The potential for Houston’s bold new policy of using value-added test scores as a part of teacher evaluations and then linking evaluation results to decisions about potential teacher dismissal will hinge on several factors, including an increased awareness of how the value-added test scores are determined and the weight they are given when judging performance. Also important is a clear understanding between teachers and administrators of how evaluation results will be used to support teachers and help improve their performance before they are terminated. There is much to be learned in how Houston proceeds with this policy as it may be tried by many districts and states as part of Race to the Top efforts.

A recent study by Learning Point Associates and Public Agenda, Retaining Teacher Talent, showed that 82 percent of teachers surveyed nationwide believe there are at least a few teachers in their school who are just going through the motions and failing to do a good job. Three quarters of the teachers surveyed said that teacher effectiveness would improve if it were easier to terminate ineffective teachers. So what advice do teachers give on how to measure teacher performance? The vast majority – 92 percent -- of teachers surveyed as part of our Retaining Teacher Talent research said student engagement was a good or excellent indicator of teacher effectiveness and 72 percent said individual student learning compared to other students was a good or excellent indicator. There was less consensus on the role of standardized test scores in measuring teacher performance but more than half of the teachers surveyed – 56 percent – said that student performance on standardized tests were a good or excellent measure of teacher effectiveness.

What lessons do these results hold for Houston? Teachers deserve transparency about how the test scores are calculated and weighted. This will increase teacher trust that administrators will use this information judiciously and dismiss only those teachers who truly have proven themselves incapable of performing. Supporting teachers in improving their performance is also critically important and plans for providing professional development need to be communicated to teachers and administrators. There seems to be general concern that the value-added scores will be weighted so heavily by administrators that the other 33 performance criteria fade to irrelevance.

In her response to the blog posts addressing the question, “Will AFT Teacher Evaluation Effort Succeed?” Randi Weingarten stated that evaluation reform efforts must be rooted in a support for and respect of teachers and that the system needs to be transparent so leaders can adapt the evaluation measures by jettisoning what doesn’t work and replicating what does. She is right on both accounts.

Houston is better-positioned than most districts to introduce test score data into their teacher termination policy. Value-added scores were first introduced into Houston’s performance-related pay plan in 2007. Teachers and administrators have had several years to become accustomed to this performance measure. However, there will be bumps in the road. Through regular, open dialogue with teachers, and a strong communications plan, Houston can create a model for dismissing under-performers who bring teacher morale and student achievement down.

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Do Charter Schools Deserve the Spotlight? December 8, 2009

Competition often spurs innovation and I believe that charter schools have done just that. Charters have agitated the fabric of education and helped to establish a model for school accountability. One of Secretary Duncan's "Listening Tour" stops was to the North Star Academy in Newark, NJ; a charter school located in my Congressional district. Observations and discussions during my visit to North Star with Secretary Duncan and similar visits to charter schools within my district support the fact that charter schools have done an excellent job with engaging parents and students beyond the traditional school schedule. Charter schools have provided enormous opportunities for students who would otherwise fall through the gigantic cracks in the education system. What charter schools have and continue to do for scores of children must be acknowledged; however, I caution the tendency to hail charter schools as the panacea to heal all that ails our school children.

We must approach the reform of our education system with multipronged solutions. Charter schools play an essential role in the reform movement, but this structure will not fit the needs of all children. Charter school results are lauded throughout the country and often compared to public schools. Their admission by lottery policy is often highlighted to underscore the compatibility of their structure for all children. Honestly speaking, it takes a special parent to apply to send his/ her child to a charter school. These are the parents who are already engaged and are already invested in their child’s education. It is great that charters are able to couple these parents with the resources to help their child transcend their own circumstances and beat the odds of succeeding in their community. However, what we need in addition to a system that catches those falling through the cracks is a system to fix the cracks all together for all children.

If we don’t widen our focus, we will have public schools that are even more concentrated with uninvolved parents, underperforming and undervalued children, poor teachers, and lost hope. Charter schools certainly serve a purpose; however, we need to spread the focus in education beyond saving only 10 percent of students who are falling through the cracks, but to close the cracks completely!

We have several lessons to learn from high performing charter schools. In fact, I have introduced two bills, along with the late Senator Ted Kennedy who was a starch supporter of equality in education, that share the same ideals of charter schools regarding parental involvement and effective extended learning time.

The first is the Time for Innovation Matters in Education (TIME) Act. The purpose of this legislation is to expand learning time in low-performing, high poverty schools and districts in order to boost student performance, close academic achievement gaps, and expand enrichment opportunities for our nation’s most under-served students. While the expectations of our students and schools have risen, and the demands of our global society are more intense, the time allotted for students and teachers to reach these standards has remained exactly the same. In fact, the near-universal school calendar of 180 six-hour days has been unchanged since it was designed to meet the needs of farms and factories in the early 20th century.

The expansion of learning time is a comprehensive strategy that redesigns a school’s entire educational program in a way that is not incremental. Built around the academic needs and interests of students, expanded learning initiatives cultivate relationships with community partners and modernize public schools to help develop 21st century learning skills to prepare all students for life-long success.

This Act establishes two types of competitive five-year grants to LEAs and SEAs to plan for and implement an expanded and redesigned school program that will:

· Add at least 360 hours per school year for all students in a school – the equivalent of two hours per day – and redesign their educational program to better meet the educational needs of academically at-risk children.

· Enable schools and school districts to demonstrate the effectiveness of significantly expanding the school day and year to raise student achievement and improve student engagement in low performing, high-poverty schools.

· Serve as a catalyst for school innovation and improvement and help determine if expanding the school day and/or year is a feasible and effective way to help students meet challenging state academic standards and close the achievement gap.

Expanding learning time will allow for more instruction in mathematics, English language arts, science and other core subjects; provide more enrichment and educational opportunities including art, music, physical education, apprenticeships, and community service; encourage schools to form partnerships with community-based organizations and institutions of higher learning to provide educational opportunities to children that are not currently available to them; and increase opportunities for educators to work collaboratively and to participate in quality professional development.

More and better use of learning time benefits all children, but can have an especially significant impact on students who are academically behind. Without rethinking the current school calendar, the challenge of getting students in these schools to grade level and beyond will remain difficult. Well-implemented (and I stress “well-implemented”) expanded learning time initiatives can provide all students in a school with the time, instruction, and structures necessary to achieve academic success and other positive outcomes.

The second is the Keeping Parents and Communities Engaged (PACE) Act. The Keeping PACE Act amends Title V of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (No Child Left Behind Act of 2001) to expand parent and community involvement in schools, and to provide the integrated supports and comprehensive services children need to learn and stay in school.

Effective parental engagement, as well as community-based, integrated student services, often makes the difference between the academic success and a failure of students in school. Many communities offer a broad scope of services and support for children and youth, but fragmented delivery doesn’t always ensure that services and community resources reach the students who need them the most.

Students today face an array of problems that are often too demanding for schools to tackle alone. Studies have shown that when schools and communities collaborate, student learning improves, family engagement increases, and schools become more effective. To better address the comprehensive needs of students, the Keeping PACE Act will offer incentives for community-based organizations, in partnership with schools, to deliver integrated student services. This legislation also authorizes funds to support Parent and Community Outreach Coordinators in Title I schools, to facilitate the participation of families and communities in the education of their children.

