Reason Foundation

Green Dot Charter Schools Raise Performance for Long-Suffering Locke High School

Posted on May 14, 2012, 4:10pm | Lisa Snell

Reason first told the story of the struggle of Locke high school parents and teachers to have their school run by Green Dot charter schools in the Drew Carey piece: Education Revolt in Watts.

Now there is good news out of Locke high school. Students are doing much better on multiple indicators under Green Dot management. As this new UCLA study reports:

Students at historically low-performing Locke High School in South Los Angeles, which recently was transformed into five smaller charter schools, are now performing better than their traditional-school peers in a number of key academic areas, according to a multi-year study conducted by the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing at UCLA (CRESST). 

CRESST's evaluation, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, looked at two groups of ninth graders who started in 2007 and 2008 - just after the charter-school group Green Dot Public Schools assumed operational control of Locke from the Los Angeles Unified School district and initiated a series of major curriculum and faculty changes. The UCLA researchers followed the students for three years. 

The study found that the Green Dot Locke students were more likely to stay in school, to take and pass important college preparatory classes, and to score higher on the state high school exit exam on their first attempt than students at demographically similar high schools in the LAUSD. The study authors called the transformation of Locke "an impressive success story" and found that the charter had achieved "consistent, positive effects on a range of student outcomes." The UCLA CRESST evaluation is ongoing. 

The full UCLA report is here.

And Fast Company has an extensive story on the news and other positive results at Locke:

Rather than centrally manage every school, each Green Dot charter is run like a startup: the staff is given broad discretionary powers over finance, faculty are given the reins to innovate with new curriculum, and the union contract is performance-based rather than a guarantee of minimum work requirements. To maintain its unusual level of collaboration, a Green Dot overhaul physically splits schools into autonomous units of around 500 students (in some cases, by using chicken wire for temporary walls).

A UCLA-Gates Foundation study released today shows that Green Dot's prescription is paying off, with 25% higher graduation rates (80% vs. 55%) and 35% higher college readiness (48% vs. 13%). Green Dot even managed to bring sanity to one of LA's worst schools, Locke, where rival gangs maintained control over bathrooms and students regularly set hanging artwork on fire.

Green Dot was able to achieve these positive results without cherry picking students and they were able to have better outcomes while enrolling students in more challenging classes. 

And as Dr. Jay P. Greene recently argued when we look at gold standard randomized studies charter school benefits are proven by the best evidence.

24 High-Performing Los Angeles Unified Schools Plan to Become Charter Schools

Posted on May 14, 2012, 3:35pm | Lisa Snell

In "The School District is Dead, Long Live the Schools," I wrote about the emerging trend of high-performing traditional schools converting to charters schools  to get more flexibility and control of their financial resources. This growing trend is distinct from the traditional trajectory of charter schools that have developed to serve students in poor performing public schools. Los Angeles Unified is embracing this trend. As the Los Angeles Times reports:

Two dozen high-performing Los Angeles schools are seeking to become charter campuses in search of more money and increased flexibility.

The list reads like an honor roll of academic excellence. Every school has surpassed the state's target score of 800 on the Academic Performance Index, which is based on standardized tests.

Although many of the schools considered the move in hopes of greater funding, campus officials said they also began to see the benefits of increased freedom over such things as curriculum, testing and schedules. "Finance is one key factor but not the only one," said Jose Cole-Gutierrez, who directs the charter school division of the L.A. Unified School District.

The interesting twist is that Los Angeles Unified appears to be encouraging these schools to become charters. This again begs the questions are central offices and school districts going to become obsolete?  Why not have all charter districts like New Orleans? As I said in the earlier Reason piece:

The bottom line is that charter schools give school leaders, teachers, and parents much more control over staffing and finances while also freeing them from the economic consequences of belonging to a district that has been in financial distress for decades. A school district may become financially bankrupt, but individual schools can live on through the charter school process. It raises the question: As a nation, should we continue to support large school districts at the expense of individual schools and students?

Philadelphia Schools to Follow New Orleans Market Education Lead Without a Hurricane?

Posted on April 25, 2012, 11:44am | Lisa Snell

Philadelphia plans to revolutionize its school system by closing schools, moving to an all-charter or autonomous school district, ditching the central office, and privatizing school services with outside vendors.

As the Philadelphia Inquirer reports:

So, at the SRC's direction, Chief Recovery Officer Thomas Knudsen on Tuesday announced a plan that would essentially blow up the district and start with a new structure.

The plan - subject to public comment and SRC approval - would close 40 schools next year and 64 by 2017, move thousands more students to charters, and dismantle the central office in favor of "achievement networks" that would compete to run groups of 25 schools and would sign performance-based contracts. . . .

Forget the command-and-control district structure. It's archaic and it doesn't work, officials said.

Instead of orders coming from a large central office that runs 249 schools, much of the power would be concentrated in the new achievement networks.

Those would represent "a breaking-apart of the district," Knudsen said. They would be "a group of people who choose to do business with the SRC and the central office to run" from 20 to 25 schools organized either by geography or by some other theme.

Successful principals or district staff could apply to run an achievement network. So could charter organizations, or universities, or a combination of those groups.

Principals would answer to the achievement networks, although they would remain district employees. The achievement networks would have contracts with the SRC, and would have to meet performance goals or risk being replaced.

The achievement network structure "creates an entrepreneurial approach, a flexibility, a nimbleness, a willingness to experiment," Knudsen said.

The current academic divisions - formerly called regions, clusters, and districts - will be gone as of this summer. Pilot achievement networks will be in place this fall, with a formal rollout in 2014.

Schools would have much more autonomy, with the ability to choose their own curriculums.

