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"Evidently, the CEO of Harmony Charter Schools will testify today that Harmony Science Cademy Schools in Texas have a 100% graduation rate. We often hear charter School operators make this claim. Are charters Schools really that great? Should we open more charter Schools to increase the graduation rate? And what, exactly, are these Schools doing to have such extraordinary graduation rates."

The 2009-2010 school year marked another year of relatively slow growth in the for-profit education management industry. The greatest increase in profiled companies occurred in the category of small EMOs (i.e., EMOs that manage three or fewer schools). We believe our key finding from the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 report, i.e., that the growth of the EMO sector is slowing, still holds true for the 2009-2010 academic year overall. While the number of new schools under for-profit EMO management has slowed, the enrollments in these schools continue to grow at a more rapid pace. This Profiles report shows that generally large for-profit EMOs are managing fewer schools, and that small and medium for-profit EMOs are growing. While past annual Profiles reports have focused on descriptive data related to the number of EMOs and schools under EMO management, this year's report adds new variables on school performance as measured by federal or state rating systems. 

In their original conception, charter schools were to be innovative public schools, freed from the stifling bureaucracy of school districts, professionally led and directed by their teachers and organically connected to the communities they served. Charter schools would be laboratories of educational experimentation, expanding our repertoire of best educational practices. This was the vision put forward by the late UFT and AFT President Al Shanker, when he became one of the very first advocates for charter schools, and it is the vision we relied upon when we started our own UFT Charter school in East New York and partnered with Green Dot to establish a charter school in the South Bronx.

As the few regular readers of this blog know, I am working on a report that focuses on Texas charter schools. Many of the myths surrounding charter schools-especially the so-called high-performing charter schools-will be examined and some debunked. In doing this research, I found something very, very curious. The Texas Education Agency lists a number of schools with the KIPP name. Yet, KIPP does not claim all of these schools on their national website. Kipp does not use the same names to identify schools with the Texas Education Agency and on the national KIPP website.

We investigate the effectiveness of Idaho charter schools relative to traditional public schools, using the average difference in test score gains in the two sectors as well as the student fixed effects estimator favored in the literature.  Our findings are quite sensitive to the choice of estimator.  When student fixed effects are included, charter schools appear more effective than traditional public schools in the elementary grades.  When student fixed effects are omitted, this is no longer true.  We attribute the difference to biases associated with heterogeneity in schools and in the quality of school-student matches when the fixed effects estimator is used.  We find much less evidence of selection bias, the standard rationale for the fixed effects estimator. 

School boards typically control massive amounts of money and assets that can be dished out through contracts for services, purchases of land, and diverted into charter Schools and voucher programs. Despite School boards' power, however, until now board elections around the country have typically been fueled by door-to-door canvassing rather than high dollar fundraising. But increasingly, large donations from wealthy individuals and corporations are pouring into Schools board races around the country to enact an agenda that attacks collective bargaining rights of teachers unions and increases the privatization of public education through charter Schools and vouchers. The Denver Public School Board race, which took place yesterday, is a prime example of outside money from wealthy individuals and corporate funded groups flooding elections. That money proved to have a significant effect on last night's election for the union-back candidates opposed to the so-called "reform slate."

"New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's school reform proposals have infuriated educators across the state. Award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High school is one of them and in this post, she  explains why. Burris, who has written frequently for this blog,  was named New York's 2013 High school Principal of the Year by the school Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary school Principals, and in 2010, was tapped as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the school Administrators Association of New York State. Burris has been exposing the botched school reform program in New York for years on this blog. Her most recent post was "Principal: 'There comes a time when rules must be broken…That time is now.'" (In this post, Burris refers to "value-added" scores, which refer to value-added measurement (VAM), which purports to be able to determine the "value" a teacher brings to student learning by plopping test scores into complicated formulas that can supposedly strip out all other factors, including the conditions in which a student lives.)"

"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"

"School closings, the threat of which hang over Chicago public Schools, and which have been a central feature of Bloomberg educational policies in New York, are perhaps the most controversial features of the Obama administration's "Race to the Top" initiative. The idea of closing low-performing Schools, designated as such entirely on the basis of student test scores, removing half of their teaching staff and all of their administrators, and replacing them with a new (typically charter) School in the same building, is one which has tremendous appeal among business leaders and almost none among educators. Advocates see this policy as a way of removing ineffective teachers, adding competition to what had been a stagnant sphere of public service, and putting pressure on teachers in high-poverty areas to demand and get high performance from their students, once again based on performance on standardized tests. For a "data driven" initiative, School closings have produced surprisingly little data to support their implementation."

"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."