These bills are both solutions that should be part of the multipronged approach to close the gaps in education and create authentic learning experiences. To answer the question of the blog: Do charter schools deserve the attention that the Obama administration is giving them? I would say absolutely! These schools have stimulated change, spurred innovation, and created models of what quality education can produce. However; at the same time, we need to increase the conversation about authentic learning experiences for all students – public, charter, parochial, home schooled. In my district some time ago, Newark Public Schools adapted the motto that “All children can learn.” As a former teacher within Newark Public Schools, I wholeheartedly believe this adage. However, we as adults owe it to our children to tap into each and every child's potential to make that statement a reality.

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The Obama administration's desire, if not passion, to promote charter schools as a major strategy for raising student achievement was evident in its proposed requirements for states seeking Race to the Top grants. However, the administration did the right thing in pulling back after a series of studies produced mixed evidence on the success of the charter movement thus far.

NSBA supports the charter school concept as long as the local school board is the authorizer. The reason is the board can provide the appropriate oversight and accountability to the public while ensuring that the charter's mission fits with the district's overall educational strategy. This gives the board the chance to figure out if the charter would actually improve the options for parents at a cost effective rate, or would simply siphon off resources without the results needed. Plus, lessons learned could be spread to other schools in the district.

Fortunately, pragmatism and flexibility outweighed ideology and heavy-handedness in the final Race to the Top requirements. But we need to be ever vigilant as the reauthorization of the ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act) takes place in the coming year. The data on charter schools, which is very mixed, means that school boards must carefully evaluate their effectiveness as they do with all schools, close the ones that are ineffective, or change the operational and instructional strategy and provide the research to share across the nation.

With so many important decisions ahead, it is incumbent on the Obama administration to continue to work in partnership with the states and local school districts to make common sense decisions that affect all children. Ongoing, objective research on charter schools - and their place in improving student achievement - is critical. Data should drive Congress's decision making. Let's hope it does.

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Mr. Sciarra's post is right on the money. His observations about New Jersey's charter schools could easily be applied with likely the same degree of accuracy to the charter systems of other charter-allowing states as well.

Furthermore, his recommendations are actionable and easily incorporated into existing charter laws and federal programs.

This is the kind of thinking we need in the process of evaluating the charter school movement. Mr. Sciarra's ideas are strikingly responsible and pragmatic. Moreover, they seem to me utterly free of ideological bias -- more about observation than about judgment.

Collecting what we know about charters, monitoring new charters more closely, acknowledging that charters have not been studied adequately to make predictions as to their future success or failure, wanting better coordination between charters and traditional public schools, all of these ideas strike me not only as right but also as simple matters of common sense and responsible action.

Without policies like those Mr. Sciarra suggests, we run the risk of expanding a reform that appears already to be somewhat chaotic, and thereby manufacturing even more chaos.

The intense interest that seems to exist around the "inherent rightness" of charters at this moment in education reform smacks of fetishism to me. Like so many of the things our country has tried in education reform, charters are still an unknown quantity -- even after 18 years and 5000 schools. It's not that there haven't been results, merely that these results are all over the board and that the factors contributing to success and failure form a complex system of correlational effects as opposed to causal relationships.

A large expansion of the charter movement without the kinds of "charter reforms" suggested by Mr. Sciarra will only make matters less clear in the future -- and therefore more likely to be politicized where the charter school issue is concerned.

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As yet another reform authorized by states to improve public education in high poverty communities, are charters an effective and equitable strategy? In New Jersey, where most charters are in the poorest districts, with many operating for years, here’s what we know so far:

1) The charters, as a sector, are among the lowest performing in the state, on par with schools in the poorest districts.

2) Several charters do very well, but others are not progressing and are on the state’s list of schools in need of improvement.

3) Urban charters enroll few students with disabilities, and even fewer ELL students in comparison to their district counterparts. They also enroll fewer free lunch (very poor) students even though state law requires charters to serve a “cross-section” of the districts’ population

4) There is no research on why certain some charters succeed, and why others don’t. The state has no rigorous, independent, ongoing evaluation regime.

5) Even if we had such research, there is no mechanism to transmit effective charter practices to district schools, and vice versa. Charters are structurally disconnected from the districts where they operate

6) Students in charters get less funding than their district counterparts, but it’s impossible to tell the extent that private funding makes up the gap. And the extent of private funding varies among the charters.

This record raises serious challenges. To advance equity for all students, federal policy should demand states put in place more rigorous frameworks for charter authorization, accountability, funding parity and transparency, and program evaluation, embedded within district-wide improvement efforts for all schools, regardless of governance structure. And we need tough requirements, with enforcement teeth, to safeguard against further student segregation in districts that are already intensely segregated. Otherwise, we’ll find ourselves in another cycle of trying to figure out how to “reform the reform.”

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Do charters deserve the attention they are getting? Our colleagues at this esteemed blog ask the question apparently in light of two “studies” showing conflicting results.

Tomes have and will continue to be written on the latest high court case of education – Raymond v Hoxby. This battle over data is yet one more reason why we must stop this fixation on definitive, so-called “research” to guide our every move. Researchers, like media (like all of us), are human. They have their biases, their flaws, their incredible strengths, their passions. They can be wrong, and they can be right. Their work may and should be used to assist us in making vital policy decisions. But the researcher’s work is not the pen-ultimate conclusion as to why and how we should behave when it comes to teaching our children and assuring academic accountability for what it is we do in our schools every day.

We know that charter schools work for the vast majority of kids, and we know that because there is very reliable data, which doesn’t need a researcher’s lens to comprehend. State test scores, in real time and growth models, combined with individual school data and other outcome measures as provided by and through authorizers, can give us a very strong indication of how charters are performing.

Making meaningful observations - based on in-depth data, of real, live people and schools - is critical to coming to any conclusion. That’s why, when we do judge and use research to back up our own conclusions (which are informed daily by the storehouse of data we receive and vet), we come down in the Hoxby camp. Consistently, Dr. Caroline Hoxby has produced high quality research that makes conclusions based on comparable locations, comparable demographics and comparable characteristics of schools (ie. grades, longevity, etc.).

The study Hoxby performed showing demonstrable and excellent achievement in New York’s charter schools was one of the most detailed reports on that state’s charter achievement, but not the only one. We know what she said is true from years of state test data, authorizer reviews, and even independent media and other scholarship.

Most of us just see one study and draw a conclusion. Without the long view – and in-depth review on a regular basis – it’s understandable that some would want to dismiss charters after reading a study like that put out by CREDO. But thankfully, there are hundreds of thousands of citizens who don’t make decisions when a university issues a report. Let’s let scholarly works guide us, but let’s stop waiting for the nirvana of educational conclusions to come so we can finally move on. The debate over how charters work and who they serve is over. Let’s embrace them, add to them, improve them and keep open to even more radical notions of reform that put failed school bureaucracies out of business so our kids can have a shot at what they deserve.

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There is nothing wrong with charters in themselves, as long as states hold them accountable for decent management and results. But they are not a magic bullet for three reasons: (1) on average, they do not seem to do any better at teaching kids from difficult circumstances than regular public schools serving the same populations, (2) they are not serving as a laboratory for innovation for the regular public schools, because the ideology of competition has created a space that is too bitter for sharing new ideas, and, as Deborah Meier says, many of them are not that innovative, and (3) if we look solely to charters for innovation, we will never succeed in creating effective, learner-centered schools at scale.

That is why we work directly with troubled public schools. If we are to succeed at making sure that every student learns in this country, we have to master the turn-around, where we work with the existing teaching force to transform large failing schools into innovative, small learning environments.

