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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."

Gov. Chris Christie Thursday unveiled sweeping plans to change the way the state's schools are funded by reducing the amount of money allocated to at-risk kids; tying funds more closely to the number of students in classrooms each day; and cutting funds for districts where enrollment is declining. Christie also released district-by-district state aid figures for the coming year that incorporate the changes. This means a loss of state aid for 97 of the state's roughly 600 school districts. Among those losing aid are 36 districts with declining enrollment - some, like Newark, where charter schools have cut significantly into the "regular" district population.

Here's my operational definition of screwed for this post. A district is identified as screwed (new technical term in school finance… as of a few posts ago) if a) the district has more than 50% higher census poverty than other districts in the same labor market and b) lower per pupil state and local revenues than other districts in the same labor market. As I've explained on numerous previous occasions, it is well understood that districts with higher poverty rates (among other factors) have higher costs of providing equal educational opportunity to their students. I then tally the percent of statewide enrollments that are concentrated in these screwed districts to determine the share of kids screwed by their state. And here are the rankings… or at least the short list of states that screw the largest share of low income students

An electronic billboard on Business Route 6 in Dickson City flashes an image of smiling students and teachers. The advertisement for the Mid Valley School District promotes student achievement and district accomplishments. At $900 a month, officials hope it saves thousands in lost tuition. As online charter school enrollment continues to grow, public school districts across the region and state are facing competition like they never have before. When students leave public school districts, their state funding follows them to cyber schools. Districts are now advertising, holding recruitment nights and thinking about public relations.

The Chester Upland School District is more than $20 million in debt, its bank account is almost empty and it cannot afford to pay teachers past the end of this month. To make matters worse, the local charter school, with which the district must divide its financing, is suing the district over unpaid bills. The district's fiscal woes are the product of a toxic brew of budget cuts, mismanagement and the area's poverty. Its problems are compounded by the Chester Community Charter School, a nonprofit institution that is managed by a for-profit company and that now educates nearly half of the district's students. The district sees the charter as a vampire, sucking up more than its fair share of scarce resources. The state, it says, is giving the charter priority over the district. 

This paper uses the Schools and Staffing Survey to examine the determinants of teacher salaries  in the U.S. using a spatial econometric framework.  These determinants include teacher salaries  in nearby districts, union activity in the district, union activity in neighboring districts, and other  school district characteristics.  The results confirm that salaries for both experienced and  beginning teachers are positively affected by salaries in nearby districts.  Investigations of the  determinants of teacher salaries that ignore this spatial relationship are likely to be mis-specified.   Including the effects of union activity in neighboring districts, the study also finds that union  activity increases salaries for experienced teachers by as much as 18-28 percent but increases  salaries for beginning teachers by a considerably smaller amount.   

Increased spending and decreased student performance have been attributed in part to teachers' unions and to the collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) they negotiate with school boards. However, only recently have researchers begun to examine impacts of specific aspects of CBAs on student and district outcomes. This article uses a unique measure of contract restrictiveness generated through the use of a partial independence item response model to examine the relationships between CBA strength and district spending on multiple areas and district-level student performance in California. I find that districts with more restrictive contracts have higher spending overall, but that this spending appears not to be driven by greater compensation for teachers but by greater expenditures on administrators' compensation and instruction-related spending. Although districts with stronger CBAs spend more overall and on these categories, they spend less on books and supplies and on school board-related expenditures. In addition, I find that contract restrictiveness is associated with lower average student performance, although not with decreased achievement growth.

"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."

As a reporter from the Voice of San Diego quickly found, no one was critical of the idea of inclusion at the time the district wanted to make the shift. In fact, inclusion is widely regarded as the attitude districts should have and what is best for students, and when districts segregate too much, they may be punished. But San Diego parents, who had advocated for more inclusion, were alarmed by the district's approach, which has turned out to be problematic in practice. Now three years into the shift to inclusion, parents and educators are wondering: Did San Diego move too fast? One parent, who oversees special education in a nearby district, reacted by plucking his young son with autism out of the district before the switch.

"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."

"There continues to be much bluster out there in ed reformy land that money really isn't all that important - especially for traditional public school districts. That local public schools and districts already have way too much money but use it so inefficiently that any additional dollar would necessarily be wasted. An extension of this line of reasoning is that therefore differences in spending across districts are also inconsequential. It really doesn't matter - the reformy line of thinking goes - if the suburbs around Philly, Chicago or New York dramatically outspend them, as long as some a-contextual, poorly documented and often flat out wrong, blustery statement can be made about a seemingly large aggregate or per pupil spending figure that the average person on the street should simply find offensive. Much of this bluster about the irrelevance of funding is strangely juxtaposed with arguments that inequity of teacher quality and the adequacy of the quality of the teacher workforce are the major threats to our education system. But of course, these threats have little or nothing to do with money? Right? As I've explained previously - equitable distribution of quality teaching requires equitable (not necessarily equal) distribution of resources. Districts serving more needy student populations require smaller classes and more intensive supports if their students are expected to close the gap with their more advantaged peers - or strive for common outcome goals. Even recruiting similarly qualified teachers in higher need settings requires higher, not the same or lower compensation. Districts serving high need populations require a) more staff - more specialized, more diverse and even more of the same (core classroom teacher) staff, of b) at least equal qualifications. That means they need more money (than their more advantaged neighbors) to get the job done. If they so happen to have substantially less money, it's not a matter of simply tradin

