From The Post and Courier

In the 14 years since South Carolina’s charter school law was passed, the number of charter schools stands at 37. It would have been more had state law and local school districts been more accommodating to their creation.

It is time for the Legislature to make adjustments to the law that ensure financial support for charter schools and relieve them of some burdensome rules. Rep. Phil Owens, R-Easley, has filed a bill, which passed out of committee and is before the full House. It provides a good start.

Most of the bill’s provisions shouldn’t be controversial. For example, it would allow for single-gender charter schools that are now prohibited. It would allow school districts to deduct money from charter schools’ allotments to cover modest supervisory costs. And it would change the election schedule for charter school boards to provide sime continuity.

The sticking points are likely to be those involving money — something no schools have enough of these days. Charter schools need help. Those in the State Public Charter School District, in particular, receive about half the per-pupil allowance that other schools receive, and that is hardly fair.

What seems unnecessarily controversial is a proposal to allow public schools that convert to charter schools to give priority admission to students within their attendance zones.

It recognizes that neighborhood schools require less transportation and foster a sense of community.

Indeed, Charleston County School Superintendent Nancy McGinley has recently won conceptual support from the board for a choice plan to reconfigure the school district so that students in each quadrant of the county would have several schools from which to choose — all of them nearby.

Another provision would be complicated but worth pursuing — allowing charter school students to participate in extracurricular activities, including sports, at their neighborhood schools (if the charter doesn’t offer them).

Charter schools are public schools, and it’s clearly in the best interest of students to foster their artistic, leadership or athletic talents.

The charter school journey has not been smooth. But the efforts of charter advocates have paid off in the form of student successes and in demonstrating that school choice is a worthy aim.

Governing legislation should help maintain momentum for a significant educational trend.

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 The Journal Sentinel

New data in a study that compares the high school graduation rates since 2003 of students in Milwaukee Public Schools with those of students in the city’s publicly financed voucher program has concluded that students in voucher schools are about 18% more likely to graduate than their peers in MPS.

The report’s updated findings, to be released Tuesday, refer to low-income students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.

MPS officials, however, question the accuracy of the study’s methodology and point out that because the names of the schools analyzed are withheld, it’s difficult to tell if similar schools are being compared in both groups.

The study was funded by the voucher-advocacy group School Choice Wisconsin but conducted by John Robert Warren, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota who has been researching high school graduation rates for about 10 years. More than 21,000 students in Milwaukee are using vouchers to attend about 110 private schools in the city.

For 2007-’08, Warren estimated the graduation rate in voucher schools to be 77%, and the graduation rate in MPS to be 65%, a difference of 12 percentage points. The information includes comparisons between seven choice schools and 23 public high schools that could provide complete data for all six years studied, and adjusted to account for an expected 5% ninth-grade retention rate in choice schools and an expected 25% ninth-grade retention rate in MPS.

Warren said the new data shows a continuation of a pattern in which voucher students graduated at a higher rate than MPS students in every year except 2003-’04. Warren’s previous report on the issue included data up to the 2006-’07 school year.

Warren said the study did not prove that voucher schools caused those students to graduate.

“We still don’t know whether it’s going to the voucher school that causes you to be more likely to graduate, or if it’s something about the kinds of families that send their kids to voucher schools would make them more likely to graduate,” he said.

According to the most recent data available, MPS reported a 68.3% graduation rate in 2007-’08.

MPS spokeswoman Roseann St. Aubin said the district knows it has “work to do” when it comes to increasing graduation rates at the high schools.

But she questioned the validity of the study because of Warren’s method for calculating the graduation rates – by comparing the number of high school graduates in the spring of one calendar year to the number of enrolled ninth-graders four years prior, then estimating a likely percentage that had been retained in ninth grade in both MPS and choice schools.

“You have to take into account things like mortality, and the number of students who move to another school,” St. Aubin said.

St. Aubin said MPS calculates its graduation rates in accordance with the guidelines set forth by the state Department of Public Instruction. Under that method, the district adds up all its dropouts over four high school years, then adds that number to the high school students who graduated in the fourth year of the data set. The graduation rate comes from dividing the number of graduates by the total number of dropouts and graduates.

Other variables, such as how to count students who receive GEDs or take more than four years to graduate, historically complicate the formulas for calculating high school graduation rates.

St. Aubin also questioned why Warren’s reports on the graduation rates do not identify the schools examined. For example, she said, the report’s methodology says it includes information received from MPS partnership high schools, which are traditionally populated by students who are at risk of dropping out or facing challenging circumstances.

“Is it apples to apples here?” St. Aubin asked. “Are we comparing schools with the same kind of programs?”

Warren said individual school data was not identified because the graduation rate averages across schools in a particular system provided a clearer picture.

From The CATO Institute

The Brookings Institution will release a new school choice policy guide on February 2nd, and from the sound of it, children, parents, taxpayers, and the authors themselves should be concerned.  The guide will provide:

a series of practical and novel recommendations for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, including national chartering of virtual education providers; expanding the types of information collected on school performance; providing incentives for low-performing school districts to increase choice and competition; and creating independent school choice portals to aid parents in choosing between schools.

The goals these recommendations are meant to achieve are entirely laudable, but there are three reasons for serious concern:

1)  The Constitution delegates to the federal government no power to provide or regulate education services, except in the execution of its explicitly enumerated powers. So the Supreme Court can ensure that state education programs abide by the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, but Congress cannot “charter virtual education providers.” Of course the federal government has been transgressing the limits on its education powers for more than half a century, but no one who supports the rule of law can condone that transgression, much less its expansion.

2)  From a regulatory standpoint, Washington is the worst level of government at which to implement an education program. National education programs impose a single set of rules on every participating provider in the country. Get those rules wrong — either up front or down the road — and you not only hobble the effectiveness of every single provider, but you eliminate the possibility of comparing outcomes between providers operating under different sets of rules. In essence you lose the ability to distinguish between different “treatments” — to determine what helps and what is harmful to the service’s overall success.

3)  We have ample evidence about the quality of education programs implemented by the federal government. For example, after 45 years and $166 billion, Head Start has just been proven entirely ineffective. (See also the NCLB paper linked to in “1)”, above). Once again, this problem is exacerbated by the all-encompassing nature of federal programs. Get them wrong and you get them wrong for every participating student, everywhere in the country. With variation in programs among states, by contrast, we not only have the ability to compare the merits of alternative approaches, we have powerful incentives for states to get their programs right. Just as tax competition drives businesses from one state or nation to another, so, too, can education policy competition. States with better policies will attract businesses and more mobile residents from states with worse ones, eventually compelling the inferior policy states to redress their errors.  We’re just beginning to see the prospects for this now, as school choice programs proliferate and grow at the state level, and introducing national programs that might well interfere with this process would be a disastrous mistake.

I hope that school choice advocates, including those who have contributed to the forthcoming Brookings report, will weigh these concerns.

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.”