We are committed to this effort, in which current teachers adapt their teaching style to take full advantage of all the innovative possibilities inherent in small schools for personalization and engagement leading to real learning. It would be a huge waste of talent, commitment, and creativity if we as a nation abandon this effort just because it is hard.

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As president and CEO of UNCF, I have a vested interest in the education that students get before they go to college. And as a member of the board of directors of the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Foundation network of charter schools, I have had a front-row seat at the potential that charter schools have for giving students the kind of P-12 education they need to succeed when they get to college. As part of my service on the KIPP board, I have visited twelve KIPP charter schools in seven states, in addition to numerous other high performing public charter schools. Based on this experience, I believe passionately that public charter schools are crucial to our nation’s effort to create an equitable public school system that offers opportunity for all children.

President Obama and Secretary Duncan are on the right track as they work to reform education by attempting to replicate what works and fostering broader systemic change through the Race to the Top grant program.

Any conversation about charter schools should start by revisiting why charter schools were created. Public charter schools were intended to bring both direct and indirect benefits to public education by:

1) Giving public school educators increased freedom in exchange for increased accountability: The idea was that charter schools, free from bureaucratic restrictions, would implement innovative approaches and achieve better academic results, especially for traditionally underserved students.

2) Becoming incubators for new ideas and strategies that can be adopted by traditional public schools: Charter schools were also intended to create an environment where educators could try new ideas and identify the ones that worked best. Traditional public schools would adopt these innovations, resulting in better educational outcomes for a broader group of students.

Nearly two decades after the first charter school opened in Minnesota, we have seen the emergence of a critical mass of high quality charter schools—KIPP, Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First to name a few. These charter schools are achieving results by extending the school day to give kids more time to learn, partnering with parents to support learning, and giving principals autonomy over key decisions. Students at these schools are not only thinking about college, they are gaining the skills, mindset, and know-how to get there.

On a direct level, these high-quality charter schools are producing results that defy the long-held belief that schools alone can’t change the trajectory for kids in our nation’s inner city and poor rural areas. In Louisiana, four of the top performing, non-selective admission schools in the state are charter schools. Two of these schools are KIPP charter schools in New Orleans that are also the two top-performing public schools in the city.

In terms of indirect impact, we are also seeing signs that public charter schools are beginning to have a transformative impact on the traditional school system. Because of the strong results charter schools have achieved, many reform-minded school superintendents are findings ways to integrate these practices into the standard operating procedure for all schools.

The need for more school time—longer school days and school years-- is a perfect example of this trend. In the past few months, we’ve heard about the need for more time from President Obama, Secretary Duncan and even TIME Magazine. Even in an era of scarce resources, extending the school day and year has gone from a fringe idea to one that is taking hold. This week the National Center on Time and Learning released a report on 655 public schools nationwide that have extended the traditional school day, impacting the learning opportunities for more than 300,000 students.

In New Orleans, Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas has extended the school days and given public schools more autonomy, and the results speak for themselves. Since 2005, New Orleans’ District Performance Score increased nearly 10 points (a nearly 20% increase), while the state performance remained flat.

We need to stop our ‘either or’ mindset about charter and traditional public schools and realize that kids—especially minority and low- income kids—need a ‘both and’ approach if we are going to move quickly to address the institutionalized inequity in our school system.

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If you haven't already caught wind of this, the Center for Education Reform created an online charter directory. It's useful if you are interested in learning more about charter demographics or charters in your state.

The charter school issue must poke at some dark place in the American psyche because we love to argue about it with so much passion – and so little logic. If I inadvertently fan the flames here, I recommend reading Mr. Rotherham’s post. His ideas are sensible, his insights sound. Above all, his voice is calm.



I would like to take a shot here at answering three questions:



1. When we consider charter schools as a strategy for reform, what are we really talking about?



2. What will be the likely impact of increasing the number of charter schools in the near term?



3. (As provided by our editor) Do charters deserve the spotlight?



If memory serves me correctly, the Charter School Movement is almost 20 years old. Originally, we were told that charter schools would provide two things: (1) New models of schooling that could be replicated broadly across our educational system; and (2) Competition to local public schools that would spur them on to bigger and better changes.



Has either of these things happened? I don’t think so. At least not yet.



The only truly new charter model I’m aware of is KIPP’s, and I think we all have to agree this is a special case for several reasons -- though no less of a stunning achievement because of this. First of all, the core of the new model is simply a longer school day and a longer school year. More time for teaching and learning should provide better outcomes. And when your kids go to school 35% more than everybody else’s, you darn sure better come up with better results – at least 35% worth which is just about what KIPP achieves.



This is not to take away from the wonderful work KIPP does or the importance of KIPP as a leader in new models of education. But the model itself isn’t easily replicated because – outside of the KIPP sphere of influence – most communities don’t want to deal with the longer school days and the longer school year. I think it’s also important to note that KIPP has secured hundreds of millions of dollars of private funding. This is wonderful. But it does make one question whether such a model of schooling could be sustained en masse without additional financial support.



Beyond KIPP, the creation of new models of schooling, and their widespread replication, has been essentially nil. Apparently, we have 5000 charter schools in the US right now. What percentage do you think have actually created innovative and successful models of schooling that could be easily replicated? From my travels around the country, I would say the percentage was near zero. Some of the better known charter providers have achieved slightly better than average results but it’s unclear that their approaches are innovative or replicable. And none has been shown to work on a scale larger than a few schools. Even KIPP, best of breed in the charter world, still has fewer than 100 schools after a decade of operation. Again, this is an amazing feat, and everyone at KIPP deserves all the accolades we can pile upon them. But as a model of replicable innovation, I’m not sure it qualifies fully – though if they could crank up the volume to dozens of new schools a year, we might really be onto something.



The second thing charter school proponents promised was good old-fashioned market competition. With charters popping up across the street from traditional public schools, those pokey old publics would have to get their collective act together. Well, I’m not sure this happened either. In fact, most of the public schools where I work are quite a bit farther along than their local charter counterparts – especially where teacher quality and use of data are concerned. This doesn’t mean they’re more popular. Even the worst charter schools I’ve worked in have been more popular than their local public schools. But as we like to say to the kids on the playground, “What is right isn’t always popular, and what is popular isn’t always right.”



So if the original arguments for charters haven’t been successfully proven in almost 20 years, what are the arguments now for expanding them? There seem to be only two: Some new charters might turn out to be good schools, and folks just oughta have more choices (this is America, after all). All of a sudden, the charter movement has turned on a dime. It’s not about replicable models and competition, it’s about the morality of school choice and high quality, mostly high quality. High quality is good; everyone wants more high quality schools. I just wish more charter schools had it, just as I wish more public schools did, too.



We all know there are some very good charter schools. But there are some very good public schools, too. And I hope we know that the same things that make some charter schools effective (see Mr. Vander Ark’s bullet points) are things that make any school effective. Though Mr. Vander Ark credits the charter movement for bringing these traits to light, I’m pretty sure people have been talking about them outside of charter circles for decades -- though he is correct in pointing out that these traits are more readily associated with charter schools than with public schools.



To steal a line from Mr. Rotherham, charters make sense in the larger context of reform. They have a place at the table. And, to be honest, with 5000 of them we better set out the extra folding chairs and go with the Chinet instead of grandma’s find china. My question is, why would anyone need more than 5000 charter schools to figure out whether charter schooling made sense? Here’s where I think we cross over into politics. So when we look at expanding charters as a (political) strategy for reform, what are we really talking about?