Though there is some precedent for this kind of work - officials pointed to the decentralization in New York City public schools - Ramos noted that what Philadelphia is proposing "is different from what many other places are doing."

The central office, already half the size it was a year ago, will shrink further, from over 1,000 employees a few years ago to about 200 in the new model. 

This model has been working well in New Orleans where more than 80 percent of students are in charter schools without a central office and in several other districts that have decentralized control to the parents and the schools. Philadelphia is moving toward the sea change in school governance and school funding that is happening across the United States.  More than 30 "school funding portability" funding systems are funding students through a student-based budgeting mechanism in cities like New York, Baltimore, Denver, Hartford and Cincinnati. In 2011, Rochester, Newark and Boston have moved to full weighted student formula systems where the money follows the child. Los Angeles Unified is moving from 100 pilot schools being funded based on per-pupil basis to all 800 schools funded based on where the student enrolls. In Louisiana, 7 school districts are piloting a student-based budgeting system, including the largest school district in the state, Jefferson Parish, with 50,000 students. New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Indiana have all recently changed their statewide school funding systems to a state formula where the money is attached to the child. These kind of systems support a level playing field for charters and district schools and do not give schools a residential advantage. 

There are many interesting details of the plan at the Philadelphia Inquirer so read all about it here.

New Orleans is Already Demonstrating What will be Possible When We Open Up School Markets

Posted on April 19, 2012, 1:44pm | Lisa Snell

As Fast Company reports not only is New Orleans the most market-oriented education system in the United States but it is becoming an open-source platform to test and nurture new innovative education ideas from teachers that are attracting large investments from venture capitalists.

"If you're an edtech entrepreneur who wants to pilot an idea, you have the most efficient and smartest market in the country here," says Matt Candler, CEO of 4.0 Schools. That's because instead of a centralized bureaucracy, there are more than 40 schools making independent decisions on both hiring and procurement. Organizations like KIPP, Teach for America, and the Gates Foundation have established beachheads, drawing top teachers and fresh blood from all over the country. These are intersecting with a nascent startup scene dubbed "Silicon Bayou" to produce a hothouse of ideas to change education: for-profit and nonprofit, from school redesigns to apps, often from younger, female entrepreneurs.

This is why Neerav Kingsland the chief strategy officer of New Schools for New Orleans has the most important message ever for everyone who works in the public school system. In "An Open Letter to Urban Superintendents in the United States of America" he writes:

In the following letter I aim to convince you of this: the single most important reform strategy you can undertake is to increase charter school quality and market share in your city--with the ultimate aim of turning your district into a charter school district.

In other words: rid yourself of the notion that your current opinions on curriculum, teacher evaluation, technology, or anything else will be the foundation for dramatic gains in student achievement. If history tells us anything, they will not be.

Read the whole thing to learn so much more about why we should be replicating New Orleans in cities across America.

Join Reason Foundation for National School Choice Week 2012 in New Orleans on Saturday, January 21

Posted on January 11, 2012, 1:17pm | Lisa Snell

You're invited to join Reason Foundation and other advocates of School Choice at the official kickoff event for National School Choice Week 2012 in New Orleans on Saturday, January 21, 2012.

First, the details:

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Lakefront Arena at the University of New Orleans

6801 Franklin Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70122

10:30 AM to 12:30 PM

RSVP online at http://www.schoolchoiceweek.com/official_kickoff

It's going to be a huge party, with musical performances by The Temptations and Ellis Marsalis , and thousands of likeminded students, parents, teachers, and community activists who are celebrating school choice across the country. In addition to these legendary entertainers, you'll hear from elected officials, celebrities, and students, parents, and teachers who will share how school choice has given them a chance at a quality education. In fact, if you represent a school choice organization, National School Choice Week will even provide you with a free table on our concourse to distribute materials on-site.

Reason Foundation is an integral planning partner for National School Choice Week (January 22-28, 2012), and we're so excited to invite you to attend this huge party and help raise awareness about school choice. And this is just the first party of the week! Between January 22-28, thousands of Americans will come together at seminars, rallies, schools, movies, and other places to shine a spotlight on the need for effective education options for children. 

Please RSVP online at http://www.schoolchoiceweek.com/official_kickoff and remember to invite your friends and family. Everyone is welcome to this massive celebration of school choice!

Charter Schools more like Vouchers: New Jersey Edition

Posted on November 16, 2011, 12:37pm | Lisa Snell

^{Legislation signed by Gov. Chris Christie will allow private schools in struggling districts to become charter schools. In this case it works just like vouchers where the money follows the child to the private school that the parent chooses.} 

^{Under the legislation (A2806/S1858), high-performing private schools can apply to the state education commissioner to make the change. Because charter schools receive public funding, parochial schools making the transition will be barred from religious instruction or displaying religious symbols.}

^{Christie said the law will help "ensure that more students are stepping into classrooms that will give them a better education and a brighter future." But he said the Democratic-controlled Legislature continues to stall other pieces of his education agenda, including school vouchers and merit pay for teachers.}

^{"These reforms must be taken up now; we cannot ask children in failing schools to wait any longer while these reforms sit untouched in Trenton," Christie said.}

Charter School Market Share: D.C. Edition

Posted on November 7, 2011, 12:18pm | Lisa Snell

According to the Washington Post, Washington DC charters may soon be the majority school system like New Orleans.  Charter students are gaining... #winning

October count came in at 46,191--that's down 419 students, about six-tenths of a percent-- from last fall's 46,515. That was when the District received a 1.6 percent bump over 2009.

The city's public charter schools continued their robust growth. The Public Charter School Board reported unaudited enrollment at 32,009--an 8.2 percent boost over last October's 29,557.

