When Eva Moskowitz chaired the Education Committee of the New York City Council, she demanded to know why Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein didn’t do a better job improving public education. Rochester Schools Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard, then a regional superintendent in the NYC schools, remembers his own time on the Moskowitz hot seat. A New York Magazine profile describes her as having “grilled and filleted” administrators in a series of 100 hearings in 2002.

Bloomberg called her bluff. “If you think we’re doing such a bad job, why don’t you give it a try?” So in 2006 Moskowitz founded the Success Charter Network with the first Harlem Success Academy.  The network now runs four schools in Harlem with another three approved for the fall. Moskowitz plans to increase the network to forty schools.

The network is living up to its name: When Harlem Success Academy’s first crop of third graders took the state’s math and reading tests, they did very well—a 95% pass rate in reading and “extra terrestrial” in math, beating all but seven elementary schools in NYC and every third grade in Chappaqua, Mamaroneck & Rye, tony NYC suburbs in Westchester County.

Moskowitz’s achievementis the subject of a film recently screened at The Little titled The Lottery. The film follows four families who seek to enroll their children in one of the Harlem Success Academies. The hopes and dreams of the parents and their children makes for heartbreaking drama.

The film draws also attention to the kind of opposition Moskowitz hasgenerated. This is worth a separate essay—and I won’t attempt to approach the subject in this column.

Let’s go back to “first principles” and ask what the charter movement can and can’t be expected to accomplish. Three studies of charter schools have been released within the past year.  Taken together, they are revealing.

Stanford University’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) released a study of charter schools in 15 states and the District of Columbia and reported that charters outperformed traditional public schools about 17% of the time but underperformed traditional public schools 37% of the time. Results varied by state with charter schools in Arkansas, Colorado (Denver), Illinois (Chicago), Louisiana, and Missouri outperforming comparison schools while in Arizona, Florida, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, and Texas, charters underperformed traditional schools. CREDO also reports that students in poverty and English Language Learners both do better in charter schools.

A study of NYC charter schools conducted by Caroline Hoxby (also at Stanford) through the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found that students enrolled for grades K through 8 in charter schools significantly outperformed both their comparison group and traditional public school peers, closing “86% of the ‘Harlem-Scarsdale achievement gap’ in math and 66% of the achievement gap in English.” The NBER study compared students who were selected for the charter lotteries with students whose names were submitted to the lotteries, but were unsuccessful and remained in traditional public schools.

Just a few weeks ago, Mathematica Policy Research (MPR) released a study of student achievement in 22 Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) middle schools. MPR found that “For the vast majority of KIPP schools studied, impacts on students’ state assessment scores in mathematics and reading are positive, statistically significant, and educationally substantial.”

What light does this shed on the charter school question? And what is the question? The naïve question, I think, is “Do charter schools outperform traditional public schools?”—the question that the CREDO study attempted to answer. When CGR was staffing the Rochester Charter Schools Committee and local attorney Robert Brown was VP of the Rochester Board of Education, Rob asked, “Are we [the Board of Education] the problem here? Is a charter school a good idea simply because we’ve eliminated a layer of coordination and management?” His question was, of course, rhetorical. Simply eliminating a layer of management is not going perform miracles. In fact, one of the challenges to the charter school model is that each school is, in effect, a self-contained district with all of the challenges that implies.

The charter idea—first posed by the late Al Shanker when he led the American Federation of Teachers—is that charter schools are permitted to try new approaches to education, but will be closed if they fail. From this perspective, the apparently conflicting results of the CREDO study on the one hand, and the NBER and MPR studies on the other, begin to make sense. CREDO found that some states—likely those with more effective oversight or more rigorous accountability—were building networks of schools that did outperform traditional public schools. The NBER study found that charter schools in NYC—where failing charters are closed—have also been successful. And finally, the MPR study of KIPP schools is the most encouraging: Here we have an approach to public education that is replicable. KIPP’s founders figured out how to create a successful school—then repeat their success again and again. Using similar approaches, Uncommon Schools, the Success Charter Network and others have performed the same miracle.

