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Archive for the ‘School choice’ Category

Kansas City: Like a run on the banks?

Friday, March 12th, 2010

In It’s a Wonderful Life, the iconic Christmas movie, there is a scene that takes place in the Building and Loan Bank. It’s the bank run scene. Customers have heard that the bank may go under so they rush to take out their money. The catch is that there isn’t enough money to pay everyone, so only those first in line will be able to get all of their deposits. George, played by Jimmy Stewart, pleads with the customers to take only what they need. He explains how the customers are all in this together, that one person’s savings is used as a loan for another person to start a small business. In other words, don’t just think of yourselves, think of the whole community. It’s a classic individual versus collective needs dilemma.

I thought of this scene as I listened to a radio report about the drastic cuts that have taken place in the Kansas City, Mo. schools. In the 1960s, the school district had over 70,000 students. Today, it has less than 17,000. The superintendent has proposed closing over half of the existing schools and consolidating others. The drop in student population over the years is due to a well-intentioned, court-ordered busing policy enacted in the 1980s. Middle-income families, who could afford it, sent their children to suburban or private schools. Those left now deal with the remnants of this massive exodus.

I want to be careful not to only blame the families who fled the district for the situation that the district now faces. Certainly there is enough blame to go around. But the families who left, who were privileged enough to afford to remove their students, also might have had the political capital to force serious reform in the district to keep the school system healthy. I do not fault parents for tending to what they perceived as a serious situation for their children. But, by abandoning the school district for the suburbs, I believe they also abandoned their community.

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From the editor: Parents propose marriage

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Let’s say a group of parents at a neighborhood school banded together and proposed to a high-performing charter school that the two schools combine efforts to create a PreK-12 school that would help send all kids from the struggling neighborhood to college.

What’s not to like, right? Parental involvement at its best. Community engagement. A tacit recognition that ideological food fights over charter versus traditional public schools are meaningless; all that matters is how to serve kids well.

Who might object, and on what grounds?

Stay tuned for some possible answers.

Last Friday, Denver’s Cole Arts and Science Academy (CASA) parents, along with Principal Julie Murgel, held a news conference to announce they had asked the Denver School of Science and Technology to open its third campus at Cole in the fall of 20l1. See video). The idea, hatched by a group of parents, had been presented to DSST leadership some weeks earlier, and DSST had responded with interest.

Every member of DSST’s first two graduating classes has been accepted into a four-year college. Forty-five percent of the school’s students qualify for federally subsidized lunches. Measured by the Denver Public Schools School Performance Framework, DSST is the top-rated high school in Denver, by a wide margin.

Much remains to be negotiated. CASA is currently PreK-8th grade, and DSST offers grades 6-12. Presumably, DSST would take over the middle grades, but that isn’t set in stone.

Attendance boundaries would be another delicate negotiating point. How might a new, high-performing high school in the area affect Manual High School? Manual is still rebuilding, under strong leadership, after being closed down for a year in the wake of an ill-fated dalliance with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

One of DSST’s cornerstones is a socio-economically mixed student body. How would the school achieve integration in a neighborhood that, while gentrifying, remains predominantly low-income? That will be an issue requiring careful, sensitive handling.

These are real challenges, but they are surmountable with open, inclusive planning, transparency and good intent. In this regard, the potential partnership is off to a good start.

But signs have already appeared that, on the Denver school board at least, there will be opposition to this plan. Probably not enough to sink it, but enough to cause some anxious moments.

I asked board member Andrea Merida, who regards charter schools with a skeptical eye, for her initial reaction to the idea. It wasn’t warm and fuzzy.

“We need to step back and take a look at the range of needs for the entire near-northeast sector before we can jump into such an arrangement,” she said in an e-mail. She then listed some specific concerns:

  • It is unclear, she said, how or whether the new school would address the needs of English language learners and special education students in the area. “I want to make sure we avoid any kind of a situation that might tend to benefit more affluent kids or segregate kids that need ELL or special education support.”
  • Parents may not have reached out to “non-English dominant families” and didn’t appear to have plans to do so, Merida said. However, one of the speakers at the Friday press conference spoke only Spanish, and another, a parent named Miguel Oaxaca, clearly wasn’t a native English speaker. So someone has done some outreach into that group of parents.
  • The principal sent information about this “unauthorized initiative” home in Thursday folders, thereby using “district resources…without having first cleared it with her instructional supervisor.” Sounds like a bureaucratic objection to me – not substantive.