School District is Dead, Long Live the Schools: Oakland Edition

Posted on November 4, 2011, 12:57pm | Lisa Snell

In a new piece at Reason.com on the Oakland charter school revolution I tell the story of how charter schools are not just for low-performing schools anymore. Successful public schools want the charter advantage too:

The majority of charter schools have started in urban areas with long histories of trapping kids in failing schools and reflect the story line told in the documentary Waiting For Superman, where desperate disadvantaged children vie for their spot in the local charter school. In addition, there has been a larger trend towards low-performing schools being restructured as charter schools, as in the Detroit proposal to convert 41 schools to charters to offer kids higher-quality education and save the school district money. And New Orleans, where 80 percent of kids are now enrolled in charter schools, stands alone as a city that successfully built a charter school Mecca out of the ruins of disaster where the money now follows the kids to any school in the city. In all of these cases the charter school growth has the "hostile takeover" flavor of kids fleeing a failing public school system.

Ascend and Learning Without Limits flip that trend. These high-quality public schools want the charter advantage for themselves. They want relief from collective bargaining, from central office mandates, and most significantly from the huge school district debts that leave less money for the students. And these Oakland schools are not alone. For example, in March 2011, the Los Angeles school board approved the charter petition of El Camino Real high school, which holds the national record for U.S. Academic Decathlon championships and maintains top test scores in the district. This reflects an ongoing trend of Los Angeles schools opting for freedom from district regulations by shifting to charter status. In fact, at 80,000 students, Los Angeles boasts the most charter students of any district in the nation. After the school board vote, former Superintendent Ramon Cortines told the Associated Press that he expects the conversion trend to continue and foresees the day when the district's enrollment of 650,000 will plummet to 400,000.

A Sea Change for School Funding in America

Posted on October 21, 2011, 12:49pm | Lisa Snell

In the United States, we are in a great transition period, moving from funding institutions to funding students. K-12 education funding, across multiple sectors, is moving closer to how we fund higher education in the United States. We are moving away from a system funded by local resources and driven by residential assignment to a system where funding is driven by parental choice and put in the child's rhetorical "backpack."

At Learning Matters an affiliate of PBS Newshour, I make the case in an online debate on school funding  that "money should follow students." I reprise the my point in the debate below, but go to read the debate to see what other education experts have to say.

In 2011, there are now 26 school voucher and tax credit programs in 15 states with close to $1 billion in school funding following students to schools. There are more than 2 million students enrolled in charter schools with more than 100 cities with 10 percent or more charter-school market share. In New Orleans, for example, 80 percent of students are enrolled in charter schools with money attached to the student and following the student to the school of choice.

Taking this even one step further, with the growth of digital learning and the need to customize education at all levels, we are beginning to see examples where not only will school funding follow students to the school, but to multiple education-service providers. In Utah, for example, the Statewide Online Education Program allows high school students to select courses from multiple high-quality course options and multiple course providers, while still being enrolled in their public high school. The money follows the kids to the course selection. In April 2011, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law Arizona Empowerment Accounts. Empowerment Accounts allow parents - in this case, parents of special-needs children - to remove their children from the public-school system and receive the money the state would have spent on them in an education savings account. Every quarter, the state deposits up to 90 percent of the base support level of state funding into a parent-controlled ESA. Parents can then use that money to pay for a variety of educational options including private-school tuition, private tutoring, special education services, homeschooling expenses, textbooks, and virtual education, enabling them to customize an education for their child's unique needs.

Traditional public school funding systems at the state and local level are also adapting to a "school funding portability" framework where state and local funding is attached to the students and given directly to the institution in which the child enrolls. More than 30 "school funding portability" funding systems are funding student through a student-based budgeting mechanism in cities like New York, Baltimore, Denver, Hartford and Cincinnati. In 2011, Rochester, Newark and Boston have moved to full weighted student formula systems where the money follows the child. Los Angeles Unified is moving from 100 pilot schools being funded based on per-pupil basis to all 800 schools funded based on where the student enrolls. In Louisiana, 7 school districts are piloting a student-based budgeting system, including the largest school district in the state, Jefferson Parish, with 50,000 students. New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Indiana have all recently changed their statewide school funding systems to a state formula where the money is attached to the child.

As Indiana's Tribune Star reported "Of all the sweeping legislative changes coming to K-12 education, from private-school vouchers to performance-based pay for teachers, the one that may have the most impact is tucked inside the 270-page budget bill. It changes the way schools are funded, following a new formula to divvy up nearly $13 billion in K-12 education dollars. The new formula follows the mantra that "money follows the child." As Representative Ed Clere, who sits on the House Education Committee explained "The new formula is a "sea change" from the past. We're no longer funding schools. We're funding students."

In Louisiana Student-Based Budgeting Logical Extension of Charter School Movement

Posted on October 21, 2011, 12:30pm | Lisa Snell

In light of Saturday's state school board elections in Louisiana, The Pelican Institute's Kevin Mooney makes the case that "strong performing charter schools in the Recovery School District (RSD) make a compelling case for even greater decentralization in Louisiana's education system, according to the proponents of student based budgeting." This is especially true now that 80 percent of students in New Orleans are enrolled in charter schools where the "money follows the child" and student outcomes are moving in positive directions on multiple indicators from test scores to graduation rates. The Reason Foundation has been involved in a two year project to help the "money to follow every child" in Louisiana to the school in which they enroll.

As the Pelican Institute reports:  

Last November, the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) began studying the new budgetary concept at the behest of the state's Streamlining Commission.  Under current policy, state money is allocated to each school district and the district officials determine how much money each school receives. But there is a better way to maximize resources and direct money into the classroom, Lisa Snell, the director of Education and Child Welfare at the California-based Reason Foundation, said.

