Archive | December, 2011

When charter schools reflect a spiritual culture

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On December 29, 2011 in Charter Schools, General, Religious education, School Choice

There are 31 charter schools in Hawaii today, a majority of which are focused on regenerating the indigenous Hawaiian culture. Three years ago, I visited the Kanu o ka ‘Āina New Century Public Charter School. According to the Kanu website:

Our name kanu o ka ‘āina literally means “plants of the land” and figuratively refers to “natives of the land from generations back.” This name reflects the commitment of our school, our staff, our students and their families to perpetuate Hawaii’s native language, culture and traditions, as mandated by Article X of Hawaii’s State Constitution.

Everything about Kanu reflected a total immersion into native Hawaiian culture. All instruction was done in the native language, and native customs were practiced throughout the school.

When we arrived on campus at 10 a.m. one morning, everyone stopped working — teachers, students, janitors, even the guy cutting the grass — and welcomed us in a traditional Hawaiian ceremony that was very spiritual. Religion is so interwoven into the native Hawaiian language and culture that it’s impossible to practice the culture and speak the language without also practicing religion. When I asked the principal the propriety of promoting religion in a publicly funded school she just shrugged and said, “This is our culture. This is who we are. If we don’t teach our children their native culture that culture will die and much of who we are will die with it.”

I then asked if these children would be competitively disadvantaged when they graduated because they were taught all subjects in the native language. I wondered if their English proficiency would suffer. The principal said the children were only at her charter school six hours a day, 180 days per year and were immersed in the majority culture at all other times. She assured me her graduates were doing fine in college.

The use of charter schools by indigenous communities to reinvigorate their traditional language and culture is occurring across the United States. Two years ago, I visited two Indian Pueblos in New Mexico that were also using charter schools to teach tribal children their indigenous language and culture, and in both cases spirituality permeated those schools.

While Hebrew language charter schools and Catholic schools that convert to charter face scrutiny from critics who assert they violate the federal establishment clause and/or state Blaine amendments, spiritually oriented charter schools operated by native communities have mostly avoided criticism. Perhaps they enjoy a special political status because the issue of cultural genocide is in play. Nonetheless, if they keep expanding more scrutiny is inevitable. Fortunately, under the US Supreme Court’s 2002 Zelman v. Simmons-Harris decision, which said parents may use public funds to pay tuition and fees at a faith-based school provided their choice is “genuine and independent,” these spiritually-oriented charter schools appear to be constitutional.

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A modest, yet radical proposal

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On December 21, 2011 in Funding, General, Teacher quality, Testing and Accountability

Now that MacArthur “genius” Roland G. Fryer’s new paper on school inputs and effectiveness is beginning to get attention, it seems appropriate to look back at the most pioneering of studies on inputs and student achievement, the Coleman Report of 1966.

Sociologist James S. Coleman (1926-1995) released “Equality of Educational Opportunity” after conducting one of the largest studies of its kind in American history and one which ultimately found that how well we enhance school inputs — money, teacher credentials, library materials — has little correlation to how well students perform. Fryer and co-author Will Dobbie, both of Harvard University, similarly looked at the input measures at 35 charter schools and found that the most traditional measures — class size, per-pupil spending, certified or uncertified teachers — are not correlated with school effectiveness. Instead, Fryer and Dobbie show that frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time and high expectations “explains approximately 50 percent of the variation in school effectiveness.”

Modern-day reform critics and even historians tend to lose sight of the suggestions Coleman himself proposed in journal after journal in the years following his landmark report. In particular, Coleman took to The Public Interest in 1966 to suggest what he called “a modest, yet radical proposal” to achieve equality of educational opportunity.

Specifically, he wrote:

a) For those children whose family and neighborhood are educationally disadvantaged, it is important to replace this family environment as much as possible with an educational environment — by starting school at an earlier age, and by having a school which begins very early in the day and ends very late.

b) It is important to reduce the social and racial homogeneity of the school environment, so that those agents of education that do show some effectiveness — teachers and other students — are not mere replicas of the student himself. In the present organization of schools, it is the neighborhood school that most insures such homogeneity.

c) The educational program of the school should be made more effective than it is at present. The weakness of this program is apparent in its inability to overcome initial differences. It is hard to believe that we are so inept in educating our young that we can do no more than leave young adults in the same relative competitive positions we found them in as children.

