The Written Word

Writing /ˈrʌɪtɪŋ/ n. 2. The activity or occupation of composing text for publication. 2.1. Written work, especially with regard to its style or quality.

 
 

Considering a Regional Investment Strategy to Drive Development in Higher-Risk Countries

February 2021. Marketlinks.

In providing advice on investing for beginners, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission explains the concept of diversification by using a simple maxim: don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

For personal investment, diversification means investing money in different asset categories—stocks, bonds, real estate, etc.—and spreading investment around within those categories, such as having a stock portfolio that invests in a range of companies from different sectors. A diversified portfolio makes it possible for investors to pursue different types of opportunities and reduce the risk of losing money. For further protection, investors often choose assets in each category that perform differently under different market conditions. For instance, during COVID-19, gains from investments in personal technology companies may have helped investors offset losses from investments in hotels and airlines.

The value of diversification isn’t just limited to personal investment portfolios. Large investors such as pension funds and insurance companies also need diversification. These organizations must balance the need to meet their obligations via high returns—often associated with riskier investments—with their fiduciary responsibility to make investments that protect their stakeholders’ capital.

Because emerging markets tend to have high rates of return and are often uncorrelated with developed markets, investments in these markets can be a diversification strategy for investors, and private investors are increasingly looking at these markets for new opportunities. Often, the effects of these investments align with USAID’s development objectives because they improve the lives of people living in these regions. For instance, increased investment into local businesses can make services accessible to more people and create jobs that enable people to move out of poverty. USAID can play an important role in de-risking investments in emerging markets, thereby mobilizing private capital into high-impact areas.

While investing in emerging markets is a diversification strategy, diversification across different emerging markets is also an important aspect of risk-mitigation for investors. When seeking to increase private capital flows into their markets, USAID Missions should consider a regional investment approach.

“A regional investment strategy can be a simple, powerful way for Missions to help the private sector manage risk and thereby create greater investment demand in their countries,” explains Cameron Khosrowshahi, the USAID Investment Officer who oversees the INVEST initiative. “In countries with small markets and high perceived risk, Missions can position themselves as part of a larger and more diversified portfolio for investors. This approach can require a mindset shift for bi-lateral Mission staff, who are traditionally laser-focused on one country. However, by using their development dollars in a way that benefits a whole region, a Mission can actually attract more investment because investors are drawn to the diversification and scale of a regional market.”

“Working hand-in-hand with regional colleagues is an important strategy for mobilizing investment,” adds Sashi Jayatileke, Development Finance Team Lead at USAID. “It’s different from the traditional approach to development projects, which has often been bilateral rather than regional, but when it comes to investment, a regional approach can increase the likelihood of successful transactions being made. With a regional approach, Missions can overcome country-level constraints by driving some dollars into other markets as well as their own.”

However, pursuing a regional investment strategy also requires thinking about investment destinations from a private-sector perspective. The natural grouping of countries for a private sector investment portfolio may differ from the countries that USAID traditionally groups together as a geographic region. Missions that are flexible in assembling group members can be more successful, understanding that from an investment perspective the country next door might not be the appropriate partner.

“The regional groupings that the private sector creates don’t necessarily fit into USAID’s traditional regional structures,” explains Kristi Ragan, INVEST’s Chief of Party. “The private sector instead determines a regional grouping that aligns with their own pragmatic, market-driven needs, creating pathways for sustainable investment strategies that mitigate risk.”

Through its work with members of the USAID Finance and Investment Network, INVEST has been piloting innovative regional approaches for mobilizing private capital into emerging markets. From Haiti to Southern Africa and South East Asia, these activities are showing the benefits of thinking regionally.

USAID Haiti: Targeting the Diaspora Using a Regional Investment Strategy

After years of economic struggle, Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. As of 2012, more than 50 percent of the population lived on less than $2.41 a day, and in 2018 approximately 14 percent of Haitians were unemployed.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) create jobs and spur economic development. Developing an ecosystem of SMEs throughout Haiti could greatly increase the quality of life and economic opportunities available for Haitians. Unfortunately, SMEs in Haiti face many challenges when trying to access capital locally, and attracting external capital is equally challenging given the high-risk climate for businesses operating in Haiti.

USAID Haiti and INVEST aim to help Haitian SMEs access financing for growth. In 2019, INVEST partnered with Delphin Investments to host an investment roadshow in the United States and Canada to determine whether the Haitian diaspora would be interested in investing in SMEs back home. About 2 million Haitians live outside of Haiti, and in 2019, personal remittances to Haiti made up 38.5 percent of the country’s GDP.

From the roadshow events, INVEST learned that members of the diaspora did have an interest in investing in Haiti beyond remittances. However, they had no method for doing so. In the U.S., there are many financial vehicles, such as mutual funds, that create structured pathways for investments in multiple companies at a time. In Haiti, such vehicles are not available, and investing directly in a company is risky and not realistic for most people.

After the roadshow concluded, INVEST released a request for proposals that asked bidding firms to outline strategies for structuring a vehicle that would enable overseas investors to invest in a portfolio of Haitian SMEs. Delphin Investments responded with a proposal suggesting the creation of a pan-Caribbean fund, with specific allocations to countries across the region including Haiti.

With USAID covering the setup costs and providing logistical support, Delphin Investments launched the pan-Caribbean fund in late 2020. It will invest in a portfolio of SMEs across Haiti and the Caribbean, and it will create liquidity and awareness for Haiti and the region in general.

By opting to fund the creation of a regional mechanism, USAID Haiti has situated the country inside a portfolio that is more appealing and less risky for investors than an investment opportunity focused on Haiti alone. This regional approach increases the likelihood that the fund will raise capital, and with a successful capital raise, it can channel money into Haitian SMEs, thereby creating jobs, increasing incomes, and expanding the services and products available throughout the country.

USAID Southern Africa: Using a Regional Approach to Drive Venture Capital into African Startups

While investors have been increasingly turning their attention to Africa, many have only shown an interest in growth-stage companies. To reach the growth stage, however, companies need early financial support, known as seed funding. Seed funding helps early-stage companies hire staff, perform market research, and develop products and services. The scarcity of seed funding throughout Africa creates a serious problem for start-ups and entrepreneurs.

Working with INVEST and USAID Southern Africa’s Regional Mission in support of the Prosper Africa initiative, Lion’s Head Global Partners (LHGP), a leading investment bank providing financial advisory services across emerging markets, is supporting Founders Factory Africa (FFA)’s Seed Fund, a new vehicle focused on filling the continent’s seed funding gap. FFA is a South Africa-based incubator that supplies African entrepreneurs with a combination of capital and technical assistance to mitigate the risks associated with the early stages of business ventures.

The Seed Fund seeks to attract venture capital (VC) investments for start-ups throughout Africa. Its primary audience is international investors, and it aims to have 50 percent of the targeted $15 million capital raise coming from U.S. investors. LHGP is helping FFA structure a fund that matches both market need and investor appetite and will assist in the subsequent fund raise.

To date, most of the flows of VC into Africa have been concentrated in a few key markets. In 2019, Kenya and Nigeria combined accounted for more than 65 percent of the continent’s VC flows. Egypt and South Africa followed, receiving almost 21 percent of flows, and all the continent’s remaining countries divided the other approximately 13 percent of VC flows. That information should come as no surprise to investors: Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, and South Africa are Africa’s key investment hubs.

