The Education Gadfly

Why are so many charter schools mediocre? What went wrong? In reflecting on the Ohio experience, particularly in the charter-saturated terrain around Dayton, and taking maximum advantage of the benefit of hindsight, I've spotted 10 contributing factors. I offer them as a navigation aid for state decision makers and community leaders in Columbus and other Ohio cities--with the important caveat that Buckeye State charter schools, by and large, are presently doing as well as nearby district schools and that the state is blessed with a handful of outstanding charters that anyone would be proud to send their kids to and spend their tax dollars on.

1) Lax authorizing. Beginning with the Ohio Department of Education and continuing into today's sponsorship bazaar, negligence, haste, and greed have characterized too many of the entities charged with ensuring the competence and viability of would-be school operators, then monitoring their performance and intervening when results are weak. Quantity trounced quality, timidity trumped courage, and politics overpowered wisdom.

2) Unfussy consumers--and not just in Ohio. Many families are desperate to find a refuge for their kids from unsafe, unfriendly, dysfunctional district schools. Such considerations understandably take precedence over academic performance. That's compounded by meager information about school effectiveness, a dearth of truly outstanding schools, a shortage of effective advisors and brokers, and the propensity of student-hungry charters to make claims that they don't necessarily live up to.

3) Mediocre school operators. Only a handful of independent (a.k.a. "mom and pop") charters have the scale, resources, and sustainability to deliver high-quality education year in and year out--and authorizers haven't been good at winnowing them. Especially disappointing is the slipshod performance of large-scale regional and national operators, which haven't given Ohio children their best efforts. A few are simply profiteers. Others, including some with excellent results elsewhere, have settled for weak school leaders and second-rate teachers.

4) Too few support organizations and charter-friendly civic structures. Ohio lacks the school resource centers and help-groups that some states boast and, at the policy/political level, it has lacked quality-focused, pro-charter advocacy groups. The universities have shunned charters, not helping with the talent pipeline and professional development, let alone with school authorizing. And the state's business leadership, with honorable exceptions, has sat on its hands when it comes to school choice in general and charters in particular. (Most major newspapers, by contrast, have been game to give this education-reform experiment a fair chance.)

5) Rust-belt geography. It's easier to run high-quality charter schools on the coasts and in a handful of hot cities in between where talented people and zealous education reformers want to be.

6) Localism. Partly out of parochialism, partly out of parsimony, and partly out of the sheer difficulty of landing distant talent, most Ohio charters have drawn their leaders and teachers from the local market. That has sometimes made for slim pickings, worsened by low pay and compounded by inadequate budgets (see #8, below).

7) Trusting overmuch in "market-forces." Too many Ohio charter operators appear to believe that as long as parents are content with a school, it's good enough. This leads to scant emphasis on academic results, a worse problem when the customers aren't fussy.

8) Inadequate finances. Ohio charters are under-funded, plain and simple, by several thousand dollars per pupil per year compared with adjoining district schools. They don't get facilities funding, either (though the state is spending billions on new district schools), and they depend for transportation on often-uncooperative district busing operations.

9) A hostile political environment. This has worsened over the past year but even when most state officials were well-disposed to charters, a plague of union-initiated lawsuits and angry local school systems created insecurity, ill-will, and a bunker mentality among charters while scaring off potential supporters, operators, and school staffers.

10) Cumulative policymaking. Ohio's charter laws now resemble an archeological dig where layers of civilization have been jumbled over the centuries. Ten years of statutory amendments has not just created a maze that high-priced attorneys need many hours to find their way through; it has also led to some truly dysfunctional policies and practices. A thorough cleaning is needed, but in a charter-hostile political environment that could mean sacrificing the baby as well as its soiled bathwater.

I'll readily admit that, in hindsight, we should have made some different decisions in Ohio and the current political situation makes it harder to recover. But the problems remain solvable and now it's time for tackling them (see here).

By Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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Capital Matters

School-funding ideas could force Strickland's hand

Ted Strickland has hung his success or failure as governor on fixing Ohio's school funding system. A quarter of the way through his term, he has yet to announce a timeline for his fix, let alone the specifics of a plan. Republican state Sen. Kirk Schuring jumped into the funding-fix fray last week with a joint resolution that would dedicate specific percentages of revenue from certain taxes to K-12 and higher education.

