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This report details how charter schools are increasingly run by private, nonprofit management organizations called charter school management organizations (CMOs). The researchers find that most CMOs serve urban students from low-income families, operate small schools that offer more instructional time, and attract teachers loyal to each school's mission, based on survey data and site visits. The authors conducted an impact analysis focused only on middle school grades, finding that a small fraction of CMO-run middle schools boosted achievement growth at notable levels. But on average, student performance in the CMO-run schools did not outpace achievement growth in other charters or in host districts for a statistically matched set of students. This review finds that the report offers an objective assessment of the comparative benefits for middle-school students of a highly select set of CMOs. It also helps to identify organizational features that operate in successful CMO-run schools that are modestly associated with stronger student growth in the middle grades. However, the authors downplay aspects of their methodology that resulted in significant selectivity concerning which CMOs were studied, raising questions regarding the population of charter schools to which they hope to generalize.

In this report, the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) claims that California charter Schools are reversing the trend of low academic achievement among African American students and effectively closing the Black-White achievement gap. After a review of CCSA's analyses and findings, however, it becomes clear that the claims are misrepresented or exaggerated. In the years under study, African American students enrolled in traditional public Schools outgained those enrolled in charter Schools by a small margin, although the charter School students started and ended higher. In addition, the authors present a regression model, with Academic Performance Index (API) scores as the outcome variable, that accounts for only 3-6% of overall variance. Based on this model, the percentage of African American enrollment is negatively related to API scores in both charter and traditional public Schools, a trend that will not reverse the academic standing for African American students. In fact, the gap continues to grow, albeit at a slightly slower rate in charter Schools. Finally, the report's claim that charter Schools are centers of innovation does not hold. Rather, as the authors eventually conclude themselves, there were no instructional practices observed in California charter Schools that are not also present in traditional public Schools.

In 2010, California enacted education legislation known as the "parent trigger." The legislation empowers parents of children at schools that have failed to meet annual yearly progress for at least four years to change the administration, convert the school to a charter, or shut it down completely if they gather signatures from at least 51% of parents at the school. Similar legislation exists in Mississippi and Connecticut, but has failed to become law in Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, and Maryland. Parents at McKinley Elementary in Compton Unified - a school that only met yearly progress once in the last eight years -were the first in the nation to "pull the trigger" and remain the sole group to do so to date. As a result of their action, the State of California required the district to hire a "direct assistance intervention team," and later, an attempt by parents to convert the school to a charter was rebuffed by the school district on technical grounds. A case is currently pending in Los Angeles Superior Court. Many school reformers believe that this law puts the interests of children ahead of teachers and helps to save children in failing schools before the clock runs out. Many education professionals, among them the president of the California Federation of Teachers, view the law as a "lynch mob provision," intended to dismantle the public school system. The politics of the "parent trigger" are confusing, with the lines between conservatives and liberals often blurred. This debate will examine the arguments in favor and in opposition to this reform, focusing on the experience to date in California and developments in other parts of the country where similar legislation is being considered.

"Over the last ten years, I have worked as a certified English teacher in a high school in Long Island, New York, a suburb of New York City.  I am in my seventeenth year working in public education.  I have taught various courses in four different school districts on Long Island that range from grades six to twelve.  Children and adolescents, whether they are school shooters or gangbangers, do not become violent without cause.  None of them were born violent. I tend to connect the rise in school violence in my suburban school district, 95% of which is African American and Hispanic, to the recent economic downturn and education policy insidiously devoted to teacher, principal and school evaluations tied to standardized testing of students.  These students have been exposed to school curriculum, said testing, and "raised" standards (Common Core) conceived by politicians, economists and billionaires, not professional and long-time education practitioners who would know much, much better how to make our public schools the envy of the world (again).  They have also been victimized by inflexible "zero tolerance" policies with mandatory minimum suspension periods, as well as increased in-school surveillance and security measures that prepare chocolate and caramel students much more for the realities of prison than they do a safe existence."