Merida concluded by saying that she looked forward to receiving the proposal. “I hope that it will have recommendations for addressing these issues.”

From what I’m hearing, there’s also some skepticism among dissenters on the board that this idea came from parents. It must have been driven by DSST, or Superintendent Tom Boasberg, this line of thinking goes.

DSST CEO Bill Kurtz told me last week that near-northeast Denver “wasn’t even on our radar screen” until Cole parents approached DSST leaders. (The charter network is in the early stages of an ambitious expansion plan. Four new DSST campuses will open in Denver in the next four years, the first of those this fall in Green Valley Ranch.)

And Boasberg spokesman Mike Vaughn had this to say about the origin of the idea:

“The leadership and parent teams at Cole and DSST have proposed a partnership.  We look forward to discussing the proposal with the entire community and with the Board of Education as part of our process for identifying locations for new schools.”

Board members might want to be careful about opposing this idea. If the new partners answer the pending questions, as I’m confident they will, it is hard to see how this isn’t good for kids in northeast Denver.

At that point, you’d have to wonder whose interests those in opposition would be promoting.

Popularity: 56% [?]

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An intriguing courtship

Friday, March 5th, 2010


Parents at the Cole Arts and Sciences Academy, a neighborhood school in northeast Denver, have dropped to a collective knee and proposed marriage to the high-performing Denver School of Science and Technology. Parents Friday formally asked DSST to open its third campus, grades 6-12, in the imposing Cole building in the fall of 2011. This would allow students in the under-served neighborhood to enroll in pre-kindergarten and stay in the same school through high school.

Although others — most recently Montbello High School — have discussed the idea of an in-school feeder pattern, this may be the first time in Denver that such a marriage has been formally put forward. And marrying a chatter school to a neighborhood public school would be the best kind of mixed marriage.

Parents and school officials say that this move is an organic one, growing out of parental desire to see better options for their children. Bill Kurtz, the CEO of DSST public schools, told me that “near northeast Denver wasn’t on our radar” until Cole parents approached him recently.

If this is, as it appears, an authentic parent initiative, it will be interesting to see how the anti-charter forces on the Denver school board will frame their opposition. Or might they decide that this represents the community involvement they’ve been advocating for, and vote in favor of this plan?

Something tells me there will be opposition on the board — but not enough to stop this intriguing partnership.

Popularity: 39% [?]

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Andrea Merida articulates her position

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

I don’t agree with Denver school board member Andrea Merida on West Denver Prep. But I’m glad she has articulated her position for the world to see. I hope someone from WDP will respond here to Andrea’s assertions about the school, so that we can have a productive debate.

My question to Andrea: If we see WDP kids move successfully through high school and into college in significant numbers, will you think differently of the school? From what I’ve observed, WDP does not produce test-taking automatons who cannot think critically. It produces confident students, ready for the challenges of rigorous high school programs.

Educating the whole child is great, but if you lack essential skills, shouldn’t those be addressed with urgency?

Popularity: 28% [?]

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Let’s hear from Diane Ravitch [Updated]

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

Memo to my friends in the Denver foundation world: As you ponder speakers to bring here in the coming months, please consider Diane Ravitch. She is a fascinating study in evolving policy positions. Great minds think alike. Diane Ravitch will be speaking in Denver in April. She will be well worth hearing.

Ravitch is almost impossible to peg politically or ideologically. She is a well-known critic of multicultural education. She served n the administrations of both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. These days, she is a fierce critic of the overuse of standardized testing and the rapid growth of charter schools. See, for instance, this recent EdWeek blog post.

Having Ravitch speak here would ruffle some feathers, I’m sure. She gores many oxes, including mine. But I admire and appreciate people whose positions evolve, and who are willing to take on ideologues from both ends of the political spectrum.