Schuring's proposal and Strickland's lack of one have received a lot of attention. Flying under the radar, however, is the State Board of Education's thoughtful and deliberate approach to developing recommendations for improving the state's school funding. While their colleagues in the General Assembly have been criticized for inaction over the past year (see here), the board is busy with real work toward mending Ohio's ailing school-funding system. Its school-funding subcommittee is considering novel approaches to relieving the state's reliance on property taxes to fund K-12 education. All ideas are on the table, from capping property taxes and opening the door for sales and income education taxes, to the regionalization of school funding.

Still unclear is whether the State Board of Education will make recommendations on modernizing how education dollars are spent. Funding inequities between schools within districts are as dramatic as, sometimes more so than, funding inequities between districts. As in the rest of the country, Ohio's current method of calculating per-pupil funding (the exception being special education) does little to consider the actual educational needs of individual students and the costs associated with meeting those needs.

For guidance on the equitable distribution of education revenue, the State Board of Education, Governor Strickland, and the General Assembly should look to the Fordham Institute's Fund the Child: Tackling Inequity & Antiquity in School Finance. This "manifesto" calls for weighted student funding that varies based on a student's individual learning needs and follows that student to the public school of his or her choice. Fund the Child also enjoys strong bipartisan support and reaches beyond traditional ideological boundaries (see the current list of signatories here)—something any Ohio school-funding plan will need in order to succeed.

By Emmy L. Partin

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Lessons of Charter School Sponsorship

Voices of experience help charter-school board members

On November 30, the Fordham Foundation, in partnership with the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the Ohio Department of Education, the Franklin County Education Service Center, and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, sponsored a charter-school board governance training program for about 85 charter school board members, operators, and sponsors. (Materials from the event can be found here.) Following is a report on a panel discussion that stressed the importance of hiring good leaders and teachers and getting parents involved in schools.

Unfortunately, as we have come to learn (see the editorial above), calling a school a charter doesn't automatically mean it is a good school. That's a shock to many novice charter-school board members who think that just about anybody can govern schools better than traditional public school boards.

The key to success, according to veteran charter-school board members, is to find and keep "roll-up-your-sleeves" leaders and teachers who can manage a classroom well and really know their subject matter, said Luther Brown, board chair for the Phoenix Community Learning Center in Cincinnati. Brown was puzzled why the poor, black children attending his school weren't doing better when he first helped to open the Cincinnati school in 2001. Good leadership and teachers may seem a no-brainer but experience has taught Brown over the years that teachers and principals are not effective teachers and principals just because they say so.

"It comes down to finding high-quality teachers," said Richard Penry, a 40-year veteran of public education and a board member of the Alliance Community Schools in Dayton and Springfield. The lack of more progress at his charter schools was especially befuddling to Penry because he works with a high-quality board of trustees, the schools are run by the country's largest school management company--Edison, Inc., and the sponsor of the schools is the Fordham Foundation.

Panelists also noted the importance of reaching out and developing strong partnerships with parents. Sometimes parents must be coerced, said Patricia Hughes, who oversees charter schools for the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation in Columbus. Panelist Judy Hennessey, director of the Dayton Early College Academy, said parents must attend a minimum number of research presentations and teacher-parent conferences. The high school goes out its way to make it easy by having presentations and conferences after regular school hours to accommodate parents' schedules.

School principals also ought to consider setting up a parent volunteer room or corner and, if they have the money, hiring a parent liaison to work with parents, said Sally Perz, a partner in the charter-school consulting firm JVS Group. "In one school it worked so well, the chief parent complainer became the parent coordinator and the school's biggest booster," she said.

By Michael B. Lafferty

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From the Front Lines

The Cincinnati promise?

More than a year ago, the Strive education partnership was formed with much fanfare in the Queen City to create a scholarship program much like the Kalamazoo Promise in Michigan. The Kalamazoo Promise is a four-year, full-ride scholarship to any public college in the state for all high school graduates who receive their elementary and secondary education in the city's public schools.

It takes big bucks to get such an ambitious program off the ground. In Cincinnati, the initial announcement has been followed mostly with wishful thinking and more publicity than money. In fact, the Cincinnati Enquirer recently reported that Strive is revising its goals and is wondering whether the organization will have enough money to pay for the scholarships.

Such difficulties also occurred in Kalamazoo. Janice Brown, superintendent of the Kalamazoo public schools, said that it took five years of conversations and a lot of faith to get donors on board. Eventually, a few anonymous donors jump-started the program's endowment that helps generate $12 million a year to fund the scholarships. Even more will be needed in Cincinnati, where the public schools serve about 35,000 students, more than three times the number in Kalamazoo. It could cost more than $36 million annually to pay for a "Cincinnati Promise." Raising that kind of cash doesn't happen overnight and it's no surprise Strive organizers are still working to determine if it is in fact doable.