"We've learned from the charter school movement that decentralization has its advantages," Snell explained. "One of the problems we see at the federal, level and district level is that there are a lot of rules about how to spend money and principals are held accountable for student achievement. But the principals have very little input how resources are directed in specific instances. They should have more autonomy over how resources are aligned toward their school's instructional goals."

The idea behind student based budgeting (SBB) is for school dollars to be dispersed on a per-pupil basis and to follow individual students into schools where the principals determine how the money is best spent. Snell made the case for SBB last year before a BESE task force. She was joined by three other presenters from across the country who have successfully implemented the new budgetary method in their districts.

Matt Hill, an administrative officer for the Los Angeles Unified School District, told task force members that assigning financial resources directly to schools had allowed for each school to have greater flexibility to make specific decisions in spending, which in turn improved student performance. Jason Willis, a former budget director with the Oakland Unified School District, said some tasks are better suited to "economies of scale" at the central office, but most duties associated with "enhancements to learning" were better dealt with at the school level.

BESE has authorized a pilot program set to go into full effect next year that includes at least six different parishes: Jefferson, Sabine, Terrebonne, Assumption, Lafourche and Iberville. Officials with St. John the Baptist indicated earlier this year that they may not take part in the pilot after initially signing up, but the parish has not officially withdrawn, Penny Dastugue, the BESE president said. She anticipates the pilot program will yield useful information for school officials over the next several months.

"This is a voluntary way for districts to explore new concepts and new practices," Dastugue said. "The idea here is to empower local school leaders and to shift the decision-making over to the local schools where there is a firm understanding of student needs."

School districts that have embraced SBB throughout the country find that it translates into greater transparency, heightened flexibility and greater equity, Dastugue noted. She also said that the overall success of the charter school program suggests that SBB can be made to work in a larger scale.
"A one size fits all approach does not work," she said. "We need to be student specific and let principals address the individual needs of their schools. In a way, we already have a successful for student based budgeting with our charter schools."

Read the whole story here.

Universal Charter Schools in New Orleans

Posted on October 17, 2011, 12:46pm | Lisa Snell

My favorite report of the year is out. Instead of universal preschool, how about universal charter schools in New Orleans and many other cities with increasing market share. Charter schools can hardly be accused of creaming or discrimination when every student is enrolled in a charter school. 

A record number of school districts—six—have at least 30 percent of their public school students enrolled in public charter schools, according to an annual report released Monday by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) entitled A Growing Movement: American’s Largest Charter School Communities – Sixth Annual Edition. In addition, an all-time high of 18 school districts have more than 20 percent of their public school students enrolled in charter schools.

“This report demonstrates that in areas where families have a choice, a growing number of them are choosing public charter schools over the traditional public schools available to them,” said Ursula Wright, interim president and CEO of the NAPCS. “Consequently, the public education landscape is shifting in many major cities.”

Exceptional findings from the report include:

• Six school districts now have more than 30 percent of their public school students enrolled in public charter schools: New Orleans, Washington D.C., Detroit, Kansas City (Missouri), Flint, and Gary.
• 18 school districts have more than 20 percent of their public school students enrolled in charter schools
• An astounding 70 percent of public school students in New Orleans attended public charter schools in the 2010-2011 school year. Charter schools are the highest performing sector of public schools in the city.
• Los Angeles again tops the list of districts with the highest number of public charter school students enrolled with 79,385 students. To provide a sense of scale, the number of students enrolled in public charter schools in Los Angeles, alone, would place the city’s charter schools in the top 45 of the 100 largest school districts in the United States.
• Nearly 100 school districts now have at least 10 percent of public school students in charter schools.

"We estimate that there are now more than 2 million students in public charter schools across the country," said Wright. "And with hundreds of thousands more students across the country hoping for an additional seat in a charter school, we expect our share of the public school landscape to continue to rise in the coming years."

The "Top 10" highest percentages of public charter school students are in these 12 districts: New Orleans Public School System, La. (70 percent), District of Columbia Public Schools, (39 percent), Detroit Public Schools, Mich. (37 percent), Kansas City, Mo. (35 percent), Flint City School District, Mich. (32 percent), Gary Community School Corporation, Ind. (30 percent), St. Louis Public Schools, Mo. (29 percent), Dayton Public Schools, Ohio (27 percent), Youngstown City Schools, Ohio (24 percent), Albany City School District, NY (23 percent), Cleveland Municipal School District, Ohio (23 percent) and Toledo Public Schools, Ohio (23 percent).

The "Top 10" districts serving the highest number of public charter school students are: Los Angeles Unified School District, Calif. (79,385), Detroit Public Schools, Mich. (45,073), the School District of Philadelphia, Pa. (40,322), New York City Department of Education, N.Y. (38,743), Chicago Public Schools, Ill. (37,909), Houston Independent School District, Tex. (37,499), Miami-Dade County Public Schools. Fla. (35,380), District of Columbia Public Schools (29,366), New Orleans Public School System, La. (27,728) and Broward County Public Schools, Fla. (24,150).

The "Top 10" districts that experienced the highest annual growth in the percentage of public charter school students are: Orange County Public Schools, Fla. (42 percent), Memphis City Schools, Tenn. (41 percent), New York City Department of Education, N.Y. (29 percent), Mesa Public Schools, Ariz. (27 percent), Baltimore City Public Schools, Md. (26 percent), New Orleans Public Schools, La. (23 percent), Alpine School District, Utah (22 percent), San Antonio Independent School District, Tex, (21 percent), Indianapolis Public Schools, Ind. (20 percent), Los Angeles Unified School District, Calif. (19 percent) and the School District of Philadelphia, Pa. (19 percent).