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Loaded language and questionable data

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Editor’s note: Jim Griffin is president of the Colorado League of Charter Schools

In the recent EdNews blog post, Charters and demographic stratification, Kevin Welner points out a new study from CU-Boulder that compares the demographics of schools operated by Education Management Organizations (EMOs) with their local school districts. The report claims findings of “extensive” segregation in these schools.

First, the Colorado League of Charter Schools takes issue with the use of the term “segregation” when referring to school choice. Segregation is a toxic term associated with governmentally sanctioned, “forced” segregation of another era. The segregation that occurred in our nation’s past was deliberate policy designed to limit public school access. By contrast, charter schools and public school choice provide parents and children an opportunity to increase educational opportunities that have been traditionally unavailable.

Second, the League put the CU-Boulder data to the test by performing its own informal study. We compared EMO-managed charter schools in Colorado with similar, non-charter, neighborhood schools, and with the district.

After backing out online charters, and one operated out of a correctional facility, our data relates to five (5) EMOs and twelve (12) charter schools across multiple districts and communities. Some of these neighborhoods are high minority and low income, while others more white and middle class. In the end, the data contradicts the study’s claim of “extensive” segregation. On the contrary, it reveals that Colorado’s EMO-managed charter schools look more like the district than the neighborhood schools with respect to the percent of minority students they serve.

Parents are demanding higher-quality public school options for their children and rightfully so. Just last week, the Denver Post revealed that of the Colorado students who graduate high school and go onto college, nearly one in three require remedial classes. This doesn’t even touch on the numerous other students (many of whom are minorities) who fall through the system completely and drop out. This is exactly why Colorado charter schools got in the business of providing ALL students, regardless of race or any other factor, a chance at a better education and a better life.

Over the past 16 years, charter schools have proven that there is another option when it comes to public education. Charters have created choice and competition in the public school market – and are showing positive results. Unfortunately, naysayers who want public education to remain exclusively in the hands of those currently operating the system – the status quo–pull out all the stops when trying to convince the public to steer away from better school options for their students, even if it means using emotionally charged terms such as “segregation.”

As Americans we demand choice and snub monopolies when it comes to selecting doctors, automobiles, and grocery stores. Yet when we want to shop for the best public school option for our children – we are criticized. To insinuate that minorities should pass up quality education options for their children if a school’s demographics are too black or too white sounds like some confused priorities.

Popularity: 25% [?]

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Life lottery

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

The Kunsmiller Middle School auditorium was far from full Wednesday evening, but the tension was palpable. West Denver Prep charter school was holding a lottery to admit its second class of 130 sixth-graders to its Harvey Park campus. See a brief video of the event. About 50 anxious parents sat scattered through the auditorium. No one engaged in small talk. Parents sat stony-faced, worry etched on their faces. The prospective WDP sixth-graders chewed their nails, hid their faces in their hands, and showed other signs of agitation. Even younger siblings curbed their rambunctiousness.

The school had names on 170 slips of paper in a fishbowl, and 130 slots to fill. Good odds, if you view it dispassionately. But when, as a parent, you feel your child’s future is on the line, that 40-seat gap feels like the Grand Canyon.

Families did not have to be present to win. As luck would have it, a disproportionate number of people in the audience had the misfortune to  end up on the waiting list. Those who got lucky let out subdued whoops, high-fived each other. Parents kissed their children out of sheer joy.

I had a hard time as I sat there watching this unfold fathoming the recent hostility toward charters in general and West Denver Prep in particular among some Denverites, including a few school board members. The parents in the Kunsmiller auditorium last night, overwhelmingly Latino, were not the city’s elite. They weren’t praying for their children’s names to be called out of some political or ideological preference for charters.

No, they recognized the stakes for what they were: A real shot at a successful middle school experience, leading to success in high school, and in all probability, college. Realistically, the alternative for these families is that their children will get lost in a large, under-performing middle school and never make it through high school.