In Kalamazoo, the promise has enticed 800 new families to move to the district, including a family from Russia. Resulting development, including a $10 million housing project, rising property values, and construction of two new schools, has helped to lift the economy in the near-term.

Kudos to Strive for starting the conversation around this innovative program in Cincinnati--just be careful not to make promises you cannot keep.

By Kristina Phillips-Schwartz

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Recommended Reading

Strong Results, High Demand: A Four-Year Study of Boston's Pilot High Schools
Center for Collaborative Education
November 2007

Ohio is a hotbed of high-school reform initiatives, including:

the KnowledgeWorks- and Gates-funded Early College High Schools like DECA in Dayton (see here);
up to five new STEM high schools to be birthed in the next two years (see here);
a number of charter high school efforts underway, like the Charles School in Columbus (see here); and
myriad district high-school reform efforts.

These efforts, and others like them, can all benefit from studying Boston's Pilot high schools. This study is made easier by the new report, Strong Results, High Demand: A Four-Year Study of Boston's Pilot High Schools, which is the first longitudinal study of outcomes of Boston Pilot high schools. The study by the Center for Collaborative Education has found that youngsters in Pilot high schools outperform their peers in traditional Boston high schools in every category studied--state test scores, attendance rates, promotion rates, and graduation rates.

Pilot schools have autonomy over their budgets, staff, curriculum, governance, instruction, assessments, and schedules. But there's a tradeoff. Like charters in Ohio, in exchange for more operational freedoms, Pilot schools have increased accountability. The schools, 10 serving about 3,000 students, use these essential freedoms to create vision-driven smaller high schools that have a singular focus on student achievement.

Ohio can learn a lot from this report, which shows it is possible for a district to embrace a cohesive reform strategy that welcomes choice and operational freedoms in return for accountability. Teacher unions can actually help drive reform and innovation as opposed to fighting them at every stage, and schools of choice truly held accountable can deliver measurable academic results for traditionally underserved children.

The report is available online at www.ccebos.org.

By Terry Ryan

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Gadfly Readers Write...

Regarding a November 28 review by Emmy L. Partin:

If I were writing your article, I would have to have called it, "Schools Are Worse than You Can Imagine!" And it would apply to publicly-funded schools nationwide along with many of the private schools.

I am a retired Air Force research engineer and I have spent the last six years doing research at Richard Allen Schools in Dayton, Ohio, and developing what they call their E-Curriculum.

One recent article sort of sums it up for me. In the September 12, 2006, edition of the Wall Street Journal, there was an article titled, "Arithmetic Problem: New Report Urges Return to Basics in Teaching Math." This article says that the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) now admits that they got it wrong when they pushed what has been derisively called "Fuzzy Math" back in 1989. And that now the NCTM wants to return to teaching the "Basics." The "Basics" would include memorizing math tables instead of giving calculators to kindergarteners.

I have no confidence (the NCTM) would be able to define...the "basics," or that they would easily jettison all the bad ideas that they have pushed for almost 20 years.

The same problem of no longer teaching the "Basics" that exists in math also exists in English language arts, science, and social studies... How can public schools be any good when their state academic content standards, their textbooks, their tests, and ultimately their curriculums are largely based on a lot of bad ideas?

From Bob Douglas

If you have something to say about the Ohio Education Gadfly, say it in an e-mail to an article author or to the editor, Mike Lafferty, at [email protected]. Correspondence may be edited for clarity and length.

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About Us

The Ohio Education Gadfly is published bi-weekly (ordinarily on Wednesdays, with occasional breaks) by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Have something to say? Email us at [email protected]. Would you like to be spared from the Gadfly? Email [email protected] with "unsubscribe gadfly" in the text of your message. You are welcome to forward the Gadfly to others, and from our website you can even email individual articles. If you have been forwarded a copy of Gadfly and would like to subscribe, you may either email [email protected] with "subscribe gadfly" in the text of the message or sign up through our website. To read archived issues or obtain other reviews of reports and books, go to our website and click on the Ohio Education Gadfly link. Aching for still more education news and analysis? Check out the original Education Gadfly.

Nationally and in Ohio, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, along with its sister organization the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, strives to close America's vexing achievement gaps by raising standards, strengthening accountability, and expanding high-quality education options for parents and families. As a charter-school sponsor in Ohio, the Foundation joins with schools to affirm a relentless commitment to high expectations for all children, accountability for academic results and transparency and organizational integrity, while freeing the schools to operate with minimal red tape. The Foundation and Institute are neither connected with nor sponsored by Fordham University.