Download a copy of the report A Growing Movement: America's Largest Charter School Communities - Sixth Annual Edition athttp://www.publiccharters.org/publication/?id=613. The report uses 2010-2011 school-year enrollment figures.

Los Angeles Charters Pwned District Schools

Posted on September 2, 2011, 10:50am | Lisa Snell

In Los Angeles,  Charters pwned district schools. The LA school board voted to exclude charter schools from the public school choice competition and give first priority to in-district schools. This is especially depressing given how much better charters are doing overall and how much better the charters that won the first round of public school choice are doing compared to the in-district providers.

The California Charter Schools Assoication keeps score and charter schools in Los Angeles are winning.

Los Angeles charter schools made the largest difference for the most disadvantaged kids.

• Both LAUSD and charter schools have seen their median API scores increase in the past four years. Charters have seen bigger cumulative gains than the district over that period at the elementary and high school levels.
• Median charter school API scores are higher than the district's for several key subgroups including: African Americans (23 point difference), Latinos (30 point difference), English Language Learners (20 point difference) and Socioeconomically Disadvantaged Students (22 point difference). See more detailed charts below.
• The difference between district and charter performance is particularly notable for Socioeconomically Disadvantaged and Latino students in charter high schools. Students from those subgroups had median API scores that were over 100 points higher than their counterparts at non-charters. English Learners at charter middle schools also had median API scores over 100 points higher than their non-charter counterparts.

Most Market-Oriented Education City in America Still Rocking Kids World

Posted on August 12, 2011, 3:03pm | Lisa Snell

The good news out of New Orleans, where close to 80 percent of students are now in charter schools, just keeps coming. As the Times-Picayune reports:

New Orleans public schools are improving test scores more rapidly than the state as a whole among three critical groups: African-American students, low-income students and special education students. . . .

For the first time since Louisiana began keeping track, a higher percentage of African-American students in New Orleans schools scored at or above grade level on the state's high-stakes test than those statewide: 53 percent in New Orleans compared to 51 percent in the state as a whole. That's a milestone, especially considering that four years ago only 32 percent of African-American public school students in New Orleans could make that claim, compared to 43 percent statewide.

New Orleans: Most Market-Driven School District in Nation Increases Test Scores Again

Posted on May 26, 2011, 3:31pm | Lisa Snell

New Orleans kids continue to improve under the market-driven charter school system. This year 71% of all New Orleans public school students attend charter schools and 77% of students enrolled in grades K-8 attend charter schools. In addition, there is no residential assignment in New Orleans and even in traditional schools which are not charter schools there is open enrollment and the "money follows the kid."

Today NOLA.Com reports on the continuing progress in New Orleans based on the just released test scores: 

The largest gains overall came among the New Orleans schools the state took over after Katrina because of their historic poor performance. Most of those schools are now independent charters overseen by the RSD, which also runs a number of traditional schools.

RSD students, including charter and traditional campuses, posted their fourth-consecutive year of improvement, increasing the proportion of students scoring at grade level or above to 48 percent. That's a 5 percent gain compared to 2010. With that progress, the proportion of RSD students scoring at grade level or better has more than doubled since 2007, from 23 percent to 48 percent.

RSD Superintendent John White said the results show the district is a national model for broader education reform efforts."The New Orleans system of schools works. Period. End of story. And we cannot go back to a system that does not put children's needs first." he said. "These results should close the book on that question."

New Orleans' kids #winning. Let's make choice and "money following the kids" a national model.

State of the State: New Jersey in 2011

Posted on April 1, 2011, 4:16pm | Harris Kenny

This is the eighth of a ten-part series on the 2011 State of the State (SOTS) speeches in states with the ten worst projected relative budget deficits for FY 2012. Budget data is from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ (CBPP) recent budget report, and SOTS speech text is from Stateline. CBPP’s data on states’ FY 2012 budget deficits as a percentage of their FY 2011 budget is the benchmark for relative budget deficits.

According to CBPP, New Jersey faces the third worst relative budget deficit in the nation in FY 2012, equaling roughly 37.4 percent of the state’s FY 2011 budget; and the fourth highest absolute budget deficit, totaling over $10.5 billion.

On January 11, 2011 New Jersey Governor Chris Christie delivered his SOTS address (full text available here). Governor Christie deliberately highlights successful state spending cuts, property tax caps, interest arbitration award caps, and closing consecutive budget deficits of $2 billion in FY 2010 and $11 billion in FY 2011. He then prefaces the remainder of his SOTS saying:

Instead of (providing a) long list of initiatives for the year head... (He wants) to highlight not the small things, but the major challenges that (New Jersey) has ignored for too long and that (it) must confront now. For New Jersey; it’s time to do the big things.

Below are the policy highlights from Gov. Christie’s address:

• Spending Cuts: Gov. Christie notably says that he wants to pursue spending cuts by having every department re-write their budgets from the “bottom up,” rather than using their FY 2011 budgets as a starting point and trimming down.
• Tax Increases: He pledges to not include any tax increases in his FY 2012 budget proposal, specifically saying that after 115 tax increases in the last 10 years it is time for comprehensive tax reform. He also says that in order to prevent tax increases, Medicaid and healthcare costs must be reformed (for more, see Government Reform below).
• Economic Development: Christie suggests pursuing tax cuts and economic development incentives, however only within the context of a balanced budget.

