January 16, 2019
Dear Friends and Family,
As an introduction to this segment, I have tried to define public schools in the same terms that David Osborne describes charter schools in his book Reinventing America’s Schools noted below in the excerpts.
• Autonomy/Diversity of School Design: One-size-fits-all as prescribed by a central government body followed up by an accrediting branch from the same government agency.
• Accountability for Performance: No formalized academic accountability process. There were complaints/suggestions by parents and sometimes discussions in Parent Teacher Associations (PTA) but seldom were such complaints in reference to comparative evaluations on standardized test scores. In fact, seldom were any comparative results established, let alone available, to evaluate the academic performance of a public school.
• Parental Choice: The school one’s child had to attend was the one assigned by the School District without exception. The only alternative a parent had to change schools was to move or to pay for a private school.
• Entrepreneurial Drive: There were the exceptional teachers who found unique ways to make the subject more interesting or techniques to make the learning process more fun, but there was no true innovation. Real innovation would probably have been squelched.
• Political Freedom: I have never heard of a public school being closed for failing to effectively educate students, but that does happen to Charter schools for poor academic performance.
So, the new formula that Charter Schools are bringing to the party has the following aspects:
It is a very big deal. It is a significant change and results to date clearly show it to be a change for the educational betterment of the children in this country. What is the fundamental change that leads to this improvement? My answer is that it gets the entire system focused on individual performance; the individual school performance, the individual classroom performance, the individual teacher performance; the individual student performance versus the collective experience. Net, the change is anti-socialism.
I come to that conclusion in part because of a personal experience that I will share with you. In the late 1980s, I was working for Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio. The President of the company partnered with the City Superintendent of Schools in an effort to improve high schools in low-income areas. I was asked to be part of the P&G contingent. To make a long story short, we found that there was significant peer pressure to minimize learning in the classrooms of the high school we studied (often boys pressuring girls). It occurred in various forms – classroom disruptions and humiliations or outside classroom pressure like “why did you answer the teacher’s question are you trying to look good and show me (us) up.” That was a time period in which personal computers were just coming on stream along with interactive instructional software (albeit limited). We decided to furnish sufficient computers with as much pertinent interactive instructional software as possible for every classroom such that each student had individual access to the interactive system. It quickly changed the classroom dynamics. There were far less teacher lectures or group interactions, as everyone was expected to engage with the interactive system. The teacher, as a result, could spend individual time with each student and no one else in the classroom knew how much others were learning. As a result of the changed dynamics, the peer pressure subsided because the forum was taken away, the kids that wanted to learn could and did, and the others sat in boredom – some even started to engage and learn. It was a change in the school academic design.
Next:
The series will now shift away from Socialism policies to Socialistic societies. It will begin with some excerpts about the Founding Fathers of Socialism/Communism – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their first published work, “The Communist Manifesto” written in 1848.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
As an introduction to this segment, I have tried to define public schools in the same terms that David Osborne describes charter schools in his book Reinventing America’s Schools noted below in the excerpts.
• Autonomy/Diversity of School Design: One-size-fits-all as prescribed by a central government body followed up by an accrediting branch from the same government agency.
• Accountability for Performance: No formalized academic accountability process. There were complaints/suggestions by parents and sometimes discussions in Parent Teacher Associations (PTA) but seldom were such complaints in reference to comparative evaluations on standardized test scores. In fact, seldom were any comparative results established, let alone available, to evaluate the academic performance of a public school.
• Parental Choice: The school one’s child had to attend was the one assigned by the School District without exception. The only alternative a parent had to change schools was to move or to pay for a private school.
• Entrepreneurial Drive: There were the exceptional teachers who found unique ways to make the subject more interesting or techniques to make the learning process more fun, but there was no true innovation. Real innovation would probably have been squelched.
• Political Freedom: I have never heard of a public school being closed for failing to effectively educate students, but that does happen to Charter schools for poor academic performance.
