Charter schools can fail for a number of reasons, and in this report, failures are broken down into eight general categories. The following explanations will help you to identify the reasons behind why charter schools fail.
Academic: This applies to schools whose sponsors found them unable to meet the academic goals and performance targets set by the state or written in their charter.
District: Applies to schools that were closed because its school district sponsor had issues with the independence of the charter and chose to cut it from the budget, or decided to close it as a cost saving measure. Some of the schools became involved in long, arduous fights with the district and due to additional costs of these lawsuits, were forced to close. Final control of these charter schools’ existence ultimately was with the district.
Facilities: Applies to schools that were unable to contract for a viable facility and had to close or voluntarily gave up their charter. While it is the charter’s obligation to find a facility, the roadblocks created by zoning boards, school districts, funding shortages and even community opposition make up the bulk of facilities problems that result in a school closing.
Financial: Charters with budgetary problems resulting from involuntary causes, such as a lack of enrollment, insufficient funds, costs that exceeded projected revenues, etc. In most cases, these schools tried to become financially healthier, but for a variety of reasons, they could not sustain the institution. Many of these charters voluntarily returned their charter when the financial problems became too great.
Mismanagement: Closures under this heading were due to deliberate actions on the part of organizers or sponsors, such as misspending, failure to provide adequate programs, materials, etc., failure to adhere to the school’s charter, or an overall lack of accountability. There can also be extreme cases of mismanagement such as fraud or theft, but these cases are rare. Schools in this category could also be called “bad-apples.” These problems are generally uncovered quickly and charters are closed before mismanagement affects student learning.
Other/Unknown: A handful of charter schools close for reasons that do not fit into any of these categories, like schools that closed due to damage from Hurricane Katrina. Other school operators returned the charter with no explanation, and there are no recorded reasons for closure.
CREDO at Stanford University
CREDO at Stanford University was established to improve empirical evidence about education reform and student performance at the primary and secondary levels. CREDO at Stanford University supports education organizations and policymakers in using reliable research and program evaluation to assess the performance of education initiatives. CREDO's valuable insight helps educators and policymakers strengthen their focus on the results from innovative programs, curricula, policies or accountability practices. http://credo.stanford.edu
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NEW STANFORD REPORT FINDS
SERIOUS QUALITY CHALLENGE IN NATIONAL
CHARTER SCHOOL SECTOR
Report Recognizes Robust Demand, Supply and Exceptional Charters, Faults Quality Controls,
Authorizers and Charter Caps
Stanford, CA – A new report issued today by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University found that there is a wide variance in the quality of the nation’s several thousand charter schools with, in the aggregate, students in charter schools not faring as well as students in traditional public schools.
While the report recognized a robust national demand for more charter schools from parents and local communities, it found that 17 percent of charter schools reported academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools, while 37 percent of charter schools showed gains that were worse than their traditional public school counterparts, with 46 percent of charter schools demonstrating no significant difference.
The report found that the academic success of students in charter schools was affected by the individual state policy environment. States with caps limiting the number of charter schools reported significantly lower academic results than states without caps limiting charter growth. States that have the presence of multiple charter school authorizers also reported lower academic results than states with fewer authorizers in place. Finally, states with charter legislation allowing for appeals of previously denied charter school applications saw a small but significant increase in student performance.
The Stanford report, entitled, “Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States,” is the first detailed national assessment of charter school impacts since its longitudinal, student-level analysis covers more than 70 percent of the nation’s students attending charter schools. The peer- reviewed analysis looks at student achievement growth on state achievement tests in both reading and math with controls for student demographics and eligibility for program support such as free or reduced-price lunch and special education. The analysis includes the most current student achievement data from 15 states and the District of Columbia and gauges whether students who attend charter schools fare better than if they would have attended a traditional public school.
“The issue of quality is the most pressing problem that the charter school movement faces,” said Dr. Margaret Raymond, director of CREDO at Stanford University. “The charter school movement continues to work hard to remove barriers to charter school entry into the market, making notable strides to level the playing field and improve access to facilities funding, but now it needs to equally focus on removing the barriers to exit, which means closing underperforming schools.”
The report found several key positive findings regarding the academic performance of students attending charter schools. For students that are low income, charter schools had a larger and more positive effect than for similar students in traditional public schools. English Language Learner students also reported significantly better gains in charter schools, while special education students showed similar results to their traditional public school peers.
The report also found that students do better in charter schools over time. While first year charter school students on average experienced a decline in learning, students in their second and third years in charter schools saw a significant reversal, experiencing positive achievement gains.
