Charter Debate to Continue on KET

Charter schools will be debated on

KET’s “Kentucky Tonight” show

at 8 p.m. Monday, January 18.

Scheduled guests include:

• Rev. Jerry Stephenson, chair of the Kentucky Education Restoration Alliance
• Jim Waters, director of policy and communications for the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions
• Sharron Oxendine, president of the Kentucky Education Association
• Superintendent Sheldon Berman of Jefferson County Public Schools

Charter schools are public schools contracted out to the private sector. In 1992, the first two charter schools operated in St. Paul, Minnesota. By September 1999, almost 300,000 students attended 1,682 charter schools operating in 33 states. By 2000, 38 states had laws allowing charter schools and a year later there were 2,372 such schools in America.

More recently the heat has been turned up on states lacking permissive charter school laws because Education Secretary Arne Duncan tied billions of federal dollars to state acquiescence. Pass a charter school law and better your chances in the Race To The Top sweepstakes.

WFPL reported that several Louisville pastors have been working with Republican Rep. Brad Montell of Shelbyville who filed a bill to allow charter schools in the state. Rep. Stan Lee of Lexington filed a similar bill in July. Both would have permitted charters to operate in competition with successful schools. The vote on Montell's bill was tied in committee, so lacking a majority, died. But supporters sense they are close and vow to push on.

• Expect Stephenson to say that the greatest need for charter schools is in inner city Louisville where a number of schools are failing.
• Expect Waters, the BIPPS communications director, to swear by Carolyn Hoxby's widely discredited study and offer it as proof of charter school effectiveness despite substantial evidence that charter performance is as varied as that of the public schools they would replace.
• Expect Superintendent Berman to defend JCPS's continued efforts to turn around their most challenging schools despite years of stagnant results.
• Expect Oxendine to question the need for charter schools based on their mixed performance nationally.

The data on charter schools is far from conclusive. Taken as a whole it's impossible to conclude that they are any better, and are sometimes worse, than the public schools. But in places, they have shown success. As I have said before, if education were a natural science, it would be like meterology; highly-localized and ever-changing. Successful charter schools seem to focus on the success of each child, building relationships, and a high quality faculty working their butts off - like in successful public schools.

As early as 1999, Arizona researchers found "evidence of substantial ethnic segregation," and that charter schools "were higher in white enrollment than other public schools." (Cobb & Glass)

In "Does Choice Lead to Racially Distinctive Schools?" Weiher and Tedin (2002) found "that race is a good predictor" of the school choice families make. Whites, African Americans, and Latinos transfer into charter schools where their groups comprise between 11 and 14 percentage points more of the student body than the traditional public schools they are leaving.

In "Decade of Charter Schools: From Theory to Practice, Bulkley and Fisler (2003) at Rutgers
found that "although some successes are evident, there is still much to learn about the quality of charter schools and the experiences of charter school stakeholders. There is strong evidence that parents and students who remain in charter schools are satisfied and that charter schools are more autonomous than other public schools. But the jury is still out on some of the most important questions, including those about innovation, accountability, equity, and outcomes."

In "The effect of charter schools on charter students and public schools ," Bettinger (2004) at Case Western Reserve found that "test scores of charter school students do not improve, and may actually decline, relative to those of public school students," but charters had no significant effect on test scores in neighboring public schools.

In "Charter Schools and Student Achievement in Florida," Florida State's Tim Sass (2006) found achievement to initially be lower in charters. However, by their fifth year of operation charter schools "reach a par with the average traditional public school." Charters targeting at-risk and special education students demonstrate lower student achievement, as do their public counterparts. He found no difference between charters managed by for-profit entities than charters run by nonprofits.

In "Skimming the Cream" West, Ingram & Hind (2006) of the London School of Economics and Political Science found evidence suggestive of both "cream skimming" and "cropping off" educational provision to particular groups of students. "It is concluded that the introduction of market oriented reforms into public school systems requires monitoring and effective regulation to ensure that autonomous schools do not act in their own self-interest."

In "The Charter School Allure: Can Traditional Schools Measure Up? Bowling Green State's May (2006) found that "urban school districts are losing significant resources to charter schools" and that "despite the lack of statistically significant evidence of academic gains, parents perceive an enhanced educational experience." The author surmises that the chasm between perceived charter school success and traditional school failure is a "perception gap"

In "The Impacts of Charter Schools on Student Achievement: Evidence from North Carolina," Bifulco at U Conn and Duke's Ladd (2006) found that "students make considerably smaller achievement gains in charter schools than they would have in public schools" and say there is "suggestive evidence" that "about 30 percent of the negative effect of charter schools is attributable to high rates of student turnover."

Then came the study that defined the debate.

It was the first peer-reviewed detailed national assessment of charter school impacts since its longitudinal, student-level analysis covers more than 70 percent of the nation’s students attending charter schools. In “Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States,” reasearchers at the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University found that "there is a wide variance in the quality of the nation’s several thousand charter schools with, in the aggregate, students in charter schools not faring as well as students in traditional public schools."

While the report recognized a robust national demand for more charter schools from parents and local communities, it found that 17 percent of charter schools reported academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools, while 37 percent of charter schools showed gains that were worse than their traditional public school counterparts, with 46 percent of charter schools demonstrating no significant difference.

Then, something unusual happened.

Education Week reported Stanford colleague Caroline M. Hoxby, an economics professor, issued a memo critiquing the CREDO study in tandem with results from her own study of charter schools in New York City. That study showed that charter schools in the city were having the opposite effect on their students’ achievement as the CREDO researchers found.