FFA’s current portfolio of start-up companies is largely reflective of these VC investment trends, with five companies located in Nigeria and three in Kenya. However, the portfolio also includes six companies located in South Africa, two in Ghana, and one in Uganda.

With the Seed Fund, FFA intends to expand its support of companies across Sub-Saharan Africa. The fund aims to have fifty percent of portfolio companies based in Southern Africa—including countries other than South Africa—and the remainder spread across East, Central, and West Africa. As a result, the Seed Fund will use the broader investment mandate to help balance out VC investment across Africa.

By opting to support a fund with approximately 50 percent allocation to the continent’s other regions, USAID’s Southern Africa Regional Mission is ensuring that the Seed Fund remains valuable and attractive to international investors through a diversified portfolio that has coverage in the continent’s key investment hubs. Through this balanced selling point, it is helping to drive a relatively new form of much needed early-stage capital into countries across Southern Africa where it would not otherwise flow because singular investments in these markets would not align with the risk appetites of most investors. As a result, this pan-African approach will help build and strengthen the start-up environment throughout Southern Africa. 

USAID’s Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment: Using a Regional Investment Strategy to Empower Women Economically in Southeast Asia

USAID’s Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment engaged INVEST to test the hypothesis that investing for gender balance and equity leads to greater returns on investment while contributing to women’s economic empowerment.  Ultimately, USAID hopes to increase the flow of capital into gender-smart businesses and the use and quality of gender-lens strategies among both investors and within portfolio companies.

With these goals in mind, INVEST and USAID decided to support the CARE-SheTrades Impact Fund (CSIF). The CSIF was launched in 2018 by CARE Enterprises, an international social justice non-profit; Bamboo Capital Partners, an impact investing platform that works with emerging market businesses serving the needs of low- and middle-income populations; and the International Trade Centre’s SheTrades Initiative.

The sector-agnostic, $75 million fund will invest in a portfolio of 15-20 growth-stage companies that meet its financial and impact requirements. CARE and Bamboo Capital Partners will provide these companies with tailored gender-smart technical assistance to ensure that they meet their financial goals while simultaneously employing practices, policies, and management strategies that empower women.

USAID is supporting the CSIF in raising $50 million by contributing $500,000 in first-loss capital, which will be paid out to the fund in three installments upon the completion of different fundraising milestones. USAID is also funding the establishment of the CSIF’s sidecar facility, which will provide bespoke technical assistance to portfolio companies, helping them to both improve their business operations and implement gender-smart practices.

In designing the CSIF, CARE and Bamboo Capital Partners opted to target companies throughout both South and Southeast Asia, with Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Bangladesh as focus countries.

Overall, South and Southeast Asia are attractive regions for investors: they offer political stability and good macroeconomic trends. Many investors consider the region a unified market, and it has hundreds of promising enterprises with well-developed revenue models seeking investment, many of which are impact oriented. However, Bamboo Partners has found that investment portfolios that include multiple countries as opposed to only one country offer risk mitigation and are more appealing to investors.

Beyond investment appeal, the regional grouping of the CSIF means that the fund can also address root problems commonly shared by countries throughout South and Southeast Asia. Despite the rapid economic growth in these regions, 36 million residents live below the international poverty line.  Poor women often face undignified employment options, and when compared to men, women overall are more likely to work low-wage jobs and less likely to own property or have access to finance.  Of the more than $12 billion of impact capital deployed in Asia over the last 12 years, only 3 percent was designated for gender-lens impact, meaning there is a vital need for investment in companies dedicated to addressing gender imbalances.

By supporting the CSIF, USAID has chosen to support a fund that will be attractive to investors and has the potential to catalyze long-term investments that create positive outcomes for women throughout South and Southeast Asia. Through this work, USAID can address historically unfair barriers and power dynamics that have hindered the economic empowerment of women and replace them with gender-smart outcomes that advance the position of disadvantaged women throughout the region.

Q&A with DPI’s Runa Alam: How Africa’s impact ventures became essential during Covid-19

October 2020. ImpactAlpha.

As the Covid-19 pandemic began to spread around the world in early 2020, gloomy predictions about the coronavirus’s effects on Africa also made headlines. 

Human-rights groups feared that the lack of infrastructure and gaps in health services could result in a widespread public health crisis. The economic outlook for Africa turned bleak as the lockdown measures designed to control the spread of the disease resulted in the continent entering its first recession in 25 years. 

So far, however, the pandemic has largely spared Africa, which has reported significantly fewer cases and deaths than other regions. While finance experts still worry that Africa’s firms will bleed from the economic impact of the coronavirus, Runa Alam, Co-founding Partner and CEO of Development Partners International (DPI), reveals that her portfolio companies have found ways to adapt and grow even in the face of the pandemic’s challenges.  

Founded in 2007, DPI, a pan-African private equity firm with an established track record of investing in Africa, has made 24 investments in 22 portfolio companies operating in 29 African countries. It has three funds with a total of $1.7 billion in assets under management. The funds invest in large companies with strong projected growth rates and experienced management teams. These businesses span 17 sectors, including telecommunications, credit retail, banking, insurance, education, pharmaceuticals, and more. 

DPI works in close partnership with businesses and entrepreneurs to create value for investors and society. When the pandemic hit Africa, DPI acted quickly, creating a Covid-19 crisis response checklist for the CEOs of its portfolio companies. The checklist, which outlines six key actions CEOs must consider in the face of Covid-19, is just one example of DPI’s longstanding value as a “hands-on” and trusted investor. To date, DPI’s hands-on strategy and the accompanying checklist is working: 100 percent of DPI’s companies are still operating despite the pandemic, and in the last two months, most of its companies have begun growing again.

I recently sat down with Alam to learn about the history of DPI, how its portfolio companies are pivoting during the time of Covid-19, and the advice she has for investors considering Africa during the current climate.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Emily Langhorne: Could you explain why you co- founded DPI?

Runa Alam: In college and then in business school, I knew I wanted to work in finance involving emerging markets because only private sector capital can deploy significantly large amounts of capital in developing countries. I find poverty an indignity, and I believe that lack of poverty is a human right. Those were my beliefs at 17, and I haven’t changed them.

I’ve been investing in Africa for 22 years. I started in African private equity when the Pan-African private equity industry started, which was the late 1990s. After eight years of investing, I thought ‘to do this correctly, one needs significant influence, and the best way to have this is to start a business,’ so that’s what my partner, Miles Morland, and I did. We wanted to build a fund manager that was best in class and had a value system of transparency, collegiality—meaning not huge hierarchies—and properly aligned incentives. Inclusivity was always a big part of the plan, and today, the investment team is 100 percent African but from many countries, and the DPI team is over 45 percent women. 

The idea of an African private equity firm is not so radical today, but 14 years ago, if you said you were going to operate in Africa, people thought you were an NGO or, best case, an impact fund but certainly not a for-profit, commercial private equity fund. 

DPI is impact investing but at commercial returns. Across the portfolio, we focus on three buckets for impact: gender balance, climate change, and job enhancement. We always looked at least one impact bucket at the company level. Because we are growth investors, we create jobs as our companies, but job enhancement is equally important. Very few companies in Africa give their employees a roadmap to promotion or the ability to train, move up, and do better. That’s important. We’ve also emphasized the importance of occupational safety across our companies, grievance mechanism, amongst other “best practices”.

So that was the vision: having a high-return fund that also provides excellent ESG and impacts African societies in a positive way.  

Langhorne: How do equity investments into portfolio companies contribute to improving the lives of people throughout Africa?

