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Charter school quality varies substantially from state to state, school to school. Nevertheless, the charter approach continues to hold promise as a potent catalyst for innovation, including empowering parents and teachers and catalyzing district school reform. At its core, strategic management for charter schools involves achieving alignment among three core elements: the mission, operations, and stakeholder support. When these elements are aligned, charter schools can achieve greatness. Unfortunately, most organizations-charters are no exception-operate in a state of misalignment due to conflicts over mission, inadequate capacity, lack of support, or some combination of the three.

Maria Velez-Clarke is principal at the Children's Workshop School in the East Village, one of several so-called progressive schools that were started in the 1990s by people who had worked for Deborah Meier, an education innovator and small school proponent who founded Central Park East School. In an interview last month, Ms. Velez-Clarke reflected on how her school, which has 225 students, was founded on the principle of collaborative learning with less hierarchy in management - and how that has fared in the age of more standardized testing and teacher accountability.

Imagine you are David Tepper, a 54-year-old guy with $5 billion in the bank. You've played the Wall Street game all your adult life, and you've scored huge wins, over and over. Now what? Tepper, a hedge fund manager who lives in Livingston, has found his answer: He is jumping into the political game in New Jersey, promising to spend huge bucks over the long term to change the state of play on school reform, starting with tenure.

"In the debate over charter schools, KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools are hailed by charter advocates as illustrative of what these alternatives to public schools can produce. With KIPP, poverty need not impede academic success. Enroll students from economically impoverished backgrounds in a "no excuses" school like KIPP and their chances of attaining academic success would soar markedly. There, neither hunger, poor health, relentless stress, lack of access to the material sustenance and cultural experiences available to students from more affluent homes, nor other adverse effects of poverty are impediments to learning and the attainment of good test scores. If only poor youngsters were not in the nothing-but-excuses public schools where they are taught by nothing-but-excuses teachers. So the story goes and so it was conveyed to me by a KIPP schools manager who, in an oped exchange, presented what the chain considers its best supporting evidence. Whether this evidence actually makes the case for KIPP I will discuss below"

"While small schools and theme academies have faded as a focus of reform initiatives, charters have expanded rapidly. They raise similar issues and many more. In fact, given the growing promotion of charters by federal and state policymakers as a strategy to "reform" public education, the stakes are much higher. According to Education Week, there are now more than 6,000 publicly funded charter schools in the United States enrolling about 4 percent of all students. Since 2008, the number of charter schools has grown by almost 50 percent, while over that same period nearly 4,000 traditional public schools have closed.[i] This represents a huge transfer of resources and students from our public education system to the publicly funded, but privately managed charter sector. These trends raise concerns about the future of public education and its promise of quality education for all."

"Initially, charter schools were embraced as a strategy to enrich what many viewed as an increasingly sterile public school landscape. Early promoters included most famously Albert Shanker, President of both the United Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers. The first charter school opened in Minnesota, one of the nation's most liberal states. "Groups of teachers and administrators who wanted to innovate and try new things would band together and little laboratories of education would emerge," Dr. Gary Miron Professor of Evaluation, Management and Research at Western Michigan University recalls, "The idea was simple: anything valuable culled from these experiments could be copied by the district…" Within a decade the goals of experimentation and innovation were replaced by a focus on kudzu-like growth. Charter schools were less and less viewed as a way of improving public schools and more and more seen as a direct competitor and eventual replacement for them."

"On Monday, the city's 4,700 union members are scheduled to vote on the contract. Both sides say they cannot predict the outcome, but either way, what happens here will echo among teachers' unions across the country. If the contract is approved, it could prompt other districts to push for pay-for-performance, by suggesting that merit pay is no longer so symbolic a fight among the rank and file. Newark's deal itself was prompted by recent changes to the state's tenure laws that were once considered unthinkable. And both sides insist that this deal could be a model for union-management collaboration, giving teachers a voice they have often felt was denied in reform. If it fails, beleaguered union leaders could take it as a new sign of strength in contract negotiations - similar, some teachers said, to the example of the Chicago teachers' strike last month."