Whether you’re for or against charters, I’ll assume that everyone is for good schools. And we’d all like to have more of them. But of the 5000 charters we have, how many are good? The best data we have indicates that most are average, comparable to their public school counterparts. But this doesn’t include, of course, the charters that have failed and closed down. So what do we know about the charter experiment? A few groups, like KIPP, took good advantage of it to build some great schools. Most charters, however, are no better or no worse than public schools. And certainly, a higher percentage of charters have failed or been shut down, so we can say with some certainty that the charter school movement will probably always provide a wider variety of schools and a wider range of outcomes than traditional public schools. After all, more freedom usually means more diversity.



So if the goal of reform is to create a more diverse menu of schooling options, charters are the way to go. If, on the other hand, the goal is to create more good schools, I don’t think we can say with any degree of confidence that charter schools as a strategy for reform will be very promising. Of course, it probably won’t hurt either.



In my mind, charters have not lived up to their billing. But I don’t think they’ve caused any harm either. To be honest, I think they’ve been something of a non-event. There’s a reason for this. It turns out that the legal mechanism by which a school is constituted is not a significant contributor to student achievement. Just because a school is created via charter doesn’t mean that its good. This is why it’s foolish to continue comparing charter schools to traditional public schools. How a school is created is way down the list of important factors. Good teachers, good leaders, good working conditions, sufficient resources, all of these things are much more important.



But I don’t want to get rid of charters either. Why not use the 5000 we have as the laboratory and start doing some serious research? If we wanted to study something meaningful, for example, how about studying the extent to which charters attract high quality teachers and principals. That would be interesting because if it turned out that our best and brightest educators were flocking to charters in droves, we’d have reason to predict that in another generation, charters would indeed be superior to public schools. Strangely, this kind of study has never been attempted to my knowledge. Nor have any charter supporters suggested such a study as far as I know. Yet this is the only kind of study that would have reasonable predictive value regarding the long term potential of charters as a strategy for reform. At the very least, I would think this would interest Mr. Duncan.



The fact this kind of information interests no one (except me, apparently) leads me to believe that Movement Charterism, like its cousin, Movement Conservatism, is largely a political phenomenon, and not a movement aimed directly at improving our education system as a whole. This is not to paint all charter fans as politically motivated. But with little hard data after almost 20 years to support the charter experiment, charter supporters have only their strong values to go on. Nothing wrong with that, of course. After all, the anti-charter folks play the same game so I guess that’s where the highly politicized nature of this issue finds its force. One thing is certain, however: there’s no meaning in the endless comparison between charter and traditional public schools. Will there always be standout charter schools? Of course there will. But there will always be standout public schools, too. And nobody’s running around saying, “We have to create more public schools!” That wouldn’t make any sense.



At the same time, we can all learn from successful schools of any type of legal creation. Do I believe in more time for teaching and learning? Sure I do. Who doesn’t? Do I believe in strong building leaders? Of course. We all believe in all the things charter advocates list as being keys to creating great charter schools (and most public school leaders would have pretty much the same list of positive traits, too; notwithstanding “at will” employment which really should be studied in charter schools to assess its effect on teacher and administrator quality and performance). Again, I go back to Mr. Vander Ark’s bullet points. If I ran a school district, as he did once, I’m sure I’d be pushing for those things in all of my buildings – just as I’m sure he pushed for them in all of his. And I wouldn’t care if I was running charter schools, public schools, or Catholic schools. I’d still try to act on the same values and knowledge I have about what makes schools successful.



So while charters are certainly here to stay, we have little information about whether or not they make a good strategy for reform. Once again, we’ve been doing the wrong research. We should be looking at things that will be strong predictors of success over long periods of time. Monitoring the flow of talent between charters and public schools would give us great insight in this area. But if we keep doing CREDO- and Hoxby-style studies, all we’ll get are ambiguous results and pointless arguments over nuances of methodology.



So what will be the likely impact of creating more charter schools as Mr. Duncan and Mr. Obama hope to do? We have no way of knowing. Again, without the right research, no one can predict whether more charter schools will make our system better or not. In fact, I could just as easily argue the opposite: that dramatically limiting the number of charter schools, down to perhaps 1000 nationwide, and culling the bottom 80% from the group, would be a perfect strategy both for improving the viability of the charter school movement and for enhancing the progress of system-wide reform. What if every charter you walked into was pretty darned successful? Wouldn’t that prove a certain point about the superior nature of the charter structure over the public structure? And wouldn’t having fewer better charter schools make identifying and replicating successful models easier?



Unfortunately, we appear to be on our way to doing just the opposite. By opening up the floodgates to thousands of new charters, we will dilute the talent pool, increase the random variation in quality, and blur the distinctions between successful and unsuccessful schools. More CREDO- and Hoxby-like studies will be conducted and the data will be even more ambiguous because of the increased variation in charter school quality.



The secret, of course, is to close the “bad” charters and only allow new ones to become “good” charters. But how would this work? States hate to close charters, even awful ones, mostly because parents like them even when they aren’t very good. And charter authorizers have no way of knowing beforehand whether a new charter will be successful or not. Furthermore, if one were to use the CREDO study’s numbers, for example, you’d probably want to close 83% of the charters in existence. While that would open up many new slots for more promising ventures, it would never be politically tolerable. So, the “close bad, open good” strategy seems tricky at best, much easier to talk about in a speech than to play out on the ground. And certainly not something I’d like to bet the future of reform on.



Which brings me finally to our editor’s question: “Do charter schools deserve the spotlight?” And the answer, in my mind, is no. What does deserve the spotlight? The things we know that make schools effective: Good teachers, good principals, Mr. Vander Ark’s bullet points, and probably a few other items that years of research and common sense have always pointed out as the way to creating and sustaining high quality schools.



The problem here is that charters do have the spotlight. And I think they’ll continue to have it right through NCLB reauthorization. In fact, Mr. Duncan may come to hang his hat on the charter movement. Why? Because it’s the best bet politically. Right or wrong, he’ll be years out of office before we know whether a new charter school explosion has had any positive effect. And in the meantime, he can be seen as innovative, tough, and active. I also believe that his tenure in Chicago showed him to be a person who likes the building up and tearing down of schools that a new charter movement would involve. Right or wrong, charter schools are just his style. And the "close bad, open good" strategy is right up his alley.



Unfortunately for education, there’s only so much spotlight. And the things that end up in the dark don’t get much attention. I believe we’ve all figured out that teacher quality is the single most important element in student success. Why doesn’t that ever get the spotlight? What doesn’t it ALWAYS get the spotlight? Why are we so enamored of “political mechanisms” like bribing states to raise charter limits? We know what works. It may not be sexy. It may not be tied to a raucous political movement. It may not make bold headlines or good fodder for long speeches. But every time we run through another reform strategy, we always come back to the simple, proven idea that the key to good learning is good teaching. When will good teaching get its 15 minutes of fame? And what can we do to make sure that 15 minutes stretches out to at least 15 years?

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Asking whether “charters” are a solution to America’s public education’s woes is like asking whether medicine is a solution for illness. Only the right “type” of medicine, under the right conditions, will make a difference. But when it does, it can make all the difference in the world.