Alam: What we do is growth investing. We grow companies, which gives our investors a return, and in the growth of companies, jobs are created. Every job in Africa, on average, supports 20 people. So, if you have 40,000 employees across Africa, think about how many people you’re providing with a livelihood. That’s the most obvious one. 

In this Covid world, we’ve also been very intentional about trying to save jobs. If there has to be any firing, furloughing comes first so that that employee can come back at some point. Less than one percent of our companies’ workforce has been retrenched.

In addition, DPI focuses on three impact buckets which can be pegged back to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Job Creation and Enhancement, Gender Balance, and Climate Change as well as impact work specific to each of our investee companies, which can touch many of the remaining SDGs.

Langhorne: What are the biggest challenges your portfolio companies are facing because of the Covid-19 pandemic?

Alam: The good news is that we don’t have any companies that are in immediate danger. Seventy percent of our companies were deemed “emergency” or “essential” companies. They’re in pharmaceuticals, education, microfinance, food, etc. They were not allowed to shut down. 

One hundred percent of our companies are operating, and in the last two months, most of our companies have clawed back to EBITDA growth from this time last year, so they have adapted to the current environment and are growing again. 

Early on, we put in place a protocol for our CEOs—a Covid-19 CEO checklist. When we create a checklist for use with our companies, we are building off the back of years of strong relationships between us and our management teams. And, the checklist isn’t just sent along with a “here it is: good luck with it.” We work with our companies daily so that the checklist items are fleshed out. Less than one percent of our companies’ employees have had COVID.

Langhorne: A lot of the recent media headlines focus on the ‘doom and gloom’ that the pandemic will bring for Africa’s economy. What are your thoughts on that?

Alam: The assumption is that if there’s a problem in a developed country, it’s much worse in Africa, but the fact is that there are different problems in Africa to those in the developed world. In fact, African countries are doing better in COVID-19 infections and deaths, even after consideration of under-reporting and under-testing, than many developed countries. The World Health Organization has reported around 24,400 deaths on the continent of Africa, which has a population of 1.3 billion.

Africa has a very young population. The average age is 19.5. Sixty percent of Africans are below the age of 25. That means this disease isn’t detrimental to most Africans because they’re young. Now is there comorbidity? Absolutely. There are people who are susceptible to malaria and people who are malnourished. That can be a problem. 

Much has been made of Africa entering its first recession in over two decades, but many places around the world are also facing recessions. This is the case in most of Europe and North America, and Australia is going into its first big recession in over three decades. Africa is a continent and within this continent there are countries in Africa that are still growing. Not every African country is entering a recession. 

Langhorne: How are businesses adapting their practices in the face of the pandemic?

Alam: There are long-term trends that are happening in Africa, and they are no different than trends everywhere else. There has been a quick adoption of technology: selling online and servicing online. In Africa, it’s being done through the cell phone which is ubiquitous unlike computers which are less prevalent. 

Another trend, which is also true globally in any recession, is that customers have less discretionary spending so every company must rethink its product line. As I said, most of our companies are in essential services. People still need food, pharmaceuticals, and bank accounts. They still need insurance. They still need to educate their children. These are the industries that our companies are in, but within those industries, companies still have to think about lower-price, higher-value offerings. Our management teams are successfully doing this work.

Langhorne: What advice would you give to investors considering Africa?

Alam: First, investing in Africa can be a hedging strategy to investing in developed countries. Africa fits into a portfolio because it doesn’t have up-and-down movements that are generally in line with the U.S., whereas Asia does because it exports to the U.S. If the U.S. economy goes down and consumption goes down, then it affects Asia. African countries’ biggest trading partners are China and Europe. If you invest in Africa, and you have investments in Europe, the U.S., and China, these investments will move in different ways. 

Second, if you are interested in creating alpha, which many investors are chasing, many of the funds in Africa are still delivering good returns because private equity managers must be “hand on” investors in this region.

Last, in recent years, Africa generally has been the second-fastest growing economy after emerging Asia, and that’s not a bad place to be. The longer-term trends of rapid urbanization, a young population leading to favorable demographics, leap-frogging in technology and other such factors are still present in Africa. We expect once economies open up fully that growth will return to Africa.

An African Model for This Moment: Local Institutional Funding of Infrastructure

with Vanessa Holcomb Mann. June 2020. AfricaInvestor.

Governments in the region are pushing for more high impact infrastructure investments, but public resources are increasingly under pressure. Kenyan Pension Funds Investment Consortium (KEPFIC) is a leading initiative in Africa investing in infrastructure and private equity with potential for replication. 

Building on an initial African Sovereign Wealth and Pension Fund Leaders Forum meeting hosted at the 2017 Africa investor (Ai) Infrastrurcture Investment Summit in Durban, MiDA Advisors, an investment advisory firm that assisted in the formation of KEPFIC, is working with Batseta, South Africa’s largest trade organization of pension funds, to replicate some of the achievements learned from the KEPFIC model.

As African debt levels shake regional economies and strain government coffers in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the urgency of marshalling local savings for vital infrastructure is clear. Dwarfed in size by global institutions and commercial lending, however, African institutional investors have been slow to fully harness their market potential to fund infrastructure and other high impact equity investments.

What would happen if international development agencies used foreign assistance funding to help local investors access the markets and co-investment opportunities they need to propel their communities to prosperous, self-reliant futures?

Buey Ray Tut, a South Sudanese refugee and founder of Aqua Africa, has argued for years that foreign assistance funding models have merely progressed from “give a man a fish” to “teach a man to fish” approaches. “Why don’t we take that one step further?” he asked. “Why don’t we help the person create a market…so he could sell the fish [and be] aid independent?”

The international development community has increasingly responded, creating durable models with potential for replication. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, has helped Kenyan institutional investors play a bigger role in financing the country’s infrastructure—the transportation, water, sanitation, energy, and housing projects integral for growing thriving and inclusive societies. Kenya currently faces an infrastructure investment gap of approximately $2.1 billion annually. Historically, the nation’s infrastructure has been funded by the public sector, increasingly under pressure to channel scarce resources toward blunting the impact of the pandemic on livelihoods and jobs.

In 2017, USAID’s Mobilizing Institutional Investors to Develop Africa’s Infrastructure (MiDA) Initiative and the World Bank began a partnership to lay the groundwork for enabling local pension funds to invest in alternative asset classes, such as infrastructure and private equity.

“The World Bank had been working in Kenya to reform the regulations around infrastructure investing,” says Aymeric Saha, who served as the managing director of the MiDA Initiative until its conclusion last year. “It was the right enabling environment for MiDA to engage with institutional investors. Kenya’s pension funds had been growing quickly, and their portfolios were highly concentrated in government securities and a few locally traded equities. They needed to diversify.”

Investing in infrastructure has generally yielded attractive returns for investors. However, these projects require expensive structuring and due diligence fees, causing most asset owners worldwide to stay away from the asset class.

“We decided that the best way to move forward was to support the creation of a consortium of local institutional investors that would enable them to jointly explore investment opportunities in alternative assets,” says Saha.

In 2018, six local funds formed the Kenyan Pension Funds Investment Consortium (KEPFIC), which allows the funds to share the costs, knowledge, and due diligence teams necessary for exploring these opportunities. It also enables greater mobilization of capital and increased bargaining power. As of 2020, 12 local funds have joined KEPFIC, and another eight are in the process of joining.

