The New York Times today has a big piece about New York City hedge fund guys and their involvement in charter schools….and, er….wait a minute…..in the Sunday Styles section??!? Sample quote:
Hedge fund managers may be better known for eight-figure incomes with which they scoop up the choicest Manhattan penthouses and Greenwich, Conn., waterfront estates. But they also dominate the boards of many of the city’s charters schools and support organizations.
“If you’re at a hedge fund, this is definitely the hot cause,” DFER’s Joe Williams tells the Times. “These are the kind of guys who a decade ago would have been spending their time angling to get on the junior board of the Met, the ballet.”
It says something that this piece is in the part of paper famously dubbed the “Ladies’ Sports Section,” right next to the wedding announcements and mint julep recipes. I’m not sure what, exactly, but it says something.
A suggestion by Claus Von Zastrow of Public School Insights that pundits like Jonathan Alter who write about education be subject to performance pay attracted the notice of Alter, who has been mixing it up with commenters to the post. It started when Von Zastrow took issue with Alter’s KIPP cheerleading and broad brush take on reform.
What do we make of Alter’s suggestion that only charter schools and merit pay are “real reform?” Well what about better staff development? Better curriculum? Stronger ties between schools and communities? Much, much better assessments? Are those phony reforms? All in all, Alter gets an unsatisfactory rating, so no performance bonus this year. In fact, his failure to improve since last summer puts him at risk of termination.
That was apparently too much for the Newsweek pundit, who showed up on the blog’s comments to defend himself and do a little advocacy work. ”With the president’s support, the pool of reformers is growing,” Alter wrote. “Come on in, guys. The water’s warm.”
Alter gets points for showing up and opening himself up for further abuse. The highlight of the thread so far: One anonymous wit who wickedly applies Alter’s take on merit pay to his own columns:
I’m glad you’ve accepted Claus’ merit pay proposal. The formula is clear. Since your job is to inform the public, we’re going to measure your readers’ knowledge. Then, a year from now, we’re going to measure it again. If they’re smarter, you’ll get a substantial bonus. If not, we’ll put you on a 90-day plan of review, support, and, if your readers don’t get smarter, we’ll have to regretfully let you go. Sorry, but it’s all about the readers, not the writers.
The Carl C. Icahn Charter School, a Core Knowledge School in the South Bronx, had 99 percent of its third- through eighth-graders score at or above grade level this year’s state math exams, while 94 percent of kids pass the state’s reading test. The New York Post notes that three more Icahn schools have opened and three more are planned. The only other Icahn school whose kids have taken the state tests saw 100 percent of its third-graders meeting or surpassing the benchmarks.
However, if New York State doesn’t lift its cap on charter schools, currently set at 2o0, plans for more Icahn schools will come to a halt. “This is part of the answer to a better education for children, so why limit it only to a 200 cap in a large state like this?” said Principal Daniel Garcia.
“It’s a joy for me to hear kids in second grade talking about why the South seceded from the North and about abolitionists,” Garcia tells the paper. “It’s no wonder by the time they get to the eighth grade, they’re superstars.”
Veteran eduscribe Richard Whitmire argues in a Wash Post op-ed that DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has “no choice but to play hardball” with teachers, unions and politicians.
Running a hurry-up education offense is the only way Rhee can maintain a viable-sized school district that has dwindled to a mere 44,000 students, while the city’s charter school population is expected to grow to 28,000 this year….In the District, charters continue to attract more new students than Rhee’s schools. If Rhee can’t stanch or reverse that trend, her district slumps into irrelevancy, a fact of life that her union opponents seem incapable of grasping. If Rhee falters, the layoffs will continue.
I get the math, but not the logic. If DC schools face an “existential threat” from charters (which Rhee supports), doesn’t it make more sense to make allies, not enemies of teachers unions? The pitch is simple: work with me or we’re both out of jobs.
Is it possible to get a good education in a school with bad test scores? Or are parents merely incapable of seeing a bad school for what it really is? “Many parents of children in academically struggling schools still believe their child is getting a fine education,” notes the Atlanta Journal and Constitution’s education columnist Maureen Downey. ”They are either unfazed by the lackluster test scores or unaware of them.”
