New Reports on Charter School Impacts

Brookings just released The Impact of Milwaukee Charter Schools on Student Achievement. Among its findings: charter school attendance is associated with higher scores on mathematics exams than attendance at traditional public schools, but there is no statistically significant relationship between charter school attendance and performance on reading exams. These positive results are due to student performance in the initial years of the program—the performance of charter schools and traditional public schools is statistically indistinguishable for the most recent years of the study.

Interesting…especially because in the first year of the study (school year 2000), which showed the largest advantage for charter schools, the sample included only 4 charter schools. The most recent year (school year 2006—in which the authors actually found a statistically significant advantage for reading scores in traditional schools), they included 35. In the report, they give great weight to the fact that first year charters tend to have a negative impact on test scores, which could account for the decline in overall performance. However, in school year 2005, the study included 38 schools…which suggests that few if any new schools were included the 2006 data [because otherwise they would have had to eliminate several previously included schools, which doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense]. Might another idea be that charters performend better in the early years because the early charters were given only to the very best of the applicants, whereas a current push to increase the number of charter schools has led to less impressive applicants being granted charters? This notion has implications for Obama’s push to lift caps on charter schools…

Another interesting finding from this report: student mobility has a negative effect on performance and is a more robust predictor of student performance than the organizational factors the authors considered (which seems to me, as a teacher who dealt with student mobility, be a “duh” statement). Also, the positive impact of charters relative to traditional public schools declines as the number of years a student has attended a charter school increases (this could be really interesting to delve into…).

If you are interested in learning more about the impact of charter schools, check out this new RAND publication, How Charter Schools Affect Student Outcomes. It presents a much more complete picture [and actually incorporates the Milwaukee data used in the Brookings report]. The most promising results for charter supporters: The long-term outcomes of high-school graduation and college entry—in the two locations with available data on these attainment outcomes (Chicago and Florida), charter high schools appear to have substantial positive impacts, increasing the probability of graduating by 7 to 15 percentage points and increasing the probability of enrolling in college by 8 to 10 percentage points.

Labels: charter, research

KIPP/Union Update

The New York Times reported Friday that the environment at a KIPP school whose teachers recently voted to unionize has gotten tense, with administrators "making veiled threats" and meeting with students alone--a meeting at which the students "had been encouraged to talk about 'negative feelings and interactions' with [teachers]." This coming after the school's founding principal told those organizing teachers that he was "disappointed" and "not pleased."

Read the article here.

Personal opinion? While I unabashedly support teachers unions, I could put aside those thoughts and just reflect... Perhaps, instead of introducing further tension into the school, the administrators at this school could think about the environment at their school and why these teachers felt it was necessary to organize. If these administrators are so opposed to running a unionized school, how could they let their school culture get to a point where the teachers feel that organizing is their best bet to improve their working environment and their students education? What mistakes did they (the administrators) make?

In none of the press that I have seen on this issue have I seen the administrators publicly taking responsibility for this creating environment. Yet the whole notion of charter schools means that they had that responsibility. This situation is being monitored by many in the educational world and is an important precursor in education reform, in terms of union/charter partnerships or creating sustainable climates in charters (or in a number of other reforms). Yet what observers are seeing is administrators (like executives in other sectors of the American economy) blaming others for their problems. This from an organization that encourages personal responsibility.

Labels: charter, KIPP, union

KIPP Teachers Organize

"Teachers at 2 Charter Schools Plan to Join Union, Despite Notion of Incompatibility"

The New York Times reported earlier this week that teachers at a KIPP school in Brooklyn have joined the UFT (the United Federation of Teachers, New York City's teacher union). Read the article here.

It seems that teachers at this school feel that their working conditions (which at KIPP schools in general are typically recognized as strenuous, to put it mildly) make teaching there unsustainable, leading to high teacher turnover and ultimately negatively impacting students' education. In addition, teachers want to make sure they can express their views on educational matters without fear of losing their jobs (see Leo Casey's post on Edwize for that one).

KIPP is a darling of a certain faction of the education reform community, so this displeases many...Some believe that "A union contract is actually at odds with a charter school” (Jeanne Allen, executive director of the Center for Education Reform, a Washington group that supports charter schools). For the record, AFT (the American Federation of Teachers, UFT's parent organization) and its affiliates do not, and have organized teachers at charter schools in other regions of the country, as well as opening and running charter schools of their own
(check out this AFT press release or this EdWeek Teacher Beat post for just a bit more information).

Regardless of whether one believes that charter schools and teachers unions are incompatible, my favorite response to the development is Alexander Russo's: "I guess this is what happens when your teachers get past the starry-eyed hero worship stage, or when your network of schools gets beyond a certain size."

So some feel this is inevitable...I wonder about the collective impact of this type of individual charter school teacher organization on the future of the charter school movement, and on the future of education reform in general.

1.22.09 Update: I also enjoyed Ezra Klein's posting

Labels: charter, KIPP, union

New Brief on KIPP

Columbia University’s Jeffrey Henig recently released a brief reviewing seven studies on the effectiveness of KIPP charter schools. Some of his conclusions? Students who enroll and stay in KIPP schools tend to perform better on standardized assessments than similar students in more traditional schools. However, Henig adds caveats to this finding, discussing unobservable biases in student motivation and support, as well as high (and seemingly selective) student attrition. He also points out that few studies actually examine the KIPP “process,” which includes high teacher turnover, and the implications of that process on the expansion and sustainability of the KIPP model. Ultimately, Henig provide recommendations to policymakers on how to best utilize the existing evidence on KIPP in informing education policy and reform strategies.

Learn more by checking out the executive summary or the full policy brief (both accessed from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice). You can also read the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews’ response to Henig's analysis.

If you are interested in more data on KIPP schools, check out SRI International’s three-year study of Bay Area KIPP schools, which found some promising short-term academic results but could not draw any long-term conclusions given the high and seemingly selective student attrition at these schools.

Labels: charter, KIPP, research