The report found that achievement results varied by states that reported individual data. States with reading and math gains that were significantly higher for charter school students than would have occurred in traditional schools included: Arkansas, Colorado (Denver), Illinois (Chicago), Louisiana and Missouri.
States with reading and math gains that were either mixed or were not different than their peers in the traditional public school system included: California, the District of Columbia, Georgia and North Carolina.
States with reading and math gains that were significantly below their peers in the traditional public school system included: Arizona, Florida, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio and Texas.
"If the supporters of charter schools fail to address the quality challenge, they run the risk of having it addressed for them," said Dr. Raymond. "If the charter school movement is to flourish, a deliberate and sustained effort to increase the proportion of high quality schools is essential. The replication of successful charter school models is one important element of this effort. On the other side of the equation, however, authorizers, charter school advocates and policymakers must be willing and able to fulfill their end of the original charter school bargain, which is accountability in exchange for flexibility."
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California's charter schools get mixed scores in new study
"New Report on California Charters: They can produce failing results for less cost than most Public Schools""
| California's charter schools get mixed scores in new study USC researchers cite lapses in financial reporting, but say it appears that many are using public funds wisely, and that academic scores are fairly similar to those of public schools. By Mitchell Landsberg Lax financial reporting makes it difficult to assess the fiscal health of California charter schools, although the limited information available suggests that many are making efficient use of their public funds, according to a study released Wednesday by researchers at USC. In its annual report on the health of the state's charter schools, USC's Center on Educational Governance also found that charters continue to outperform traditional public schools in English instruction but, paradoxically, do a worse job of lifting nonnative English speakers to fluency. And their overall math performance has slipped, lagging behind traditional public schools. Charters are public schools that are run independently, with only minimal oversight from school districts. There are now close to 700 charters in California, making them a significant part of the state's educational landscape, but causing strains in the capacity of districts to monitor them. Although the schools are required to file quarterly financial reports with local districts, which in turn file them with the state, USC researchers found that data was spotty in some counties, including Los Angeles, where fiscal data was available for only 30 of 163 schools. Education professor Priscilla Wohlstetter, who heads the research project, said it appears that schools are filing the reports, but that some districts are lumping them together, making it impossible to review them individually. "This is so critical," she said, "because the president and the secretary of Education have said we are going to double the number of charter schools around the country; however, we want to make sure we have good state accountability systems that track progress. . . . If there's this much missing data, how is California going to be able to access the federal money that's available?" Jed Wallace, president of the California Charter Schools Assn., said he believes that the problem is that the financial reporting requirements are "overly burdensome," and need to be streamlined. Although the USC researchers were critical of the reporting lapses, they praised the schools for what information was available, saying that most had improved their fiscal health and were spending most of their money in the classroom. The report also found that the Academic Performance Index scores of charter schools overall were fairly similar to those of traditional public schools. mitchell.landsberg @latimes.com | |
| BEYOND THE RHETORIC OF CHARTER SCHOOL REFORM: A Study of Ten California School Districts UCLA Charter School Study
This report provides an overview of findings from one of the first intensive studies of charter school reform in California, the second state to pass charter school legislation and the state with both the second largest number of charter schools and the most students enrolled in these schools. Charter school reform allows groups of parents, educators, and entrepreneurs to create more independent schools, free from many state and local regulations. The purpose of this two-and-a-half year study was to examine many of the most prominent claims of charter school advocates against the day-to-day experiences of educators, parents, and students in charter schools as well as in nearby public schools. We conducted case studies of 17 charter schools in 10 school districts across the state. We sampled for diversity at both the district and school level in order to capture the range of experiences within this reform movement. While charter reform as a public policy tool prescribes no particular school-level practice or singular reform strategy, it is appealing to educators and policy makers due to claims about how charter reform will spur much-needed change throughout the public system. |
"The Relationship Between Policy Talk and Implementation: A Comparison of Charter Schools with Conventional Public Schools" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Hilton San Francisco & Renaissance Parc 55 Hotel, San Abstract: One of the key concepts embedded in much of the policy talk around charter school reform is increased decision-making at the school site in exchange for greater accountability. Using the 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), this study seeks to test the relationship between policy talk and implementation in charter school reform by comparing conventional public schools and charter schools around issues of accountability and decision-making. Focusing on these areas of school life, are there differences between charter schools and conventional public schools? Using a framework proposed by Newman, King, and Rigdon (1997) to analyze performance accountability, this study seeks to identify possible differences in performance accountability between charter schools and conventional public schools. Is charter school accountability best characterized as internal accountability -- i.e. are standards for teaching and learning generated within the school site? Or is charter school accountability better characterized as external accountability or imposed by entities outside the school? Both types of accountability refer to how goals for the school are formed. An additional concept, organizational capacity, refers to the degree to which the school has developed the capacity necessary to reach these goals. Do we see differences in the organizational capacity of charter schools compared to conventional public schools? The focus of this paper is a exploratory analysis of variables that will be used to develop school-level measures of these constructs in subsequent analyses. | |
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Research Doesn’t Offer Much Guidance on Turnarounds
By Debra Viadero
Ever since U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called for turning around 5,000 of the nation’s worst-performing schools, the phone has been ringing steadily at the University of Virginia’s School Turnaround Specialist Program. Most of the calls are from educators looking for expert advice on how to go about transforming failing schools into success stories.
