Category Archives: Public Charter Schools

A quick hit this afternoon. The Cato Institute’s Adam Schaeffer today has released the summary of a new data analysis by RAND Corporation economist Richard Buddin, seeking to explain what he calls “The Charter School Paradox”: On average, charter schools may marginally improve the public education system, but in the process they are wreaking havoc on private education. Charter schools take a significant portion of their students from private schools, causing a drop in private enrollment, driving some schools entirely out of business, and thereby raising public costs while potentially diminishing competition and diversity in our education system overall. I’m still wrapping my little mind around the information presented and what he has to say, but let’s clear up one thing right away: being anti-charter is not the answer. But Cato has made a case to be considered, namely that learning will better thrive, and be more cost-effective, with both a healthy private education sector and adequate choices within the public system.

Update, 8/22: Intercepts blogger Mike Antonucci makes some incisive observations about the need for better-informed voters while asserting that the PDK/Gallup results are not that significant, noting he “wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot poll.” It’s late August and back-to-school season, which means it’s once again time for the new Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) / Gallup “poll of the public’s attitude toward public schools.” Right up front, let it be known that this won’t be as “Pretty Darn Klever” as my commentary on last year’s results, but a few things of interest need to be pointed out from the results. The headline and the first question featured is “What do you think are the biggest problems that the public schools of your community must deal with?” Far and away the #1 answer at 35 percent was “lack of financial support.” Coming in a distant fourth was “overcrowded schools” at 5 percent. More interesting is what’s missing on the school finance topic from the poll of 1,000 American adults. Just a few weeks ago the Fordham Institute released its own national survey (with a nearly identical sample size). The question of what approach local school districts should take to meet existing […]

Edublogger extraordinaire Joanne Jacobs brought my attention to Opportunity Culture, a new website project of the group Public Impact. The idea? How to extend the reach of excellent teachers with innovative uses of time, space, technology and professional roles. Opportunity Culture has a smart group of people advising the project, and of course Public Impact itself is co-directed by the Hassel team, who recently wrote a relatively concise Education Next piece on how the reach of excellent teachers can be enhanced.

The latest edition of the Olympic Games is almost here (who else do you know who gets to live through two different Summer Olympics at age 5?), so what better time to hand out some figurative medals to states for K-12 student learning success? A new Harvard study by Eric Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann sheds some helpful light on trends in Achievement Growth among nations and states. The authors examine gold-standard test results of 4th and 8th graders to see where the United States’ progress from 1995 to 2009 ranks among 49 nations and how 41 individual U.S. states with enough data stack up against each other from 1992 to 2011. The good news? American students cumulatively picked up nearly a year’s worth of additional skills learned in math, science and reading, with stronger gains at the earlier grade level. The not-so-good news is we’re stuck in the middle of the pack: Students in three countries–Latvia, Chile, and Brazil–improved at an annual rate of 4 percent of a std. dev., and students in another eight countries–Portugal, Hong Kong, Germany, Poland, Liechtenstein, Slovenia, Colombia, and Lithuania–were making gains at twice the rate of students in the United States. By […]

Friday means I’m taking it easy, and leaving the work up to Choice Media TV‘s Bob Bowdon, who interviewed Jeff Kwitowski of K12, Inc., to talk about online education in this 8-minute video:

A quick Friday freebie to wrap your mind around, compliments of Education Week‘s Sean Cavanagh: An estimated 610,000 students are on waiting lists to attend charter schools—a jump of about 200,000 from just two years ago, a national organization says. The National Alliance of Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) — with its brand new executive director Nina Rees — notes that there are as many students nationwide on charter school waiting lists as attend charters in the two most heavily enrolled states, or enough to “fill seven and a half Olympic Stadiums during this summer’s Olympics in London.”

Once in awhile you read something that makes you really step back and think. In that spirit I commend to you the new Friedman Foundation report The Greenfield School Revolution and School Choice by Greg Forster and James Woodworth. Want to know what I mean? Start off with a statement like this potent summary: Existing choice programs transfer students from marginally less effective public schools to marginally more effective private schools, but they do not seem to drive more ambitious school reforms. Forster and Woodworth dive into the data, unpacking the private-sector share of students and schools in places where school choice has had the biggest reach, such as Milwaukee, Florida, Arizona, Ohio, and Washington, D.C. Generally speaking, while doors are opening to break down some segregation, the private sector is shrinking and still catering to provide niche educational opportunities. Far and away, the greatest amount of true innovation is coming from charter schools, which includes blended learning superstars like Carpe Diem and Rocketship.

Marcus Winters — whom I will long remember as the author of Teachers Matter and featured presenter at the Independence Institute’s first-ever Brown Bag Lunch — has written a great new piece for City Journal. Appropriately titled “Better Schools, Fewer Dollars,” Winters’ column addresses the issue of tight budgets and educational productivity. A few weeks ago I highlighted a new 2-minute Education Policy Center video on rethinking Colorado school finance that sounded similar themes. Winters brings forward data, some more familiar than others, to show how spending per K-12 student skyrocketed in the past generation with very little or no improvements to show for it. The Manhattan Institute senior fellow further undermines the logic of adequacy studies used to inform court decisions like Colorado’s Lobato case. And this is what a Denver judge hangs her cut-and-paste ruling for the state to spend billions more in scarce resources? Anyway, Winters also reviews the research on cost-saving charters and voucher programs, which show some benefits for students and at the very worst could be interpreted as not doing any harm. Nothing new or surprising there for faithful readers or others who have paid attention to the education reform debate. But his concluding […]

It’s not every day when my parents turn on the radio and get to hear education policy top the national news headlines. But yesterday Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave a big speech to explain why improving education was “the civil rights issue of our era, and it’s the greatest challenge of our time.” Hardly a coincidence, I’m sure, but the Romney campaign also just released “A Chance for Every Child.” The document outlines his education policy plans, including:

I’ve been telling you a lot lately about education goings-on in Colorado, and with good reason. There has been plenty to comment on. Yet once in awhile it’s good to step back and take a look at some other states. Today, specifically, I wanted to share with you a few thoughts about new developments from a couple A states. And when I say A states, it’s not that they necessarily deserve a passing grade. First is last week’s awful news from Alabama. The local Decatur Daily reported: Proponents of charter schools will likely have to wait at least another year as an Alabama House panel Thursday effectively killed a measure that would have allowed for the creation of the taxpayer-funded, privately-operated schools.