Confessions of a School Reformer, a new book by emeritus Stanford education professor Larry Cuban, still going strong at eighty-eight, combines personal memoir with a history and analysis of U.S. school reform efforts over the past century, seeking to show how his own life and career have been entangled with that history and the lessons he has drawn from that junction. It’s an ambitious undertaking that is ultimately illuminating and sobering.
The personal saga is interesting as far as it goes, not so much because Cuban held lots of high-wattage jobs—seven years as Arlington, Virginia, superintendent was the most powerful—but because his entanglement with ed-reform has spanned all three of what he depicts as its major eras, and his reflections on what they did and didn’t achieve are worth taking seriously.
The child of working-class Jewish immigrants from Czarist Russia, he attended public schools in Pittsburgh during the depression and World War II and was the first in his family to attend college. Throughout those formative years, he was surrounded by the progressivism—old-fashioned progressivism, not today’s version—that dominated American education at the time and that comprised the first of the three reform eras. Boyhood recollections include plenty of “hands-on, learning-by-doing” in classrooms, and his time at the University of Pittsburgh’s school of education included much Dewey, along with that influential thinker’s sublime confidence that education is a powerful engine for reforming society itself. Yet as Cuban reflects on his own education, he is powerfully struck—a key theme of this book—by how much more influential in one’s life are forces other than formal school and the extent to which schooling is itself shaped by the forces around it:
[T]he inescapable fact remains that over 80 percent of children’s and teenagers’ waking time is spent outside of school, in the family, the neighborhood, the company of friends, religious settings, and the workplace. Too often, I believe, formal schooling…is given far more weight than it deserves in assessing how children and teenagers become adults. Family, friends, and larger events go well beyond formal schooling in shaping character and behavior over a lifetime. Life educates.
Larry Cuban
Phase two, both for ed-reform and for Cuban, was the civil rights movement, which he associates with the 1950s through 1970s. It was then that he taught high school history in de facto segregated Cleveland and in a Washington, D.C., struggling with the challenges of ending de jure segregation. While in the nation’s capital, Cuban also stepped into roles as a master teacher, in the central office’s staff development office, and for a time, in the federal government’s Civil Rights Commission. Reflecting on those years, with what feels like a blend of honesty and sorrow, he recalls being:
[F]illed with a passion to teach history and help students find their niche in the world while working toward making a better society. That confident Deweyan belief in the power of schools (and yes, teachers, too) to reform society brought me to Washington, D.C., in 1963…. Looking back, I see far more clearly now…that national political, economic, and social occurrences (e.g., recession, war, presidential changes) rippled across districts and schools, further weakening my initial beliefs that better schools could make a better society. Instead, I learned that societal effects flowed over districts, schools, and classrooms. I had the causal direction wrong: Societal changes alter schools far more than schools remake society.
Cuban went on to the Arlington superintendency, which lasted until local political shifts turned out the liberal school-board majority that had employed him and replaced them with “a set of political conservatives whose appointments were aimed at a set of policies different from the ones that earlier boards and I had adopted.” County leaders now wanted a “low-profile, fiscally cautious superintendent” who would curb costs and not rock boats.
So Cuban and his family headed west, where he picked up a doctorate from Stanford, became friends with the distinguished education historian David Tyack, and embarked on a new life as university professor and prolific author. (Perhaps his best known book, coauthored with Tyack, was 1995’s Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform.)
By then, as Cuban sees it, America had emerged from its civil rights era and entered into the third phase of education reform, which envelopes us still. He sometimes calls it the “standards-based reform movement” and sometimes “systemic reform,” and (to my surprise) he includes school choice in its many flavors under that heading along with standards, testing, and school accountability. With the exception of vouchers, he writes, that mode of ed reform, “initially pushed by business leaders, was largely embraced by states and districts by the early 2000s,” then became “de facto national policy” with NCLB and ESSA, and “its life span as a reform movement now challenges the half-century reign of Progressive education.”
In Cuban’s view, this version of reform, like its predecessors, maintains the “over-confident expectation that formal education will transform society according to the reformers’ blueprint”:
Public confidence in what schools can do for both individuals and communities has grown in the past decade, even during the Covid-19 crisis. Such growing public confidence—an all-important political fact—reveals again a cast-iron faith in schools as escalators taking individuals to where they want to go and, of equal importance, as an avenue for renewing those American ideals found in the Declaration of Independence.
Yet Cuban no longer buys it. What he’s learned over a long, full career, both from the on-the-ground portions and from a considerable period in academe, “has blended into a mix of what schools can and cannot do in a decentralized national system of schooling driven by an abiding faith in schools as an all-purpose solvent for individual, institutional, and societal problems.”
The short version is that “schools, rather than altering a capitalist democratic society, reflect it.” He’s not saying they don’t matter. Kids learn lots under their roofs that they need to know by way of skills and knowledge. Incremental change in schooling remains possible and, Cuban believes, will continue. (He cites ongoing tech-driven innovations as examples.) But the basics haven’t changed much and aren’t likely to. “Progressives, civil rights reformers, and standards-based promoters have all left their thumbprints on public schools, yet, in the final analysis, these fervent reformers changed only surface features….” And with the core elements of schooling as we know it, also essentially unchanged, go the durable societal problems—inequality, mediocrity, etc.—that led to those reform movements in the first place.