Charter schools still enroll only a fraction of schoolchildren in our cities—3% in NYC, for example. What about the rest? The charter school will improve overall educational outcomes for America’s children only if a) charter schools serve as a proving ground for different approaches to K-12 education, AND b) what is learned in charter schools is applied to traditional public schools. In the question and answer session following the screening of The Lottery, Superintendent Brizard was asked that question—What does the Harlem Success Academy experience mean for his efforts at the Rochester City School District? While some leaders of traditional schools attempt to discredit or diminish the record of charter operators like the Success Charter Network or Uncommon Schools (operator of Rochester Prep Charter School), Brizard did not. He believes that the accomplishments of these operators are real. The challenge is applying the lessons to Rochester’s traditional public schools. Brizard’s creation of “autonomous schools,” his emphasis on empowering principals, and ideas for teacher preparation all draw from the charter school experience.

Kent Gardner

“Data-driven decision making” is about as buzz-wordy as buzzwords come.  Districts and schools have been awash in data ever since NCLB, but it’s hard for outsiders to get why actually using this data is not yet part of the culture of school districts.  Several reasons: Our “product” is children, who seem to defy measurement.  From a teacher’s perspective, the measures we do have typically come once a year, after the year is over—and so are divorced from any adjustment I could make to my behavior.  Data has been presented as a tool for accountability (think hammer), rather than performance improvement (think flashlight).   To change this culture, educators need to see concrete examples of how using data helps kids and teachers be more successful.

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If you pay even the slightest bit of attention to the mainstream media then you know the heat is on teachers unions.  More to the point, it seems they’re actually feeling the heat.  Many of today’s leading reformers see implosion as the desired outcome; myself, I’d be pretty satisfied with a dramatic physical or chemical change—both of which require a significant reordering of matter.

There are signs that this change is occurring: NYS’s biggest unions supporting a plan whereby 25% of teacher evaluation would be based on student test performance, and the tentative deal between Michelle Rhee and the D.C. teachers’ union to allow performance-based pay are just two.  Whether you view Race to the Top as powerful incentive or Machiavellian bribe, it is has been a catalyst in fundamentally changing the conversations about how we provide effective teachers to all kids.  The signs are pretty clear that teachers’ unions are easing their virtual stranglehold on teacher quality policy.  Seismic shift?  Not yet, but we need them at the table, so this is a big deal.

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Checker Finn, in this week’s Education Gadfly, mustered the courage to ask if all students should be prepared to attend college. This is a kind of “third rail” in education circles because it raises the taboo subject of differential ability. The notion of “different intelligences” tried to chip away at the idea that the ability to solve differential equations or write sonnets is on a higher moral plane. Yes, people are good at different things. Moreover, while it is hard to enjoy something you don’t do well, many people are perfectly capable of the kind of work required in college but simply don’t enjoy it. There are many satisfied carpenters and auto mechanics who could have been competent, but bored, software engineers or lawyers.

We’ve backed ourselves into a bit of a corner in the United States. We require a college degree for all kinds of tasks that don’t require it.

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Picking up where last week’s posts on teacher quality left off—because it’s a critical issue, and to respond to some of the feedback we received.  Some of you felt that we over-simplified the issue, suggesting that a teacher’s effectiveness is the only factor in student achievement.  Implicit here is that we deny the impact of a host of other factors—curriculum, school leadership, socio-economic status, facilities, and district policies and practices.

Not so.  Of course all of these factors figure into student achievement.  Even the most zealous teacher-quality reformer wouldn’t disagree.  Teacher quality is ONE part of the multi-pronged and complex approach we must take to improve schools.  And saying so doesn’t mean you’re looking to make teachers scapegoats for all that ails the system.

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In case you missed it, the NYS legislature actually passed some legislation last week, just beating the deadline to apply for round 2 of Race to the Top.  Notably the statewide charter school cap was raised from 200 to 460, while banning for-profit operators and expanding the state’s fiscal oversight of charters.  There are also provisions which will encourage charter schools to enroll more students with disabilities and English Language Learners.  In a separate bill, the state tied teacher evaluations to student performance data—a big deal considering that NYS previously had a “firewall” which made it illegal to link student performance to teachers.  Check out the NYTimes and Wall Street Journal for details.  These moves significantly increase NYS’s odds of snagging the $700 million that’s on offer from the feds.

Much of the positive buzz in the last week has been about the fact that these developments required a good bit of collaboration amongst typical adversaries.  Seventy percent of the unions in the participating districts signed MOUs, including the largest local, the UFT in NYC.  Still, three of the Big 5 teachers’ unions (Buffalo, Rochester and Yonkers) opted not to sign.

According to the state’s application, $477 million would go directly to participating school districts and charter schools (91% of which signed MOUs) while the remaining $219 million supports statewide teacher and principal capacity building, curricula and assessment work, and the statewide data system.