But if research-tested prescriptions for success are what those callers want, neither the center’s experts nor any other scholar may have much to offer. That’s because rigorous research on how to engineer the kind of dramatic transformation that Mr. Duncan is advocating is a scarce commodity, according to many scholars.
“There is both a lack of turnarounds in education and a lack of research about turnarounds,” said Bryan C. Hassel, a co-director of Public Impact, a Chapel Hill, N.C., consulting firm that has studied turnarounds in education and other fields. “And the research base for turnarounds outside of education isn’t any kind of ‘gold standard’ research base, either.”
The press for research-based solutions to the school turnaround problem is also heightened by the promise of billions of dollars in economic-stimulus grants to states from the U.S. Department of Education to do the job. The Race to the Top program alone includes $3.5 billion meant to be used for that purpose, as well as for meeting the other goals of that program, and the federal education-spending bill is expected to include millions more in Title I school improvement grants.
But even before Secretary Duncan began offering federal dollars and making speeches highlighting the topic in June, the need for dramatic action on the school turnaround front was obvious.
Under the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires schools to undergo restructuring when they fail to reach their academic targets for five years in a row, the list of failing schools grows annually. By the 2007-08 school year, five years into the law, more than 3,500 schools across the country were officially in some stage of restructuring.
Counting Successes
While no one is tracking how many schools at the national level have successfully emerged from restructuring, a handful of small-scale studies suggest the number is tiny, even when including the high-profile successes that Mr. Duncan has touted in Boston, Chicago, Hartford, Conn., New York City, and Philadelphia.
A Michigan case study by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy, for example, found that only five of the 34 elementary and middle schools identified for restructuring in that state had left that status.
At the Virginia turnaround-specialist program, one of a handful across the country to specialize in transforming chronically low-performing schools, the track record is better. Of the 43 principal “turnaround specialists” in the program’s first three cohorts, 57 percent went to schools that have since either met their targets for adequate yearly progress under the NCLB law or achieved substantial academic gains.
Not everyone agrees, though, that research on turning around the poorest-performing schools is lacking. Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University research scientist, for one, contends that in many cases, “we have more knowledge than we actually apply.”
He and his colleagues are putting their know-how to work through an intensive strategy that builds on the Talent Development model for school improvement that was developed at Johns Hopkins, adds an early-warning system so that educators can identify students at risk of dropping out early, and enlists City Year, a Boston-based group that recruits young people for a year of full-time service, to act as mentors and tutors for the neediest students.
A one-year pilot of the model in Philadelphia resulted in a 40 percent reduction in the number of students with behavior and attendance problems. In addition, Mr. Balfanz said, half the students with failing grades were able to raise their grades. He is expanding the model in the fall to New Orleans, Chicago, and San Antonio for further testing.
Studies Ignored?
Those who see a lack of research evidence for turning around failing schools, some researchers say, are also ignoring the large body of existing research on comprehensive school reform, a strategy that makes use of off-the-shelf models for schoolwide improvement.
Reviews of studies of those whole-school improvement models have shown that, while most don’t seem to work, a handful, such as Success For All and Direct Instruction, consistently produce academic improvements over time.
“I’m distressed that this is being approached as though we know so little,” said Robert E. Slavin, Success For All’s developer. “We learned a vast amount from research on comprehensive school reform that would be of great use in turning around low-performing schools.”
In a new policy brief, the Washington-based Alliance for Excellent Education echoes Mr. Slavin’s view, calling on the federal government to do more to encourage whole-school reform as part of a systemic strategy for improving low-performing schools.