So yes, WDP may consist almost entirely of low-income kids of color. Long may it wave. I am an ardent believer in integration. I read with great interest the two recent studies  (here and here) highlighting the segregated nature of some charters. But then I observe the cynical, political ways in which some people already are planning to warp these studies’ findings to suit their own ends. Further, I can’t help but wonder how such well-intentioned, potentially important pieces of research can seem so irrelevant to the realities on the ground in this and other cities.

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Charters and demographic stratification

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Alan Gottlieb’s post from last Thursday points readers to a study from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles [11 mb pdf], which analyzed charter schools across the country and found them to be substantially more racially isolated than traditional public schools. The study has received quite a bit of attention as well as pushback from charter school advocates.

Today, CU-Boulder’s own policy center, along with its partner policy center at ASU (collectively, EPIC/EPRU) will release a study that, coincidentally, asks some of the same questions as did the UCLA study. Our study provides a comprehensive examination of enrollment patterns in schools operated by private corporations and finds these schools to be segregated by race, family income, disabilities, and English language learner status.

As compared with their local public school districts, these schools operated by Education Management Organizations, or EMOs, are substantially more segregated, and the strong segregative pattern found in 2001 is virtually unchanged through 2007.

This new study, Schools without Diversity: Education Management Organizations, Charter Schools, and the Demographic Stratification of the American School System, is written by Gary Miron, Jessica Urschel, and Elana Tornquist of Western Michigan University, and William Mathis of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Please find this new report here.

The fact that our conclusions are remarkably similar to the UCLA study is particularly noteworthy. The two studies, conducted independently using different data, different researchers, and different methods, both found extensive segregation in charter schools. This type of independent verification is extraordinarily important as it establishes that the findings are robust – are not just the result of one particular way of looking at the data. Together, these two new studies paint a powerful picture of charters adding to the school segregation caused by the nation’s highly segregated neighborhoods.

The EMO study is particularly important because the Obama administration has placed a great deal of faith in the scaling up of nonprofit EMOs (sometimes called Charter Management Organizations, or CMOs) as part of the administration’s turnaround strategy. The findings of this new study suggest that these policies have the very real potential to be harmful to the nation’s social and educational interests.

Having just read the various responses the UCLA study, allow me to preemptively address those concerns, which may also be raised in response to the EPIC/EPRU study:

  1. Pointing to the segregation is in no way condemning the schools, teachers, or students at those segregated schools. Individually, these can be great schools. What these studies highlight is a policy shift away from the Brown v. Board understanding and ambition. We’ve moved from “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” back to a version of Plessy’s “separate but equal,” generally stated as something like, “segregation doesn’t matter; what matters is that we hold every school accountable for excellence.”
  2. While high-quality segregated schools – whether charters or not – deserve praise for their excellent academic outcomes, I am troubled by the abandonment of the diversity goal. Why, in reading the responses to the UCLA study, do I see so many people buying into a false dichotomy between excellence and diversity? We should approach charter schools with the foundational understanding that diversity and high achievement are mutually reinforcing and then structure our charter policies accordingly.
  3. The reality is that charter schools as a whole do not appear to generate improved test scores. So, looking at these two new studies, it seems that we are getting the harms of segregation without any significant achievement benefits. Yet charters and choice are here to stay, so the questions we should be asking concern how to best structure choice policies to further both goals – diversity and excellence. In his comment below Alan’s post, Alex Ooms offered one suggestion on how this might be done: require charters (and, one might add, non-charters) to roughly reflect the wealth diversity of their surrounding districts or community. The same can be done for English language learners and students with special needs – and issues of race can also be addressed if structured in a non-individualized manner.
  4. Both the EPIC/EPRU study and the UCLA study show racial stratification in both directions. That is, we’re seeing both “White flight” and “minority flight”. Several comments I’ve seen therefore conclude that we’re attacking Latino and African American students for choosing non-diverse schools. Speaking for myself, I would never condemn a parent for making such a choice. If a parent perceives his or her best schooling option to be a segregated school, I would certainly hope that the segregation isn’t the reason for that conclusion. But ultimately I’m not in a position to question any given parent’s choice. I should note that surveys consistently show that parents of all races state a preference for integrated schools, all else being equal. So what I do question are state policies that fail to create incentives for schools, including charter schools, to have that diversity.
  5. Finally, please go back and take a look at the bottom of Alan’s post to see the table that the Colorado League of Charter Schools sent him in anticipation of the UCLA report’s release. It presents Colorado state-level data showing the overall charter school enrollment to be very similar to overall Colorado non-charter public school enrollment. But this completely misses the point about school-level segregation. In fact, I imagine a similar table could have been generated for 1960 Alabama, since black students were generally in enrolled some public schools, while white students were enrolled in others. If we average out the enrollments in all-black and all-white schools, we will by definition come up with the same percentages as the schools overall. It’s a good thing that charters in Colorado end up serving a representative swath of the state’s population, but the school-level segregation pointed out in these reports raises a separate and important issue.