So why do we assume, when it comes to evaluating schools, that we must look at numbers alone? Sure, there have been calls to build additional indicators, beyond test scores, into school grading systems. These might include graduation rates, student or teacher attendance rates, results from student surveys, AP course-taking or exam-passing rates, etc. Our own recent paper on model state accountability systems offers quite a few ideas along these lines. This is all well and good. But it's not enough. It still assumes that we can take discrete bits of data and spit out a credible assessment of organizations as complex as schools. That's not the way it works in businesses, famous for their "bottom lines." Fund managers don't just look at the profit and loss statements for the companies in which they invest. They send analysts to go visit with the team, hear about their strategy, kick the tires, talk to insiders, find out what's really going on. Their assessment starts with the numbers, but it doesn't end there. So it should be with school accountability systems.

For-profit colleges and universities have a well-deserved reputation for deceptive recruiting, low-quality programs, and sky-high prices. Now you can add union suppression to that reputation. A branch of the for-profit college mega-provider Kaplan University has noticed that some of its teaching staff are considering a union, and the management is not pleased. Recently, administrative staff at a branch of Kaplan International Centers (KIC) in New York City issued a memo to teachers to explain "the risk" of showing an interest in "union organizing." And the contents of the memo are revealing of the smears and innuendo that for-profit education institutions and other employers use to squelch union organizing activities and to make employees uneasy of asserting their rights to collective action.

Now, in the midst of the latest controversy, it has become clear that ALEC has also played a major role in writing the so-called "parent trigger" laws designed to allow charter management organizations to engage in hostile takeovers of public schools. Interestingly, the web page on the ALEC site which contained the model "parent trigger" law has been taken down, out of the fear, one would presume, that increased public attention on ALEC and its role in promoting reactionary, anti-public education legislation could become a tad bit embarrassing. But the good folks at ALEC Exposed, a virtual clearinghouse on all matters ALEC sponsored by the Center for Media and Democracy, have a library of all the draft ALEC education legislation, and there one finds the missing ALEC model "parent trigger" legislation.

Philadelphia public schools are on the operating table, reeling from a knockout blow of heavy state  budget cuts. It was too much to bear after decades of underfunding and mismanagement at the hands of shortsighted Philadelphians and mean-spirited politicians in Harrisburg. So the District is today announcing that it's going to call it quits. Its organs will be harvested, in search of a relatively vital host. "Philadelphia public schools is not the School District," Chief Recovery Officer Thomas Knudsen told a handful of reporters at yesterday's press conference laying out the five-year plan proposed to the School Reform Commission. "There's a redefinition, and we'll get to that later."  He got to it: talk about "modernization," "right-sizing," "entrepreneurialism" and "competition." Forty schools would close next year, and six additional schools would be closed every year thereafter until 2017. Closing just eight schools this year prompted an uproar. Anyhow, the remaining schools would get chopped up into "achievement networks" where public or private groups compete to manage about 25 schools, and the central office would be chopped down to a skeleton crew of about 200. District HQ has already eliminated about half of the 1,100-plus positions that existed in 2010. 

There is much handwringing about low educational attainment in the United States these days. We hear constantly about U.S. rankings on assessments like the international PISA tests: The United States was 14th in reading, 21st in science, 25th in math in 2009, for example. We hear about how young children in high-poverty areas are entering kindergarten unprepared and far behind many of their classmates. Middle school students from low-income families are scoring, on average, far below the proficient levels that would enable them to graduate high school, go to college, and get good jobs. Fewer than half of high school students manage to graduate from some urban schools. And too many poor and minority students who do go on to college require substantial remediation and drop out before gaining a degree. There is another story we rarely hear: Our children who attend schools in low-poverty contexts are doing quite well. In fact, U.S. students in schools in which less than 10 percent of children live in poverty score first in the world in reading, out-performing even the famously excellent Finns.

