From PittsburghLive.com

Here’s a report to make school choice critics reach for the Pepto: More low-income students in Milwaukee’s 20-year-old voucher program — 18 percent more — graduate from high school than their traditional public school peers.

In fact, if Milwaukee’s public school graduation rate matched that of students using school vouchers from 2003 to 2008, 3,352 additional students would have received diplomas, according to the study by University of Minnesota professor John Robert Warren.

Add to that a study reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: The annual economic benefit from all those high school grads would be an additional $21.2 million in personal income and about $3.6 million more in tax revenues.

Did we mention that Milwaukee’s school choice students cost less than half the $14,011 per-pupil cost of students in the city’s public schools?

It’s a cold dose of reality for those who demonize school choice as a needless draw on education dollars with nary any benefits — which, in fact, are abundantly evident in other school choice programs across the nation.

As President Obama so appropriately put it in his State of the Union speech, “Instead of funding the status quo, we only invest in reform that raises student achievement.”

The choice couldn’t be more clear.

From Wall Street Journal

Kudos to the country’s two newest governors, Republicans Bob McDonnell of Virginia and Chris Christie of New Jersey, who have tapped strong school choice advocates to head their state education departments.

Last week, Mr. McDonnell chose Gerald Robinson to become Virginia’s next Secretary of Education. Mr. Robinson currently heads the Black Alliance for Educational Options, a national nonprofit that backs charter schools and performance pay for teachers. Meanwhile, Mr. Christie has picked former Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler to serve as his state’s next education commissioner. Mr. Schundler is an unabashed supporter of using education vouchers and charter schools to improve the plight of urban school districts.

This is good news for all school children in both states, but it’s especially auspicious for low-income kids stuck in failing schools who have the most to gain from a state education official who is unafraid to shake up the establishment. Virginia has a grand total of three charter schools, one of the lowest numbers in the nation. New Jersey spends more money per pupil than all but two states, yet test scores in Newark and Jersey City are among the worst in the country.

Messrs. Robinson and Schundler have records that show a willingness to butt heads with teachers unions and other protectors of this status quo, but they’ll also need political cover from their bosses. Asked if Mr. Schundler’s selection was intended as a message to the local teachers union, the New Jersey Education Association, Mr. Christie replied, “I don’t think the appointment of Bret Schundler sends any signal to the NJEA. The election of Chris Christie sends a message to the NJEA.”

From The Wall Street Journal

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.

School choice opponents insist that charters diminish the overall public school system by luring away the best students, the most motivated parents and scarce per-pupil dollars. However, Ms. Hoxby’s research has shown that "creaming" can’t explain the academic success of charter schools given that the typical urban charter student is a poor black or Hispanic kid living in a home with adults who possess below-average education credentials.

It’s true that the growth of charters has reduced enrollment at some traditional public schools in places like Detroit and Washington, D.C. But charters are themselves public schools, albeit without the burden of work rules and other constraints imposed by unions and the bureaucracy. They are hugely popular with parents, and more than 1.4 million kids now attend 4,578 charters in 41 states.

The result has been, on balance, a superior education for the charter-bound kids and pressure on local public schools to improve or lose students. Public schools that must compete with charters are no longer insulated from the consequences for failing to educate their charges. How is that a bad outcome?

One of the most encouraging findings by Mr. Winters is how charter competition reduces the black-white achievement gap. He found that the worst-performing public school students, who tend to be low-income minorities, have the most to gain from the nearby presence of a charter school. Overall, charter competition improved reading performance but did not affect math skills. By contrast, low-performing students had gains in both areas, and their reading improvement was above average relative to the higher-performing students.

President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are using the leverage of federal dollars to promote an increase in charter schools, which are still limited in many states by caps on their number and on funding. State and local policy makers who cave to union demands and block the growth of charters aren’t doing traditional public school students any favors.

From The LA Times

It’s back to business as usual at the Los Angeles Unified School District, and that’s not a good thing. The district’s potentially transformational initiative to open about 250 schools to outside management is in danger of being undermined as various interest groups stake out turf. The central goal of the program — to radically refashion education for the district’s most disadvantaged students — could be lost in the skirmishing.

The Public School Choice policy approved by the school board in August was unfortunately vague, a strategy to overcome resistance from various quarters. Now that Supt. Ramon C. Cortines is crafting the detailed implementation of the policy, groups that sought to put their stamp on it are raising objections.