USAID, through the Kenya Investment Mechanism, is assisting KEPFIC with the establishment of a secretariat and a legal structure, and MiDA Advisors, an advisory firm established by Saha and others to continue the MiDA Initiative’s mission, is helping to ensure that KEPFIC has the highest standards of governance and a strong investment strategy.

KEPFIC will begin the raise for its first shared fund this year, starting with $2 million commitments from its founding members. In partnership with USAID INVEST,  MiDA Advisors is assisting KEPFIC with the selection of its asset manager.

“Facilitating co-investment with U.S. pension funds is one of KEPFIC’s long-term goals, and that requires having an asset manager who can address the concerns of both local and U.S. funds,” says Saha.

Some KEPFIC members have already begun investing in alternative assets. Kenyan Power Pension Fund and Britam Insurance recently made commitments to Everstrong Capital, a U.S.-based asset management firm focused on investing in African infrastructure. Such investments have a significant impact on the local communities.

“The Everstrong Kenya Infrastructure Fund is designed to mobilize capital which is critical in meeting the funding gap for infrastructure in Kenya and selected other regions of East Africa,” explains Philip Dyk, managing partner at Everstrong Capital. “Investments in infrastructure provide diversification to fund investors because of the predictable, long-term revenue and low correlation to economic cycles. Energy, transport, communications, and water utility assets provide essential services that are used even during times of uncertainty, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Other KEPFIC members— KenGen Defined Contribution Scheme and other pension funds—have approved commitments to a private equity fund managed by Development Partners International (DPI), a London-based pan-African private equity firm. DPI invests in companies that benefit from the growth of Africa’s emerging middle class and provides the technical assistance needed to ensure that each portfolio company and its employees thrive.

A meeting between MiDA and Batesta, South Africa’s largest trade organization of pension funds, hosted at the 2017 Africa investor (Ai) Infrastructure Investment Summit in Durban, throught a partnership with the African Sovereign Wealth and Pension Fund Leaders Forum, is now bearing fruit for expanded opportunities. MiDA Advisors is working with Batseta to help kickstart the formation of a South African consortium initiative, replicating aspects of the KEPFIC model. South Africa’s funds will seek solutions tailored to the country’s larger and more advanced capital markets, financial institutions, and infrastructure developers.

The appeal and adaptability of consortium models makes them a viable option for other African nations seeking to mobilize local resources for financing their infrastructure needs.  “Establishing these consortiums definitely speaks to using development assistance as a means for creating self-reliance,” says Saha. “Local pension funds will now be effectively investing local savings in sectors that are creating jobs for people, having significant impact on the economic development of Africa, and producing humanitarian outcomes for local communities.”

How high-impact businesses in emerging markets are pivoting in the COVID crisis

with Kristin Kelly Jangraw. May 2020. ImpactAlpha.

Local texture manufacturers in North and West Africa are pivoting to meet demand for personal protective equipment. Flower growers in Kenya are switching to grow basic foodstuffs.

Small and mid-sized companies create 80% of Africa’s jobs, (compared to 60% in the U.S. and 50% in the European Union) and are at risk as the COVID crisis ripples through emerging markets. Local advisors and intermediaries that straddle investment and international development in emerging markets are playing a critical role in helping them adapt, survive and contribute to the economic recovery.

Such providers are well positioned to connect private capital with businesses seeking new types of financing. With local offices in emerging and frontier markets, they can help foreign investors conduct due diligence on local businesses that would otherwise be impossible because of travel restrictions stemming from the pandemic.

Many of these firms are at the forefront of the Covid-19 response, rapidly finding ways to address the economic—and by extension humanitarian—challenges in developing countries.

The stakes are high. “The Covid crisis is going to hit developing countries so much harder than the United States and Europe since their healthcare systems and governments don’t have the same resources to combat the crisis,“ says Saskia Bruysten, the CEO of Yunus Social Business. “Without immediate support, many social businesses and impact-first companies working to end poverty and implement sustainable development will be wiped out.“ 

These businesses and others around the world have an overwhelming need for advisory services, relief funds, and catalytic capital that can help them survive the coming months and years. While a new wave of government-sponsored stimulus packages have begun to address the health crisis and the economic crisis it generated, the private sector has a large role to play, too. With the right kinds of capital and transaction advisory assistance, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in frontier and emerging markets can pivot to serve the immediate needs of their communities. 

COVID pivot

The priority is to shore up local supply chains so that they can continue to meet people’s basic needs, starting with food and healthcare. The world has seen an abrupt increase in the demand for PPE—personal protective equipment, such as masks and gloves—for those working both within and outside of hospitals. However, the surge in demand and increased difficulty in sourcing these products has left many businesses unable to get the gear they need to operate. Without a sufficient PPE supply, workers performing jobs across all supply chains are at an increased risk of falling ill.

In North and West Africa, for example, temperature-controlled food warehouses, an integral part of the food supply chain for much of the region, can’t get protective gear for their workers. 

“The temperature-controlled logistics facilities we invest in can’t get PPE because they are not designated as critical-needs businesses, even though they are,” says Matthew Meredith, a managing principal at LixCap, a Morocco-based investment advisory firm that has investments in these warehouses. “If coronavirus rips through a facility in Tangier, it impacts food supply chains across Morocco. That situation is replicated across emerging markets, so we really need to see some businesses within the supply chain convert to ramping up the local production of PPE.” 

Local textile manufacturers, for example, could pivot and begin producing masks, gloves, and isolation gowns. However, for such conversions to become a reality, businesses need assistance adapting their production lines and financing new equipment to meet the sudden, overwhelming demand for PPE. By modifying their services and offerings, businesses can survive and keep their workers employed even if the demand for their usual products has dried up, and they also enable businesses in other sectors to continue their operations. 

Jake Cusack, co-founder of CrossBoundary, a frontier market investment advisory firm, says that many businesses looking to make these adjustments have turned to firms like his for help.

“If you’re a light manufacturer, should you now switch to producing PPE? If you grow flowers in Kenya and the global flower market has dried up, should you begin growing basic foodstuffs that can be sold locally? We are helping them think through their pivot strategies so that they can align with the new sources of demand in the economy, while being mindful that some of these dynamics may be relatively short-term.”

Flexible capital

While such course changes are especially urgent in keeping critical sectors online, businesses in every sector will need assistance to adapt to the transformed business environment. Because the pandemic and social distancing measures have resulted in decreased sales, less demand for products and services, and diminished revenues, otherwise successful businesses have found themselves in a liquidity crunch. Many will need help restructuring their capital—sometimes in dramatic ways—to survive.

Fearing defaults given the current economic climate, local banks are unlikely to lend to SMEs, especially in emerging markets that lack small business loan programs. Furthermore, SMEs struggling with liquidity issues may be increasingly wary of committing to additional monthly payments. As such, these businesses need assistance thinking through how to restructure their capital—consolidating their debt with better payment terms and attracting new equity investments—and the transaction advisory services provided by firms like CrossBoundary can help.

“We are trying to prevent otherwise good businesses from going bankrupt because of this shock,” says CrossBoundary’s Cusack. However, the businesses that most need these services the most have the least ability to pay for them at moment. “For most businesses, we are doing it pro bono, saying ‘Pay us when you can,’ or working with USAID or other donor assistance to help absorb the cost,” he says.

He’s right: international development agencies can help these SMEs by subsidizing the advisory services they need. However, in the short-term, international development agencies also must provide immediate relief capital to SMEs struggling to weather the crisis and stay afloat. 