But a practice guide on school turnaround strategies by the Education Department’s Institute of Education Sciences, or IES, suggests there’s a good reason to bypass that research: Whole-school improvement strategies tend to be slow and scattershot.
“School turnaround work involves quick, dramatic improvement within three years,” the guide says, “while school improvement is marked by steady, incremental improvement over a longer period of time.”
One-size-fits-all research solutions are also hard to find because winning strategies differ from school to school, experts say.
“The reason we put so much emphasis on diagnostics is that turnaround specialists have to determine what conditions led to the decline in the first place,” said Daniel L. Duke, a professor of educational leadership with the University of Virginia program.
A lack of scientific research notwithstanding, there’s no shortage of research-informed advice on how to transform chronically low-performing schools.
Experts are drawing recommendations from case studies of schools that have successfully transformed; turnarounds in other sectors of the economy, such as business; and the body of literature on schools that “beat the odds” by achieving better-than-expected results given their demographic makeups. Those sources may have a lower standard of evidence, but it’s better than no guidance at all, many scholars say.
Serious About Change
The most recent contribution to that genre of reports was the IES practice guide. Published in May, the guide represents the considered opinion of a federally appointed panel of experts on best bets for strategies practitioners can use to turn around schools stuck in a low-performing rut.
According to Rebecca Herman, a researcher from the Washington-based American Institutes for Research, or AIR, who headed the panel, the experts relied mostly on case studies to develop four cross-cutting recommendations.
Primary among them, the report says, is to “signal the need for change with strong leadership.” That could mean a public pronouncement on the urgency for change, replacing the principal, or requiring a school’s leader to take on a higher-profile role in guiding instruction, according to the report.
For example, at Delaplaine McDaniel Elementary School in Philadelphia, school officials recruited Darlynn Gray, a turnaround specialist trained by the Virginia program, to act as the new principal. A charismatic figure, she immediately set to work meeting with teachers and parents, leading the students in combined morning dance sessions and academic pep rallies, and using a bullhorn to monitor students’ behavior as they walked home from school.
Philadelphia took a different approach at Pickett Charter Middle School, another successful turnaround with results documented in a case study. District officials closed the school and turned it over to Mastery Learning, a charter-management group with a reputation for a “tight” management style.
Expert opinion is nearly unanimous, though, on the importance of achieving an early, quick win, regardless of who is in charge. One famous example of that strategy from Ms. Hassel’s work: William Bratton, when he took over the New York City police department in the late 1980s, led a crackdown on minor criminals, such as the then-ubiquitous “squeegee pests” who washed the windows of cars stopped in traffic and then demanded payment. The effort helped convince skeptical New Yorkers that the police department could make a visible difference. In schools, experts say, an early, quick win might be as simple as a fresh paint job on a tired building.
The IES practice guide also calls for maintaining a focus on student learning. Typically, scholars say, turnaround schools do that by collecting data to identify and track gaps in student learning or behaviors that get in the way of learning, such as poor attendance patterns or discipline problems, so that they can be addressed strategically.
An influential 2007 report by the Boston-based Mass Insight Education and Research Institute extended recommendations to include districts and states. It called on districts to build “protective zones” in which clusters of schools, many of them partnering with charter-management organizations or other external providers, could operate free of traditional bureaucratic constraints. States, in turn, would form small, specialized units to supervise and coordinate the work of “lead” turnaround specialists in those districts.
“There’s lots of research behind what hasn’t worked, and what successful, individual urban schools look like,” said William E. Guenther, the president and founder of Mass Insight and one of the primary authors of its 2007 report. “If we simply say ‘Let’s wait for the research,’ then it will be too late.”
Meanwhile, in an effort to fill in the research gap, the Institute of Education Sciences has also launched three new research programs, all aimed at building up a “menu of practices” from which educators can choose when faced with having to revitalize a persistently low-performing school.
Under the first grant, which was awarded to the AIR this month, researchers will use student-achievement data to identify promising practices, programs, or policies from low-performing schools that turn the corner in three states: Florida, North Carolina, and Texas. The other two grants, due to be awarded next year, will underwrite a national center on scaling up effective schools and a program of research aimed at developing a framework educators can use to diagnose problems in low-performing schools.
But Mr. Hassel of Public Impact said federal education officials also should be studying the 5,000 turnaround attempts that are about to be unleashed with funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic-stimulus package approved in February.
“That’s a huge learning opportunity, but there’s no apparatus to glean the knowledge from that experience,” he said. “We learned far too little from the No Child Left Behind experience on this.”
Edweek.org
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