This sober-verging-on-glum analysis cannot be termed encouraging, but it’s based on a great deal of experience, reflection, and hard-won wisdom. You may want to see for yourself.
Chester E. Finn, Jr., is a Distinguished Senior Fellow and President Emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is also a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.
The Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute, Matt Beienburg, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss how Arizona’s allocations of money to education savings accounts could result in a pullback of federal coronavirus relief funds in the state.
While Kroger workers faced a pay cut in the midst of an ongoing, deadly pandemic, its CEO saw his income skyrocket by some $21 million. That is the kind of ugly corporate greed we are up against, and it’s the kind of greed we’ve got to defeat.
Julia Keleher, secretary of education of Puerto Rico, was sentenced to six months in federal prison after ushering in sweeping reforms, such as including breaking up the central education bureaucracy and introducing charter schools.
This is a scenario we all know well: Responding to a crisis, the federal government quickly doles out sizable sums of relief dollars for schools with confusing rules about how education leaders can use it.
Here’s the part that’s maybe not so familiar: The federal government then discredits, prosecutes and imprisons an education leader for what amounts to a procedural error in spending the money, an error that (by the way) yields the leader no personal gain.
This is not a made-up scenario. It happened to Julia Keleher.
It’s a scenario that could have a chilling effect on district and state education leaders across the nation who are right now tasked with moving quickly to deploy federal relief funds.
Today’s crisis is the Covid-19 pandemic, and the $190 billion in federal pandemic relief money sent to states and districts is the closest thing to a blank check we’ve seen. Clearly there’s no playbook for this moment, and successive waves of U.S. Department of Education guidance have left many leaders unclear about how they’re allowed to spend the money.
Flash back to 2017, and the crisis was Puerto Rico, decimated from Hurricane Maria and facing a deepening financial predicament. With many of its historically low-performing schools in disrepair, and massive enrollment declines as families fled the island, the education system was in bad shape. The federal government sent nearly $500 million to rebuild schools and revamp the education system. Puerto Rico’s then-Secretary of Education, Julia Keleher, signed contracts to tackle the most immediate challenges quickly, including repairing buildings and working to resume and improve learning for the island’s remaining students as quickly as possible.
She wound up sentenced to six months in federal prison, accepting a plea agreement in 2021. The U.S. government charged her with conspiracy for violating a prohibition on subcontracts. She signed off on having a subcontractor to do less than $50,000 worth of analysis of school-level damage post hurricane—work the federal government required and whose quality was never in question. The government also took issue with $12,000 in closing incentives on an apartment Keleher bought–incentives that were offered to anyone who purchased a unit in that building. In the end, there appears to be no legitimate claim that Keleher took or personally benefited from public money. I wrote a letter of support for Keleher to her sentencing judge, attesting to her tireless and dogged dedication to Puerto Rico’s students, having provided informal advice on a volunteer basis on school finance issues during her two-year tenure.
Compare that scenario to another eyebrow-raising decision a leader made with federal pandemic relief dollars. In 2020, former Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Austin Beutner signed a $49 million contract with a three-month old startup headed by a former business partner to do COVID-19 testing for students. He bypassed the district’s tedious procurement process and signed it himself using emergency powers.
Jail time? No. He’s lauded for tapping his business connections and moving fast to get things done. No federal inquiry has been initiated.
Why the wildly different reactions to these decisions on how to spend federal relief funds?
One plausible explanation is that it was never about Keleher’s infractions. To quote one columnist: “Keleher became a lightning rod of public criticism for the changes” she made in the system.
Keleher made enemies aplenty in her tenure on an island with a reputation for corruption, angering the teachers’ union and others as she closed hundreds of excess schools as students fled to the U.S. mainland. She also ushered in sweeping (and controversial) reforms to boost abysmal student outcomes, including breaking up the central education bureaucracy and introducing charter schools. As an outsider, she was dubbed a “colonizer.” She resigned in April 2019, citing toxic politics.
Federal prosecutors seemed to take their cues from those angry about Keleher’s changes, and jumped in with a legal fishing expedition. She was indicted three months later. In the months following, prosecutors smeared her name in the media with press releases of baseless charges only to then drop the original charges after the media circus died down. During this whole time she’s under a gag order, unable to even publicly dispute the claims made against her. She accepted the plea deal to move on with her life.
Readers might be wondering if there’s something I’m missing. At first, I wondered too. When federal prosecutors go after someone, many of us often assume it’s for good reason.
This reality has implications far beyond Keleher, to any leader making tough decisions that could anger some segment of the system. Lots of districts are seeing enrollments drop in the wake of today’s pandemic crisis. That means as federal funds dry up, many may find themselves grappling with some of the same issues that surfaced in Puerto Rico’s post-hurricane turmoil. Some will face the prospect of closing schools and laying off staff to right-size the system for a new, smaller population. These decisions will be painful and unpopular.
I’ve said it before: Leaders can be especially vulnerable to accusations of financial missteps where board members, teachers’ unions or others in the community are at odds with those leaders. When tensions are high, any potential misstep can get magnified. And the pandemic does not inoculate leaders from charges of financial blunders. Big money draws big scrutiny. So, leaders need to be aggressively transparent, especially with contracts.