“Speed is critical,” says Vanessa Holcomb Mann of USAID INVEST, an initiative of the United States Agency for International Development implemented by the international development firm DAI. Yunis, Lixcap, and CrossBoundary are members of USAID’s partner network, managed by USAID INVEST, which includes advisory firms, NGOs and other intermediaries that help mobilize private capital aligned with development goals.

“Some businesses have a pressing need for immediate relief capital in the form of grants or zero-interest loans from governments and donors,” says Mann. “They can’t wait three to six months for capital injections.”

However, relief capital is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and Holcomb Mann acknowledges that many businesses are still suitable for private investment, and, in the face of Covid-19, are actively looking for new sources of capital. Businesses in emerging markets are seeking strategic partnerships with U.S. investors that they have never considered before. 

“We’ve had a flood of inquiries from local companies,” says LixCap’s Meredith. “They are looking to access mezzanine financing,” a financing strategy that attracts lenders because it offers higher interest payments, and, in the case of default, it allows them to convert their debt to an equity stake in the company. 

“These companies have a strong fundamental business and a good management team,” he says. “They’ve never needed mezzanine financing before. They’ve always been able to get money from the banks and haven’t wanted other shareholders inside their organizations. Now, however, they are going to lose two quarters of their revenue, and that has changed what these companies are willing to do to survive.”

International development agencies can use blended finance interventions, such as providing catalytic capital (a type of financing that has better than market-rate terms and often acts as a protective layer of capital for other investors), to accelerate the flow of capital into these companies.

“Amid all the uncertainty, a lot of investors are actually sitting on cash, waiting to see what will happen,” says Holcomb Mann. “These investors, namely funds, have capital to deploy now, and catalytic capital from development agencies can help accelerate that deployment by easing investors’ concerns over possible, unknown risks. It can move the money off the sidelines into high-impact businesses, which is important, because the quicker we can get them this capital, the more robust and resilient they’ll be.” 

Foundation for recovery

By using such interventions to support SMEs, international development agencies can do more than just stop the immediate bleeding resulting from the crisis: they can put in place the supports needed for longer-term recovery and self-reliance. 

“The last decades that development agencies have spent strengthening SMEs in emerging markets has laid a solid foundation for the recovery. There is confidence that the strongest of these firms will be able to pivot quickly, provide employment, and help their communities through this crisis,” says Kristi Ragan, chief of party for USAID INVEST.

However, these SMEs will only be able to contribute to the recovery if they survive long enough to evolve and gain access to the financing they need to pivot. 

While the development and investment communities are working quickly to implement sizable, coordinated relief facilities and blended finance funds in support of SMEs, the scale of the crisis creates a pressing need for force multiplying partners—partners that, with a little support, can have an outsize impact. Fortunately, those partners stand at the ready. 

No blueprint exists for solving the challenges brought on by Covid-19. As development organizations work to address these challenges, no partner organization can claim decades of experience working in Covid-19 response. However, many of the less traditional commercial partners have years of insight from working on-the-ground in these SME ecosystems, thereby enabling them with the logistical and experiential know-how needed to develop tangible solutions for the current challenges.  

USAID recognizes that Covid-19 threatens to destroy a generation of SMEs that the development community has long worked to support. The best chance for the survival of these businesses requires international development agencies to partner with, and listen to the ideas of, private sector actors—partners who have been supporting local SMEs for years, intimately understand their needs, and draw upon deep, market-based experience to help them solve their problems.

Overcoming an Outdated Narrative: Why Investors Need to Recognize Africa’s True Potential

with Cameron Khosrowshahi. April 2020. NextAfrica investorBillion.

When Nigerian author and MacArthur Genius grantee Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie arrived in the United States for college in the 1990s, her roommate was surprised that she knew how to use a stove. People asked her where she had learned English, and her writing professor informed her that the African characters in her novel weren’t believable because they drove cars. For the first time, Adichie found herself confronted with what she now calls the single story of Africa, “a story of a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS.”

It’s a pervasive narrative, upheld through modern media and internalized by Western audiences. It’s also an incomplete story—a one-dimensional frame that’s had an extraordinary influence on how much of the world views Africa. This worldview permeates even the financial sector, causing investors to overemphasize risks—both real and imagined—across the continent. As a result, they overlook investment opportunities that could benefit their shareholders and retirees, as well as enhance America’s contribution to the prosperity, stability and self-reliance of African nations.

 THE IMPORTANCE OF INFRASTRUCTURE

Africa’s infrastructure—its transportation, water, power, health and education systems—fundamentally affects every human development outcome on the continent. Unfortunately, the gap between current infrastructure spending in Africa and the amount required to ensure electricity, water and sanitation access alone stands at about $3.3 trillion. All the world’s aid agencies and donor resources combined would not achieve that sum: It requires channeling the largest pools of capital on the planet. That means tapping into $70 trillion in institutional capital worldwide, especially the pension funds and insurance companies that allocate over $45 trillion in assets. Mobilizing a mere one percent of institutional capital would equal more than four times the total official development assistance provided annually by all donor countries combined.

This underinvestment in Africa’s infrastructure will become only more critical as the coronavirus pandemic begins to penetrate lower-income countries and places additional stress on already under-developed health systems. While the pandemic’s long-lasting effects on the world economy and investment trends are still unknown, the mobilization of private investment alongside development assistance will continue to play an important role in the realization of positive social, environmental and humanitarian results as the developing world copes with the ongoing crisis.

Within the U.S., pension funds alone manage approximately $9 trillion, but they invest little of that capital in sub-Saharan Africa. However, African infrastructure assets should be an attractive asset class for pension investors. Because of persistently low interest rates in developed economies, institutional investors cannot generate the cash flow necessary to meet their obligations by investing in Western markets alone. It’s no secret that U.S. public pensions, in particular, are underfunded and facing huge liabilities. The search for higher yields means institutional investors must consider opportunities in faster-growing markets. In 2018, Africa was home to six of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies.

African infrastructure assets also have long-dated, inflation-resilient returns that match the long-term liabilities that institutional investors must pay out – and they have the potential to deliver outsized investment returns, according to a 2018 Mercer Study. Despite these factors, much of U.S. institutional capital remains overwhelmingly invested in developed markets, meaning that a sudden drop in those markets would dramatically cut the savings of future retirees. Africa’s markets are the least correlated with developed markets, which provides an excellent opportunity for institutional investors to diversify their portfolios.

 ONBOARDING INVESTORS

Nevertheless, many institutional investors are still reluctant to invest in Africa. Their lack of experience with the region makes them feel vulnerable to poor investment decisions. Rather than see Africa as a land of opportunity, many see the continent as a land of risks. Their concerns reflect real risks—political, macroeconomic, reputational—but also may overweigh perceived risks that are increasingly at odds with the realities of modern Africa. In doing so, institutional and other investors may be missing out.

Investing in any emerging market is accompanied by uncertainty. Political risks, such as the possibility of conflict, tax increases or regulatory changes, can increase the possibility of delays, damage to physical assets and nonpayment. Weaker management capacity can threaten profitability, and weak corporate governance structures can give companies’ management a stronger voice than their shareholders. However, Africa is at no greater risk of these investment challenges than other emerging market regions – and infrastructure projects in the region actually benefit from unique risk controls when compared to projects elsewhere. Many African projects are U.S. dollarized, minimizing currency risks linked to foreign exchange rates. And development agencies and development finance institutions (DFIs) provide concrete risk-mitigation—such as partial-credit guarantees, subordinated debt and contingent financing — for many infrastructure investments throughout the region.