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Forming school communities on the basis of choice

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On December 20, 2011 in General, Parent empowerment, School Choice, Teacher empowerment

Boston University professor Charles Glenn, one of redefinED’s newest contributors and an expert on comparative school choice policy, has taken to the journal First Things to further explore what he has long called the myth of the common schoool. From 1970 to 1991, Glenn served as director of urban education and equity efforts for the Massachusetts Department of Education, where he oversaw the administration of state funds for magnet schools and desegregation:

What has developed in recent decades is a substantial emptying out of the content of democratic localism in education, without a corresponding increase in real control from society as a whole. Professional educational administrators and the teachers’ unions have, between them, come to shape educational practice in countless ways that are beyond the reach of the democratic process, whether at the local, state, or national level. Seldom are real issues of how, much less why, to educate put before parents and other citizens.

Most parents have little appetite to debate these questions, but they are eager to choose among schools with distinctive missions when the alternatives are explained clearly. I saw that in Massachusetts in the 1980s when I had responsibility for promoting educational equity and worked with a dozen cities to create choice-based desegregation plans based on clear differentiation of schools. Parents were much more interested in choice than in “voice.” This in turn made it possible for the teachers in each school to work together to fashion a distinctive approach or mission that would be attractive to parents.

American education now is undergoing a reinvention of localism, in the form of charter schools and other innovations that place significant decisions back in the hands of those engaged with shaping and maintaining an individual school: teachers and other school staff (and students as appropriate) in dialogue with parents and community institutions and supporters, as in the nineteenth century. Since the barriers of distance have been greatly reduced, such school communities can be formed on the basis of choice rather than of geography.

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Too many liberals are on the wrong side of the school choice debate

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On December 19, 2011 in Charter Schools, Education and Public Policy, General, Religious education, School Choice

We liberals see our public schools as the centerpiece of America’s “melting pot” society. Religiously divisive societies like Northern Ireland and Lebanon worry us. Teachers unions are generally applauded as providing needed job protection for committed professionals who are helping to shape the lives of our children. These beliefs combine to cause all too many liberals automatically to oppose school choice plans that would enable more low-income families to choose religious or other private schools for their children. That’s too bad, and it need not be that way.

Liberals certainly think that our society should pay special attention to the needs of low-income families, often non-white families. And it is clear to everyone that all too many of the children from these families are now poorly served by conventional public schools. To remedy this problem, liberals typically put their faith in the internal reform of public education. In the meantime, however, liberals with means seem content for other people’s children to remain stuck in public schools that they would never tolerate for their own children.

Lots of low-income families also are committed to public education, and if their local schools are bad, their focus is on making them better. But other low-income families would like to choose something else for their children. Surely liberals are predisposed to respect the judgments of all families, rich or poor, as to what they believe is in the best interest of their children.

Encouragingly, in large parts of America, school choice has now become a central feature of public education. Charter schools, magnet schools, inter-district transfer programs, and the like all enroll children on the basis of family choice. A number of school districts have even converted their entire enrollment system into a family choice plan that no longer bases assignment on the location of the family’s residence. Well-to-do families have traditionally been able to “choose” their children’s public schools by deciding where to live — especially in upper-income suburban enclaves which offer good public education to which low-income families are realistically denied access. The newer sorts of public school choice arrangements provide wider opportunities to low-income families, and liberals like President Obama support them.

Charter schools may threaten teachers unions, and they are often managed by entrepreneurs, sometimes even profit-making organizations. But they are still public schools — open to all (by lottery, if applications exceed seats available), free of charge, and free from religion.

This is exactly the problem, however, for low-income families who want faith-based schools for their children. School choice programs, such as Milwaukee’s voucher program and Florida’s tax credit scholarship program, target these families. Through them, tens of thousands of families now can opt for something they could not otherwise afford. Most other wealthy nations also subsidize that sort of choice. Yet, American liberals are the most outspoken opponents of such plans.

This stance is inconsistent with fundamental liberal beliefs. Liberals are all for “choice” when it comes to abortion and want the government to pay for abortions sought by poor women. Why can’t more liberals see the desirability of fully extending choice to low-income families when it comes to education?

Some liberals persist in arguing that “common” public schools are necessary because they are society’s way of transmitting democracy and tolerance to everyone. This is a romanticized picture of what actually happens in public schools. Moreover, America’s private schools don’t teach intolerance. To the contrary, research shows that their students become as or more tolerant than their public school-going counterparts. Indeed, it is the closing off of private schools to those who cannot afford them that interferes with parents’ fundamental exercise of their free-speech rights when they are unable to select the educational values their children are taught.

Contrast America’s system of higher education. The federal government provides “Pell Grants” to low-income students regardless of whether they attend public or private colleges. The great private universities all provide additional tuition assistance to low-income applicants and many of the best admit on a needs-blind basis. It is left to students and their parents to decide whether or not they wish to attend a faith-affiliated college.