The national debate about school reform has a “back to basics” ring to it. Effective schools are made up of effective classrooms. Effective classrooms depend on effective teachers. Simple, right?

A big deal?  Sure, but…

The recently encouraging big conversations and Race to the Top hullabaloo going on in Washington and state capitals are producing ideas, policies, incentives and laws that will make a difference in teacher quality.   But why should we wait?  Local districts need to be working in the here and now to improve the effectiveness of the teachers who are working with our students (and my kids) today. Many district leaders have, in effect, abdicated the power they have to improve teaching within the current systems.

Get to work, Rochester

According to one district data source, principals completed and filed observations/evaluations for just over 1/3 of all teachers during the last school year. (For the record, some may have been completed and not filed—if so, then that’s another problem.)  And of those completed & filed, only 1% were rated “below standards” or “unsatisfactory.” This mirrors national trends (see last week’s post).

I’ve two reactions to this.

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The New York Times story is titled “The Teachers’ Union Last Stand” (see http://goo.gl/wF0e).  The headline oversells the content rather a bit—Randi Weingarten is unlikely to suffer the fate of George Custer. Yet the thread of the story is that the least desirable trait of teachers’ unions—their one-for-all-and-all-for-one-ness—is under attack.

This is the challenge of collective bargaining. Union contracts often act like the Euro Zone. The currency’s four year low against the dollar (time for that trip to Tuscany!) is largely a consequence of Greece spending beyond its means. Oh, and lying about it. But in a bargain many—particularly the Germans—have come to regret, Euro-zone countries are all pledged to come to the rescue, even if the rescued party is wholly to blame.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about teacher evaluation—even before the Regents’ proposal to the  NYS Legislature was released. See my reaction to the proposal below. First, some thoughts:

• Our system for evaluating teachers is broken.
• Few of us learn without specific and regular feedback on our work—and our teacher evaluation system provides little.  My first year of teaching, I desperately craved something more helpful than, “Great job,” “Your students love you,” and “Your handwriting on the board should be in cursive.”  Broad observations like, “You need to work on classroom management,” or “Create more engaging lessons,” do the struggling teacher no good.  I wanted to know what was expected of me and given some concrete ways to  improve.
• It makes no sense to evaluate teachers solely on student test data, or even solely on student performance.  There are too many factors that teachers don’t control and too many questions about how to measure that performance.
• It makes no sense to evaluate teachers without student performance data.  If you aren’t willing to be somewhat responsible for student learning, why teach?  Effort matters, but it’s not enough.
• Teacher evaluations can be a joke.  Often the evaluator doesn’t show up or stays for about 15 minutes.  There may or may not be a specific rubric or list of criteria on which you are judged.  There may or may not be a chance to discuss the lesson afterwards.  You may or may not be observed by anyone who knows the curriculum, instruction or your content area.
• Evaluation currently is about compliance, not learning.  I’ve been asked to sign my observation forms when no observation was done, and had perplexed administrators wonder why I wanted them to actually come and observe. This “surface over substance” mentality infects teachers too—for my first observation, the mentor assigned to first year teachers advised me to “prepare” by cleaning my desk and arranging for my “troublemaker” students to spend the observation period in a colleague’s classroom.
• Annual performance ratings don’t mean much.  There are often only 2 choices—unsatisfactory or satisfactory. Is it any surprise that the vast majority of teachers (some studies say over 95%) receive satisfactory ratings?  And the ratings don’t have any consequences—there’s little direct link to professional development, differential pay, termination, or career development.

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Suppose I’m moving to the Rochester area and I’d like to know the graduation rate for the Rochester School District. I start Googling, and I find the district’s March presentation on graduation rates. It gives a rate of 46% for 2009. But then I come across the State Education Department’s PowerPoint presentation from a few days later (found here) that cites a 42% rate for the same year. Huh?

Welcome to the world of graduation rate reporting, where nothing is ever as simple as it should be.

The difference that explains the apparent discrepancy is that the district is counting students who graduate in August (they needed summer school to make up a course or pass a required test), and the state is not, including only students who graduated by June.  (The state does present August graduation rates separately.)  Each rate is perfectly legitimate in its own context, but the existence of both rates can obviously lead to confusion.

And there’s more, so much more, that even the casual observer should understand before drawing conclusions about graduation rates. Unfortunately, there are few places to go for a good explanation of what’s happening, and not enough attention being paid by most news outlets to the nuances

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