Ultimately, I hope those who criticized the UCLA report and who might be tempted to criticize the new EPIC/EPRU report take a step back and consider the long-term benefits to the charter movement if it embraces reforms designed to create greater school-level diversity. Yes, these reports do raise serious concerns about the current situation, but they aren’t calling for charters to be abandoned. They are calling for meaningful reflection and change so that these schools can help move the country toward its ideals.

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Do charters make segregation worse?

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

A new study out today from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project finds that charter schools across the nation “continue to stratify students by race, class, and possibly language, and are more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the country.”

This study will have the anti-charter camp cackling with glee, and it raises some legitimate areas of concern. But I think it misses the boat in some key respects.

First, a little background. I know CRP co-director Gary Orfield, and respect him a great deal. In fact, when I worked at The Piton Foundation, I hired the Civil Rights Project — then housed at Harvard — to conduct a study of the resegregation of Denver Public Schools after busing. Part I is here, and Part II here.

While the group did excellent research, I found the partnership frustrating in one regard. As regular readers of this blog know, I am an ardent believer in socio-economic school integration. I believe socio-economic integration is a more valid frame for school equity than is racial integration. But despite repeated effort to get CRP researchers to focus on socio-economic integration, the study still ended up heavily weighted toward racial integration. This as caused in part by the nature of available data, but it also reflected Professor Orfield’s abiding commitment to racial integration.

This new study touches on socio-economic issues, and finds that charters

“are associated with heightened economic segregation, which research has often linked to weak schooling opportunity. Some states report charter schools serving disproportionate numbers of relatively affluent students who are not eligible for free or reduced priced lunches (FRL), while others report higher levels of FRL- eligible students (e.g., low-income students) in charters.”

The findings on socio-economic segregation appear to come from a scan of older research rather than any new research conducted by CRP.

My second caveat about this study is that some urban charter schools are demonstrating that integration, of whatever kind, does not have to be a necessary precondition for academic excellence. KIPP, West Denver Prep and other schools of their ilk around the country are proving, so far on a small scale, that low-income kids are not doomed to failure if they attend high-poverty schools. This study ignores that, choosing to focus single-mindedly on integration.

In a perfect world, all schools would be integrated, because integration provides great social value to all involved. But this isn’t a perfect world, and until we achieve nirvana, we need to develop schooling strategies that acknowledge imperfection.

That said, I can buy the argument that in suburban communities, charters make racial segregation even worse than it already is.

The Colorado League of Charter Schools, sent over a table yesterday in anticipation of this report’s release. It shows that the racial composition of Colorado charter schools is virtually identical to the racial composition of non-charter public schools.

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Using “neighborhood schools!” cry to fight integration

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

As inner-ring suburbs around the country become more diverse, the usual fights over attendance boundaries are intensifying, as some more affluent families fight school district efforts to redraw attendance boundaries for racial and socio-economic balance. The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about one such dispute, in Plano, Tex.

It’s interesting that in Plano, as in similar communities, the rallying cry is “We want to attend our neighborhood school!” Neighborhood school advocacy in Denver, at least in recent months, draws its motivation from a different source. Here, it’s in part a reaction against charter schools and new schools, and the focus is more on low-income students, even if many of the neighborhood school advocates are themselves middle class.

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