Liberals who personally care about religion and who send their children to religious schools often seem indifferent to the religious beliefs of parents who are too poor to make the same choice for their children. Giving vouchers or tax credit-funded scholarships to children from low-income families should be a “free exercise” issue with civil liberties organizations. Instead, these programs are miscast as an “establishment” of religion. But the right kind of school choice plan no more breaches the “wall of separation” between church and state than does the current income tax deductibility of contributions to religious organizations.

Of course, school choice by itself is not a “silver bullet” that will magically cure all our educational woes. But school choice plans can help low-income families obtain something they want for their children that even the most liberal charter school plan cannot provide — religious education. My wife and I are not religious and we never sent (or wanted to send) our daughter to a religious school. But we could have afforded it if it had been our family preference. I consider myself a liberal, and I find it anything but liberal to automatically oppose choice plans that could empower low-income families to select for their children from among the options I had for mine.

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On for-profit education, what motivates a reporter

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On December 16, 2011 in Charter Schools, General, Online learning, Technology and Innovation

If it feels to the education reformer that The New York Times and The Miami Herald have made grand attempts to gore the growing presence of for-profit education providers, it’s because they have. But there are many false assumptions that lead the critic to suppose these are the transgressions of the “liberal media.” If choice advocates and education entrepreneurs want to overcome this adversity, it’s important to know what factors lead to headlines like “Cashing In On Kids.”

It first helps to survey a typical newsroom, and I don’t mean a survey of the political inclinations of its inhabitants. In many ways, the liberal-conservative chasm is irrelevant to what sparks investigations like we saw of K12 Inc. in the Times. Consider the newsrooms that shaped Times reporter Stephanie Saul — The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and Long Island’s Newsday. The traditional “beat” structure of these newsrooms and their “City Desks” has remained largely unchanged for decades, and it is centered around the coverage of public institutions — public schools, city councils, police departments and statehouses.

Now Saul is no “beat” reporter, but most daily and metropolitan newspapers employ an education reporter, and that means those reporters invariably cover their local school boards, whether they’re in New York City or New Baltimore, Mich. These reporters generally spend many days of the week in school district offices, talking with superintendents and scanning the e-mail correspondence of school board members. If they’re doing their job right, these reporters are applying a healthy dose of skepticism to every message they hear or read from these sources. But that is beside the point. They are immersed in issues and developments that are in the public interest and they are writing from public institutions.

In this world, for-profit education providers are nothing less than an insurgence into what is traditionally considered “public.” Their operations are, naturally, opaque, whereas newspapers demand sunshine — if not for their stories then for the public for whom they claim to write. This conflict informs a bias that is nearly absolute among reporters: A profit-making school or university is concerned primarily with making a profit; the education of its children is secondary.

I suffered from this bias myself when I was a reporter covering education for nearly 10 years at newspapers in Michigan and Florida. I was hardwired, just like all my colleagues, to examine any public policy or proposal that had the ultimate effect, however insignificant, of putting profits in someone’s hands. So, of course, the burgeoning sector of for-profit higher education opened several avenues for inquiry: Who was attending these schools, and how were these colleges recruiting these students? How much of the college’s revenues came from publicly backed student loans, and what was the institution’s loan default rate? And, perhaps the juiciest question: What were these companies paying in campaign contributions to elected officials?

I chased stories of students who filed lawsuits against these schools because they couldn’t transfer the credits they earned to more traditional institutions. I covered attorney general investigations that found heavyhanded recruitment of underqualified students and that these colleges overpromised the return on the students’ investment. This is the prism through which I viewed for-profit education and its unprecedented growth. And I was not alone.

This does not condone the worst of Saul’s reporting of K12. The Times story suffered from a striking lack of balance, and there was little that took the reader to the ideal path toward greater accountability and higher standards in online learning. But it does show that as for-profit companies increase the size of their footprint by investing in charter school management and online education, the scrutiny they face will be heightened for the ages of the children they serve and for the sweep they bring into primary and secondary education.

I have since left newspapering to help develop the policy and communications initiatives for a Florida program that administers a publicly funded private school option to 38,000 low-income children, and I have learned to exercise more nuance and sophistication in our expanded universe of public education. It is unfair to assume that children are being treated with malice by schools that keep one eye on the bottom line, especially when these schools must follow the regulations required of all private providers in any given state. But it is difficult to imagine that the culture in any newsroom will soon be superseded by one that considers how for-profit schools could help us find greater educational innovations with efficiency. So in the meantime, our education entrepreneurs would do well to understand what motivates an enterprising reporter. It may not be the partisan motivations we assume.

