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Imagine trying to determine international rankings for tennis players or soccer teams entirely by a) determining how they rank relative to the average team or player in their country, then b) having only the average team or player from each country play each other in a tournament, then c) estimating how the top teams would rank when compared with each other based only on how their country's average teams did when they played each other and how much better we think the individual teams or players are when compared to the average team or player in their country? Probably not that precise or even accurate, ya' think?

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.

y daughter and I were swimming in my pond one sunny summer day, and I said, "This is the best pond in the world." My daughter responded (sharply): "Why must it be the best? Can't it just be a wonderful pond?" I was actually slightly miffed, but she had a point. We are (or I am?) so accustomed to assuming that praise has to include a comparative term that it rolls out without thinking. It's not a wholly silly notion, but we've taken it to such extremes that I find my daughter's chiding words even wiser today than I did that summer day. Whatever the cause of this bad habit, both child-rearing and schooling have swallowed it whole. Everything is a "race," a "competition;" everyone and everything is rank ordered. We forget that no matter how "we" improve there are always exactly the same number of kids in the front of the line as at the end of the line-and every place in between. Ditto for individuals, schools, and nations! The "who" can change, but everyone cannot be in the top half. If the bottom moves up, who takes their place?

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.

I did a piece a short while back on TEAM Academy, a Charter school which I thus far admire in Newark, NJ. I admire the school because, while the data I've been able to gather from official sources still indicates that TEAM is far from a statistical match with its surroundings, and appears to have greater cohort attrition than I might like to see, I am, at this point, comfortable stating that TEAM Academy is more comparable than others to its surroundings than other Newark Charters.

"New York City has just released the new round of results from its school rating system (they're called "progress reports"). It relies considerably more on student growth (60 out of 100 points) than absolute performance (25 points), and there are efforts to partially adjust most of the measures via peer group comparisons.* All of this indicates that the city's system is more focused on school rather than student test-based performance, compared with many other systems around the U.S. The ratings are high-stakes. Schools receiving low grades - a D or F in any given year, or a C for three consecutive years - enter a review process by which they might be closed. The number of schools meeting these criteria jumped considerably this year. There is plenty of controversy to go around about the NYC ratings, much of it pertaining to two important features of the system. They're worth discussing briefly, as they are also applicable to systems in other states."

"Twenty years after their creation, charter schools constitute the fastest-growing sector of American public education, according to a report released Wednesday. Enrollment in these publicly funded but often privately run institutions rose by more than 200,000 students in the 2011-2012 school year compared to the previous year, the report found. That increasing enrollment has yielded a total of more than 2 million students in charter schools -- about 5 percent of the number of kids in public schools across the country. The report is an annual attempt by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, an advocacy group, to track the trajectory of these schools and their market share in different places."

In this report we provide some context to these policy responses to special education enrollment in charter schools by describing the distribution of students with disabilities in New York State charter and district-run schools. We show that different levels of comparison-state level, school type, district level, and authorizer level-yield different results, and comparisons at high levels of aggregation (such as those made at the state level) mask important information and variation. Whether, and in what ways, charter schools appear to systemically underserve students with disabilities depends on how you answer the question, "Compared to what?" 

"Several recent reports, including one from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, have found that charter schools generally under-enroll special education students when compared to conventional public schools. A new report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, however, asserts that charter schools' special education rates are much closer to those of district public schools than is described by these other recent reports. A review of that new report concludes that, even though it was touted as reaching different conclusions - more favorable to charter schools - than past research, in fact the results are very much consistent. It confirms that charter schools are systematically under-enrolling students with special needs."