Still, Keleher’s case stands out as troubling. It leaves me wondering: What does it tell leaders who make the tough trade-offs, especially in a crisis? Does shifting public sentiment mean federal officials will come knocking at the door? Is the best move one that keeps the loudest voices happy at any cost? This case would seem to offer the nation’s education leaders a sobering answer, to say the least.
Recently I shared Keleher’s case with a room full of superintendents as part of a training on using Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER, funds. The room was silent. Incredulity was written on their faces. I could see them pondering whether they regretted accepting these roles and the responsibility to steward the federal relief dollars.
District leaders I know are working absurdly long hours right now. Much of it is the nature of a crisis, but some is also to understand the federal rules, file required spending plans, submit proper reimbursements, meet reporting deadlines, and comply with financial record-keeping.
Whether intended or not, the legacy of the Keleher case may be to make leaders even more bureaucratic and risk-averse than they already are. That should be unsettling to all of us. Especially in a crisis, we desperately need leaders whose focus is squarely on meeting the needs of kids.
Marguerite Roza is research professor at Georgetown University and director of Edunomics Lab.
Bill Oberndorf has committed his resources to expanding opportunities for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. He chairs the American Federation for Children, which funds scholarships for low-income students to attend private schools and supports pro-school-choice political candidates at the state level. In 2021, Oberndorf was named the Simon-DeVos Philanthropist of the Year by the Philanthropy Roundtable, a national association of philanthropists. Education Next senior editor Paul Peterson recently spoke with Oberndorf about the state of school choice in America.
Paul Peterson: Why did you de-cide to focus much of your philanthropy on helping disadvantaged children attend private school?
Bill Oberndorf
Bill Oberndorf: I felt extremely fortunate that I was able to attend a wonderful private school in Cleveland, and only because my grandparents set aside and saved money for the education of my brothers and me. I felt that every kid who wants to work hard in school, whose parents want something better for them, should have access to the kind of education that best fits the needs of that child. I feel that this is the civil-rights issue of our time.
The idea of private-school choice through government-funded vouchers was proposed by Milton Friedman in the 1950s. Seventy years later, we have only a few such programs in this country. Why has it been so difficult to build public support for this idea?
I remember talking to Milton Friedman about this shortly before he died. He said, “Well, we’re just about right on schedule. It takes decades for ideas to take root before they really can flourish.” So Milton was not deterred. The opposition has come from the teachers unions, which are such a powerful force and funding source for the Democratic Party that this has created major obstacles along the way.
But the good news is that now there are private-school choice programs in 22 states. And 45 states plus D.C. have charter-school programs.
Yes, but in recent years it seemed like progress was stalling out. In 2016 in Massachusetts, for example, a ballot initiative to expand charter schools was defeated, even though charter schools in Massachusetts seemed to be doing very well. There were also divisions within the school-choice movement, and the energy seemed to be disappearing. How were you assessing the state of school choice at that time?
The charter-school movement had scaled up to around 3 million students enrolled, and suddenly, for the first time, that sector was feeling the kind of union opposition that the private-school choice movement had felt all along. This did create a lull, but since then, some important things have happened that have helped change the overall trajectory of the advocacy and implementation of private-school and charter-school choice.
What’s happened, of course, is the Covid-19 pandemic, and the shutting down of district schools across the country, with private schools remaining open in many places. Do you think that’s critical to what seems to be a turning of public opinion today?
Yes. The tide went out because of Covid, and many people who never had been touched by the impact of union power suddenly felt that impact. The other factor was that because so much remote instruction was going on, parents actually saw for the first time the quality of the teaching in their kids’ classrooms, and they didn’t like what they saw. This was a real eye-opener, and it has caused the acceptance and popularity of education choice to skyrocket.
Over the last school year, a lot of people moved away from the standard district-run school, either to the private sector, to charter schools, or to homeschooling, which has exploded. Is this people voting with their feet against what was happening during the pandemic?
Absolutely. And at the American Federation for Children, which is now the largest school-choice organization in the country, we start with funding state legislative races and directly backing candidates. You referenced the ballot initiative losing in Massachusetts. There has never been a ballot initiative that’s passed, because it’s too easy to knock them off. Instead, we look at states where we feel that, over a three- to five-year period, we can change the legislative composition to be favorable to choice and where we can help elect a governor who is receptive to signing such legislation.
In 2020 we backed 390 state legislators and won 337 of those seats, concentrated in 13 states. And what resulted in 2021 was the passage of legislation funding 150,000 new private-school seats, at about $6,000 dollars apiece—almost $900 million of government money. And, as you mentioned, there were also increases in homeschooling and in charter enrollment. This shift is having a big political influence too, in how people vote once they see how their children are benefiting from these programs.
What do you see as the main driver here?
I think it’s the culmination of a lot of frustration that parents have had over the years—and particularly the kind of parents we try to help, low-income parents, and this is changing how they are voting.