While African infrastructure projects often have less immediate liquidity and longer completion lead times than infrastructure projects in other regions, these attributes have not led to greater default risks. In fact, African default rates are lower than the average rates across all global regions, including North America. Additionally, the continent’s infrastructure project debt has a significantly lower default rate compared to other emerging market regions, such as Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia, which many institutional investors perceive as safer options for portfolio diversification.

Regardless, shifting the mindset of “Africa skeptics” with raw data alone remains a tremendous challenge. That’s why the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) partnered with the National Association of Securities Professionals to launch the Mobilizing Institutional Investors to Develop Africa’s Infrastructure (MiDA) initiative. Driven by the larger market forces affecting investor behavior, MiDA was explicitly designed to take advantage of these tailwinds. The U.S. investment community had already begun to turn its attention to Africa in its search for higher yields and greater diversification. However, since the aversion to investing in Africa is often based on perception rather than evidence, the initiative deliberately took a step back and focused on dismantling these accumulated, preconceived notions about the continent. MiDA’s hands-on, intensive approach has started by taking investors directly to the investment sites, inviting them to explore the neighborhoods they were investing in and get to know the people responsible for deploying their capital and looking after their investments.

Over the last three years, MiDA has facilitated investor delegation trips to sub-Saharan Africa, offering American institutional investors the chance to learn about opportunities directly from their African peers. These delegations traveled to Senegal, South Africa and Kenya, where participants visited on-the-ground investment opportunities across multiple sectors and met with members of the African investment community. This first-hand experience on the continent changed their perceptions in ways that facts and stats had failed to do.

The 2019 delegation consisted of 32 investors, a combination of asset owners and managers, who held over $1 trillion under their management. In Africa, they saw sophisticated and well-structured infrastructure projects, including a power plant in Kenya and an affordable housing project, funded by local pensions, in Johannesburg.

Richard Ingram, the executive director of the Teacher’s Retirement System of the State of Illinois (TRS), participated in the 2019 delegation. “For me, this trip was an example of why there’s no substitute for actually ‘being there,’” he says. “Whenever you read investment outlooks for the coming year, there’s very little mention of Africa. It just struck me as odd that such a big chunk of the world wasn’t even on the radar screen.  … The ability to get beyond the headlines, to see the reality in Africa, was a real motivation for me going [on the delegation].”

The MiDA delegation gave American pension decision-makers like Ingram the opportunity to form direct, personal connections with their African counterparts in local pension communities across the continent. Moving beyond stereotypes, they had the chance to explore co-investment strategies with their African peers, speaking a common language of finance and evaluating risk.

For American investors, having a strong local partner or financial intermediary familiar with the local context – including project intricacies and institutional weaknesses – decreases operational risks significantly. Their foresight can also help foreign investors plan ahead to avoid potential pitfalls. For instance, long project timelines in sub-Saharan Africa need to be properly accounted for and managed; otherwise, payment delays can create liquidity risks for investors and drag down return expectations. Building up investors’ knowledge of a new market through co-investments and joint due diligence processes can greatly increase the comfort-level of institutional investors looking to become active in the region.

At the same time, American investors can share their expertise with a growing African institutional investor community. American institutional capital is an important gateway for African asset owners into the scale and sophistication of the U.S. financial sector. The African institutional investor community is small but growing, and U.S. capital and expertise can help this nascent community reach its potential, giving them the tools they need to finance their own future with the savings of their own people.

Since the delegation visit, Ingram has traveled back to Africa to do follow-up work. He’s been developing a list of potential investment partners for TRS, and he’s inviting the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, or DFC for short, to present to his staff about the risk mitigation and due diligence value that the DFC can bring to institutional investors considering African investments. He’s now committed to expanding awareness about investment opportunities on the continent.

 BUILT TO PROSPER

With a little over $2 million in grant funding, MiDA has mobilized $1 billion in two-way investment commitments so far. USAID is now poised to roll out the next phase of institutional capital mobilization work under Prosper Africa, U.S. government initiative designed to bolster two-way trade and investment between the U.S. and Africa. Prosper Africa’s institutional investor program, supported by USAID’s regional missions in Kenya and South Africa, will combine investor relationship-building with a heavier dose of transaction facilitation, all managed by USAID’s INVEST initiative, which mobilizes private capital for development.

As African economies grow, countries have a choice between relying on opaque systems of state-directed development, or helping to build transparent markets that empower both citizens and their businesses. These countries can remain dependent on handouts from wealthier nations or develop the means to resource their own futures independently. USAID believes that private investment in Africa will help countries choose the latter course and take a step forward on their journeys to self-reliance.

As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi says, Africa is a place of many stories. Stories of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and entrepreneurial people overcoming economic and social challenges, working toward sustainable development and inclusive growth. Stories that involve Americans and Africans working together to pursue a common prosperity.

 

Blended Finance 101

March 2020. Marketlinks.

In 2015, the United Nations developed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—a global checklist of objectives designed to ensure the sustainable development of our world and the prosperity of its people. Unfortunately, the annual funding gap for reaching the SDGs by 2030 is trillions per year—a figure that vastly exceeds the resources of development agencies.  After all, official development assistance from government aid worldwide is only about $150 billion a year.

Shortly afterwards, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) reoriented its policy framework around using foreign assistance funding to support developing countries on their Journey to Self-Reliance, defined as their capacity to plan, finance, and implement sustainable solutions to their development challenges.

Achieving self-reliance goes hand-in-hand with progressing towards the Sustainable Development Goals, and engaging the private sector is an integral component for the success of both agendas. Closing the SDG funding gap will require mobilizing the world’s largest financing pools—private capital, and a country’s journey to self-reliance requires the development of its private sector and the deepening of local financial markets.

Unfortunately, many developing countries have unattractive investment climates that negatively affect the appetite of banks, institutions, and individuals to lend to and invest in businesses operating in their jurisdiction. Numerous barriers prevent capital flows into these markets, including: weak liquidity, high market volatility, exchange rate fluctuations, the small size of individual investment opportunities, and potential investors’ lack of familiarity.

Here, however, international development agencies can help. They can encourage private investment in development countries through blended finance interventions.

Blended finance is the strategic use of development funds, such as those from government aid and philanthropic sources, to mobilize private capital for social and environment results, such as improving infrastructure, education, agriculture, healthcare, and more.

Good blended finance transactions not only mitigate investment risks and align private capital with immediate development needs, but they also have a positive long-term impact on local financial ecosystems—an important stepping stone on a country’s path to self-reliance. Because blended finance centers on improving risk-adjusted returns, it also helps increase the number of investment opportunities for the private sector in developing countries. Furthermore, by drawing in private capital, blended finance interventions ultimately allow international development agencies to make progress beyond what they could achieve with their own limited budgets.

Blended finance interventions aim to create both financial returns and positive social and environmental outcomes. Described simply, these interventions enhance an investment’s potential return—the money it makes over time—relative to its risk factor—the possibility of incurring a financial loss instead of a return.  In other words, they improve the investment’s risk-adjusted return, thereby making it more attractive to investors.[1]  Risk-adjusted returns are an important factor in an investor’s decision to invest in an activity, fund, company, etc. If two investment opportunities have the same anticipated return over the same duration of time, the one that has the lower risk will have the better risk-adjusted return, making it the more likely choice for investment.