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Michigan charter bill passes; cross-district enrollment effort stalls

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On December 15, 2011 in Charter Schools, Education and Public Policy, General, School Choice

Earlier today, the Michigan Senate approved a measure that ultimately removes the limits on the number and location of charter schools in the state, ending a battle fought almost entirely along party lines. The House approved the legislation yesterday, and Gov. Rick Snyder is expected to sign it into law.

The charter bill is one among several education reform initiatives embraced by Snyder that also would mandate the state’s cross-district enrollment policy in every school system and would extend dual enrollment in colleges and universities to students in private high schools.  Of those three efforts to enhance school choice, the charter initiative has enjoyed the greatest momentum. The cross-district enrollment measure, which would require any public school to open its doors to students from other districts as long as it has seats, has stalled in committee.

Over at Jay Greene’s blog, Matt Ladner applauds the Legislature’s action to expand charter schools, but admiringly hopes for the day “when complacent check-book choice districts might reconsider their decision not to admit students whose parents happen not to be able to afford a $400,000 mortgage.”

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Where should we look to build a new teacher unionism? Look to Minneapolis.

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On December 15, 2011 in Charter Schools, General, Unionism

The teachers union in Minneapolis has a long history of progressive leadership. My friend Louise Sundin was president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) for 22 years and helped us start the Teacher Union Reform Network in the mid-1990s. Under Louise’s leadership, the MFT was an intelligent force for innovation and the MFT’s current president, Lynn Nordgren, is continuing this tradition.

In this recent Minneapolis Star Tribune column, Nordgren foreshadows the future of teacher unionism as she explains why the MFT is embracing charter schools as a vehicle for teacher empowerment.

We believe there can and should be outstanding new schools with autonomy over increasing student achievement, defining curriculum, and managing budget, scheduling, and staffing … This isn’t the first time, of course, that the MFT has led the way in establishing innovative, teacher-run schools. The union tried for years to launch “self-governed” schools, which give teachers a powerful role, in partnership with Minneapolis public schools.

The industrial model of unionism teachers borrowed from the steel and auto workers in the 1960s erroneously assumes that individual teachers must be disempowered in the interest of greater collective power. But the new unionism the MFT is implementing through this charter school initiative sees collective and individual power as mutually enhancing, and not in conflict. The MFT’s collective power will grow — and not diminish –  as it uses its collective power to empower individual teachers.

Teacher-run schools are consistent with a larger cultural trend toward worker-run enterprises. As this recent New York Times column observed, Americans are increasingly becoming involved in co-ops and worker-owned companies: “Some 130 million Americans, for example, now participate in the ownership of co-op businesses and credit unions. More than 13 million Americans have become worker-owners of more than 11,000 employee-owned companies …”

In public education, the movement toward greater teacher and parent empowerment is accelerating, and Nordgren and her MFT colleagues are smart to begin repositioning their union now. The future of teacher unionism is being formed in Minneapolis.

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Proposed repeal of Florida’s Blaine Amendment off state ballot — for now

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On December 14, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Religious education, School Choice

A Florida judge has ruled that language in a proposed repeal of Florida’s Blaine Amendment is ambiguous and misleading, and has ordered the Secretary of State to remove the proposal from the 2012 ballot for now, The Associated Press and St. Petersburg Times are reporting.

But the victory could be short-lived for the Florida Education Association, which challenged the amendment. Although Circuit Judge Terry Lewis found the ballot summary misleading, he’s letting Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi rewrite the summary for another review.

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Private school options empower more than just children

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On December 14, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Religious education, School Choice

At the Dropout Nation, editor RiShawn Biddle visited his archives and resurrected his examination of the school choice movement and his call for black churches to open their own schools. “They must embrace school reform and take the role that Catholic churches have done for so long and for so many,” Biddle writes.

So it seemed appropriate for redefinED to visit its own archives and unearth this post from Doug Tuthill showing how publicly funded private school options have already helped black churches take the step that Biddle urges:

As the Florida coordinator of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), I am frequently asked by Democrats in other states why so many elected Florida Democrats support all forms of school choice, including vouchers and tax credit scholarships, but not tenure and teacher pay reforms.  The answer is black middle-class jobs and the rise of black-owned schools.