Governor Doug Ducey from Arizona told me he got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote the last time he ran. He said, “That’s only because of this issue of school choice. That’s the only reason I got that kind of percentage.” And when Ron DeSantis’s opponent, Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum, said, “We’re going to end the school-choice programs in Florida,” DeSantis ended up getting 18 percent of the Black female vote in the gubernatorial election. That was 70,000 votes, and he won by 30,000 votes. So this is changing outcomes, with people who are simply tired of seeing what’s happening to their children, who are subject to sending their kids to schools that none of us would ever let our kids go to.
Are political leaders talking to one another from state to state? Is this what’s moving the conversation?
Yes, I think school choice is finally gaining traction in a way we’ve never seen before. And in this next election cycle, the federation will have 550 different state legislative races to invest in if we are able to raise the funds to do so. Governors understand the implications of school choice, and politicians of color are understanding it is good for their constituents. So we don’t view this as a Republican issue or a Democratic issue. About 20 percent of the money we give to candidates every year goes to Democrats. We’d like it to be a lot higher than that.
And I think that, with what happened in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the riots in the summer of 2020, you cannot have a real conversation about systemic racism if you do not talk about K–12 and the outcomes for these kids. It is what’s holding back students of color in this country. It’s an inconvenient truth. If we do not talk about this, I don’t think we will be able to make substantial progress moving forward.
This is an edited excerpt from an Education Exchange podcast, which can be heard at educationnext.org.
By: Education Next Title: “This Is the Civil-Rights Issue of Our Time” Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/this-is-the-civil-rights-issue-of-our-time-philanthropist-bill-oberndorf/ Published Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2022 10:00:13 +0000
For years, media attention to charter schools has focused on the horse race: which schools are better, charter schools or district schools?
What if one were to tweak this question and ask instead: which type of school shows greater capacity for improvement, and what can educators and policymakers learn from the answer?
For some time, research has indicated that charter schools, on average, provide a superior education to students living in poverty, Black students, and Hispanic students. Now, research also shows charter schools are improving at a faster rate than district schools.
For our most disadvantaged students, charter schools are not only out in front, but they are also widening their lead.
That is great news for the children enrolled in charter schools, but no consolation to those who are not. To accelerate the achievement of all children in all types of schools, it may help to take a closer look at why one group of public schools (charter) is improving faster than another (district).
The answer is twofold:
The combination of choice and flexibility provides charter schools with the incentive and the ability to implement practices that lead to better results.
The charter sector has taken decisive actions based on those results, closing low-performing schools and replicating those that are succeeding.
These two factors work in tandem and reinforce each other to drive improvement; one without the other would not likely produce the same level of progress.
States began enacting charter-school laws 30 years ago, in part to create a “laboratory” for learning about effective innovation and improvement that could be transferred to other public schools. Three decades in, that knowledge is available and, if we do learn from it and apply it throughout public education, it can be used to accelerate learning for all children.
Controlling for differences in students’ background characteristics, they found that student cohorts in the charter sector made greater gains than did those in the district sector (see Figure 1). “The difference in the trends in the two sectors amounts to nearly an additional half-year’s worth of learning,” the authors wrote. “The biggest gains are for African Americans and for students of low socioeconomic status attending charter schools.”
In 2013, Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, known as CREDO, reached a similar conclusion related to research the center had done four years earlier. “When compared to the 2009 results, the 2013 findings indicate overall improvement in learning gains for students at charter schools relative to their traditional public school peers in both reading and math,” the center reported.
Here too, the differences were most pronounced for low-income students:
“Compared to the learning gains of TPS [traditional public school] students in poverty, charter students in poverty learn significantly more in math,” the report said. “Moreover, this difference in performance has widened.” In 2009, charter students in poverty had an advantage of about 7 more days of learning in math each year than their TPS peers. In 2013, the edge was 22 additional days.
Patrick Baude and colleagues found similar results in a study of Texas charter-school performance from 2001 to 2011. “Charter school mathematics and reading value-added increased substantially relative to traditional public schools,” the researchers wrote. “This improvement is notable because there is evidence that traditional public schools were also improving on average.”
What explains the difference in these improvement rates? And what can policymakers and K–12 educators learn from this information?
The Role of Choice
Throughout the year, the principals and boards of charter schools focus on one particular set of data: the enrollment numbers for the coming school year. In the winter and spring, they look at the number of applicants and the grades to which they are applying. If demand is low, they are compelled to find ways to attract more students. In the summer, after lotteries have occurred, they project how many students will show up when school opens. In the fall, they compare actual enrollment and attendance to earlier projections.
Of course, principals at district schools also pay attention to enrollment, but not as often or in the same ways. For charters, the issue of enrollment spells constant pressure to improve.
That’s because a charter school’s enrollment has an immediate and significant impact on the school’s budget and the services it can provide. A school expecting 500 students that enrolls 490 may lose funding for that year that’s roughly equivalent to a full-time teaching position.
A district school that experiences the same enrollment shortfall would likely experience no impact at all. The district will shield that school from the revenue loss for that year and perhaps for years to come. (Those funds must come from somewhere, of course, and they come at the expense of other schools that are not losing enrollment.)
In a high-performing charter school, the incentive to achieve enrollment projections creates an organizational mentality focused on continuous improvement in every sphere: academics, culture, extracurriculars, teachers’ job satisfaction, communication with parents, and more. While some charter schools (often those that are struggling) spend big money on marketing campaigns, high-performing schools know that the most powerful marketing is parent word-of-mouth. If a school is delivering for students and families, others will learn about it and apply. If it is not delivering, people will hear about that, too.