So, the new formula that Charter Schools are bringing to the party has the following aspects:
- Schools having significant autonomy, including creating a diversity of school academic designs,
- Accountability for academic performance including the potential shutdown of a school if the performance is insufficient,
- Latitude to fire individual teachers or in some cases a total cadre of teachers in a school for poor academic performance,
- Opportunity for parents to choose a school for their child and then to pull a child out of a school and send them to a different school if they are dissatisfied,
- Comparative analysis of academic performance based on standardized tests.
It is a very big deal. It is a significant change and results to date clearly show it to be a change for the educational betterment of the children in this country. What is the fundamental change that leads to this improvement? My answer is that it gets the entire system focused on individual performance; the individual school performance, the individual classroom performance, the individual teacher performance; the individual student performance versus the collective experience. Net, the change is anti-socialism.
I come to that conclusion in part because of a personal experience that I will share with you. In the late 1980s, I was working for Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio. The President of the company partnered with the City Superintendent of Schools in an effort to improve high schools in low-income areas. I was asked to be part of the P&G contingent. To make a long story short, we found that there was significant peer pressure to minimize learning in the classrooms of the high school we studied (often boys pressuring girls). It occurred in various forms – classroom disruptions and humiliations or outside classroom pressure like “why did you answer the teacher’s question are you trying to look good and show me (us) up.” That was a time period in which personal computers were just coming on stream along with interactive instructional software (albeit limited). We decided to furnish sufficient computers with as much pertinent interactive instructional software as possible for every classroom such that each student had individual access to the interactive system. It quickly changed the classroom dynamics. There were far less teacher lectures or group interactions, as everyone was expected to engage with the interactive system. The teacher, as a result, could spend individual time with each student and no one else in the classroom knew how much others were learning. As a result of the changed dynamics, the peer pressure subsided because the forum was taken away, the kids that wanted to learn could and did, and the others sat in boredom – some even started to engage and learn. It was a change in the school academic design.
Next:
The series will now shift away from Socialism policies to Socialistic societies. It will begin with some excerpts about the Founding Fathers of Socialism/Communism – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their first published work, “The Communist Manifesto” written in 1848.
Happy Learning,
Harley
SOCIALISM – SEGMENT 11
CHARTER SCHOOLS – EXCERPTS
WHAT CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE AND ARE NOT: Charters are public schools operated by independent, mostly nonprofit organizations, free of most state and district rules but held accountable for performance by written charters, which function like performance contracts. Most, but not all, are schools of choice. In reality, charters are a new form of public school, which now educate more than three million students. They are organized differently from 20th century systems, but they are accountable to public bodies, they are publicly funded, and they are free and equally accessible to all students.
Critics like to charge that charters are out to make profits at the expense of children, but less than 13% of charters are operated by for-profit organizations. Critics also constantly accuse charters of draining money from public schools. Since charters are public schools, that is impossible. They do drain funding from traditional school districts, however – because parents have pulled their children out of district schools and placed them in charter schools. When a school no longer educates a child – because the child has moved away, or chosen to attend a school in another district, or left for a charter school – most of the money leaves as well. In 2014, charters averaged on 72% of the money per student that districts received, nationally.
Most charter school leaders believe that industrial unionism, with its labor vs. management paradigm, is a poor fit for education. They prefer to view teachers as professionals, giving many of them decision-making roles. Hence, the more teachers there are in charter schools, the fewer there will be in unions.
THE KEYS TO CHARTER SUCCESS: In 21st century systems, where school boards contract with independent organizations to operate schools, the battle for self-interest is quite different. School operators still push for their own interests, but they no longer act as a unified block. Every time a school is closed for poor performance, other operators line up to take its place. Hence, elected leaders are no longer so captive of adult interests; they have some freedom to do what is best for the children. And the principals and teachers feel enormous urgency to improve student learning – otherwise, their school might be replaced. For the first time, virtually every adult’s priority is student achievement.