All investments incur some level of risk; however, investments in developing countries often present additional risks. While these countries often have attractive investment features that developed economies lack, such as high yields, fast-growing economies, and uncorrelated markets, if the risk-adjusted returns aren’t as attractive as the investment options in other markets, commercial investors won’t invest money into these opportunities.

By improving the risk-adjusted returns of transactions in these markets, international development agencies alongside other public and philanthropic actors can drive commercial investment into markets, sectors, projects, or companies that the private sector would not otherwise consider.

While blended finance transactions are usually complex, development agencies often rely on a few fundamental interventions to support them.

One intervention is to participate in the deal structure. Structuring is the combining of different types of capital, risk mitigation, and incentives to attract investors and appropriately fund an investment. Capital structure in blended finance refers to the specific combination of debt, equity, and grant funding used to finance an investment as well as the priority of investors and lenders in terms of absorbing losses and earning a return.

Debt and equity are the two main ways to raise money for an investment. By taking on debt, the borrower owes another party money, pays interest to borrow that money, and has a defined repayment schedule. By taking on equity investments, the investee is allowing an outside party to take partial ownership of the company. Lenders who issue debt are paid back before equity investors gain profits, so lenders take on less risk than equity investors. For this reason, equity investors expect a higher rate of return and more control over the investment. However, unlike debt, equity investments do not have to be paid back, which can be helpful if a firm encounters a period of declining earnings.

An example of how international development agencies can participate in a deal is by injecting catalytic (aka concessional) into its structure. Catalytic capital is financing that has terms more favorable than those set by the market; for example, it may have low or no interest, grace periods, or long payback timelines.[1] Development agencies can also contribute catalytic capital in the form of grant-like capital for which there is no expected payback. By contributing a new layer of capital into the structure, development agencies can absorb lower returns or the first financial losses, thereby protecting the returns of private sector partners if the investment does not turn out as forecasted. Ultimately, the presence of catalytic capital helps de-risk investments and create the appropriate risk/returns required to crowd in private sector investors.

Blended finance interventions do not always require development agencies to participate in the deal structure. Instead, they can improve an investment’s risk-adjusted returns via other approaches, including the financing of technical assistance such as sidecar facilities and transaction advisory services. Financing a fund’s technical assistance sidecar creates a facility through which fund managers can provide portfolio companies with business advisory services, thereby decreasing the risk associated with investing in these companies. Similarly, the lack of transaction advisors in emerging markets often creates barriers that prevent private capital from entering these markets. By covering the fees of transaction advisors, development agencies can incentivize them to work on deals in emerging markets that they would otherwise avoid because these markets tend to be riskier and less profitable than developed markets. 

Other blended finance approaches that development agencies use include providing a guarantee to lenders in the case of losses, purchasing insurance against certain risks, or assisting in the development of a project so that its fruition appeals to private sector actors and simultaneously has social and environmental benefits.

Blended finance aims to make development spending more catalytic, meaning that for every public or philanthropic dollar spent on a development project, additional dollars in private capital are mobilized to invest alongside it, ultimately increasing social and environmental impact.  As such, all blended finance transactions should have three signature markings that demonstrate the alignment of private and development interests: impact, returns, and additionality.

Impact illustrates the ways in which the investee or investable project contributes to sustainable development in a developing country. Returns demonstrate that the transaction is expected to generate a profit. Additionality offers proof that the international development agency’s intervention (catalytic capital, insurance, technical assistance, etc.)  generated meaningful private sector participation that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. If private capital would have entered the deal (at the same value and with the same conditions or time frame) without the international development agency’s involvement, then there is little to no additionality.

Additionality provides the rationale for pursuing blended finance strategies. Without evidence that blended finance helps secure additional financing or improves a project’s development results, development agencies run the risk of wasting resources on transactions and projects that would have been equally successful without their involvement. The worst-case scenario is that their resources “crowd out” private capital that would have come naturally into the transaction had the development agency not stepped in to fill an assumed void.

Unfortunately, additionality is difficult to prove because blended finance transactions do not function like science experiments that carefully compare an intervention against a control group. No alternative transaction exists to quantify the amount of money that would have been raised without the intervention. Likewise, a project can’t quantify how successful or unsuccessful it would have been had additional private capital not been mobilized.

Often international development agencies report leverage ratios for blended finance: the amount of commercial financing mobilized by development capital using blended finance.

In general, leverage usually equates to the amount of commercial capital (at market terms) divided by the catalytic or concessional capital. However, the blended finance ecosystem lacks a universal methodology for calculating leverage ratios, which makes comparing ratios from multiple sources difficult. Every individual transaction has a different risk profile based on the sector and market, and different interventions produce different leverage ratios even if used in the same market or sector. All these factors make comparing leverage ratios across different blended finance transactions challenging.

The relationship between leverage ratios and additionality is also a complicated one. At face-value, high leverage ratios seem positive because they show a significant amount of private capital spent per donor dollar. However, high leverage ratios can underscore that the blended finance intervention was not truly needed. For instance, if a deal attracts a significant number of high-value, private sector investments, then it’s possible that it would have attracted commercial investments without development agency participation. Blended finance transactions with lower mobilization can be shown to have high additionality because they reveal that a development agency influenced commercial investment in an area with significant risks but high social or environmental returns (e.g., investing in conflict-affected areas or least developed countries).  Thus, high leverage ratios may actually be at odds with additionality, signifying an unnecessary blended finance intervention, rather than a successful one. 

Banning All For-Profit Charters Without Considering Performance Would Be a Grave Mistake — Every Neighborhood Deserves a BASIS Education

December 2019. The 74.

Wasting no time in wooing the nation’s largest labor union, Democratic primary candidates have come out strong against public charter schools. Sen. Bernie Sanders led the pack with the most aggressive anti-charter stance, insisting that all charters abide by the union contracts in their local districts and calling for a total ban on for-profit charter schools. Not to be outdone, Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently rolled out an education plan designed to appeal to unions: It ends the main source of federal funding for charter schools and echoes Sanders’s call for a ban on for-profit charters.

Even more-moderate Democrats have been attempting to shore up teachers union support: South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg expressed skepticism that the expansion of charters could help improve public education, and he openly denounced for-profit charters, saying they have no place in the future of American public education. Former vice president Joe Biden, a man who served as second-in-command to arguably America’s most pro-charter president, said he did not believe in using federal funds to support for-profit charter schools.

On the surface, this middle-of-the road stance against for-profit charters seems noncontroversial. But most Americans don’t know that Arizona is the only state that allows for the creation of new for-profit charter schools. (California revised its law in 2018 to ban new for-profit charter schools.)

Charter schools are tuition-free, public schools open to all students. In terms of academic performance, they are held to the same state standards as district-run schools — or, if laid out in their charter, higher ones. Because they operate independently of a school district, however, charter schools have autonomy over staffing, budgeting, curriculum, school design and management structure.

While two-thirds of charter schools in the United States are freestanding and do not rely on a management organization, the remaining 2,500 public charters contract with a management organization to conduct operations that a district’s central office handles for traditional public schools. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools describes a management organization as “an entity that manages at least three schools, serves a minimum of 300 students, and is a separate business entity from the schools it manages.” Charter management organizations are nonprofits, while education management organizations are for-profits.

CMOs are behind 25 percent of the country’s charter schools, while EMOs operate 12 percent of charters. Outside of Arizona, all charter schools, regardless of whether they have a contract with an EMO or CMO, have nonprofit boards, making the schools themselves nonprofit entities.