The Power of Flexibility
Choice drives the quest for improvement in the charter sector, but choice itself does not improve teaching and learning. Rather, it is flexibility that enables charter schools to improve in ways that are less available to district schools.
One way that charters have tapped into their flexibility is by lengthening the school day and school year. Using data from the 2007–08 school year, the National Center on Time and Learning observed, “Charters, as opposed to traditional public schools, are more likely to extend their school year, offer longer days, and operate a year-round school calendar.” That year, the typical charter-school day was nearly 15 minutes longer than a day at its traditional public-school counterpart. While 23.5 percent of charter schools reported a longer school year than the conventional 180 days, 16.7 percent of traditional public schools did so. Ten percent of charter schools offered a significantly longer year of 187 days or more.
Fast forward to the National Center on Time and Learning’s 2012 report “Mapping the Field: A Report on Expanded-Time Schools in America.” Noting that the first serious proposal for expanding school time had appeared nearly 30 years earlier in the landmark report A Nation at Risk, the center’s publication underscored that “no movement ensued on the part of traditional public schools to break from the conventional calendar and/or schedule. The one notable exception to this adherence to school-time norms came from the emerging group of independent public schools known as charter schools.” Charter founders, the center’s report observed, had “crafted their schools—which had been established to be deliberately unlike the conventional—on a platform of a longer school day and/or year.”
Charter schools, which made up just 5 percent of public schools nationwide at the time of the center’s study, constituted 60 percent of all expanded-time schools.
The center also observed that it was much more common for start-up schools to adopt an expanded-time schedule than it was for an existing school to convert to the model. Nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of the expanded-time schools they identified were start-ups.
In 2015, the center’s findings on charter schools and time were even more pronounced. “The average charter school day has grown markedly over the last decade, with particular growth in the upper quartile,” the center noted in a review of research and practice.
Research indicates that more time in school generally leads to improved learning outcomes. Citing a meta-analysis of 15 studies, the National Center on Time and Learning found that additional time in school “can have a meaningfully positive impact on student proficiency and, indeed, upon a child’s entire educational experience. Such enhancement can be especially consequential for economically disadvantaged students. . . . For these millions of students, more time in school can be a path to equity.”
Of course, if extra time in school is to have this positive effect, a strong academic program is essential. As in all schools, academic excellence in charter schools is dependent on strong teachers. Research suggests that the workforce in charter schools differs from that of district schools in several important ways.
In 2012, roughly midway through the 2005–2017 timeframe studied by Shakeel and Peterson, the National Conference of State Legislatures reported that teaching looked different in charter schools in several areas:
Demographics. “Charter school teachers are more diverse; there are almost twice as many black and Hispanic teachers in these schools.” Further, “some data indicate charter school teachers are more likely to have graduated from a competitive or selective college.”
Licensure. “Fourteen states [out of 41 states with charter-school laws at that time] require only a certain percentage of charter teachers in each school to be licensed, varying between 30 percent and 90 percent. Four states and the District of Columbia have no requirement for licensure.”
Turnover. “Involuntary attrition is significantly higher in charter schools due to the lack of barriers to teacher dismissal and to a school’s possible instability.”
Collective Bargaining. “Twenty states and the District of Columbia exempt charter schools from collective bargaining agreements and only Iowa holds all charter schools to all existing school district collective bargaining agreements.”
While these teacher variables—demographics, licensure, turnover, and collective bargaining—could explain charter schools’ performance relative to district schools at any given point in time, they do not speak directly to the faster rate of charter-school improvement over time. A 2020 study by Matthew Steinberg and Haisheng Yang does. They first review prior evidence indicating that charter-school teachers improve with experience at a faster clip than district-school teachers. In their own study of Pennsylvania schools, they find that this is particularly the case for charter schools that are part of charter management organizations, whose teachers “improve more rapidly than teachers in its traditional public schools or standalone charters.”
Decisive Action
Imagine a city with 100 schools where, every year, the three or four lowest-performing schools in the city close and a handful of new schools open. The quality of the new additions ranges from weak to excellent, but in the aggregate, they are average. Over time, replacing the three or four lowest-performing schools with average schools will lead to improvement. Replacing them with above-average schools would lead to even faster improvement.
This scenario has not happened often among district schools, despite bold public policies like the No Child Left Behind Act and Race to the Top. With few exceptions, districts have resisted closing schools, even those that have persistently failed to educate children satisfactorily.
The charter sector, though, has embraced this scenario, annually closing 3 to 4 percent of its lowest performers for years. Over time, the sector has opened not only average schools, but a greater number of excellent schools—those run by charter management organizations.
According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, from 2005–06 to 2017–18, the charter sector closed between 3.1 percent and 3.7 percent of its schools every year but two, with an average of 185 closures per year (see Figure 2).
Throughout that time, I led the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, which advocated for charter-school quality and accountability. In 2012, in our “One Million Lives” campaign, we called on public officials and authorizers to close a thousand low-performing charter schools by 2017 and to open two thousand new, high-quality charter schools. The goal was ambitious, since the sector had never closed 200 schools per year even once. Yet the campaign was widely embraced by the charter community, including advocates in states with many charter schools like Texas, California, Arizona, and Ohio.