In a memorandum titled "Fact vs. Fiction: An Analysis of Dr. Hoxby’s Misrepresentation of CREDO’s Research," the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, (CREDO), fired back.

The memo, "A Serious Statistical Mistake in the CREDO Study of Charter Schools," by Caroline Hoxby, does not provide any basis whatsoever for discounting the reliability of the CREDO study’s conclusions. The central element of Dr. Hoxby’s critique is a statistical argument that is quite unrelated to the CREDO analysis. The numerical elements of it are misleading in the extreme, even had the supporting logic been correct. Unfortunately, the memo is riddled with serious errors both in the structure of the underlying statistical models and in the derivation of any bias.

This is all going on at Stanford University, the same campus where the conservative Hoover Institution does its work with such notable conservatives as Condolesa Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. It the same place where Eric Hanushek tries to prove that money doesn't matter in education. One gets the distincitive au de political bias from the place. Turns out that Hoxby works there too. What a surprise.

“I don’t think the field of education research or policymakers are well served by scholars going back and forth with dueling memos, without peer review and without ample time to think it through,” said associate professor of education and sociology Sean F. Reardon, a colleague of both scholars at Stanford told Ed Week. “But I don’t think either side got it right,” he added.

Neither study has been published yet in a peer-reviewed journal. But that won't stop political operatives from citing them as definitive evidence.

Distorting the Evidence: Fresh Spin from Hanusek

Professional defense witness Eric (money won't improve the schools but it sure helps my lifestyle) Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth have unleashed a new book Schoolhouses, Courthouses and Statehouses (Princeton University Press, 2009), that claims to solve “the funding-achievement puzzle in America’s public schools.”

Hanushek is the conservative Hoover Institute's education economist who has appeared as a witness for the defense in more than a dozen education finance litigations. Lindseth is an attorney who has represented state defendants in a number of education adequacy litigations.

So there is plenty of financial incentive for them to support their dubious claims.

According to ACCESS Network's Mike Rebell, the new book continues their “slash and burn” tactics by exaggerating the extent to which expenditures for public education have increased in recent decades, dismissing the significance of the detailed cost studies that most states now use in budget analyses, and accusing plaintiff litigators of “almost always oppos[ing] significant changes in the way education funds are spent.”

The most extreme statements in the book are contained in the chapter entitled “The Effectiveness of Judicial Remedies,” which purports to document the extent to which student achievement has improved in the four states that they have concluded have had “significant” court-ordered remedies in place the longest, namely Kentucky, New Jersey, Wyoming, and Massachusetts. Focusing their analysis exclusively on certain student scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), they conclude that in three out of four of these states “ while court-ordered dollars have brought a host of services and facilities for schools……these appear not to have generally brought the improved student performance so long sought and so urgently needed.” ( p.170.)

Black-White Gap Widens Faster for High Achievers

The most difficult issue surrounding closing the white-black test score gap is finding those factors that are good for all children, but that disproportionately benefit disadvantaged children.

When schools finally began addressing this problem (in the mid-90s) we quickly found that the implementation of typical school programs had the tendency to produce gains - but the white kids we growing faster than the black kids - thus expanding the achievement gap, rather than narrowing it. Initially some schools approached the problem by lowering standards, or by placing all of their resources in traditional remediation programs. Both approaches failed.

As resources moved away from top students, now comes a study that suggests the students who lose the most ground academically in U.S. public schools may be the brightest African-American children. As African American students move through elementary and middle school the test-score gaps between them and their better-performing white counterparts grow fastest among the most able students and the most slowly for those who start out with below-average academic skills.

Some researchers believe the patterns have something to do with the fact that African-American children tend to be taught in predominantly black schools, where test scores are lower on average, teachers are less experienced, and high-achieving peers are harder to find.

Education Week reports:

For his analysis, Sean F. Reardon, an associate professor of sociology and education at Stanford University, analyzed reading and mathematics scores for nearly 7,000 elementary students taking part in a federal study known as the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. From kindergarten to 5th grade, he found, the achievement gaps grew twice as fast among the students who started out performing above the mean than they did among lower-performing children.

A second report from economists Steven G. Rivkin and Eric A. Hanushek (whose testimony in school finance cases like Young v Williams should come with a warning label) shows "The higher the initial achievement score, the researchers found, the more scores diverged over time between black and white students."

“It appears on average to be worse for a child to be in a school with a high black enrollment share, but it’s not clear why,” said Mr. Rivkin. “It could be important given the recent [U.S.] Supreme Court decision on desegregation,” he added, referring to a ruling in June of last year that sharply limited schools from using race to assign students to schools."

A third paper by Lindsay C. Page, a Harvard University researcher, found that differences between the schools that black and white students attend began playing an increasingly important role in recent decades in the growth of racial achievement gaps at the national level.

That analysis also determined that the national gap, which narrowed in the 1970s and 1980s and then widened again in the 1990s, tracked closely to changes in the percentages of white and black parents with more than a high school education.

This mirrors findings from Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phllips who found the greatest gains made by black students came between 1968 and 1980 and were explained by the civil rights movement, the War on Poverty and school-based improvements. The trend was reversed following "Reaganomics."

As Brandeis University law and social-policy professor Thomas Shapiro understood, "the wealth gap is not just a story of merit and achievement; it's also a story of the historical legacy of race in the United States."

Changing that legacy will require a fully-funded and efficient system that provides the resources students need to attain high standards; greater access to pre-school and kindergarten programs, more help for English-language learners and special needs students, and additional school days. It may also require attention to the social needs of the poor. It will require a comprehensive approach.

But the most recent meeting of the Kentucky legislature revealed no understanding of the problem or any motivation to fix it.