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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.

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.

Education reform proposals are often based on high-profile or dramatic policy changes, many of which are expensive, politically controversial, or both.  In this paper, we argue that the debates over these "flashy" policies have obscured a potentially important direction for raising student performance-namely, reforms to the management or organization of schools. By making sure the "trains run on time" and focusing on the day-to-day decisions involved in managing the instructional process, school and district administrators may be able to substantially increase student learning at modest cost.In this paper, we describe three organizational reforms that recent evidence suggests have the potential to increase K-12 student performance at modest costs: (1) Starting school later in the day for middle and high school students; (2) Shifting from a system with separate elementary and middle schools to one with schools that serve students in kindergarten through grade eight; (3) Managing teacher assignments with an eye toward maximizing student achievement (e.g. allowing teachers to gain experience by teaching the same grade level for multiple years or having teachers specializing in the subject where they appear most effective). We conservatively estimate that the ratio of benefits to costs is 9 to 1 for later school start times and 40 to 1 for middle school reform. A precise benefit-cost calculation is not feasible for the set of teacher assignment reforms we describe, but we argue that the cost of such proposals is likely to be quite small relative to the benefits for students. While we recognize that these specific reforms may not be appropriate or feasible for every district, we encourage school, district, and state education leaders to make the management, organization, and operation of schools a more prominent part of the conversation on how to raise student achievement.

A series of studies from Roland Fryer and colleagues have explored the effectiveness of specific charter school models and strategies, including Harlem Childrens' Zone (Dobbie & Fryer, 2009), "no excuses" charter schools in New York City (Dobbie & Fryer, 2011), schools within the Houston public school district (Apollo 20) mimicking no excuses charter strategies (Fryer, 2011, Fryer, 2012), and an intensive urban residential schooling model in Baltimore, MD (Curto & Fryer, 2011).  In each case, the models in question involve resource intensive strategies, including substantially lengthening school days and years, providing small group (2 or 3 on 1) intensive tutoring, providing extensive community based wrap around services (Harlem Childrens' Zone) or providing student housing and residential support services (Baltimore). The broad conclusion across these studies is that charter schools or traditional public schools can produce dramatic improvements to student outcomes by implementing no excuses strategies and perhaps wrap around services, and that these strategies come at relatively modest marginal cost. Regarding the benefits of the most expensive alternative explored - residential schooling in Baltimore (at a reported $39,000 per pupil) - the authors conclude that no excuses strategies of extended day and year, and intensive tutoring are likely more cost effective. But, each of these studies suffers from poorly documented and often ill-conceived comparisons of costs and/or marginal expenditures.

"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."

As students across the country stage a national day of action to defend public education, we look at the nation's largest school systems - Chicago and New York City - and the push to preserve quality public education amidst new efforts to privatize schools and rate teachers based on test scores. In Chicago, the city's unelected school board voted last week to shut down seven schools and fire all of the teachers at 10 other schools. In New York City, many educators are criticizing Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration after the release of the names of 18,000 city teachers, along with a ranking system that claims to quantify each teacher's impact on the reading and math scores of their pupils on statewide tests. "The danger is that if teachers and schools are held accountable just for relatively narrow measures of what it is students are doing in class, that will become what drives the education system," says Columbia University's Aaron Pallas, who studies the efficiency of teacher-evaluation systems. "The effects of school closings in [New York City] is one of the great untold stories today," says Democracy Now! education correspondent Jaisal Noor. "The bedrock of these communities [has been] neighborhood schools and now they're being destroyed." Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union says, "When you have a CEO in charge of a school system as opposed to a superintendent - a real educator - what ends up happening is that they literally have no clue how to run the schools." Lewis recounts a meeting where she says Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told her that, "25 percent of these kids are never going to amount to anything."

"Would I send my child to this school?" This is a question I asked myself every day while working at Achievement First and helping to build their first high school in Brooklyn, NY in 2009 and 2010. I served as the Director of Student Life at Achievement First Crown Heights High School (now called AF Brooklyn High School), which entailed developing and managing all after-school and summer enrichment programs, building the advisory system for both college skills and character development, counseling students, and organizing and leading community events each week to contribute to school culture. As a member of the founding team, I was involved in almost every aspect of the school, from hiring, to behavior management, to building systems for school culture and discipline, to working with others in the Achievement First network to find and implement best practices for our new school.

"When you make me cram 30-50 kids in my classroom with no air conditioning so that temperatures hit 96 degrees, that hurts our kids. When you lock down our schools with metal detectors and arrest brothers for play fighting in the halls, that hurts our kids. When you take 18-25 days out of the school year for high stakes testing that is not even scientifically applicable for many of our students, that hurts our kids. When you spend millions on your pet programs, but there's no money for school level repairs, so the roof leaks on my students at their desks when it rains, that hurts our kids. When you unilaterally institute a longer school day, insult us by calling it a "full school day" and then provide no implementation support, throwing our schools into chaos, that hurts our kids. When you support Mayor Emanuel's TIF program in diverting hundreds of millions of dollars of school funds into to the pockets of wealthy developers like billionaire member of your school board, Penny Pritzker so she can build more hotels, that not only hurts kids, but somebody should be going to jail."