• Government Reform: He identifies the state’s “antiquated and unsustainable pension and benefit system” as a cloud hanging over the state. Christie notes that without reform, the unfunded liability of New Jersey’s pension system will grow from $54 billion to $183 billion within 30 years. In order to address this problem he proposes raising the retirement age, curbing the effect of cost of living adjustments based on actual inflation, collecting modest contributions by employees toward their retirement and contributions by the State to the pension fund. Regarding the pension system, he starkly says, “Benefits are too rich, and contributions are too small, and the system is on a path to bankruptcy.”

  Gov. Christie concludes his SOTS by discussing education reform. Christie has a broad vision for education reform, and emphasizes the following policy goals: promoting school choice through vouchers, increasing the number of charter schools, empowering principals, reforming poor-performing public schools, cutting out-of-classroom costs, focusing efforts on teachers and children rewarding merit rather than seniority, improving the measurement and evaluation of teachers and eliminating teacher tenure.

Policymakers in the Garden State have been engaged in high-profile budget wrangling over the past few years, and it appears that will continue as the State grapples with persistent budget deficits. For additional policy tools they should refer to the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) State Budget Reform Toolkit and Reason Foundation’s Annual Privatization Report 2010: State Government Privatization section. For the previous articles in this SOTS series, see: Louisiana, North Carolina, Wisconsin, California, Illinois, Nevada, Connecticut, Minnesota and Oregon.

Michelle Rhee's Legacy: Changing the Court of Public Opinion

Posted on October 13, 2010, 11:25am | Lisa Snell

As the media frenzy heats up around Michelle Rhee's resignation from the D.C. public schools and speculation begins about where she will land, we should all take a moment and thank her for making it safe for the rest of us to engage in a more robust discussion about public education in America.

While Michelle Rhee was certainly overhyped, it is because of the media fascination with her personal story that the general public now has a much better idea of what is at stake and what is wrong with the way schools run in America.

Michelle Rhee’s number one accomplishment is making the sacred issues surrounding teachers--from firing teachers to tenure to teacher performance matter in the court of public opinion. Examining teacher performance is no longer a third rail for American politics. Her biggest legacy will be making it safe for other education leaders and superintendents to start questioning the status quo about how we hire, fire, and retain teachers in the United States. This genie is not going back in the bottle and although we have a long way to go, the teaching profession is changing and the teachers unions are no longer free from public scrutiny.

The bottom line is that almost every school district in America could benefit from imitating Rhee's actions in terms of firing the lowest-performing teachers, closing failing schools, and changing teacher contracts.

This is a good time to go read Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward's excellent feature on Chancellor Rhee and her contributions to education reform: Last Chance for School Reform.

Charter schools versus Los Angeles Unified: School Building Costs Edition

Posted on August 24, 2010, 12:18pm | Lisa Snell

If you thought the $578 million for one high school in Los Angeles was obscene, wait until you here how much it cost to build several charter schools in the same geographic region with the same real estate and material costs and restraints. As the California Charter School Association President Jed Wallace writes in today's Los Angeles Times:

The Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools cluster, scheduled to open this fall on the site of the former Ambassador Hotel, was built at a cost of $578 million, or nearly $140,000 per student seat. It is without question the most expensive public school ever built in the Los Angeles Unified School District, and quite possibly the most expensive public school in the country.

The project's astronomical cost raises a question about whether the school district is using resources efficiently. . . .

When charter schools manage to get funding to build their own schools independent of the district, they do so for far less money than the LAUSD does. Recently, the Alliance for College Ready-Public Schools broke ground on a facility within sight of the Watts Towers that will serve 550 students and will cost $8.8 million. That is $16,000 per student seat, or one-ninth the cost of the Ambassador site project.

And the Alliance site is no exception. Over the past several years, Green Dot built seven charter schools in the vicinity of the RFK Community School, and it spent less than $85 million for all of them. Those schools currently serve about 4,300 students, which means they were built for under $20,000 per student seat.

If the district had given the $578 million it spent on one school to charter schools, we would have created many more seats for students, and the seats would have been in schools that are providing great results for kids and their families.

To summarize we are talking $140,000 a student versus less than $20,000 per student to build school buildings in Los Angeles. Charter schools in Los Angeles prove the district has wasted millions on school buildings rather than focusing on student achievement. If the district had given some of this money to charters they would have cheaper buildings and higher-performing students.

Louisiana School Reform and Red-Tape Reduction: Heartland Institute Podcast

Posted on July 15, 2010, 2:12pm | Lisa Snell

Check out my new Heartland Institute podcast in which I discuss school choice in New Orleans; the new Red-Tape Reduction Act for Schools signed by Governor Jindal; and the prospects of student-based budgeting in Louisiana.

After the Hurricane: An Interview with Lisa Snell of Reason Foundation

School Turnaround Folly: $3.5 Billion Federal Grant Edition

Posted on July 13, 2010, 2:36pm | Lisa Snell

As Leslie Maxwell reports at Education Week, the $3.5 billion in school improvement grants are overwelmingly going to schools who chose the easiest school improvement model: transformation. The rest of the schools chose school turnaround; the second weakest option. Despite the Obama Administration's chatter about charter schools, almost none of the $3.5 billion will go to school closure or schools restarting as charters.

Schools receiving millions of dollars in federal money meant to reverse years of low achievement are overwhelmingly opting for "transformation," the least disruptive of four intervention methods endorsed by the U.S. Department of Education.

This model is very similar to the "other" category under No Child Left Behind which meant each school could decide their own plan for school improvement. Once again individual schools will millions in federal dollars for promising to get it right this time. In California, for example, out of 113 schools likely to get the funding, 72 chose transformation and 32 chose turnaround with only two schools identified for school closure.