In 2013, the Texas Charter School Association successfully advocated for the passage of a state law that raised performance standards for charter schools and provided for the closing of schools that failed to meet those standards for three successive years. The legislation also raised the cap on the number of charter schools allowed in the state and streamlined the renewal and replication process for successful schools. The Texas reform law embodied the charter philosophy: growing the number of high-quality schools and closing those that persistently failed to deliver for kids. During the two years leading up to the law’s passage, two charter schools had closed in Texas. In the two years following, 20 charters closed.
California’s state charter-school association also publicly pushed for high standards and the closure of charter schools that persistently failed to deliver results. Beginning in 2011, the association annually identified charter schools it recommended for nonrenewal. “We have too many persistently underperforming charters, and we need to come up with constructive suggestions to make sure there is sufficient accountability in the movement,” said Jed Wallace, president of the association.
In Arizona, DeAnna Rowe became the executive director of the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools in 2007. With over 500 schools throughout the state, Rowe said in an interview that the board had until then taken a “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach. “It was the right strategy at the time to launch and grow school choice for Arizona families, but at some point, you need to weed the garden.” The board improved its application process, a step that led to stronger start-ups and fewer closures. It also created a school-evaluation framework using guidance from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and used the framework to give greater latitude to well-performing schools and create improvement plans for lesser performers. The documentation that was created along the way “provided stronger evidence to close schools if it was necessary,” Rowe said.
By 2017, the goal of the One Million Lives Campaign was achieved, with a total of 1,080 failing schools shut down.
Smart Replication
The charter sector’s willingness to shutter poorly performing schools is matched by its commitment to replicating schools that excel, best illustrated by the work of the Charter School Growth Fund. The fund has invested more than $420 million in about 250 charter-school networks since 2010. Those cash infusions have helped open more than 625 new schools, and the charter-network segment of the sector has grown to serve 517,000 students in 2020–21 from about 140,000 in 2010.
Kevin Hall, chief executive officer of the growth fund, noted that “it wasn’t clear in the 2005–2010 timeframe that this idea would work at all. If you looked at school districts, you wouldn’t say that growing makes sense. There was not very much evidence.”
Since then, the number of CMO schools, the number of students served, and the quality of those schools have all increased. While freestanding charter schools still comprise the majority of charters and serve the most students, the proportion of charter schools that are part of a CMO nearly tripled (to 29 percent from 11 percent) between 2007 and 2019, and the proportion of charter-school students they enroll has more than tripled (to 30 percent from 9 percent), according to data from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (see Figure 3).
Rapid growth in the CMO segment has contributed to accelerated improvement in the charter sector overall, because CMO schools, on average, are delivering strong results. In 2017, CREDO studied academic performance by school-management type and concluded that “on the whole, . . . attending a charter school that is part of a larger network of schools is associated with improved educational outcomes for students” and that “research work has shown steady and consistent, even if gradual, improvement in charter school network performance.” CREDO also noted that nonprofit operators notched “significantly higher student academic gains” than did for-profits.
In reading, students attending a freestanding charter school were found to experience the equivalent of an additional 6 days of growth per school year, relative to traditional public schools, while students in CMO schools (nonprofit and for-profit), experienced an additional 17 days of growth.
Yet, 15 years ago, it was not at all clear that expanding and replicating charter schools would lead to high-quality outcomes. “In K–12 as a whole, scale does not necessarily translate into being better,” Kevin Hall said.
So why did it happen? The answer lies in “smart replication.”
Kevin Hall, chief executive of the Charter School Growth Fund.
“We sort of obsess on School One,” said Hall, “and then, ‘Is School Two as good or better than School One?’” What’s more, copying successful methods and approaches is not enough on its own. School operators “have to know why,” he said. “Why are they getting good results? What are they doing? Then there is a virtuous cycle. Can they attract talent, build their own talent? Do they codify what they’re doing so they can get better? All of those things happen in our
best performers.”
Hall and Ebony Lee, a partner at the Charter School Growth Fund, emphasize four key factors for charter-school success: talent, high expectations for students and the school team, high levels of support, and a forward-looking focus on what happens with students after they graduate.
Some large and influential charter authorizers, including the State University of New York, have also supported smart replication. Susie Miller Carello, executive director of the SUNY Charter School Institute, said her organization has tripled the number of schools under its umbrella over the past 10 years, keeping its focus on accountability and devoting time to learning about successful approaches to scaling.
“We went from ‘one good school at a time’ to ‘one good school as a proof point’ and being willing to support the replication of that school,” Carello said. “We talked with venture capitalists about how they determine if there is a good company they want to take on. We talked about the markers of being able to scale. You have a good program; can you convey it with fidelity to the next one or the next three? So now we give multiple charters at a time. We are venture bureaucrats.”
The charter sector’s approach to accountability and replication has had its critics, including some in the charter community itself. Some believe that authorizers have overemphasized standardized tests that define student success too narrowly and inhibit truly innovative educational models. There has been a backlash against “no excuses” models that produce high test scores but often rely on strict disciplinary systems in doing so. Companies that run virtual charter schools doubled down on this argument, maintaining that parent demand, not test scores, is the only valid measure of school quality.