Last week, I was talking to a couple planning to leave a D.C. charter school. They liked the school well enough. But the commute - from home, to school, to work - had reached two hours a day. As the couple waited to close on a house in Virginia, they knew they would miss the District. But they looked forward to walking to their neighborhood school.  I thought about this family while digging into the new $100,000 study of D.C. schools sponsored by the charitable arm of Wal-Mart. The study's big takeaway: There are not enough "top-performing" schools in working-class D.C. neighborhoods. This is not exactly news. But their solution - close some neighborhood and charter schools and replace them with more charter schools - makes no sense given the rest of the study's findings.

"It's widely agreed that American education is in trouble.  What is missed in both the response to the crisis and the cacophony of reform efforts is a true understanding of the nature of the problem. In the early days of public schooling, Horace Mann called the schools the balance wheel of society. It was thought that schools served as a corrective for all kinds of problems ranging from skill gaps that needed to be remedied for the economy to flourish to culture gaps that were created by immigrants that needed to be Americanized. The school never worked in quite that way, but it was part of a web of social institutions that helped build a framework that allowed America to grow both in prosperity and in diversity. We face a lot of social and economic problems; we expect the schools to solve them. When they don't, we think it's a school failure. Instead, the schools are in fact a signal of a breakdown. Nowadays, the balance wheel is not working so well; it would be more accurate to think of public schools as the canary in the mine."

Many education reform advocates are pushing to lengthen the school day, not only as a way to increase teaching time and offer extra instruction and enrichment, but also to accommodate working parents. Charter programs like the KIPP schools have promoted the longer day, and it is being accepted by some urban public schools, notably in Chicago. When and where does it make sense to institute a longer school day, and how should it be designed? While this change may benefit children from disadvantaged backgrounds, providing a social support system, would it help other American students if they had to spend more time in school, given what we know about how they learn?

The claim that Chicago public school teachers aren't working enough hours during the school day are unwarranted at best and intellectually dishonest at worst, according to research from a University of Illinois labor expert. The contentious debate between Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis over the length of the school day has focused on Chicago public schools having the shortest official day of any major city - five hours and 45 minutes for elementary school students, and six hours and 45 minutes for high school students. But Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at Illinois, says when you account for time outside of the contractually obligated instruction, a teacher's day is almost twice as long.

That sense of immediacy, what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called "the fierce urgency of now," gave rise to the charter school movement. Charter schools are public schools that operate under separate management, giving them the freedom to innovate, to refine, and to tailor approaches to specific groups of students. Many charters have longer school days, weeks, and years. We have seen urban charter schools that perform better than their traditional public school counterparts, making up ground that students have lost in traditional schools. They are a right-now education solution for children who need a high-quality education.

For the first time, officials are moving to shut down an entire New York City charter-school network. Three schools that make up the Believe High School Network are slated to close in June after the state Education Department said on Tuesday it plans to revoke the charters of the two schools it oversees. The announcement came a day after the city Department of Education said it would close the Believe school under its purview. Although the city's struggling schools generally face closure because of poor academic performance, the Believe schools are being targeted for fiscal and governance problems.

The union representing nearly 700 public school employees who were laid off at the end of the school day on Friday held a last-minute lunchtime rally on the steps of City Hall, calling the layoffs a political vendetta and threatening possible legal action. But for all of the chanting and sign waving by District Council 37, the layoffs went through as planned. At the end of the day, Sungmi Kang, 47, a school aide at Stuyvesant High School, was out of work, along with 638 other school aides, parent coordinators, community associates, and other school support staff. They are the city's lowest paid employees and the latest victims of budget cuts.

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.

More than 100 school districts in Texas have passed a resolution saying that high-stakes standardized tests are "strangling" public schools, the latest in a series of events that are part of a brewing revolt in the state where the test-centric No Child Left Behind was born. State-mandated standardized testing has become so dominant in Texas that, according to Denise Williams, testing director of the Wichita Falls Independent School District, high school students are spending up to 45 days of their 180-day school year taking them, according to the Times Record News. Students in grades three through eight spend 19 to 27 days a year taking state-mandated tests.

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.

Scapegoating is a powerful tool to sway public opinion. That's why I'm not surprised that teachers unions are consistently being singled out for the shortcomings of public schools ("Can Teachers Unions Do Education Reform?" The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 3). After all, they are such an easy target at a time when the public's patience over the glacial pace of school reform is running out. The latest example was an essay by Juan Williams, who is now a political analyst for Fox News ("Will Business Boost School Reform?" The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 28). He claims that teachers unions are "formidable opponents willing to fight even modest efforts to alter the status quo." Their obstructionism is responsible for the one million high school dropouts each year and for a graduation rate of less than 50 percent for black and Hispanic students. Williams says that when schools are free of unions, they succeed because they can fire ineffective teachers, implement merit pay, lengthen the school day, enrich the curriculum and deal with classroom discipline. These assertions have great intuitive appeal to taxpayers who are angry and frustrated, but the truth is far different from what Williams maintains.

Last week, I reported that the city's charter school sector was on the verge of releasing a trove of data about its schools. I began my reporting after I learned about the plan in February, and a week ago, I learned that the organization in charge of the report had big plans for the report's release. The organization, the New York City Charter School Center, sent an advisory a week ago announcing Monday as the big day and inviting reporters to an 11 a.m. press conference to learn about the report, which would compile data about the schools' performance and their students. But those plans were scrapped over the weekend. On Sunday afternoon a spokeswoman for the charter school center emailed to say that the "State of the Sector" report was being delayed because all of the data had not been verified.