What they notice — and what they value — is that their 10-year-old son’s artwork hangs in the school hallway or their 15-year-old daughter marches on the field with the band on Friday nights. Parents talk about how hard the teachers work, regardless of how the school’s test scores rank with other schools across the state. They feel their children are accepted and encouraged.
Downey, who has been cranking out thoughtful and provocative ed pieces for the AJC for much of the past year, cites data from the National Education Longitudinal Study, which noted “a disconnect between actual student performance and parental satisfaction…especially among parents of low-achieving students and students attending schools in high-poverty neighborhoods.”
“The state may say our school is failing, but it’s not failing my child,” one parent tells Downey, who also notes that “as states encourage the creation of still more charter schools, parental satisfaction will become more important.”
The NY Times plays up Secretary Duncan’s coming warning to charter school operators that “low-quality institutions are giving their movement a black eye.” Writes the Times’ Sam Dillon:
The charter movement is putting itself at risk by allowing too many second-rate and third-rate schools to exist,” Mr. Duncan says in prepared remarks that he is scheduled to deliver in Washington at the annual gathering of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. In an interview, Mr. Duncan said he would use the address to praise innovations made by high-quality charter schools, urge charter leaders to become more active in weeding out bad apples in their movement and invite the leaders to help out in the administration’s broad effort to remake several thousand of the nation’s worst public schools.
The Times makes much of last week’s Stanford study indicating that nearly half of all charter schools nationwide “have results that are no different from the local public school options, and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their students would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.”
It will be interesting to see how charter advocates react to Duncan’s call. At worst, it seems like a reminder of the accountability principles undergirding the movement. Indeed, if the movement practices what it preaches, closing bad charter schools should be considered a victory– for the charter movement.
Much sturm und drang over this week’s Stanford University study, which indicates charter schools nationwide are not performing as well as traditional public-schools. Among the bright spots, however, were charters in Colorado, which the study says ”demonstrated significantly higher learning gains for charter school students than would have occurred in traditional schools.”
What’s in Colorado’s special sauce?
The Colorado Charter School Blog considers several factors including this one: “Compared nationally, Colorado is atypical by having almost half of its charter schools using the Core Knowledge curriculum. Most states have more ‘home grown’ or experiential charter schools.”
Jay Greene invokes Neville Chamberlain in a WSJ op-ed this morning, calling out school choice proponents who in his view, have tried to appease teachers unions by supporting charter schools but not vouchers. “On education policy, appeasement is about as ineffective as it is in foreign affairs,” Jay writes. “They hope that by sacrificing vouchers, the unions will spare charter schools from political destruction.”
But these reformers are starting to learn that appeasement on vouchers only whets unions appetites for eliminating all meaningful types of choice. With voucher programs facing termination in Washington, D.C., and heavy regulation in Milwaukee, the teachers unions have now set their sights on charter schools. Despite their proclamations about supporting charters, the actions of unions and their allies in state and national politics belie their rhetoric.
“Vouchers made the world safe for charters by drawing union fire,” Greene concludes. “But now that the unions have the voucher threat under control, charters are in trouble.”
President Obama goes to the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Washington today to outline how his administration plans to improve education from “cradle to career,” Reuters reports quoting officials familiar with the President’s planned speech.
They said he would challenge U.S. states to adopt more rigorous standards of education, especially in reading and math. He would also explain how he plans to reward good teachers, redesign federal aid programs for students, and turn around underperforming schools. Obama will note the large gap between the best and worst performing states with respect to reading and math, the administration officials said in a briefing.
The Wall Street Journal reports Obama’s merit pay proposal “would significantly expand a federal program that increases pay for high-performing teachers to an additional 150 school districts.” The President will also call for more charter schools and challenge states to lift limits on the number in operation, the paper says.
Hi boys and girls! Today on Sesame Street, we’re learning about liquor stores, landfills, sex shops and charter schools! Sing with Cookie Monster! One of these things is not like the other things…
