Will Bipartisanship Rule in Building Quality Charter Schools?
By Christian Braunlich • Nov 11th, 2009 • Category: Education, FeatureBy any mathematical equation, a 17-point victory offers newly-elected Governor Bob McDonnell a mandate on those policies he made part of his platform.
And one policy on which he marched in bipartisan lockstep with President Barack Obama was the issue of developing quality public charter schools – particularly those that would serve as a turn-around mechanism in areas where individual schools or school systems had consistently failed to make progress over the past decade.
The Obama Administration’s support for public charters as a means of improving the educational futures of at-risk students is well known. And recent reports from Boston, New York and Washington, DC demonstrate that a quality charter school can make a dramatic difference in the education and the lives of at-risk children. At Harlem’s Democracy Prep, for example, charter school students scored almost as well as students in the affluent Scarsdale suburban school district.
McDonnell’s campaign joined in that bi-partisanship, but it appears to have stopped at the shores of the Potomac River. In a post-election newspaper interview, Virginia Senate Majority Leader Richard Saslaw declared his opposition to expanding the charter school law on the grounds that they weren’t needed in suburban areas – thus throwing under the bus kids in urban schools where up to 40 percent of the students do not graduate from high school on time.
One would hate to conclude that, given the choice between siding with failing kids or siding with the teachers’ union (which opposes all charters in Virginia), the Democrats are choosing union power over kid power.
Instead, it would be more generous to conclude that there’s simply a concern about expanding any kind of charter, regardless of its quality. In that reservation, there is a kernel of truth.
Public charter schools are designed to be independently operated – schools where educators are given the freedom to design instructional programs that best serve their student population. In return, those schools are to be given strong accountability systems and oversight for student performance.
But not all public charter schools are quality charter schools. It does not serve a child if he leaves a traditional public school that is failing him or her, only to move to a similarly failing public charter school.
While many good parents want better opportunities for educationally at-risk children, starting an effective public charter school isn’t quite like the old films where Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland decide “Oh boy, let’s put on a show!” Too few of those who want to organize a charter have the skills and background to develop a successful instructional program and assessment measures.
But similarly, too many local School Boards – currently the only entities that can authorize a public charter school – misunderstand the role of charters or the School Board’s role as authorizers. They confuse oversight with daily management, and focus on inputs rather than student outcomes. In short, there is a tendency to believe charter schools are okay as long as they are run by School Boards and look like the regular public schools surrounding them – which sort of defeats the purpose in the first place.
The most successful charter schools – the Knowledge is Power Program, Aspire, the Achievement First network – have important common qualities. Among them are high expectations, extra time for students, effective (and multiple) assessment tests and a strong faculty and team spirit.
But these successful qualities flourish best in places where there is a strong balance between offering schools a high level of school autonomy and freedom and demanding strong accountability systems for student performance. Public charter schools that are forced to be dependent on local school systems (and subject to regulatory burdens and limitations on basic operations) rarely succeed. Forcing restrictions on charter schools that limit the level of innovation and flexibility those schools can use tend to result in failure. And focusing on inputs rather than student outcomes puts the emphasis on the wrong end of student learning.
Learning how quality public charter schools operate – and how effective charter authorizers genuinely supervise, rather than manage, those schools – is an important step in revamping Virginia’s charter school law and offering new opportunities for educationally at-risk students.
That’s why the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy will have three charter school experts – Sara Mead, of Democrats for Education Reform; Don Soifer, of the DC Public Charter School Board and Diona McLucas, of the Black Alliance for Educational Options – speak at their annual Education Policy Luncheon on the subject of “What Makes a Quality Charter School?”
This luncheon will be held in Williamsburg on November 18, just prior to the Virginia School Boards Association Convention, and will examine the characteristics of quality charter schools, and what authorizers must do to ensure educational achievement.
Christian Braunlich Christian N. Braunlich is vice president of the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, Virginia’s premier non-partisan public policy foundation. He served eight years on the Fairfax County School Board, the nation’s 12th largest school system, where he was a strong advocate of educational accountability and research-based reading programs.