For over a decade, Ohio law has dictated where charter schools can open. Expansion was unlimited in Lucas County (the "pilot district" for charters) and in the "Ohio 8" urban districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, and Youngstown). But, in any given year, charters could open up in any other district that was classified as a "challenged district," as measured by whether the district received a state "report card" rating of "academic watch" or "academic emergency." This is a performance-based standard.

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.

District Awards for Teacher Excellence (D.A.T.E.) is a state-funded program in Texas that provides grants to districts for the implementation of locally-designed incentive pay plans. All districts in the state are eligible to receive grants, but participation is voluntary. D.A.T.E. incentive pay plans were first implemented in Texas districts during the 2008-09 school year, and the program is currently in its third year of operation during 2010-11 with approximately $197 million in annual state funding. 

Public concern about pervasive inequalities in traditional public schools, combined with growing political, parental, and corporate support, has created the expectation that charter schools are the solution for educating minorities, particularly Black youth. There is a paucity of research on the educational attainment of Black youth in privately operated charters, particularly on the issue of attrition. This paper finds that on average peer urban districts in Texas show lower incidence of Black student dropouts and leavers relative to charters. The data also show that despite the claims that 88-90% of the children attending KIPP charters go on to college, their attrition rate for Black secondary students surpasses that of their peer urban districts. And this is in spite of KIPP spending 30-60% more per pupil than comparable urban districts. The analyses also show that the vast majority of privately operated charter districts in Texas serve very few Black students.

The New York-based Wallace Foundation will give $75 million over the next five years to six school districts who are working on comprehensive methods to identify, train, evaluate and support principals. The six districts to receive the funds are: Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C.; Denver; Gwinnett County, Ga.; Hillsborough County, Fla; New York City; and Prince George's County, Md. Wallace will give each district between $7.5 million and $12.5 million, and, as a condition of the grants, the districts will contribute one- third of their grant amount in local matching funds.

Every year, the state of Ohio releases an enormous amount of district- and school-level performance data. Since Ohio has among the largest charter school populations in the nation, the data provide an opportunity to examine performance differences between charters and regular public schools in the state. Ohio's charters are concentrated largely in the urban "Ohio 8" districts (sometimes called the "Big 8"): Akron; Canton; Cincinnati; Cleveland; Columbus; Dayton; Toledo; and Youngstown. Charter coverage varies considerably between the "Ohio 8" districts, but it is, on average, about 20 percent, compared with roughly five percent across the whole state. I will therefore limit my quick analysis to these districts.

"The metropolitan Nashville school system has 81,000 students, about 70 percent of whom receive free or reduced-price meals, according to the district. In addition, nearly one-quarter of the district's students come from homes where English is not the native language. That level of diversity and economic hardship, the district says, is one of the reasons the district repeatedly rejected an application by Great Hearts Academies to open a charter school, saying that affluent students would be over-represented in the proposed school's population because of the school's proposed location. That reasoning was not good enough for the Tennessee education department, which announced earlier this week that it would not change its decision to withhold $3.4 million in state aid from Nashville schools because, state officials said, the district violated state law by rejecting the charter. "

The federal program providing billions of dollars to help states and districts close or remake some of their worst-performing schools remains a work in progress after two years, with more than 1,200 turnaround efforts under way but still no definitive verdict on its effectiveness. The School Improvement Grant program, supercharged by a windfall of $3 billion under the federal economic-stimulus package in 2009, has jump-started aggressive moves by states and districts. To get their share of the SIG money, they had to quickly identify some of their most academically troubled schools, craft new teacher-evaluation systems, and carve out more time for instruction, among other steps. Some schools and districts spent millions of dollars on outside experts and consultants. Others went through the politically ticklish process of replacing teachers and principals, while combating community skepticism and meeting the demands of district and state overseers.

The results of the Gifted and Talented exams are in, and according to the NY Times, more than half of the children tested in wealthier districts like District 2 and District 3 were found to be "gifted", while only six children made the grade in District 7 in the South Bronx.  Why the disparity? Are these tests merely a way of sorting children by race and class, as Debbie Meier pointed out in 2007, when Klein first proposed to base all admissions to gifted programs on the basis of high stakes exams, or do the results really reflect children's inherent abilities?  And does the proliferation of G and T programs across the city help or hinder the goal of equity and systemic reform?