Charters are the hopeful section of education innovation

From UtahPolicy.com:

A new report from the Center for American Progress gives Utah a “D” grade when it comes to innovation in education. The report not only looks at how well a state’s educational system is performing now, but looks at whether they invest in new technology and other forward-looking questions.

The report says Utah has “below average academic standards” and does a poor job preparing students for college and career readiness.

53% of its schools report offering dual-enrollment programs, which allow students to earn high school and college credits simultaneously. That is 12 percentage points below the national average of 65%. Utah does not have high school exams that gauge college and career readiness.

Utah also gets low marks for use of technology in the classroom.

On the other hand, several charter schools are blazing new trails in both these areas. Utah Virtual Academy, Open High School of Utah, Merit Academy, and Utah County Academy of Science, among other charter schools, excel in offering options for high school students to earn college credits, including duel enrollment options.

Charter schools like Vista School, C.S. Lewis Academy, Lakeview Academy, and the newly approved Aspire Online Charter School are breaking new ground for the use of technology in the classroom, using the latest education innovations to enhance instruction and improve student learning outcomes.

Districts immitating the best charters

The school district in Rochester, New York is empowering local schools within the district to allow them the freedom to compete with and implement programs like the ones that exist in the city's charter schools.

"Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard wants to take five schools and model them after successful charter schools." Hopefully, the school will then get similar results, like True North Rochester Preparatory School, which "had some of the best math scores in the county last year, despite serving mostly poor kids."

"Brizard’s idea is to choose five schools and give them as much autonomy as possible, in terms of having control over how monies are spent and how faculty are selected."

This could be a huge development in the overall education reform movement--one that could help charters and districts together. Let's move together toward a model that allows innovation and flexibility for schools, choice for parents, and accountability for results for all.

Losses of 3,000 education jobs

We know the budget picture for next year looks bleak, and here's a story on how bleak it could actually be.

The "2010 general session could be the toughest in at least a generation, with the loss of up to 3,000 public- and higher-education and state jobs."

Performance Pay in Idaho

I attended a session on teacher evaluation systems combined with performance pay given by Idaho Digital Learning Academy. The principles involved:

• Set high expectations
  
• Prepare teachers to excel
• Monitor and evaluate them
• Reward those that achieve high standards

IDLA (which exists as a supplementary program to districts throughout the state--very few full-time students, but rather most students take a handful of courses that their local school doesn't offer) agrees with Bill Gates (and me) that technology is just a tool, and that unless that tool is in the hand of a competent professional, the results won't be any better than textbooks without good teachers.

They provided a decent rubric with appropriate standards. It was a fairly good presentation and plan, except for the outcomes. IDLA didn't share any data about the impact this plan had on student achievement, only data on how many teachers qualified for their bonus under the plan, which equals 20 percent of their salary.

They seemed very pleased that 95 percent of their teachers received a bonus last year, but that bothered me, and I said so. "Doesn't that mean standards are too low," I asked. The teacher development person at IDLA said, "Maybe," and that that's why they constantly evaluate.

I'm all for setting standards and letting all who reach the standard get the rewards and incentives, but when 95 percent of your teachers are getting "exceeds expectations" on evaluations, the expectations are too low. This system rewarded not only the excellent teachers, but also the average ones, and almost all the below average ones (taking the median definition of average where half are above and half are below).

That's not a way to reward excellence, it's a way to eliminate the expectation of excellence altogether. I'll let Syndrome say it:

Florida Virtual School's slogan

Any time
Any place
Any path
Any pace

Dr. Terry Moe at VSS

Dr. Terry Moe, author of Liberating Learning, is giving the keynote address at the Virtual Schools Symposium. Some highlights:

• Education establishment interest groups seek power and are hyper-effective at it.
• Technology is threatening the status quo. When virtual schools take kids and money away from the powerful districts, the established interests mobilize and try to stop innovation from happening. (Examples from Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Wisconsin.)
• What we are witnessing is a simple extension of the "politics of blocking" into the realm of educational technology. We could make leaps of progress right now if it weren't for the political forces seeking to stymie reform and innovation.
• What's going to happen? The revolution in information technology is so huge and is impacting so many aspects of society, that it is unstoppable. It will undermine the impact of the teachers' unions over the long term. Union power depends on numbers, and more technology means schools need fewer teachers. Technology will blast the necessity of geography in education. Teachers literally be anywhere, and therefore they become much more difficult to organize.
• Technology makes student performance data instantly available, shining a light on the poor performance of the status quo, particularly for hard-hit populations. The conflict between the traditional Democratic constituencies (teachers' unions and at-risk populations) has immobilized Democrats historically, but more and more they are committed to the idea that disadvantaged kids deserve the best opportunities and are favoring reform over the blocking tactics of the teachers' unions.
• You can see that with Arne Duncan and Barack Obama.
  