Similarly, data shows only the right type of charters – high-quality models based on proven strategies and staffed by the most effective teachers and leaders – have dramatically raised student achievement, particularly for low-income and minority students. But when charters are the right model – like KIPP, Green Dot, Aspire, Alliance for College Ready Schools, Uncommon, Achievement First, and the Success Charter Network – they have proven to be one of the most successful innovations to occur in K-12 education in the last several decades.

Yes, the Obama administration is right to use federal stimulus dollars to encourage the growth of high-quality charters. The trick will be in ensuring that federal dollars support only those state and district charter efforts in which charter authorizing is well designed, charters are held accountable according to appropriate student achievement metrics, and processes are in place to shut down low-performing charters that don’t deliver significant student growth.

The elements of successful charters are well known: challenging standards, more academic learning time, strategies to attract the best and brightest teachers and principals, school leaders who are empowered to make the right hiring, firing, budgetary, curricular, instructional and school climate decisions under which students can succeed, and low central office overhead so resources actually reach children’s desks.

Failure to distinguish between the outcomes of high-quality charter models and low-quality models is like assuming that the tonics and elixirs of the late 1800’s are just as appropriate to “cure” cancer as the cutting edge radiation, chemotherapy and medicinal practices of today.

It’s imperative that the charter movement itself – as well as federal, state and local leaders and the media – do a better job of making this “semantic” distinction. And we all need to do a better job of closing down low-performers and keeping the quality-bar high.

And the fortunate forthcoming federal support? If you’ll excuse the cliché, it’s just what the doctor ordered.

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Not so long ago it was easy for critics to dismiss charter schools as a sideshow in urban education. But the movement has come of age. Now, 57 percent of the students in New Orleans, 36 percent in Washington DC, 32 percent in Detroit, than a quarter in heartland cities like Kansas City, Mo., Dayton and St. Louis attend charter schools.

The argument behind charters—that, freed from bureaucratic tangles, innovation can flourish—holds undoubted appeal; and theory and reality sometimes coincide. But as the charter movement moves from sideshow to center stage, it faces an age-old reformist dilemma. Is it possible to maintain consistently high quality in a public education system that serves tens of millions of kids? Can innovativeness be nurtured and substandard education (“the bigotry of low expectations”) be eradicated? Can the education of tens of millions of students be improved by burrowing from within?

It’s hardly surprising that the new charter school data is inconsistent. States differ widely in the level and caliber of their support and the rigor of their monitoring; and within school districts, the quality and outcome differences among charters are enormous. To ask whether one favors charter schools is as meaningless as asking whether No Child Left Behind is working—since neither is really a program, the answer must be “it depends…”

What happens to the students who aren’t in charter schools? A recent New York Times article detailed how New York City grossly favored its charter schools, and you’d anticipate that charter schools will flourish under such a regime. But what about the majority of students, those who can’t get into these schools? The advocates envision a tipping point when charter enrollment is sufficiently high that regular schools will have to reform themselves, learning lessons from the charters, or else die. Whether that theory holds up is an empirical question, and the answers will be supplied by what transpires in the high-charter-enrollment cities, as well as other locales nudged into expanding charters by the “race to the top” incentives. Trust, but verify, as the saying goes—watchfulness needs to be the order of the day.

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Charters seemed like a nice and "harmless" idea: to offer people a chance to put together a school based on a different way of thinking about schooling; a chance to try their different ways out on a voluntary population in settings in which such ideas weren't always going against the grain, exhausting precious tome and energy over rules and regs.

We had an idea like that in NYC before Charters became the fashion. Called the Networks for School Renewal, and funded by Annenberg, we proposed in 1992 to create a large "charter-like" public zone in NYC in which a variety of existing school networks could expand their ideas more fully and coherently over a five year period. Based on a careful documentation of the process we would learn more about what could and should be brought to scale as well as what the trade-offs were. We got support from the local AFT, from the Mayor's office, from the NYC Board of education, the Chancellor and the State Commissioner. We were ready to go--in fact we had started "going". None of the schools were "new", but they were mavericks with a history of modest and exceptional success. The project, in essence, was like the Boston Pilot School work that began shortly after. But given that NYC is itself so much larger the scale-up was intended to be more ambitious, serving about 50,000 students (the size of an average American city). It didn't happen.

It was ended--although Annenberg continued to provide funds for the schools that would have been part of the project--because we got a new Chancellor, a new local school board, and a new State Commissioner.

Then came charters. My thoughts were generally positive. It seemed an opportunity to start some "mom&pop" ventures - joint projects of teachers and parents, to push the envelope of reform. And indeed many such exciting charters started, initiated by parents and educators--like my late colleague Ted Sizer's charter school in Massachusetts. But within a short time it was clear that most of the charters were not started by people with any expertise in schooling, kids, teaching, curriculum etc--but only an expertise in making money (hedge funders and financial managers and business CEOs), and their allied Foundations. They ranged from do-good liberals in ideology, to longtime opponents of public education--as well as public everything else! The charters became in many ways a substitute for vouchers and privatization--which were regularly being defeated at the polls. They served the interests of many anti-union leaders and their foundations who considered labor unions a restriction of human freedom and here was a chance to undercut two politically active unions. The charters served some who saw it as a pure business opportunity. Others saw these ventures as part and parcel of their general opppsition to public services versus the "free market place" (like mercenary armies and private prisons, which were on the rise too). Others thought of them as just a good opportunity to "start their own little thing"--a chain of little schools that could bring them both high salaries, public attention, praise, and a chance to do something different.

Under the slogan of education as the civil rights issue of our time many leaders in the minority communities jumped on board too. Yet, in fact, it has served to distract our attention from equally pressing gaps. Our justice system has been sending a grossly disproportionate number of our young people of color to jail for increasingly long period of incarceration, the wage gaps have grown, so have the gaps in employment and health, and the recent crisis alone has disproportionately enlarged the home-owner gap. We even have more school segregation than ever before.

Sadly enough most of the charters are not even doing anything different or new in the way of teaching/learning. Nothing that could not--on the whole--have been done in regular schools is happening in the new charters. Educational "lab schools: they are not. They are, rather, an experiment in political science, or economic theory.

At a time when we are beginning to grasp the damage inflicted on our body politic and the economic welfare of so many Americans by an unaccountable business and financial industry, we are "choosing" to experiment on seeing how such a system might work in educatiing K-12 kids, particular poor inner-city ones.

By the time it plays out and we see how this new "theory" works in practice, it may be very hard to undo its impact on a generation of young people.

Yes, the time had long since passed--as the late Ted Sizer reminded us in 1984--to recognize the dysfunctionality of too many of our schools. He took it for granted that the "re-inventers" would be experts in the craft of schooling, child development, education and youth development, and cautious in assuming that such a "revolution" in schooling could or should be done rapidly and from the top down. Rather he argued for the increased involvement of the school's own constituents in the r-making of their own schools. If there's one thing I thought we have learned about in the last century it was the danger of utopian ideas in the hands of "elites" empowered to transform society from the top down.

These sweeping reforms are taking place without the consent of the governed, and without discussion of the public purposes of public education. I'm with Ted on the idea that schooling boils down to learning to "use one's mind well"--with one caveat. As public institutions they must also be guided by the mission of helping young people use their minds well in the service of democracy and the common, public good.

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I'm tempted to just write, "Yeah, what Chancellor Klein said," and let that be the end of it. Charters are an essential part of the school reform toolkit, and it's really hard to argue otherwise credibly. In many cases they have been the source of tremendous innovation, while driving student outcomes. Yes, there are lots of bad charter schools, but there are many more terrible traditional public schools, and you couldn't get away with arguing for less emphasis on that traditional system (in most circles).