During the days of Jim Crow, school districts were the biggest employers of college educated African-Americans and even though other professions have opened up, school districts today remain a leading employer of college-educated African-Americans.   Consequently, education reforms that are perceived as negatively impacting school districts are usually opposed by the black community. This is one reason former chancellor Michelle Rhee’s effort to reduce job protections for Washington, D.C. educators was so fiercely opposed by many district African-Americans, even though they knew black children were benefitting.  Saying that school districts should put the needs of students above the concerns of adults ignores that adults feed, clothe and house students and meeting those needs is difficult without a job.

Every Florida black elected legislator opposed the early school choice programs, but the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students and the McKay Scholarship for exceptional students have caused a change  in attitude.  These programs have enabled black churches and community groups to create financially viable schools, and as these schools have grown so has black political support for school choice. Black ministers are employing black teachers and administrators to work in their growing schools and are seeing the lives of black children turned around. These ministers, in turn, are pressuring black elected officials to support these scholarship programs, and they are responding.

Last spring, a majority of the Black Caucus supported legislation significantly strengthening the Tax Credit Scholarship program, while unanimously opposing legislation that reformed tenure and teacher pay in school districts. A respected minister from Fort Lauderdale, Rev. C.E. Glover of Mount Bethel Baptist Church and Christian Academy, even joined a coalition to challenge both gubernatorial candidates this fall to support the scholarship. “I have led this ministry for a quarter-century now, and I can tell you that nothing is more satisfying or more important than our mission to provide for the academic needs of children in our community,” Glover told reporters. “For those of us who have fought the historic battle against the indignities of racial discrimination in our nation, we understand the importance of providing educational opportunity to new generations.”

The lesson for DFER out of Florida is that school choice programs that enable local black and Hispanic communities to own and manage financially healthy schools are essential to expanding support for education reform within the Democratic Party. Black and Hispanic legislators will support school choice programs, including vouchers, if these programs allow their constituents to own schools and expand middle-class employment. Protests from school boards and teacher unions that minority-owned private schools drain market share from school districts do not resonate with black and Hispanic elected officials when they see minority-owned schools creating jobs and succeeding with children who were previously failing.

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School choice and racial integration

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On December 9, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Religious education, School Choice

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education ended the “separate but equal” racial segregation of the south. In 1962, Milton Friedman’s book, Capitalism and Freedom, for the first time advocated school vouchers.

Although the two events were separated by only eight years, hardly anyone at the time saw them for what they were — two very different visions of achieving quality education for all, one through compulsion and coercion, and the other through freedom of choice, including the liberty to choose religious schools. In 1954, the conventional wisdom of the news media was that the Brown decision would, in time, mean equal education for our minorities. And in 1962, hardly anyone other than the visionary Friedman himself could foresee when many people throughout the U.S. would come to believe in school choice as a fundamental human right. Few people in those days would have bet on Friedman’s vision emerging triumphant.

But consider where we are 57 years after Brown:

  • The nationwide high school dropout rate among blacks in now conservatively 40 percent.
  • One-third of our black men without high school diplomas are in prison.
  • Sixty-seven percent of African-American families are headed by single parents and 72 percent of African-American births are out of wedlock.

At a time when the public schools are widely perceived in areas as being overly segregated, and the black middle class has experienced a unique growth through those that are single and living alone rather than through families, the notion that our public schools are capable of achieving racial equality in education now seems almost quaint. By contrast, our schools of choice, whether private or charter, have greater opportunities for better integration and offer a superb education to minorities. Further, the racial integration in those schools exists on a far deeper level than a simple counting of whites versus minorities would suggest.

In 1998, researcher Jay P. Greene authored the study, “Integration Where it Counts.” In it, he and his associates secretly observed whether students of various races in public and private schools sat next to each other in their lunch rooms. He found that in private schools, students of varying races were far more likely to sit next to each other than in public schools.

Further, private religious schools outperformed private non-religious schools. Greene hypothesized that the mission of the religious schools — of teaching that we are all children of God — played a role. To take this thought to the next higher plane, it is the difference between teaching that racial equality is endorsed by the local school board versus loving thy neighbor as thyself being God’s will.

The American Center for School Choice, of course, has taken on a special guardianship of private religious schools, and the results of Greene’s study, now more than a decade old, will come as no surprise to our members. Freedom of religion — including the right to choose a religious school — is a fundamental human right, even without any need to demonstrate tangible benefits. But it is certainly gratifying when religious freedom and tolerance can be shown to produce worldly benefits to our children and our communities.

The notion that the public school establishment, operating through compulsion and coercion when assigning most students to school, can bring about racial equality in education has now been decisively thrown on the scrap heap of history, and, in fact, no one is now advocating any credible way out of the damage that has been caused to minorities other than through school choice.

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