• All of that will weaken the unions, more technological reform will go through, and that will disrupt the status quo, leading to the implementation of pent-up change. For the first time in history, we will be allowed to just do what works.
• There are things we can do to make this happen faster. Unfortunately he didn't expand here at all.
• "Technology will be the biggest force for school choice that we have ever seen."
  

Virtual School Symposium

I'm in Austin, Texas for the Virtual School Symposium. There are thousands of people here, many from charters, who operate either virtual schools or online or technologically enhanced programs as part of their brick and mortar school.

The courses and breakout sessions have been fascinating, but the exhibitors and their innovations in professional development, data tracking, and instructional development are the best part.

There are several universities here that operate virtual schools that offer coursework to students nationwide, allowing any school anywhere to offer online courses for subjects the school can't teach on site. Florida has developed an online curriculum that they provide to other schools in other states, and one school from Indiana talked about how they have implemented it in their school, along with BrainHoney, an instructional development and data tracking tool from a Utah-based company named Agilix.

There are no boundaries at all.

Union membership down, charter enrollment up

That's a solid combination.

Hopefully, we'll keep moving to the time when schools focus on the needs of their students rather than the political interests of their employees' union.

That's the world charters operate in, where parents have the ability to insist that school's don't pay union employees with education dollars.

The union says that the main reason for their decline in membership enrollment is due to "the economy," but I'd like to think that one reason is that more and more students, and therefore more and more teachers, are finding a better education environment exists where schools respond to the needs of parents instead of unions.

Looking for a place to save if budgets are cut?

How about this story highlighting the fact that school districts pay the salaries of teachers on leave to lobby the district itself on behalf of the teachers' union. An State Auditor's report showed that Districts are not fulfilling their statutory responsibilities, and instead are paying for staff working for an organization whose interests "conflict with the interests of the district."

Could you imagine something like that happening in a charter. What parents would stand for it? What boards would allow it? How could any administrator or board ever justify to parents that they are spending their education dollars on a lobbyist who is lobbying the school itself? Is that putting kids first in education?

Such expenses could only exist in a political system that doesn't respond to the needs of its students as readily as it does to the interests of its employees. Ask yourself why schools exist. To enrich its staff or to educate its children?

Now take the obvious answer to that question and ask how you could possibly justify taking money that could go to hire more teaching staff and give it instead to someone working for the employee union.

State Senator: "State Retirement must change"...

...to something like what's offered at charter schools. (See my previous posts about the retirement system here.)

Sen. Dan Liljenquist, R-Bountiful, chairman of the legislative committee that oversees retirement says in today's DNews that the Utah Retirement System is unsustainable because it means that a huge chunk of a new employee's compensation -- salary, benefits and pension -- would be committed to the retirement benefits. As a result, school districts, police and fire departments and state and local governments wouldn't be able to pay the salaries to lure new workers.

Liljenquist recognizes that the current retirement system is a Ponzi scheme, where the payout to early contributors comes from those currently paying into the system. That works as long as the economy and the state workforce is growing faster than the retirement cycle of former employees. That's not the case now, and the system currently faces $6.3 billion in liabilities, forcing state agencies to reduce the pay of current employees so they can contribute more to the retirement of former ones.

Who would choose to work in such a system?

Park City paper writes about new charter...and then let's district attack it

Two stories about the new Weilenmann School of Discovery ran in the Park Record this weekend, one that primarily quoted the school's founders, and one two days later that quoted the school district's fear mongers.

Says the district, "I don't see that they are offering anything superior to what we have currently, technology wise or accessibility wise. We're just kind of curious as to why they find it necessary." That's a curious thing to say for a school that doesn't yet open until next fall. How does the district know how the charter will compare with the district's own technology and accessibility? Isn't is possible that people in Park City find a new school necessary because not every child finds the attention and approach they need in a single school district?

Also, "They'll tout it as a free private-school education," the district said. Well, leave it to the media to take predict the future quotes and print them as if it's a fact.

The charter school's approach was totally different. Rather than bad-mouthing the district, Weillenmann representatives touted their own program.

Mid-year cuts could be coming

According to Martell Menlove, the state Deputy Superintendent of education, the legislature is looking at revenue well below projections for the current year.

If those trends continue, and if half of the shortfall is in income tax, public education could face a 4.8 percent retroactive cut for the current year.

Other options would be dipping into rainy day funds or raising taxes, though the latter's tough to do retroactively. Rainy day fixes have the potential to just delay the inevitable to the following year.

Marlies Burns recommended that charters start now looking at their budgets and making reductions.