But there are a few important things to remember. One, I'll echo my colleagues below who point out that charters are not a panacea. They're not, and it's dangerous to suggest that they should be. After 15 years of chartering, roughly 3% of all public school students are in charter schools, and while growth trajectories have accelerated lately, the quality trajectory hasn't. Questions about how sustainability and growth interact should be taken seriously, as it will be hard to justify continued expansion if more and more families have experiences with weak schools. Education reforms move quickly from concept, to pilot, to "THE SOLUTION." Charters are teetering on the edge of the solution chasm, and education loves to eat its young.

Two, Andy R makes a great point about the label "charter." Whenever someone asks me if I like charter schools, I always ask them, "Do you like restaurants?" Chartering is merely a governance mechanism that may or may not remove some of the obstacles to quality professional practice. In the best cases, charters leverage that governance mechanism to do amazing - sometimes transformative - things. In the worst cases, they squander that potential advantage and do worse than comparable traditional public schools. We need to develop more nuance in our discussion of charter schools. What are the good ones doing that work? Are there particular policy milieus that are more conducive to quality than others? How do we increase the likelihood of quality?

Three, one of the great benefits of charters is the extrinsic impact they can and should have. One of the early promises of chartering was that we would learn great things that we could transfer to the traditional public schools. This happens far less than it should, and policies should do more to facilitate and incentivize that transfer. (My pet issue: more charter operators should take on the challenging work of school turnaround. It's a beast of a task, and we need the talent.) The other extrinsic impact, though, is the pressure charters bring to bear on their neighboring traditional school systems. Obama and Duncan are right to emphasize charters, because chartering SHOULD force the hand of system leaders that are reluctant to make difficult choices. In the turnaround space, most of us love charters, because they can be a really good boogeyman for recalcitrant system leaders. This only works, however, if the President and Secretary stay strong on the new school improvement grant (1003g) requirements. So far, they've been exceptional on that front.

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There is no question that charter schools deserve the attention of the Obama Administration. Charter schools combine high standards with strict accountability, while bringing new leaders, resources, and ideas into public education. In New York City, we’ve seen the value of charter schools in their students' outstanding academic performance and in huge parent demand for seats in these schools.

Charter schools are publicly financed, but free from all the micro-regulation and bureaucracy that can hinder traditional public schools. They are run by not-for-profit boards of trustees instead of municipal government agencies, and can easily be closed if they don’t get good results for their students. New York City now has 99 charter schools, up from 17 when I started as Schools Chancellor in 2002. Their growth is part of a larger effort to cultivate two critical elements for fixing public schools: competition and innovation.

Most charter schools are located in our communities of greatest need. They offer poor families—in traditionally lower-performing school districts—a choice about where to send their children to school. And those parents are choosing charters. About 31,000 students currently attend charter schools in New York City, and another 30,000 students are on waiting lists. Their results explain the extraordinary demand.

On last year’s New York State English Language Arts and mathematics exams—the annual measures of student achievement and progress—77 percent of charter school students were proficient in English Language Arts and 91 percent were proficient in math, compared to 69 percent and 82 percent of students citywide. These results are even more remarkable because charter school students are more likely to come from underprivileged backgrounds than students in the City as a whole. In other words, charter schools are proving that poverty is no excuse for educational failure.

One reason many charter schools do so well is that they are able to innovate and differentiate. Many have implemented longer school days and years, for example. Charter schools also have more hiring flexibility and can experiment with teacher salaries. One of our newest charter schools, The Equity Project, has fewer teachers but pays them $125,000 annually, nearly three times more than they would earn at a traditional public school. It is too early to tell whether this approach will have an impact on student achievement. But when innovations like this work well, or don’t, we can learn from them and try to replicate the successful ideas on a larger scale. We can only take advantage of these lessons, however, if schools have the freedom to try new ideas in the first place.

Critics often claim that charter schools succeed because they “skim” the best kids. In fact, admissions are based on random lotteries open to anyone. A recent study by Stanford University Economist Caroline Hoxby found that students who entered lotteries and won spots in New York City charter schools performed significantly better on state exams than students who entered the same lotteries but did not win seats. By restricting her analysis to students who lotteried for seats, Hoxby’s study is the most conclusive to date on charter school performance—and it eliminates the possibility that charter students perform better because they might be advantaged in any way.

This is not to say charter schools are a panacea for public education. They require leaders with a clear vision for progress, and widespread community and governmental support. And they should be part of a comprehensive school reform effort—but not the only part.

While we give charter schools the flexibility to innovate, we also hold them accountable for results. Charter schools come up for renewal every five years and must prove their students are making academic progress. Since 2002, three charter schools in New York City have shut down for poor performance and we anticipate others will have to close in the next several years.

All students benefit from the lessons we learn at charter schools. Their successful strategies can be replicated, and the competition they create puts pressure on all schools to come up with new ways to improve. In this global economy, the competitiveness of any nation depends upon a highly-educated and well-trained workforce. To deny students more high-quality school options like charters puts them, and our futures, at a disadvantage.

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Charter schools absolutely deserve the attention of the Obama Administration. For too long we have held from the policy perspective that “one size” or type of school design serves all American public school students well. That has always been a short-sighted view especially when combined with the very inequitable treatment of students and public schools in terms of expectations and financing. Charter schools have been the reform that has gained the most traction in terms of how low-income and minority students are educated. Yes, there results are uneven, but as a nation we have been comfortable with uneven results since public schooling for all was established. All schools need to be held accountable for results, but there are many more students being poorly educated and on the short-end of financial resources in traditional public schools than there are students in low performing charter schools.

High performing charter schools have demonstrated that disadvantaged students can be held to and perform at high academic levels. Successful charters need to be expanded, replicated, and allocated their fair share of public resources through weighted student funding schemes where dollars follow individual students to the schools their parents or they select. Traditional public schools also need to be funded in this way and given freedom to innovate so that some day no school is “traditional” as we have known in the past. All students need choice of public schooling. The exciting thing in cities such as New Orleans and Washington, DC, is that low-income families are demonstrating that they can be active consumers in a choice environment.

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Too often the debate over charter schools is decoupled from the larger contextual issues surrounding education outcomes today. We don’t need to rehash those here but regardless of what one thinks of charter schools hopefully we can all agree that American education needs transformational change and that the debate over charters should be part of that larger conversation.



Yet a serious problem with the debate over charter schools is the generic use of the term “charter.” The other day I was in a conversation with a few people and someone from Ohio was saying that they don’t see charters as being very good. I said that if I were from Ohio and that was my only experience with the charter sector I likely wouldn’t be very enthusiastic about the strategy either. But today with more than 5,000 of these schools across many different geographies “charter” is an increasingly meaningless label. For instance what do Mike Piscal’s (he blogs below) schools really have in common with a fully online charter school in Ohio (or even in California) other than the name and statutory characterization of “charter?” In other words, asking how “charter schools” work is increasingly like asking about restaurants, stocks, or cars – a lot of variance within each category. Yet there is a tendency toward sweeping and deterministic statements rather than nuance in this debate.



