for all charter school expenditures.

Section 1002.33(23), Florida Statutes, requires the Florida Department of Education to prepare an annual statewide analysis of student achievement in charter schools versus the achievement of comparable students in traditional public schools. This report of charter school student performance fulfills the statutory requirement for the 2010-11 school year. The analysis examines the average performance of charter school students and traditional public school students using eight years of Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) reading and math scores, as well as the FCAT science test scores that were added to the school grading calculation in 2007-08. Only students who were enrolled in a charter school or a traditional public school for an entire school year are included in the analysis. Limiting the analysis to include only full-year students is consistent with the state's school accountability system for awarding school grades under the A+ Plan. In addition, the report compares charter and traditional public schools in terms of achievement gaps and student learning gains.

The charter school movement has been a major political success, but it has been a civil rights failure. As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates, the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools. The Civil Rights Project has been issuing annual reports on the spread of segregation in public schools and its impact on educational opportunity for 14 years. We know that choice programs can either offer quality educational options with racially and economically diverse schooling to children who otherwise have few opportunities, or choice programs can actually increase stratification and inequality depending on how they are designed. The charter effort, which has largely ignored the segregation issue, has been justified by claims about superior educational performance, which simply are not sustained by the research. Though there are some remarkable and diverse charter schools, most are neither. The lessons of what is needed to make choice work have usually been ignored in charter school policy. Magnet schools are the striking example of and offer a great deal of experience in how to create educationally successful and integrated choice options.

The charter school movement has been a major political success, but it has been a civil rights failure. As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates, the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools. The Civil Rights Project has been issuing annual reports on the spread of segregation in public schools and its impact on educational opportunity for 14 years. We know that choice programs can either offer quality educational options with racially and economically diverse schooling to children who otherwise have few opportunities, or choice programs can actually increase stratification and inequality depending on how they are designed. The charter effort, which has largely ignored the segregation issue, has been justified by claims about superior educational performance, which simply are not sustained by the research. Though there are some remarkable and diverse charter schools, most are neither. The lessons of what is needed to make choice work have usually been ignored in charter school policy. Magnet schools are the striking example of and offer a great deal of experience in how to create educationally successful and integrated choice options.

Charter schools in Chicago would get easier access to facilities and a likely increase in per-pupil funding under a proposed district-charter compact that would also make charters subject to some of the same testing and accountability standards as traditional schools. The draft agreement between CPS and its charters was handed out at a Tuesday conference for participants in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation initiative called "District-Charter Collaboration Compacts." Chicago Public Schools and Spring Branch Independent School District, outside of Houston, are joining the 12 districts across the country that already signed on.