So, let the fun begin!

Entheos highlighted for expeditionary learning

Elizabeth Stuart is making good on her outreach to charters. Directors will remember that several weeks ago, Stuart emailed us seeking leads on human interest stories and interesting events in charter schools.

Entheos Academy is the first I've seen highlighted.

Congratulations to them, and let's keep this good press going.

Best line: "'I think I want to try a bunch more stuff before I decide [on my life's work],' a student said. "I like trying new stuff."

New evidence that charter schools help all kids

Opponents of school choice are running out of excuses as evidence continues to roll in about the positive impact of charter schools.

Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby recently found that poor urban children who attend a charter school from kindergarten through 8th grade can close the learning gap with affluent suburban kids by 86% in reading and 66% in math. And now Marcus Winters, who follows education for the Manhattan Institute, has released a paper showing that even students who don't attend a charter school benefit academically when their public school is exposed to charter competition.

Mr. Winters focuses on New York City public school students in grades 3 through 8. "For every one percent of a public school's students who leave for a charter," concludes Mr. Winters, "reading proficiency among those who remain increases by about 0.02 standard deviations, a small but not insignificant number, in view of the widely held suspicion that the impact on local public schools . . . would be negative." It tuns out that traditional public schools respond to competition in a way that benefits their students.

Imagine that. Competition works.

For the full story in the Wall Street Journal click here.

East Hollywood's first feature

Students from East Hollywood High School have been working on the school's first feature-length film for a year. It's finally finished and ready for our viewing pleasure.

William Shakespeare's Macbeth
Tuesday, November 10 at 7 p.m.
Tower Theatre - 876 E. 900 South - SLC
Tickets available at the door - $5

See the film trailer at http://www.vimeo.com/6004082

New state board budget proposal

I'm at the State Board of Education Finance Committee meeting, and after approving (most of) my waiver, they have moved on to discussing their budget proposal, which if you'll remember from previous posts was totally unfair to charter school students, reducing their funding more than 400% more than district students.

The new proposal, coming after a heated discussion at the charter board meeting in Ocotober, is much more fair, considering charter school growth to be the same as public school growth, so that local replacement funding has only a $9 decrease from current levels, administrative funding only a $2 decrease, combined with the overall funding of about 2.6%, leaving charter students treated the generally same under this budget proposal as other public school students.

Unfortunately, they didn't pass out their spreadsheets and budget numbers to the public, so I'm unable to look at them, but just going off of what Todd Hauber is saying, at the same time that I'm typing.

So, while I don't have the exact data, I like what I'm hearing and am pleased at the change of tune from the committee.

**UPDATE** The DNews reports on the budget change, also identifying charters as the main reason for the change.

Growth exacerbates budget problems

More than 12,000 new students entered Utah's public school system this year, about half of which went to charter schools at a time when budgets were already reduced. This growth makes fewer dollars have to stretch even farther to cover more students, and that is further exacerbated in charters.

As per-student spending drops (even when budgets are static--more students and same dollars equals fewer dollars per student) growing districts are able to cope by increasing class size. New students don't necessarily mean more expenses. But in charters, whose enrollment is capped, when per student funding falls, individual schools cannot count on growth to make up any shortfall. We can't increase class size.

Even the most successful charter schools with the strongest waiting lists and best results are likely to face budget cuts next year and won't be able to generate more revenue by enrolling more students.

See stories about the growth and affects on budgets in today's Trib and DNews.

Nationwide election results good for charters

Charter school supporters overall did well yesterday in elections across the country, according to the National Alliance.

Charter supporters won in New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Colorado, Massachusetts, and other states.

Locally, charter supporter Mike Winder is now the mayor-elect of West Valley City.

I have a theory

The AP has a story about how the Obama administration is using stimulus dollars to coax education law changes in states that are consistent with Obama's educational goals. Well, it's nice that Obama supports charter schools, though I'd prefer that education decisions are made locally. That's another topic.

My theory is that states like Utah, that might typically shun such dollars with strings are actually happy to have political cover to change laws that make no logical sense and are only there because of union political pressure.

It only makes sense to use some measure of student achievement as part of judging teachers' performance, but such a practice was specifically banned in Wisconsin--until a planned Thursday vote to allow it. It never made sense to ban student outcomes as part of teacher evaluations, but unions had been successful in getting such practices and legal roadblocks in several states.

And of course charter school expansion is part of the Obama plan. Again, it makes no sense to cap the growth of the most popular and cost-effective part of the public education system, but unions and their allies have put such caps in place in many states, including a version of a growth cap in Utah.

If this leads to improvement of the charter school laws in Utah, I'll be more muted in my criticism of the transfer of policy to D.C. Maybe.