The specifics of how growth models should be constructed and used to evaluate schools and teachers is a topic of lively policy debate in states and school districts nationwide. In this paper we take up the question of model choice and examine three competing approaches. The first approach, reflected in the popular student growth percentiles (SGPs) framework, eschews all controls for student covariates and schooling environments. The second approach, typically associated with value-added models (VAMs), controls for student background characteristics and aims to identify the causal effects of schools and teachers. The third approach, also VAM-based, fully levels the playing field so that the correlation between school- and teacher-level growth measures and student demographics is essentially zero. We argue that the third approach is the most desirable for use in educational evaluation systems. Our case rests on personnel economics, incentive-design theory, and the potential role that growth measures can play in improving instruction in K-12 schools

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.

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.

Professor Michael Klonsky teaches in the College of Education at DePaul University in Chicago. He also serves as the national director of the Small Schools Workshop, and on the national steering committee of Save Our Schools, a national movement dedicated to supporting public Schools. Klonsky has blogged, spoken and written extensively on School reform issues with a focus on urban School restructuring. Klonsky received his MA in Education Studies in 1992 and his PhD in Curriculum & Instruction from UIC in 1996. He talks with Communications Director Eva Moon.

This book aims to inform the policy debate by examining four primary research questions in several geographic locations: (1) What are the characteristics of students transferring to charter schools? (2) What effect do charter schools have on test-score gains for students who transfer between TPSs and charter schools? (3) What is the effect of attending a charter high school on the probability of graduating and of entering college? (4) What effect does the introduction of charter schools have on test scores of students in nearby TPSs? We  examine similarities and diferences in the answers to these questions across locations, seeking insights about the policy levers that might be available to improve the outcomes associated with charter schools.

The success of school-choice initiatives is commonly measured in reading and math scores. But how does being admitted to a preferred school affect other parts of a student's life? In an article in Education Next, Harvard University's David J. Deming argues for looking beyond school-based outcomes, suggesting that that kind of growth can be achieved in ways that do not necessarily lead to long-term success. Instead, he analyzes the impact of winning a school choice lottery on the criminal activity of students in North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district over a period of seven years.

In an era when school reform and budget savings are championed by representatives of both major political parties, Long Island cannot economically, politically, or culturally afford to maintain small racially segregated school districts. Based on demographic data available in New York: The State of Learning, an annual statistical profile of New York State school districts, Malverne schools and schools in surrounding communities do not have to be racially segregated. In near by Rockville Centre, 80 percent of the students are white. If Malverne, Lakeview, and Rockville Centre were combined into one school district, the student population would be 53 percent white, 30 percent black, 13 percent Latino, and 4 percent Asian. If we think even more broadly and Malverne, Lakeview, Rockville Centre, West Hempstead, Lynbrook, and East Rockaway were consolidated into a manageable district with under 11,000 students, the student population would be 69 percent white, 14 percent black, 13 percent Hispanic, and 4 percent Asian.

In The Louisiana Recovery School District: Lessons for the Buckeye State, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute criticizes local urban governance structures and presents the decentralized, charter-School-driven Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans as a successful model for fiscal and academic performance. Absent from the review is any consideration of the chronic under-funding and racial history of New Orleans public Schools before Hurricane Katrina, and no evidence is provided that a conversion to charter Schools would remedy these problems. The report also misreads the achievement data to assert the success of the RSD, when the claimed gains may be simply a function of shifting test standards. The report also touts the replacement of senior teachers with new and non-traditionally prepared teachers, but provides no evidence of the efficacy of this practice. Additionally, the report claims public support for the reforms, but other indicators-never addressed in the report-reveal serious concerns over access, equity, performance, and accountability. Ultimately, the report is a polemic advocating the removal of public governance and the replacement of public Schools with privately operated charter networks. It is thin on data and thick on claims, and should be read with great caution by policymakers in Ohio and elsewhere.

In several previous posts I have addressed the common argument among charter advocacy organizations (notably, not necessarily those out there doing the hard work of actually running a real charter school - but the pundits who claim to speak on their behalf) that charter schools do more, with less while serving comparable student populations. This argument appears to be a central theme of current policy proposals in Connecticut, which, among other things, would substantially increase funding for urban charter schools while doing little to provide additional support for high need traditional public school districts. For more on that point, see here. I've posted some specific information on Connecticut charter schools in previous posts, but have not addressed them more broadly. Here, I provide a run-down of simple descriptive data, widely available through two major credible sources.

Now our small community is faced with the unthinkable - we may be forced to close a highly performing public school to hand that school lock, stock and barrel over to a Charter school.  Shocking, isn't it?  How could this happen?  Charter school law was intended to help children who are under-served and falling through the cracks of traditional education systems.  Unfortunately, across the country there are more and more charter schools popping up which are taking advantage of loopholes to create pseudo-private schools with questionable admissions practices, high "suggested donation" requirements from parents and low representation of truly underprivileged children.