Others have faulted wealthy donors for fixating on growing a relatively small number of charter networks that are disproportionately led by white founders from elite universities and from outside the communities their schools serve. Civic leaders in more than one city focused on recruiting brand-name national networks to their city rather than supporting local educators. Nonprofit organizations, variously referred to as “harbormasters” and “quarterbacks,” were launched with the purpose of saturating the market in cities picked by philanthropists with charter networks that were also selected by philanthropists.
In recent years, after the period studied by Shakeel and Peterson, the charter community has reassessed its approach on these fronts, supporting a broader definition of school quality and investing in new schools that emerge from the communities they serve. The Charter School Growth Fund has been a leader on both fronts. Still, it is worth noting that the fast pace of improvement captured by Shakeel and Peterson predates these changes. Indeed, Baude’s Texas study specifically noted the positive results from schools that focused on test scores: “Our evidence suggests that the increasing share of charter schools adhering to a No Excuses philosophy contributes to observed improvements in the sector.”
While it remains to be seen whether the new, evolved charter sector will deliver the same level of results as the old, “the whole charter premise is working,” Kevin Hall said. “High performers are replicating and, methodically, low performers are closing. It’s not perfect, but over time, this is what is happening.”
* * *
The system has its flaws. Charter performance remains weak in some states, and some schools cream-skim students. Cases of financial malfeasance are still too common, and almost all virtual charter schools have delivered substandard results. Most charter-school advocates recognize these problems and are pushing for improvement, as they have done for years.
In the summer of 2005, the newly established National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, led by its founding president Nelson Smith, convened leading charter advocates from across the country at a conference on Mackinac Island in Michigan. There, the alliance released a task-force statement that read:
If chartering is to thrive, and to play a central role in delivering public education, we must elevate quality to the highest priority. We must look inward at our schools, our authorizers, our state associations, and our own beliefs and habits of mind, so that nothing—nothing—gets in the way of pursuing higher student achievement.
For the next 12 years, the period studied by Shakeel and Peterson, the charter-school community heeded this call. As a result, charter-school performance improved because of choice, flexibility, and the sector’s commitment to taking decisive action based on results. During this time, under a Republican president and a Democrat, in red states and blue, these ideas were the dominant themes in all public education. The district sector often resisted them, the charter sector often embraced them, and charter schools showed the faster improvement.
More recently, though, some of these ideas, such as no-excuses models and the closure of failing schools, have been falling out of favor. Indeed, some former advocates of these concepts have turned their attention to other strategies. Public officials, education advocates, and educators of all stripes would do well to remember the lessons learned from research on charter schools: students receive a better education when we provide families with choices, when schools have the flexibility to implement proven practices, and when our system of public education opens more schools with a track record of strong results while closing those that persistently fail.
Greg Richmond is the superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Chicago and the founder and former chief executive of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers.
A resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, Mary Grabar, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Grabar’s new book, Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America.
By: Education Next Title: The Education Exchange: Debunking the 1619 Project Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/the-education-exchange-debunking-the-1619-project/ Published Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2022 10:00:38 +0000
Doug Lemov has just released Teach Like a Champion 3.0. The book updates Teach Like a Champion, which was a sensation when it came out in 2010. Today Doug, formerly a teacher, a principal, and a charter school founder, is the co-managing director of the Teach Like a Champion organization, which helps educators master the practices described in the book. Given the extraordinary disruptions of schooling, I thought it worth checking in with Doug on what the latest version of Teach Like a Champion has to offer.
Rick Hess: Where did Teach Like a Champion come from?
Doug Lemov: It came from appreciation for teachers, from a strong belief that the profession is full of unacknowledged masters of a craft—“champions”—whose work contains solutions to the very real and complex challenges of a very difficult job. But also from the realization that we fail to recognize those teachers and value what they do. Meanwhile, people leave teaching because they often feel like they’re not succeeding. It’s one thing to struggle all day and feel like you are making a difference; it’s another to struggle and go home wondering if it helped at all. The profession has to do better by the people who take the job. The short videos Teach Like a Champion includes of our colleagues at their very best not only helps express how much we value them, but it helps other teachers succeed.
Hess: How has the world of education changed in the decade since Teach Like a Champion first came out?
Doug Lemov
Lemov: Well, there are some good ways that it’s changed. The number of schools that offer radically better classroom learning environments—orderly, productive, happy, challenging, scholarly—has increased significantly in a lot of communities. That gives us more models to study and more evidence that exceptional classrooms are possible. And, therefore, the argument has become, “How do we make excellence the norm?” rather than, “Is excellence possible in all classrooms?” I also think science is beginning to win the day. More people recognize that access to classrooms informed by what cognitive science tells us is an equity issue. That’s a huge win. But there are also greater challenges. Obviously, there’s been a massive disruption to learning due to pandemic. But there’s also a massive disruption caused by epidemic: the proliferation of technology, especially smartphones and social media. This affects students both directly—by degrading their attentional skills, for example—and indirectly—by crowding books out of students’ lives. And I think the social changes in this country have had mixed effects. There’s a greater awareness of equity issues, and that’s important, but specious arguments get carried along on the tide of social justice as easily as substantive ones. People argue that academic achievement is somehow the domain of one group of people but not others. Or that equity involves lessening standards.