Mr. Braunlich has served as Chief of Staff to Congressman John LeBoutillier, Assistant Vice President of Public Affairs for the National Association of Manufacturers, president of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, and vice president of the Center for Education Reform. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Washington Post, The Northern Virginia Journal, The Washington Times, and The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star.
Email this author | All posts by Christian Braunlich
I don’t have a problem with different approaches – as long as – all of them – are held accountable to the same assessment standards and based on the results of those assessments – we evolve the policies and curricula accordingly.
Right now.. despite some improvements, most of our kids rank near 10th when compared internationally – and any Governor who professes to want to be a “jobs” governor needs to be focused on Virginia providing a competitive education – for as many kids as possible – keeping in mind that every kid that we do “leave behind”, his societal costs will be paid for by the kids that did not get left behind.
The problem with the SOLs and NCLB standards is the failure to adequately measure “success”. Additionally, if you simply teach to the test in the traditional setting then all that is emphasized is “succeeding” at taking the test, not necessarily learning. In effect you can game the system, show compliance, accreditation, acceptable yearly progress, etc and yet still fail to provide a good education. Meanwhile, the charter students may in fact be learning much more, but since they haven’t crammed for the fill in the bubble test then they may not perform as well, even though they may have better mastery of the specific content, as well as demonstrate greater capacity for things not easily quantified with a multiple choice test (analytical skills, reasoning, etc).
[...] Daily Times) Texas — $10 million gift energizes charter chain (Houston Chronicle) Va. — Will bipartisanship rule in building quality charter schools? (Bacon’s [...]
The NAEP has standards comparable to world standards and “teaching to the test” is what our competitors do and it is how the kids in our countries will out compete our kids for world jobs.
We can make all the excuses we want about what tests don’t do but at the end of the day – the test that cannot be dismissed is whether or not our kids have the equivalent education they need to compete for world jobs.
I would urge anyone who thinks that teaching to the test is wrong to take a look at the NAEP proficiency standards for Reading – here:
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/Reading/achieveall.asp
Basic
(208) Fourth-grade students performing at the Basic level should demonstrate an understanding of the overall meaning of what they read. When reading text appropriate for fourth-graders, they should be able to make relatively obvious connections between the text and their own experiences and extend the ideas in the text by making simple inferences.
Proficient
(238) Fourth-grade students performing at the Proficient level should be able to demonstrate an overall understanding of the text, providing inferential as well as literal information. When reading text appropriate to fourth grade, they should be able to extend the ideas in the text by making inferences, drawing conclusions, and making connections to their own experiences. The connection between the text and what the student infers should be clear.
Advanced
(268) Fourth-grade students performing at the Advanced level should be able to generalize about topics in the reading selection and demonstrate an awareness of how authors compose and use literary devices. When reading text appropriate to fourth grade, they should be able to judge text critically and, in general, to give thorough answers that indicate careful thought.
this above is where we rank 10-15th in the world.
Virginia SOQs say that 70-80% of our kids are “proficient” but by the NAEP World Standards above – only 30% of our kids are.
Kids who meet these standards in other countries do so across the board. They don’t need “magnet” or “Charter” schools because their basic school curriculum is keyed to meeting these standards.
We are fooling ourselves if we want to blame the test or think that Charter schools will fix this problem.
I have no problem with the Charter schools as perhaps finding a better path for us but those schools need to be 100% open to all kids and they need to demographically represent the community they serve and they need to meet the NAEP standards for proficiency IMHO.
the most important thing that we have not done so far – is to agree on a standard curricula and a standard assessment approach.
what’s I’ve heard is that teaching to the test is not good and Charter schools are good … but no agreement on what good means since we don’t see to like measuring achievement.
we need to agree: 1. – on the need to measure 2. – a way to measure
advocacy to bring more Charter schools online without a resolution to 1. and 2. above is not a solution.