Strange to say, the biggest threat to the initiative comes from charter school operators, which have the most to gain from it. The program will allow outside organizations to bid to run about 50 new schools and 200 chronically underperforming ones over the next several years, and most of those proposals were expected to come from charter groups. But many charter operators are rebelling against a provision in the initiative that requires them to give enrollment preference to students within each school’s attendance boundaries.

Charter schools usually admit students through a lottery regardless of where in the district they live, a requirement under state law. There are exceptions, though, the most notable one being Locke High School in Watts, which was taken over by Green Dot Public Schools last year under an agreement that it would educate the students within Locke’s boundaries. But the California Charter Schools Assn. finds the district’s attendance-boundary requirement untenable, and some charter operators are threatening to abandon the initiative altogether.

That would be a shame, but Cortines should hold firm and should receive the full support of the board on this issue. The attendance boundaries are among the strongest elements of the new policy. Neighborhoods throughout the district, many of them with the most disadvantaged students, have been waiting years for new schools to open and for reform at their existing local schools. The parents will play a role in deciding which organizations should run those schools, and their children should be guaranteed seats in them. Lotteries are a fair method for admitting students to traditional charter schools, but they also favor students whose parents are informed and involved enough to enter the lotteries in the first place — which also means that these schools attract a motivated population of students and families. Left out are many students, such as foster children, who most need well-run schools.

What the charter operators do need is more flexibility in spending their money. They rightly object to provisions that would require them to use such district services as maintenance and cafeteria workers, even though they could get these services cheaper by hiring their own staffs or contracting outside. The district’s service unions and some board members have been adamant about keeping this restriction. If they succeed, it should be with the requirement that the district provides competitive prices. Charters’ ability to put more of their money into classrooms is key to their success.

Parent Revolution, a group that advocates an empowered role for parents, also is lobbying for a change of rules. It wants current and future parents at low-performing schools to be able to push their schools to the front of the reform line if more than half sign a petition. Cortines is only willing to designate such schools as "engagement schools," which would begin a long process of deciding whether and when they join the initiative. We have some doubts about the petition effort — the district should give top priority to the lowest-achieving schools, not to the ones with the most organized parents. But the procedure Cortines has laid out seems more likely to frustrate parents than empower them.

If the Public School Choice initiative does not emerge as a strong reform policy, L.A. Unified will be signaling its ongoing inability to fix itself and its schools — which could prompt an outside takeover of the district. It is imperative that students’ needs not be overshadowed this time by adult priorities.

From The Wall Street Journal

‘Creaming’ is the word critics of charter schools think ends the debate over education choice. The charge has long been that charters get better results by cherry-picking the best students from standard public schools. Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford economist, found a way to reliably examine this alleged bias, and the results are breakthrough news for charter advocates.

Her new study, "How New York City’s Charter Schools Affect Achievement," shows that charter students, typically from more disadvantaged families in places like Harlem, perform almost as well as students in affluent suburbs like Scarsdale. Because there are more applicants than spaces, New York admits charter students with a lottery system. The study nullifies any self-selection bias by comparing students who attend charters only with those who applied for admission through the lottery, but did not get in. "Lottery-based studies," notes Ms. Hoxby, "are scientific and more reliable."

According to the study, the most comprehensive of its kind to date, New York charter applicants are more likely than the average New York family to be black, poor and living in homes with adults who possess fewer education credentials. But positive results already begin to emerge by the third grade: The average charter student is scoring 5.8 points higher than his lotteried-out peers in math and 5.3 points higher in English. In grades four through eight, the charter student jumps ahead by 5 more points each year in math and 3.6 points each year in English.

Charter students are also shrinking the learning gap between low-income minorities and more affluent whites. "On average," the report concludes, "a student who attended a charter school for all of the grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86% of the ‘Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap’ in math and 66% of the achievement gap in English."

The New York results are not unique. In a separate study, Ms. Hoxby found Chicago’s charters performing even better than the Big Apple’s. Using the same methodology, other researchers have seen similar results in Boston.

Charters are also a bargain for taxpayers. Nationwide on average, per-pupil spending is 61% that of surrounding public schools. New York charters spend less than district schools but more than the national average because, unlike district schools, they generally have no capital budget and must pay rent from operating expenses.

Little wonder President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are pressuring states to become more charter-friendly. Why the Administration can’t connect the dots from the evidence to other effective school choice reforms, such as vouchers, can only be explained by union politics. Caroline Hoxby has performed a public service by finally making clear that "creaming" is a crock.