"Today institutions of higher education, public and private, remain largely segregated by race, religion and economic condition. White colleges and universities remain primarily white, Black institutions remain primarily black, and denominational institutions remain even more religiously identifiable. Such segregation is sanctified with tons of federal and state money in the forms of tuition vouchers, tax credits and government subsidized loans. The Obama administration has been largely foreclosed from remedying the situation for fear of offending powerful political forces representing the investors and private institutions. The higher education voucher/loan dilemma portends a probable scenario for the future of tuition vouchers and charter schools at the primary and secondary levels. Stiglitz quotes Alexis de Tocqueville who said that the main element of the "peculiar genius of American society" is "self-interest properly understood." The last two words, "properly understood," are the key, says Stiglitz. According to Stiglitz, everyone possesses self-interest in the "narrow sense." This "narrow sense" with regard to educational choice is usually exercised for reasons other than educational quality, the chief reasons being race, religion, economic and social status, and similarity with persons with comparable information, biases and prejudices. But Stiglitz interprets Tocqueville's "properly understood" to mean a much broader and more desirable and moral objective, that of "appreciating" and paying attention to everyone else's self-interest. In other words, the common welfare is, in fact, "a precondition for one's own ultimate well being."17 Such commonality in the advancement of the public good is lost by the narrow self-interest. School tuition vouchers and charter schools are the operational models for implementation of the "narrow self-interest." It is easy to recognize, but difficult to justify. "

"This paper arises out of frustration with the results of school reforms carried out over the past few decades. These efforts have failed. They need to be abandoned. In their place must come recognition that income inequality causes many social problems, including problems associated with education. Sadly, compared to all other wealthy nations, the USA has the largest income gap between its wealthy and its poor citizens. Correlates associated with the size of the income gap in various nations are well described in Wilkinson & Pickett (2010), whose work is cited throughout this article. They make it clear that the bigger the income gap in a nation or a state, the greater the social problems a nation or a state will encounter. Thus it is argued that the design of better economic and social policies can do more to improve our schools than continued work on educational policy independent of such concerns."

There is widespread concern that administration consumes too much of the educational dollar in traditional public schools, diverting needed resources from classroom instruction and hampering efforts to improve student outcomes.  By contrast, charter schools are predicted to have leaner administration and allocate resources more intensively to instruction. This study analyzes resource allocation in charter and district schools in Michigan, where charter and tradition public schools receive approximately the same operational funding.  Holding constant other determinants of school resource allocation, we find that compared to traditional public schools, charter schools on average spend nearly $800 more per pupil per year on administration and $1100 less on instruction.

Education Week reports on the growth of websites that attempt to provide parents with help in choosing schools, including rating schools according to testing results. The most prominent of these sites is GreatSchools.org. Its test-based school ratings could not be more simplistic - they are essentially just percentile rankings of schools' proficiency rates as compared to all other schools in their states (the site also provides warnings about the data, along with a bunch of non-testing information). This is the kind of indicator that I have criticized when reviewing states' school/district "grading systems." And it is indeed a poor measure, albeit one that is widely available and easy to understand. But it's worth quickly discussing the fact that such criticism is conditional on how the ratings are employed - there is a difference between the use of testing data to rate schools for parents versus for high-stakes accountability purposes. In other words, the utility and proper interpretation of data vary by context, and there's no one "correct way" to rate schools. The optimal design might differ depending on the purpose for which the ratings will be used. In fact, the reasons why a measure is problematic in one context might very well be a source of strength in another.

In a previous post, I compared value-added (VA) and classroom observations in terms of reliability - the degree to which they are free of error and stable over repeated measurements. But even the most reliable measures aren't useful unless they are valid - that is, unless they're measuring what we want them to measure. Arguments over the validity of teacher performance measures, especially value-added, dominate our discourse on evaluations. There are, in my view, three interrelated issues to keep in mind when discussing the validity of VA and observations. The first is definitional - in a research context, validity is less about a measure itself than the inferences one draws from it. The second point might follow from the first: The validity of VA and observations should be assessed in the context of how they're being used. Third and finally, given the difficulties in determining whether either measure is valid in and of itself, as well as the fact that so many states and districts are already moving ahead with new systems, the best approach at this point may be to judge validity in terms of whether the evaluations are improving outcomes. And, unfortunately, there is little indication that this is happening in most places.