The new formula – school autonomy, accountability for performance, diversity of school designs, parental choice, and competition between schools – is simply more effective than the centralized, bureaucratic approach we inherited from the 20th century.
The Seven C’s of Charter School Success:
COMPARING CHARTER AND TRADITIONAL SCHOOLS: Autonomy: There is a common human tendency to assume that there is one best way to run a school, which leads to uniform policies. Charters were invested in part to counter this, because in reality, different children learn differently and flourish in different environments. To tailor their efforts to their student’s learning styles, behaviors and backgrounds, schools need a fair amount of autonomy.
Accountability for Performance: After autonomy, the second big lever the Charter Board uses to drive quality is accountability for performance. These new realities are highly motivating. Experience and data both suggest that when everyone in a school building knows their jobs are at risk, the effect is greater. The motivation is not just individual; it affects everyone. If staff members believe in their leaders, they tend to pull together to do what’s necessary. By weeding out the worst schools, authorizers not only bring up the average, they motivate everyone working in the surviving schools.
Parental Choice: The third significant lever driving charters is parent choice.
Entrepreneurial Drive: A fourth reason charters excel is their entrepreneurial drive. Educating poor children in the inner city is so challenging that it often requires leaders to reinvent the educational process – the basic school design. Those who open charters are often driven by such visions.
Political Freedom: The final driver of success for charters is the political freedom to do what is best for the children, including closing failing schools, even when it conflicts with adult interests. When the Charter Board considers closing schools, it gets pressure only from those school communities. But when traditional systems contemplate closing schools, it gets pressure from across the system; employees, their unions, parents and neighborhood activists.
In sum, the charter sector outperforms the tradition sector because it has more autonomy, more accountability, more choice, more ability to handcraft schools that meet the needs of diverse students, more entrepreneurial drive, and more freedom to do what is best for the children. Source: Reinventing America’s Schools by David Osborne
TEACHERS:
Teach for America: At Business Today’s fall 1988 conference Wendy Kopp, a student at Princeton, learned about the crisis in teaching – 12% of first-year teachers across the country were uncertified, clustered in urban areas. What if elite young college graduates could be convinced to teach in low-income public schools, even for a short period of time. Skipping classes, she produced an ambitious senior thesis, “An Argument and Plan for the Creation of the Teacher Corps.” After turning in her thesis, Kopp revised it into a thirty-page proposal for grant funding. Union Carbide donated office space in Manhattan, and Mobil offered Teach for America (TFA) its first grant for $26,000. 2,500 seniors from across the nation applied to join TFA’s inaugural class. Nearly 500 were selected. They would begin teaching in the fall of 1990, after an eight-week training institute, including one week of teaching in Los Angeles summer schools. Of the first class of TFA recruits, 80% fulfilled their two-year commitment and 42% stayed in teaching beyond that. Philanthropic support continued to grow, and the program attracted overwhelming media attention. Teach for America teachers became some of the most scrutinized workers in the nation, with researchers tracking their career trajectories, their attitudes about politics and society, and their student’s test scores.
A wealth of research indicates that one of the best things a teacher can do for her students is to set high, individualized expectations for each one of them, regardless of a child’s past performance or whether he comes to class with a label such as low-income, special education, or learning disabled. Effective teachers believe all children can learn – a fundament of the TFA philosophy. In general, academically ineffective teachers are those who set the bar too low: some evidence suggests that half of what is taught in most classes is already known by most students. To avoid teaching children what they have previously learned, teachers should assess students at the beginning of the school year and at the beginning of new units, to identify their strengths and weaknesses. This type of teaching has exploded in prominence since the mid-1990s, driven in large part by the strategies and rhetoric used at the KIPP charter schools and adopted by TFA and many of the other charters at which its corps members and alumni increasingly work.
Valued-Added Measurement: Value-added measurement in its relatively crude, early form, simply used a student’s score on an end-of-year standardized test to predict her score on the following year’s exam. Teachers who preside over larger-than-expected jumps in scores earned above average value-added ratings.