Sara Mead and I led a 12 state and city set of case studies about charter schools and when we concluded it we called our summation paper, “A Sum Greater than the Parts.” That’s because while overall there is much to recommend the charter strategy as one avenue of school reform, right now the quality and results of these schools are mixed. The variance can be traced to policy and practice decisions – especially on the part of charter school authorizers. We offer some ideas and recommendations for improving that. But to understand those issues you have to get beneath the label charters and start looking at different types of charters, different policy arrangements, and other variables that do shed some light on what’s happening out there. That’s how we can learn from experience and accelerate the good schools and deal with the lousy ones.



Because charter schools have become so politicized, however, it’s difficult to have those conversations and every study becomes a club for advocates on various sides of the debate rather than a chance for policy feedback and change.

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When well-executed, charter schools deliver strong results, often for the most disadvantaged students, exceeding almost anything in the traditional public school sector. But when they are not well-run, many charter schools produce academic, financial and compliance outcomes that are worse than the traditional public school sector.

How do we get more of the former and fewer of the latter? By setting clear standards for those organizations that would like to operate a charter school. The agencies that establish and enforce those standards are called authorizers and every authorizer has three core responsibilities to the public:

1) To set high standards for groups that wish to start a school and for existing charter schools that are up for renewal,

2) To preserve the autonomy that allows charter schools to excel by protecting them from re-regulation, and

3) To protect the interests of students and the public in areas such as admissions, special education services and financial management.

Quality authorizing is a linchpin for quality charter schools. In cities and states where authorizing is done well, students, families and the public benefit from charter schools that provide a solid education to students. Where authorizing is done poorly, the charter sector is often plagued by a number of weak schools.

Unfortunately, authorizing is a kaleidoscope of varying state policies and local practices across the nation. In some states, only school districts can authorize charter schools; in other states school districts cannot authorize them. Some states require charter schools to operate under legal contracts and to conduct annual audits, some do not. Some states hold charter schools accountable for achieving the state’s academic standards as a condition of renewal; other states allow each charter school to establish its own academic goals.

Secretary Duncan is personally familiar with this work from his years leading the Chicago Public Schools, one of the best authorizers in the country. Indeed, the final Race to the Top guidelines recognize the importance of authorizing, but missed the opportunity to establish strong standards for authorizing. Charter schools deserve the spotlight that the Administration has placed on them. Going forward, Congress and the Department of Education should support a quality charter school sector by distributing federal funds only to states that have strong authorizing policies and practices in place.

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As an education issue, charter schools are no more or less controversial than magnet schools, alternative schools, or open enrollment schools. Regardless of the relative quality of the regular schools to which students are assigned by arbitrary district boundaries, parents still like to choose the best school for their children. So why is there such resistance to charters, and why should the President of the United States feel it necessary to champion their expansion?

Two reasons: 1) Charters operate largely outside of school district authority; and 2) they are mostly non-union. No matter how popular they may be with parents, they are demonstrably unpopular with most of those employed by the public school system.

NEA President Van Roekel's remarks are telling. He has visited many traditional public schools with innovative and successful programs. "One thing they have in common," he writes, "is collaboration among local administrators, unions, parents and other partners."

Not "collaboration among local administrators, teachers, parents and other partners," but unions. We can therefore infer by his reasoning that non-union schools lack an essential ingredient for innovation and success.

If charter schools were all controlled by school districts, administrator opposition to them would evaporate. If they were all unionized, NEA and AFT would rarely find them worthy of comment, much less prolonged campaigns of containment. But then, they wouldn't be charter schools anymore, would they?

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Charter schools are being overhyped and oversold. They are no panacea.

They represent deregulation and privatization. Deregulation nearly destroyed our national economy. What will it do to public education?

Every study except one shows that charter schools run the gamut from excellent to abysmal. The Stanford CREDO study reflected this wide disparity in quality. Last June, Andrew Rotherham and Richard Whitmire wrote an article in U.S. News & World Report acknowledging that only about 300 of the nation's nearly 5,000 charter schools are truly excellent. Tom Toch recently released a study of charter management organizations that recognized that most are not equipped to scale up to handle hundreds or thousands of new schools (Toch removed his name from the study because the editors at EdSector [which he co-founded] deleted his frank criticism of the charter sector).

In my research for my forthcoming book (The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education), I found study after study that reach common conclusions:

1. Most charter schools get the most motivated students in the poorest communities, because they are the ones whose parents enter lotteries and are willing to sign contracts to take on extra responsibility.

2. Charter schools often have disproportionately small shares of the hardest to educate students, such as those who are English language learners, those who are homeless, and those with disabilities. Consequently the public schools get disproportionately large numbers of these students. Consequently, charter schools have a built-in advantage in any comparison.

3. In New York City, charters are placed in regular public school buildings, taking space away from the public schools, and presenting the appearance of "separate but equal" education: the charter students have small classes, nicely renovated space, and lots of technology, while the regular public school students make do with overcrowded classrooms, lacking in any advantages. The charters have millionaire (and billionaire) sponsors who attend to their every need, while the public schools students must accept the leavings.

4. Despite the advantages enjoyed by charters in comparison to public schools, students in charters have never outperformed their peers in public schools on any National Assessment of Educational Progress test. Typically there is no significant difference, or the public schools outscore the charters. Even in the 2009 math NAEP, recently released, there was no difference in performance between the sectors, not for black kids, Hispanic kids. poor kids, or uban kids.

Charters are not the answer to our education problems. Privatization is creating a very well-compensated private sector, but is doing nothing for the vast majority of kids who are left behind or pushed out. Privatization is not the answer.

Diane Ravitch

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Given the US challenge of achieving quality at scale—the combination of equity and excellence—the most important innovation of the last decade is charter networks. Their success is undeniable. Their lessons are clear. Key elements include:

· clear goals and a strong college-bound no-excuses culture;

· data-driven instruction and performance-based employment;

· extended learning time and personalized environments;

· efficient support services and knowledge management; and

· effective leadership—school, community, network

Perhaps most important, charters give us a picture of a sound governance alternative to school districts based on accountability and autonomy. Dozens of charter management organizations have taken advantage of the opportunity to design systems of school from scratch creating strong examples of high performance organizations. Schools shouldn’t get tenure; if they are not serving their community effectively they should be closed. All schools should operate under a performance contract.

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The answer is an emphatic yes. Expansion of high-quality charter schooling is well worth the attention it’s getting from Obama and Duncan. But let’s understand what that “attention” actually is, and why it’s justified. The Administration doesn’t advocate unconditional proliferation of charters. As Duncan recently told Ed Week: "We’ve never said charter schools are the magic answer. I went to the charter school community and said third-rate charter schools are part of the problem. But successful charter schools are part of the answer.”

Research on charter schools generally finds three tiers of performance:

• At the top is a set of path-breaking charters, both independent and networked, that are blasting through the low expectations that have kept so many poor and minority students from achieving.

• At the bottom are some charter schools that are failing their students. Their charters shouldn’t be renewed. That’s the essence of charter accountability.

• In the middle is the largest group of schools. They’re doing pretty well and, according to several recent studies, improving with time.

The argument among researchers is mostly about the size of each tier -- but everyone agrees that the quality of public policy has a strong impact on whether charters succeed or not.

Right now, Race to the Top is the big engine driving policymaker interest in charters, even in the 11 states that currently have no laws. The final guidelines do a remarkably good job of asking the right questions. Most press attention has focused on charter “caps” – the rules that hamper growth in number or size of charters in 24 states – but to score serious points on the R2T application, governors must do more than promise to open the floodgates. They must also describe a thoughtful system of charter authorizing, which is glossed over in most state laws. They must address funding equity, putting charters on a more level playing field with other public schools. They must say how they’ll ensure suitable learning spaces for charter school kids by providing either funding or access to existing public school buildings.