"In this study, we test the idea that new charters hit their mark early in their operations and do not vary much after that. The notion originated from time spent in young charter schools studying their experience as new organizations and as agents of education reform. Interviews with school staff along with our own observations of school activities and operations have formed the impression that the "rules" of a school get set early on in the life of the school. By rules, we mean the adult and student cultures, the formal and informal procedures for identifying and addressing problems, and the school community's commitment to student learning as the primary focus of the school. These are obviously richly nuances facets of a school with myriad potential interactions among them, just as with any social organization. Yet, however they come about, we have observed that they are shaped quickly in new schools. Moreover, these norms and behaviors are sturdy and difficult (though not impossible) to change later on."

Yesterday, the NY State Assembly Education Committee held a rare hearing in NYC on the state and city's implementation of the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, the so-called "turnaround" Schools, and how the entire program is in complete disarray.    The big news is that the city is determined to go ahead with turnaround model for 26 Persistently Low Achieving Schools even if they receive any of the federal funds to do so. Turnaround  is an euphemism for closing these Schools, firing much of the staff and reopening them in the fall with new names  There is massive confusion and no public input about the plans for these Schools, and yet the city seems determined to close and reconstitute them, like lemmings going over a cliff, even at the city's taxpayers' expense.  Why?  Because they can. See Two Years In, Federal Grant Program To Improve Struggling City Schools Has Derailed (NY1); Plans to Close 26 Schools Will Proceed Regardless of Financing, City Says (Schoolbook) and Chancellor: Plan to Close, Reopen Schools Was Not Act of 'Revenge' (WNYC) and Walcott: Turnaround will happen even without federal funding (GothamSchools).  My testimony is here on how many these Schools and their students have been systematically disadvantaged by overcrowding and extremely large class sizes; with no plans by the city or the state to do anything to address these deplorable conditions.

As the closing of "failing" schools becomes an annual ritual, along with the opening of brand-new schools (some of which will eventually join the ranks of "failing" schools), it is time to ask about where accountability truly lies. I wonder if  it ever occurs to anyone in the New York City Department of Education that their own policies of closing schools and shuffling low-performing students around like checker pieces on a checker board have actually created "failing" schools. Every time they close a large high school with large numbers of low-performing students, those students are then pushed off into another large high school (like Dewey) that is doomed to "fail." Why doesn't the leadership of the DOE ever take responsibility for helping schools that have disproportionate numbers of students who enter ninth grade with low test scores, including students with disabilities, homeless students, and students who are English language learners? Their methods of "reform" look like 52-pickup: Just throw the cards in the air and hope that somehow you come up with a winning hand.

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.

Today, Rachel Monahan reported in the Daily News that the DOE is going forward with a contract for Joel Rose's new company to run the School of One in NYC public Schools. Joel Rose devised and ran the "School of One" for DOE, a much-hyped online program to teach middle School math, starting in the summer of 2009.  Rose has had a pretty standard trajectory for a corporate reformer: he started as a TFA recruit, then worked for seven years at Edison charter Schools under Chris Cerf, moved over to DOE as Cerf's chief of staff in 2006, and started the "School of One" as a summer School program in a few middle Schools.

K12 Inc. enrolls more public school students than any other private education management organization in the U.S. Much has been written about K12 Inc. (referred to in this report simply as "K12") by financial analysts and investigative journalists because it is a large, publicly traded company and is the dominant player in the operation and expansion of full-time virtual schools. This report provides a new perspective on the nation's largest virtual school provider through a systematic review and analysis of student characteristics, school finance, and school performance of K12-operated schools. Using federal and state data, this report provides a description of the students served by K12 and the public revenues received and spent by the company at the school level. Further, the report presents evidence from a range of school performance measures and strives to understand and explain the overall weak performance of these virtual schools.

In 2009, the state law granting the Mayor control of the New York City public school system was renewed. That renewal included a requirement that the New York City Independent Budget Office "enhance official and public understanding" of educational matters of the school system. The law also requires the Chancellor of the school system to provide IBO with the data that we deem necessary to conduct our analyses. That data began to flow to IBO at the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year. This report is our first annual summary of that data. Over the course of the last year, we have issued a number of detailed analyses of specific topics, and we will continue to produce those types of reports. This current report is designed as a descriptive overview of the school system rather than as an in-depth look at particular issues. It is organized into three main sections. The first presents demographic information on the students who attend New York City's public schools. The next section describes the resources-budgets, school staff, and buildings-that the school system utilizes. The final section describes the measurable outcomes of the school system's efforts for particular subgroups of students.