A more sensitive early value-added formula was developed in the mid-1990s, where statisticians recognized the fact that disadvantaged students tend to experience slower academic growth than their middle-class peers, no matter how good their teachers. That’s because poor children are more likely to experience out of-school disruptions, such as poor nutrition, a move, or homelessness, which can affect learning. The research team created a value-added equation that included controls for children’s demographic traits, such as parental income and proficiency in English, essentially giving teachers who worked with disadvantaged kids bonus points. This technique found smaller, yet still significant, teacher effects on kids’ test scores.
Today reformers across the country are experimenting with empowering teachers to coach their peers, to remake teacher education, to design creative curriculum materials, and to lead school turnaround efforts. These practices conceive of veteran teachers as assets, not liabilities.
Source: The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
CHARTER SCHOOLS – EXCERPTS
WHAT CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE AND ARE NOT: Charters are public schools operated by independent, mostly nonprofit organizations, free of most state and district rules but held accountable for performance by written charters, which function like performance contracts. Most, but not all, are schools of choice. In reality, charters are a new form of public school, which now educate more than three million students. They are organized differently from 20th century systems, but they are accountable to public bodies, they are publicly funded, and they are free and equally accessible to all students.
Critics like to charge that charters are out to make profits at the expense of children, but less than 13% of charters are operated by for-profit organizations. Critics also constantly accuse charters of draining money from public schools. Since charters are public schools, that is impossible. They do drain funding from traditional school districts, however – because parents have pulled their children out of district schools and placed them in charter schools. When a school no longer educates a child – because the child has moved away, or chosen to attend a school in another district, or left for a charter school – most of the money leaves as well. In 2014, charters averaged on 72% of the money per student that districts received, nationally.
Most charter school leaders believe that industrial unionism, with its labor vs. management paradigm, is a poor fit for education. They prefer to view teachers as professionals, giving many of them decision-making roles. Hence, the more teachers there are in charter schools, the fewer there will be in unions.
THE KEYS TO CHARTER SUCCESS: In 21st century systems, where school boards contract with independent organizations to operate schools, the battle for self-interest is quite different. School operators still push for their own interests, but they no longer act as a unified block. Every time a school is closed for poor performance, other operators line up to take its place. Hence, elected leaders are no longer so captive of adult interests; they have some freedom to do what is best for the children. And the principals and teachers feel enormous urgency to improve student learning – otherwise, their school might be replaced. For the first time, virtually every adult’s priority is student achievement.
The new formula – school autonomy, accountability for performance, diversity of school designs, parental choice, and competition between schools – is simply more effective than the centralized, bureaucratic approach we inherited from the 20th century.
The Seven C’s of Charter School Success:
- Control: Decentralized operation decision making at the school level.
- Choice: Creating different kinds of schools for different children and giving families
- Consequences: Creating accountability for performance
- Culture: Giving school leaders the freedom to mold school cultures
- Capacity: Building talent pipelines of teachers and school leaders
- Contestability: Ensuring that no school has a right to continue if its students are falling too far behind.
- Clarity of purpose and role: Separating steering (setting policy and direction) from rowing (operating schools), so system leaders and school leaders can each focus on clear missions and the former are no longer politically captive of their employees.
COMPARING CHARTER AND TRADITIONAL SCHOOLS: Autonomy: There is a common human tendency to assume that there is one best way to run a school, which leads to uniform policies. Charters were invested in part to counter this, because in reality, different children learn differently and flourish in different environments. To tailor their efforts to their student’s learning styles, behaviors and backgrounds, schools need a fair amount of autonomy.
Accountability for Performance: After autonomy, the second big lever the Charter Board uses to drive quality is accountability for performance. These new realities are highly motivating. Experience and data both suggest that when everyone in a school building knows their jobs are at risk, the effect is greater. The motivation is not just individual; it affects everyone. If staff members believe in their leaders, they tend to pull together to do what’s necessary. By weeding out the worst schools, authorizers not only bring up the average, they motivate everyone working in the surviving schools.