R2T also includes charters within the “restart” and “closure” options for turning around low-performing schools. There’s been some wariness in the charter community about using successful startup-based models to salvage existing schools; happily, the final guidelines now make clear that starting a healthy new school qualifies as a bona fide “turnaround” under the closure model. Whether it happens in the same building or in the adjacent neighborhood is beside the point; the objective is to turn around the life prospects of the kids, and that’s what the best charters do. And here, as elsewhere in the app, there’s an emphasis on high-performing charter schools, a crucial point that many critics seem to ignore. We’re not talking about replicating every charter school, whatever its track record; we’re talking about taking terrific, proven models and letting them serve more students.

No question that R2T provides a mighty incentive for states without charter laws to enact them. (It allows the holdouts to propose “innovative schools” but only awards them 8 points.) Here again, the aim is not to insist that every state become a California with its 800 charter schools, but to insist that states not arbitrarily bar the door to a reform that has shown such promise.

Finally, as respondents grapple with this week’s research-based question, I expect there will be some enthusiastic back-and-forth about what the research is actually telling us. In addition to the capsule summary provided above, here are a couple of thoughts about the rules of this often-bumpy road:

First, remember that no one study will ever produce a definitive answer to the question everyone asks: “Do charter schools work?” Better questions are “How do the best ones work?” “What combination of rigorous approval, sound oversight, adequate resources, capable management, and strong accountability produce the great charter schools?” Almost every new study tells us something, but in this business there are no slam-dunks. (For an exhaustive look at more than 150 studies of charter performance, see “Charter School Achievement: What We Know” at www.publiccharters.org.)

Second, watch out for apples and oranges. This week’s question counterpoints two recent studies that made headlines, the national CREDO report and Caroline Hoxby’s NBER study of New York City charters. We’re obviously delighted at the strong results Hoxby’s work found, but it does not predict the performance of all charter schools nationally. As a lottery-based study in one jurisdiction, it’s not designed to do that. However, it does demonstrate what can happen when you create the right conditions for success, as NYC does through strong authorizing and provision of facilities space.

Third, remember that this is all about tradeoffs. Anytime a President, governor, or county executive creates a budget, they’re selecting some policy choices above others. I don’t know of a single algorithm that will predict the specific payoffs of charter schooling as a policy/budget choice, but researchers Julian Betts and Emily Tang sure got my attention with a comment in their review of “gold standard” charter studies: “The magnitude, or effect size, of the results for the elementary and K–8 charter schools is sizable” – and far greater by comparison, they say, than for another popular reform, class-size reductions. We need a lot more of this kind of analysis. I’m confident it will show that well-structured charter programs not only produce strong benefits for students, but are also be a wise investment of public dollars.

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The parents of nearly 60,000 students in Los Angeles have taken their children out of traditional public schools and put them into public charter schools-a clear sign that the public is not confused about the promise that charter schools hold for their children, despite the recent release of two studies that appear to have conflicting results.

Ten years ago in Los Angeles, there were fewer than 5,000 children in public charter schools. Twelve years ago only four or five charter management organizations (CMOs) existed, and today there are over 20 high-performing CMOs in the country. But the rate of parents pulling their children out of public schools in Los Angeles has increased at an almost geometrical rate. Why? Because the promise of charter schools for them has turned 10 years later into a promise kept.

Charter school operators like ICEF Public Schools, Aspire, Green Dot, Partnerships for Urban Communities (PUC), and the Alliance have been sending more than 80% of their graduates to college for several years in a row. Within another decade, these CMOs will grow to serve nearly 300,000 students in the poorest, most underserved, and sometimes forgotten areas of our country.

These are the types of successes Secretary Duncan and President Obama are excited about. Charters in Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, Boston and D.C. are sending low-income and children of color to college in record numbers. These charters are located in neighborhoods where too often more students end up incarcerated than graduating from college. We have a track record, and the President and the Secretary are going to do everything they can to help us reach of our goal of helping hundreds of thousands of students get their shot at the American Dream. The data is clear, irrefutable, and compelling to an honest mind. Think Socrates.

Sadly, what was generally glossed over were the details beyond the recent headlines, which show the findings of the two studies do not, in fact, contradict each other. CREDO found that while nationwide the performance of charters was lagging, there are many areas of great success including New Orleans and Denver, where the charter schools are doing better than the traditional public schools.

The CREDO study also showed that charters in other states do very well in certain key areas. In California, the finding revealed that students do better in charter schools over time and they boast significant gains for English Language Learners. But charter schools also had a larger and more positive effect for low-income students than traditional public schools-a point directly in line with the second study, which showed charters closing the achievement gap between students in poor and affluent communities. We see that every day at ICEF Public Schools, where we serve the predominantly African-American community of South Los Angeles. ICEF now has 15 high-performing public charters and have graduated 100 percent of our three graduating classes, getting all of the students into college-99 percent of them to four-year colleges.

What the Harvard University study revealed is what thousands of parents and educators in this country have known for years: where they matter and are needed the most-in large, urban neighborhoods-charter schools are not only working, they're infinitely better than the traditional public schools.

Like all public schools there are some great charters and some low-performing charters, but by-and-large the very successful charter schools are knocking it out of the park. Two separate district-level reports found that nearly 70 percent of charter schools at L.A. Unified outperform their nearby district public schools. Every ICEF school, for example, has scored in the top 10 percent of all public schools in the state compared to schools serving similar students. According to the California Department of Education, View Park Prep is the top-ranked public high school at educating African-American students in California.

Given the tremendous gains in achievement spurred by charter schools, this reform movement is one that certainly deserves the attention it's been receiving from the Obama administration. President Obama wants more parents to have the choice that thousands already have in cities across the nation. It is imperative that we quickly replicate the charter school models that are working very well, like ICEF's and the ones named above, while holding all low-performing public schools accountable-charters and traditional schools alike.

Ask yourself this: if charter schools are a drug that are saving the lives of tens of thousands of children now, but they're not yet saving millions of kids' lives, would we stop administering it?

Or if an otherwise healthy person-our public schools-developed a high cholesterol problem, would you not treat them with the Lipitor of reform-charter schools-so that all parts of the body remained healthy?

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The Administration has been absolutely correct to emphasize innovation in education - but wrong to equate innovation with charter schools. We all know there are some great charter schools. We also know there are some that aren't so good. It all depends on how well they're designed and held accountable. Charter schools are not a magic bullet, and they aren't the only schools where you can find innovative ideas at work today.

The Administration's initial emphasis on charter schools was misplaced because it ignored the great innovation occurring in many traditional public schools. I have visited many of these successful programs, and one thing they have in common is collaboration among local administrators, unions, parents and other partners. It isn't always easy to get all of these parties together, but when it happens it is a powerful thing.

Charter schools have sometimes been used as a shortcut to avoid collaboration, but that shortcut won't work in the long run; indeed, a recent report by Education Sector raised questions about the ability of successful charter schools and charter management organizations to replicate their success on a large scale.

Thankfully, the Administration has listened to NEA and others who were concerned about the emphasis on charters. The revised guidelines for the Race to the Top grants now refer to "innovative, autonomous schools" -- which is not limited to charters.

We should remember that charter schools were originally envisioned as places where educators, communities and parents could try new ideas. That process can also occur in traditional public schools. The key is to encourage collaboration, not avoid it.

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