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.

While Governor Malloy's proposal to ban collective bargaining at Commissioner's Network schools is appalling and inappropriate, the notion of turning a public district school over to a charter school company should be rejected because, despite what Mr. Green claims, Connecticut's charter schools DO NOT have a proven track record when it comes to serving the broader community. Charter schools may be a "successful" model for a sub-set of parents, who want their children to attend a certain type of program, and local legislators have every right to support those parents, but district schools must take every child who walks through the door; the facts make it extraordinarily clear that charter schools do not do that.

Redistributing highly effective teachers from low- to high-need schools is an education policy tool that is at the center of several major current policy initiatives. The underlying assumption is that  teacher productivity is portable across different schools settings. Using elementary and secondary school data from North Carolina and Florida, this paper investigates the validity of this assumption. Among teachers who switched between schools with substantially different poverty levels or academic performance levels, we find no change in those teachers' measured effectiveness before and after a school change. This pattern holds regardless of the direction of the school change. We also find that high-performing teachers' value-added dropped and low-performing teachers' value-added gained in the post-move years, primarily as a result of regression to the within-teacher mean and unrelated to school setting changes. Despite such shrinkages, high-performing teachers in the pre-move years still outperformed low-performing teachers after moving to schools with different settings.

"Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made school choice a foundation of his education agenda, and since he took office in 2002, the city opened more than 500 new schools; closed, or is in the process of closing, more than 100 ailing ones; and created an environment in which more than 130 charter schools could flourish. No neighborhood has been as transformed by that agenda as Harlem. When classes resume on Thursday, many of its students will be showing up in schools that did not exist a decade ago. The idea, one that became a model for school reform nationwide, was to let parents shop for schools the same way they would for housing or a cellphone plan, and that eventually, the competition would lift all boats. But in interviews in recent weeks, Harlem parents described two drastically different public school experiences, expressing frustration that, among other things, there were still a limited number of high-quality choices and that many schools continued to underperform."

Much controversy has been aroused and much ink has been expended about the way in which Eva Moskowitz is now defying the original stated purpose of charter schools, and marketing her chain of Success Academies to white middle class families in Brooklyn and on the Upper West Side.  Her glossy flyers, sent to households by the truckload, with many families having already received five or six, increasingly feature the faces of little white children. There has also been much debate about the problems of NYC's demanding school "choice" process -- but not much said about how school choice may further segregate  our public schools, especially in many areas of Brownstone Brooklyn, where the last ten years or more of gradual gentrification have led to more diversity in neighborhood schools.  While the UCLA Civil Rights project has shown how charter schools contributes to more segregation nationwide, here are the observations of one Brooklyn parent who is also a high school teacher, Cindy Black, about what happened when a new elementary school of "choice" -- though not a charter -- opened up  in her community

The dozen schools moving toward closure in Nassau and Suffolk counties are not the first ones since the Great Recession wreaked havoc on municipal budgets. The Lawrence school District closed one of its elementary schools in 2009, Bower Elementary school in Lindenhurst closed in 2010, and Cross Street Elementary school in Mineola closed last year. So did 134-year-old Stella Maris Regional school in Sag Harbor-the oldest Catholic school on Long Island. Not that precedent eases the pain.

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.

Much has been written about the importance of school leadership, but there is surprisingly little systematic evidence on this topic. This paper presents preliminary estimates of key elements of the market for school principals, employing rich panel data on principals from Texas State. The consideration of teacher movements across schools suggests that principals follow patterns quite similar to those of teachers - preferring schools that have less demands as indicated by higher income students, higher achieving students, and fewer minority students. Looking at the impact of principals on student achievement, the authors find some small but significant effects of the tenure of a principal in a school. More significant, however, are the estimates of variations in principal effectiveness. The variation in principal effectiveness tends to be largest in high poverty schools, consistent with hypothesis that principal ability is most important in schools serving the most disadvantaged students. Finally, considering principal mobility, the authors find that principals who stay in a school tend to be more effective than those who move to other schools.