The Brookings Institute recently reported on the failure of school turnarounds in California:

“Much of the rhetoric on turnarounds is pie in the sky—more wishful thinking than a realistic assessment of what school reform can actually accomplish,” writes Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution. “It can be done but the odds are daunting” and “examples of large-scale, system-wide turnarounds are nonexistent.”

Mr. Loveless looked at 1,100 schools in California and compared test scores from 1989 and 2009. “Of schools in the bottom quartile in 1989—the state’s lowest performers—nearly two-thirds (63.4 percent) scored in the bottom quartile again in 2009,” he writes. “The odds of a bottom quartile school’s rising to the top quartile were about one in seventy (1.4 percent).” Of schools in the bottom 10% in 1989, only 3.5% reached the state average after 20 years.

Reason.tv's School Choice Extravaganza

Posted on July 9, 2010, 3:56pm | Lisa Snell

Check out Reason.tv's week long school choice extravaganza including a piece about the school choice revolution in New Orleans; an interview with Louisiana State Superintendent Paul Pastorek about how school choice works and why New Orleans is different; a longer panel in which I host a discussion on school choice in New Orleans and the nation with Educate Now’s Leslie Jacobs and Basis charter school’s Arwynn Mattix; and finally a conversation with Former Assistant Secretary of Education Bill Evers about education thus far under the Obama Administration.

Education Under Obama: A Conversation with Former Assistant Secretary of Education Bill Evers
Williamson M. Evers was the US assistant secretary of education for policy from 2007-2009. Today, Evers is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and serves on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's California Academic Content Standards Commission. Reason.tv's Paul Feine recently sat down with Evers to get his assessment of US education policy under Obama thus far

Education Under Obama: A Conversation with Former Assistant Secretary of Education Bill Evers

Louisiana Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek on the New Orleans School Choice Revolution
Paul Pastorek has served as the Louisiana State Superintendent of Education since his appointment in 2007, less than two years after Katrina ravaged the region. The storm appeared to be the final blow to an already failing public school system. But then something amazing happened. In the wake of Katrina, reformers like Paul Pastorek decided to seize the opportunity to start fresh with a system based on choice.

Louisiana Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek on the New Orleans School Choice Revolution

Katrina's Silver Lining: The School Choice Revolution in New Orleans
Before hurricane Katrina ravaged the city in 2005, New Orleans had one of the worst performing public school districts in the nation. Today, New Orleans has the most market-based school system in the US. It's too early to tell if the New Orleans experiment in school choice will succeed over the long term, but for the first time in decades people are optimistic about the future of New Orleans schools.

Katrina's Silver Lining: The School Choice Revolution in New Orleans

Talking School Choice With Reformers Lisa Snell, Leslie Jacobs & Arwynn Mattix
Reason Foundation's Director of Education Lisa Snell hosts a panel with Leslie Jacobs, founder of education reform nonprofit Educate Now! As a former member of the New Orleans School Board, Jacobs was a driving force behind the charter school movement that rejuvenated the New Orleans public school system after Hurricane Katrina. Also on the panel is Arwynn Mattix from the BASIS Education Group, which runs charter schools in Arizona that have attracted praise from figures such as Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton.

Talking School Choice With Reformers Lisa Snell, Leslie Jacobs & Arwynn Mattix

Public Pension Reform: Free the Teachers

Posted on July 9, 2010, 12:38am | Lisa Snell

In the New York Daily News, charter school Biology teacher, Emmanuel George, makes the case for teacher pension reform.

Green Dot Acts Responsibly to Close Under-performing Charter School

Posted on March 23, 2010, 6:20pm | Lisa Snell

Green Dot has taken heavy criticism for its plan to close an under-performing and under-enrolled charter school next year. Yet, shouldn't school districts act like Green Dot and actively manage schools and close under-enrolled schools and redirect scarce resources to higher-performing schools. As the Los Angeles Times reports:

Green Dot Public Schools, a leading charter school operator, is shutting down a campus because of low enrollment, financial pressures and subpar performance, officials confirmed Monday.

The action prompted a daylong student protest Monday at Animo Justice Charter High School, south of downtown Los Angeles.

The closure marks a first for locally based and nationally recognized Green Dot, which has 19 area campuses and one in New York City. . . .

Green Dot's financial model relies on philanthropic subsidies until it can build enrollment, one grade at a time, to 560 students. Animo Justice never quite hit its annual enrollment targets, accumulating a $1 million deficit, said chief executive Marco Petruzzi. . . .

Closing Animo Justice makes sense because it has not equaled other Green Dot schools in performance and enrollment, Petruzzi said.

Green Dot is offering the students and faculty placement in other Green Dot schools. Imagine if every school in the nation was responsible enough to close if under-enrolled and under-performing and deployed resources to more successful schools. What a concept!!

Reason Saves Cleveland Schools: Follow Detroit Edition?

Posted on March 17, 2010, 6:08pm | Lisa Snell

As Reason Saves Cleveland with Drew Carey, the one consolation for Cleveland is that they were not Detroit. However, Cleveland could look to Detroit's new school plan as a robust example of how to Fix the Schools.

In a Fix the Schools policy brief, I argue that the bottom line is that the district should seek continuous improvement by assessing performance of all schools, closing the lowest-performing schools, and creating alternative opportunities for students in the least-productive schools.

In Detroit Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb unveiled his plan for a "leaner and smarter" Detroit Public Schools that calls for closing about 45 buildings and rebuilding others.

Within five years the district will be transformed from a district with old schools that are under capacity to a district where 75 percent of students attend new or recently improved schools, said Bobb, the district's emergency financial manager.

In addition to Bobb's plan to close schools, Excellent Schools Detroit which is a nonprofit representing 15 community organizations in Detroit plans to financially support the start-up of 70 new private, charter, or district schools.