Fueled by the ever-increasing availability of detailed test score datasets linking teachers to students, the research literature on teachers' test-based effectiveness has grown rapidly, in both size and sophistication. Analysis after analysis finds that, all else being equal, the variation in teachers' estimated effects on students' test growth - the difference between the "top" and "bottom" teachers - is very large. In any given year, some teachers' students make huge progress, others' very little. Even if part of this estimated variation is attributable to confounding factors, the discrepancies are still larger than most any other measurable "input" within the jurisdiction of education policy. The underlying assumption here is that "true" teacher quality varies to a degree that is at least somewhat comparable in magnitude to the spread of the test-based estimates. Perhaps that's the case, but it does not, by itself, help much. The key question is whether and how we can measure teacher performance at the individual level and, more importantly, influence the distribution - that is, to raise the ceiling, the middle and/or the floor. The variation hangs out there like a drug to which we're addicted, but haven't really figured out how to administer.

Public School 30 and Public School 179 are about as alike as two schools can be. They are two blocks apart in the South Bronx. Both are 98 percent black and Latino. At P.S. 30, 97 percent of the children qualify for subsidized lunches; at P.S. 179, 93 percent. During city quality reviews - when Education Department officials make on-site inspections - both scored "proficient." The two have received identical grades for "school environment," a rating that includes attendance and a survey of parents', teachers' and students' opinions of a school. On the state math test, P.S. 30 did better in 2011, with 41 percent of students scoring proficient - a 3 or 4 - versus 29 percent for P.S. 179. But on the state English test, P.S. 179 did better, with 36 percent of its students scoring proficient compared with 32 percent for P.S. 30. And yet, when the department calculated the most recent progress report grades, P.S. 30 received an A. And P.S. 179 received an F.

Educational interventions are often evaluated and compared on the basis of their impacts on test scores. Decades of research have produced two empirical regularities: interventions in later grades tend to have smaller effects than the same interventions in earlier grades, and the test score impacts of early educational interventions almost universally "fade out" over time. This paper explores whether these empirical regularities are an artifact of the common practice of rescaling test scores in terms of a student's position in a widening distribution of knowledge. If a standard deviation in test scores in later grades translates into a larger difference in knowledge, an intervention's effect on normalized test scores may fall even as its effect on knowledge does not. We evaluate this hypothesis by fitting a model of education production to correlations in test scores across grades and with college-going using both administrative and survey data. Our results imply that the variance in knowledge does indeed rise as children progress through school, but not enough for test score normalization to fully explain these empirical regularities.

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.

Students attending a cluster of Los Angeles schools overseen by the charter operator Green Dot significantly increased their test scores and persistence in school, and took more challenging courses than comparable peers, a newly released study has found. The schools were part of what was originally Alain Leroy Locke High School, an academic low-performer located in an impoverished neighborhood in the south part of the city. With permission from the Los Angeles Unified School District, Green Dot took over the school in 2007 and began its transformation into a series of smaller charter schools.

Using a statistical technique called value-added modeling, the Teacher Data Reports compare how students are predicted to perform on the state ELA and math tests, based on their prior year's performance, with their actual performance. Teachers whose students do better than predicted are said to have "added value"; those whose students do worse than predicted are "subtracting value." By definition, about half of all teachers will add value, and the other half will not. Carolyn Abbott was, in one respect, a victim of her own success. After a year in her classroom, her seventh-grade students scored at the 98th percentile of New York City students on the 2009 state test. As eighth-graders, they were predicted to score at the 97th percentile on the 2010 state test. However, their actual performance was at the 89th percentile of students across the city. That shortfall-the difference between the 97th percentile and the 89th percentile-placed Abbott near the very bottom of the 1,300 eighth-grade mathematics teachers in New York City. How could this happen? Anderson is an unusual school, as the students are often several years ahead of their nominal grade level. The material covered on the state eighth-grade math exam is taught in the fifth or sixth grade at Anderson. "I don't teach the curriculum they're being tested on," Abbott explained. "It feels like I'm being graded on somebody else's work."