Philadelphia school "recovery" officials have announced a radical restructuring plan that calls for: * closing 40 low-performing, underutilized schools in 2013 and a total of 64 more by 2017 * organizing "achievement networks" of about 25 schools that would be run by outsiders who bid for management contracts * increasing the number of charter schools, which now educate about 25 percent of the city's roughly 200,000 students * effectively shutting down the central office, which is already half the size it was last year * phasing out all academic divisions now in place by this summer, with pilot achievement networks in place as early as this fall.

Two state education officials, expected to play a key role in the future of the city's school system, share a common background with MBAs and ties to a Los Angeles-based foundation. One more similarity: Camden's school board has rebuffed initial requests from their reform programs. Bing Howell and Rochelle Sinclair are assigned to state Department of Education programs - Hope Act Schools and Regional Achievement Centers - that are intended to upgrade the performance of Camden's school system. Both are fellows of the Broad (rhymes with road) Foundation, a nonprofit that seeks to improve urban schools through "better governance, management, labor relations and competition."

…Directly Publicly Subsidized, Limited Public Access, Publicly or Privately Authorized, Publicly or Privately Governed, Managed and Operated Schools

Do charter schools do more - get better results - with less? If you ask this question, you'll probably get very strong answers, ranging from the affirmative to the negative, often depending on the person's overall view of charter schools. The reality, however, is that we really don't know. Actually, despite uninformed coverage of insufficient evidence, researchers don't even have a good handle on how much charter schools spend, to say nothing of whether how and how much they spend leads to better outcomes. Reporting of charter financial data is incomplete, imprecise and inconsistent. It is difficult to disentangle the financial relationships between charter management organizations (CMOs) and the schools they run, as well as that between charter schools and their "host" districts.

The first thing I noticed was the chummy exchanges between the public officials in change of the New York City public school system and the top dogs of the charter leadership-the Wall Street hedge fund managers, the leader of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), the leader of the New York City Charter Center, and various others. It comes clear that there is a strong and concerted effort to hand over as much public space as possible to the charters.

Thomas Knudsen, the man who was temporarily put in charge of Philadelphia schools in January, was running late to last Monday's press conference. He had been delivering the same presentation all day, and doomsday rumors had already leaked: The plan he was about to lay out would dismantle the central office and parcel out school management, at least in part, to private companies. Knudsen, paid $150,000 to hold the newly created post of Chief Recovery Officer through June, made a point of shaking the hand of every single reporter in the room before beginning his presentation. "Philadelphia public schools is not the school district," he announced, laying out the five-year plan before the School Reform Commission (SRC). "There's a redefinition, and we'll get to that later." He got to it, using terms like "portfolios," "modernization," "right-sizing," "entrepreneurialism" and "competition." In short, it was a plan to shutter 40 schools next year, and an additional six every year thereafter until 2017. The remaining schools would be herded into "achievement networks" of 20 to 30 schools; public and private groups would compete to manage the networks. And the central office would be reduced to a skeleton crew of about 200. (About 1,000-plus positions existed in 2010, and district HQ has already eliminated more than a third of those.) Charter schools, the plan projects, would teach an estimated 40 percent of students by 2017.

I utilize longitudinal data covering all public school students in Florida to study the performance of charter schools and their competitive impact on traditional public schools. Controlling for student-level fixed effects, I find achievement initially is lower in charters. However, by their fifth year of operation new charter schools reach a par with the average traditional public school in math and produce higher reading achievement scores than their traditional public school counterparts. Among charters, those targeting at-risk and special education students demonstrate lower student achievement, while charter schools managed by for-profit entities perform no differently on average than charters run by nonprofits. Controlling for preexisting traditional public school quality, competition from charter schools is associated with modest increases in math scores and unchanged reading scores in nearby traditional public schools

KIPP argues that we counted all of their centralized expenses against them, and counted NONE against the NYC public schools. This is not true. We actually didn't count KIPP regional and national expenses that exist beyond what the locals pay in management fees accounted for on their budgets. Second, as I will show below, even if we count all of the system-wide expenses (& other obligations) of NYC BOE schools, KIPP schools continue to substantially outspend them.