Hess: How is Teach Like a Champion 3.0 different from what came before?
Lemov: I think the biggest single change has to be far more intentionality about mapping the overlap between cognitive and social sciences and what teachers do. That shows up in several ways. The first chapter is about the principles that comprise a strong mental model of how students learn. If you have a clear model of how learning works, then it’s easier to make optimal decisions. The second chapter is about lesson preparation, because preparation is different from planning, and it’s critical to the success of a lesson. And then there are a series of new techniques, a lot of them based on how to bring more background knowledge into the classroom and how to better build long-term memory—two key ideas from the chapter on mental models. I’ve also added a new kind of video called keystones. They are 10-minute clips—much longer than the other clips in the book—and they show the broader culture and tone of great classrooms and how teachers combine and adapt specific techniques. The idea is that a video of any one thing inherently distorts the classroom, so I thought these longer videos would help teachers see the big picture a bit better.
Hess: Some critics have suggested that the kinds of directive practices for which Teach Like a Champion is famous are problematic, arguing that they stymie students or create patriarchal learning environments. I’m curious what you make of such concerns.
Lemov: I tried to write about this directly using the story of an imaginary student, Asha. She’s sitting in class and has an idea but is a bit hesitant to share it. Her idea could be wrong, or, just as bad, already obvious to everyone else. Maybe saying something earnest about DNA recombination makes you that kid—the one who raises her hand too often, who tries too hard, who breaks the social code. But somehow in this moment, the desire to voice her thought overcomes her anxiety. I ask my readers to think about what happens next: Will her classmates seem like they care about her idea? Will she read interest in their faces? Or will they be slouched in their chairs and turned away, their body language expressing their indifference? Those factors will influence the relationship she perceives between herself and school. Yes, it matters whether her teacher responds with encouragement—but probably not as much as how Asha’s peers respond. The teacher’s capacity to shape norms in Asha’s classroom matters at least as much as her ability to connect individually with Asha. To create the highest-quality learning environments for young people, teachers have to actively shape the learning environment and sometimes the social fabric of daily interaction. Yes, that requires teachers to ask students to do what may at first seem unnatural. But the benefits massively outweigh the costs.
Hess: OK, but what about those who say that Teach Like a Champion’s approach puts too much emphasis on particular student behaviors?
Lemov: Tom Bennett has this beautiful line in Running the Room. He’s writing about how school should transmit the values of self-discipline, self-regulation, hard work, and patience. “Everything of value you can conceive of was acquired through these things—through sustained effort, practice, and delayed gratification.” To love young people is to give them classrooms that build these habits. You want to speak but you learn to listen first; you are tired some days but complete your tasks regardless. And in the end, those are the steppingstones of greatness. But in lieu of that, we’ve somehow accepted a Hollywood vision where success flicks on like a switch on a journey of self-discovery. I’m going to do everything I can to build schools that offer something better.
Hess: Teach Like A Champion has been translated into something like 15 languages. What’s struck you about the reception overseas?
Lemov: The international work is so powerful and so humbling. I’ve been to the Middle East three times now. The first time, in Jordan, I was invited by Queen Rania’s Teacher Academy. I was doing this workshop for teachers when the queen walked in and sat down at a table while I was showing a video. She raised her hand—needless to say I called on her—and she gave this beautiful analysis of how the teacher had made the cold call feel caring and why it was so important for children in Jordan to get both: the caring and the loving accountability. But working abroad, my first thought is always to acknowledge the differences. I talk sometimes to teachers who have 60-plus kids in their classrooms and are refugees from the Syrian conflict. In some cases, there are kids who are 10 and 12 and have never been to school. … So I start by saying: I understand and respect that everything is not the same. But what surprised me was how quickly teachers said: No, no, this applies. Your kids do what our kids do. When it comes to the core dynamic of the classroom, so much of it is the same.
Hess: If you had to leave teachers with just one piece of pedagogical wisdom, what would it be?
Lemov: Low tech, high text. Phones away, books out. Attention is the driver of learning. You wire or rewire your brain through how you use it. The ability to sustain your focus, to key in to the signal and ignore the noise is built by habit. Every time phones are out, you are practicing fracturing your or your students’ attention, making half-attention the normal state. Read and read and read. In hard copy only. Write and write and write. Pencil to paper.
Hess: And, for school or system leaders, what one thing can they do that would matter most for the quality of teaching?
Lemov: Curriculum has been the most overlooked factor in the struggle for higher achievement. High-quality, knowledge-rich curriculum is key. It has to be carefully designed and include rich but adaptable daily lesson plans. And it has to understand what the cognitive science tells us: Facts and higher-order thinking are not opposites. You can only think deeply about that which you know a great deal about. Knowledge is deeply important and too often scorned by educators.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.
The Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute, Matt Beienburg, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss how Arizona’s allocations of money to education savings accounts could result in a pullback of federal coronavirus relief funds in the state.
For years, media attention to charter schools has focused on the horse race: which schools are better, charter schools or district schools?
A resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, Mary Grabar, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Grabar’s new book, Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America.