Parental Choice: The third significant lever driving charters is parent choice.
Entrepreneurial Drive: A fourth reason charters excel is their entrepreneurial drive. Educating poor children in the inner city is so challenging that it often requires leaders to reinvent the educational process – the basic school design. Those who open charters are often driven by such visions.
Political Freedom: The final driver of success for charters is the political freedom to do what is best for the children, including closing failing schools, even when it conflicts with adult interests. When the Charter Board considers closing schools, it gets pressure only from those school communities. But when traditional systems contemplate closing schools, it gets pressure from across the system; employees, their unions, parents and neighborhood activists.
In sum, the charter sector outperforms the tradition sector because it has more autonomy, more accountability, more choice, more ability to handcraft schools that meet the needs of diverse students, more entrepreneurial drive, and more freedom to do what is best for the children. Source: Reinventing America’s Schools by David Osborne
TEACHERS:
Teach for America: At Business Today’s fall 1988 conference Wendy Kopp, a student at Princeton, learned about the crisis in teaching – 12% of first-year teachers across the country were uncertified, clustered in urban areas. What if elite young college graduates could be convinced to teach in low-income public schools, even for a short period of time. Skipping classes, she produced an ambitious senior thesis, “An Argument and Plan for the Creation of the Teacher Corps.” After turning in her thesis, Kopp revised it into a thirty-page proposal for grant funding. Union Carbide donated office space in Manhattan, and Mobil offered Teach for America (TFA) its first grant for $26,000. 2,500 seniors from across the nation applied to join TFA’s inaugural class. Nearly 500 were selected. They would begin teaching in the fall of 1990, after an eight-week training institute, including one week of teaching in Los Angeles summer schools. Of the first class of TFA recruits, 80% fulfilled their two-year commitment and 42% stayed in teaching beyond that. Philanthropic support continued to grow, and the program attracted overwhelming media attention. Teach for America teachers became some of the most scrutinized workers in the nation, with researchers tracking their career trajectories, their attitudes about politics and society, and their student’s test scores.
A wealth of research indicates that one of the best things a teacher can do for her students is to set high, individualized expectations for each one of them, regardless of a child’s past performance or whether he comes to class with a label such as low-income, special education, or learning disabled. Effective teachers believe all children can learn – a fundament of the TFA philosophy. In general, academically ineffective teachers are those who set the bar too low: some evidence suggests that half of what is taught in most classes is already known by most students. To avoid teaching children what they have previously learned, teachers should assess students at the beginning of the school year and at the beginning of new units, to identify their strengths and weaknesses. This type of teaching has exploded in prominence since the mid-1990s, driven in large part by the strategies and rhetoric used at the KIPP charter schools and adopted by TFA and many of the other charters at which its corps members and alumni increasingly work.
Valued-Added Measurement: Value-added measurement in its relatively crude, early form, simply used a student’s score on an end-of-year standardized test to predict her score on the following year’s exam. Teachers who preside over larger-than-expected jumps in scores earned above average value-added ratings.
A more sensitive early value-added formula was developed in the mid-1990s, where statisticians recognized the fact that disadvantaged students tend to experience slower academic growth than their middle-class peers, no matter how good their teachers. That’s because poor children are more likely to experience out of-school disruptions, such as poor nutrition, a move, or homelessness, which can affect learning. The research team created a value-added equation that included controls for children’s demographic traits, such as parental income and proficiency in English, essentially giving teachers who worked with disadvantaged kids bonus points. This technique found smaller, yet still significant, teacher effects on kids’ test scores.
Today reformers across the country are experimenting with empowering teachers to coach their peers, to remake teacher education, to design creative curriculum materials, and to lead school turnaround efforts. These practices conceive of veteran teachers as assets, not liabilities.
Source: The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 11_soc_charter_schools.pdf |