The group is planning to offer start-up funds to attract organizations and educators capable of opening high-quality public, charter or private schools in Detroit or neighboring suburbs accessible to Detroit students.

 What's driving the initiative is low achievement in many of Detroit's public and charter schools. About half of the high schools on the state's draft list of the lowest-performing schools in Michigan are in Detroit Public Schools, in addition to some charter schools.

The most significant part of the Excellent Schools Detroit plan is that it embraces a "school-sector agnosticism" that does not favor district, or charter, or private schools. As the Excellent Schools Detroit FAQs explain:

Our focus is on students, not institutions. We want every school, no matter who runs it, to serve its students well. This plan is designed to foster excellence and not tolerate failure. DPS, like every other school operator, has every chance to improve its schools. The Emergency Financial Manager has made it very clear that DPS intends to compete very strongly to attract more students and families. But we also are not putting all of our eggs in one basket. We believe fostering the opening of new schools -- whether they are DPS or charter or independent -- is a faster way to get us to our goal.

The district school closures and the Excellent Education Detroit plans embrace Reason's version of Andy Smarick's mantra is his great piece The Turnaround Fallacy in which he argues:  "Stop trying to fix failing schools. Close them and start fresh."

Detroit seems to be moving toward the recipe to fix failing urban schools: close failing schools, open new charter schools, give principals control of their budgets, let parents choose schools, replicate great schools, repeat.

Superintendent Paul Pastorek on Charters and Turning Around Low-Peforming Schools

Posted on January 29, 2010, 4:34pm | Lisa Snell

In Reason Foundation's Innovators in Action 2009, I interview Louisiana State Superintendent Paul Pastorek about turning around low-performing schools, the role of charter schools, and the challenges and future plans for school improvement in Louisiana.

Here is a sample of what Pastorek had to say:

There was an article I recently read titled, "Try, Try Again." I think it epitomizes our strategy. We'll give a school to a charter operator. We'll let them work it. If they fail, we'll bring in another charter operator and if they fail, we'll bring in another charter operator until they get it right. That strategy is appropriate when we try to restructure businesses, and we don't always succeed in restructuring businesses. Likewise, when we try and restructure schools, we don't always succeed, but I would rather give an organization outside the state an opportunity to be successful. If they're not successful, we'll take them out of business and bring somebody else in.

I think one of the interesting features of charter schools in New Orleans is that we've created an incubator for charter schools. And we've actually replicated that model and launched an incubator in Baton Rouge. This ensures that we aren't putting all our eggs into the national charter operator basket.

We want to bring in small operators. We want to offer real opportunity for creativity and innovation, and so we're trying to cultivate a charter landscape that involves a healthy mix of experienced charter providers as well as people who don't have experience or a track record operating charters.

By the way, now that the state is in its second year of awarding charters in the Baton Rouge area, we'll see an influx of more experienced charters come to the Baton Rouge area. We're seeing some really high quality people express an interest in Baton Rouge—and they are coming with very creative ideas and options.

I'm very optimistic about our efforts around charters in the Recovery School District, because I don't think the strategy of a state takeover, where we try and run schools using the traditional district command-and-control will work anywhere. And frankly, that approach doesn't and can't effectively deal with low achieving schools. So if we can avoid the command-and-control approach and utilize charters for our low-performing schools, I think we will achieve a better outcome.

The full interview is here.

Innovators in Action 2009

Posted on January 29, 2010, 4:22pm | Leonard Gilroy

Now more than ever, governments at all levels are looking for ways to reduce spending and improve the services delivered to taxpayers. As such, I'm pleased to announce the release of Reason Foundation's Innovators in Action 2009, which profiles nine innovators who have demonstrated leadership through action on privatization, competition, government re-invention and other market-based reforms designed to reduce the costs of government and deliver more value to taxpayers:

• Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue created the Commission on a New Georgia, an advisory group of corporate executives partnering with the state to re-engineer its bureaucratic machinery.
• Former New South Wales, Australia Premier Bob Carr embraced privately financed toll roads as a means of delivering infrastructure better, faster and cheaper than traditional government approaches.
• Louisiana Commissioner of Administration Angele Davis is playing a central implementation role in Gov. Bobby Jindal's wide-ranging efforts to streamline the state bureaucracy.
• Under the leadership of State Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek, Louisiana's burgeoning school choice movement is using transparency, standards and accountability to improve student achievement and turn around low-performing schools.
• Indianapolis Mayor Gregory Ballard has advanced an array of competition and government reform initiatives designed to control costs, improve government performance, and bring best business practices to government.
• Former Florida Council on Efficient Government Executive Director Henry Garrigo helped to create a national model for a state center of excellence in privatization to ensure sound decisionmaking on outsourcing proposals.
• Chicago's Chief Financial Officer Gene Saffold oversaw the Windy City's $1.15 billion lease of the city's downtown parking meter system in 2009.
• Former AT&T executive Oliver Porter led a citizen task force that created the template for the largely privatized government in Sandy Springs, Georgia.
• Chief Information Officer Eric Gillespie and his colleagues at Onvia saw major gaps in the federal government's commitment and ability to deliver on stimulus spending transparency— and they stepped in to fill it by creating Recovery.org at a fraction of the cost it took the feds to create their own Recovery.gov.

Amidst today's massive deficits and red ink, we need government leaders who are willing to ditch the failed status quo and seek out better ways of doing things. We hope the examples and experiences offered by these innovators will inspire reform-minded officials at all levels of government to provide better, leaner and cheaper government to taxpayers.

• Innovators in Action 2009 homepage
• Full report (PDF, 950kB)
• Press release