The question is: When Democratic candidates attack for-profit charters, are they distinguishing between for-profit schools and nonprofit charter schools that have management contracts with EMOs?

An even better question: Why are Democratic candidates focused on the tax status of a school’s management entity as opposed to the school’s academic outcomes?

Banning all EMO-operated schools without taking into account school performance would be a grave mistake, especially since the highest-performing, nonselective public schools in the country are managed by an EMO.

BASIS public charter schools

At a time when the U.S. has fallen behind its international counterparts academically, BASIS Charter Schools offer world-class education. The network serves about 19,600 students in Arizona, Texas, Louisiana and Washington, D.C. It consists of 27 nonprofit public schools of choice that contract with the EMO BASIS.ed, which provides curriculum, teacher recruitment and training, information technology support, human resources, financial and business services, accounting, and legal and student services. BASIS.ed charges the schools a management fee. Independent auditors regularly review the management fee paid by the schools and have concluded that it is “reasonable given the services.”

“Each school is governed by an autonomous nonprofit board of directors,” BASIS.ed CEO Peter Bezanson explained. “The board members have no connection to the EMO, which is an important safeguard because it allows them to make a decision about whether to use BASIS.ed as the company to manage the schools. That distinguishes us from our peers [in Arizona] that are for-profit schools.”

BASIS Charter Schools began in Tucson, Arizona, when Michael and Olga Block struggled to find a middle school for their daughter. Olga Block had been a dean at Charles University in Prague in the Czech Republic before coming to the United States. She wanted her daughter to attend a school that was internationally competitive in terms of rigor, student accountability and academic focus.

Having no luck finding such a program in Tucson’s traditional public schools, the two parents decided to start a charter school that prioritized content-area knowledge and combined the high academic standards of Europe and Asia with the American ideology of self-sufficiency. They recruited and selected teachers based on their subject-area expertise as opposed to their teaching certifications. In 1998, BASIS Tucson opened its doors to 58 students, including the Blocks’ daughter.

“They call us a for-profit management company, but really, we began as — and are — a family-owned business,” says Bezanson, whom the Blocks recruited five years ago when they stepped down as CEOs. “Being a family-run business is powerful because it allows us to be nimble and make changes quickly in a way that a nonprofit organization might not be able to do. We aren’t only concerned with returning investments to investors. We’re concerned with offering the highest-performance, highest-quality education available in the country. We’re focused on running the best schools in the world.”

The best schools in the world

In large part, the expansion of the network has occurred because BASIS Charter Schools offer a rigorous curriculum designed to produce internationally competitive students — an educational option that, in America, usually only comes attached to a price tag or mortgage.

While the reputation of BASIS Charter Schools goes far beyond test scores — the schools pride themselves on creating a culture where students respect learning, seek knowledge independently and develop a sense of self-efficacy — student performance on exams has far exceeded the performance of students at most U.S. schools.

On the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment — arguably the world’s most important international assessment — U.S. students consistently score below students from equally developed countries in Europe and Asia (such as Finland, Singapore and South Korea). Since 2000, the OECD has administered PISA every three years, and the U.S. has maintained an 18-year history of underwhelming performance.

However, on the OECD’s 2018 Test for Schools, an international exam based off of PISA, students at BASIS Schools outscored every other educational system in all three core subjects.

To receive a BASIS diploma, students must take seven Advanced Placement courses, sit six AP exams, and pass at least one exam with a 3 (out of 5) or higher. In 2018, the network had an overall AP exam pass rate of 85.5 percent, with an average AP exam score of 3.7. On average, a BASIS graduate will take 11.8 AP exams. Overall the percentage of BASIS Charter Schools students scoring a 3 or higher on their AP exams exceeds their peers both within the U.S. and abroad. The OECD also considers students who score at least at a level five out of six on the exam as potential “world class” knowledge workers of tomorrow. In math, 58.8 percent of BASIS students achieved a five or above, and in reading and science the percentages were 32.6 percent and 32 percent, respectively.

Because they earn numerous AP credits, many BASIS graduates enter college as a first- or second-semester sophomore.

The BASIS model

In addition to a specialized and challenging curriculum, BASIS campuses have a unique instructional model. In first through fourth grades, students have a “learning expert” who accompanies them throughout the day to different classes taught by “subject area experts.” Students are exposed to higher-level subjects, including Mandarin, engineering, Latin, physics, logic, economics and chemistry, earlier than at most public schools. They can begin AP courses as early as eighth grade.

It’s an intentionally rigorous curriculum, and the network’s leadership team is unapologetic about it.

“The BASIS curriculum is not for everyone,” BASIS executive director DeAnna Rowe said. “But, for parents and students who want an education at this particularly unique level — and make no mistake, there are many families who do, indeed, want such an education — there is nothing like it.”

At the high school level, students finish all of the graduation requirements by junior year so that they can spend senior year focused on capstone courses, such as “history through film” or “infectious diseases,” that promote deeper, more creative thinking. Teachers often design the capstones based on their own passion and student interests. Because BASIS Charter Schools recruit teachers based on their subject-area expertise, it’s not unusual for teachers to have doctorates or other terminal degrees in their disciplines. Students respect their teachers, and teachers’ passion for content positively affects student engagement.

“[The] network’s greatest achievement might be the notion that we are here for any student that is willing to work hard — for any child that wants this sort of high-achieving environment,” Rowe said “You can’t find this at many other American schools, and not every student or family wants this sort of experience, but we will welcome and support anyone who wants it: anyone at all, no matter their previous academic or personal success or background.”

BASIS Charter Schools cast a wide net of recruitment strategies: social media campaigns, newspaper and radio advertisements, billboards and occasionally even street banners that contain information about how and when to apply. When opening a new school, it’s common practice for the staff to hold informational meetings in neighborhoods throughout the metropolitan area. Overall, the schools have racially diverse campuses; however, the number of socioeconomically disadvantaged students served varies significantly from campus to campus.

“We get accused a lot of cherry-picking students, and that’s false,” Bezanson said. “We don’t choose our kids; our kids choose us. We use a blind lottery system, with only a sibling preference, to determine admission. We don’t care where kids come from. We want to serve every single person who wants the education we have to offer, regardless of race, income or gender identity.”

The network serves a high percentage of first- and second-generation Americans, whose families come from all over the globe — from Mexico to Ukraine to China.

“A lot of these families find our education consistent with what they received as a youngster in their home country,” Bezanson said.

Many families — regardless of where they live — are seeking a public education that will educate their kids to the highest possible level. Network-wide, BASIS Charter Schools have 12,300 students on their waiting list. These families care about outcomes for their children, not the tax status of the school’s management organization.

“There’s obviously been a lot of pushback against public charter schools over the last few years,” Bezanson said. “I’d love for the people in power, both Republicans and Democrats, to understand what public charter schools have done to revolutionize educational quality in the U.S.”

Bezanson believes that what the charter sector needs most is high-quality authorizers that hold schools accountable for performance and revoke their charters if student achievement lags.

“A charter school should not exist unless its students are performing above average,” he said. “If we as a community of charters are vigilant about closing the low performers, we would solve a lot of our own problems.”

That’s something that Democratic candidates should learn from Bezanson. Rather than attempt to dismantle the charter sector, these candidates should be making progressive arguments based on school quality, seeking to improve the sector by demanding accountability for performance from both the charter schools and their authorizers. Threatening to ban the nation’s highest-performing nonselective public schools because of political ideology is regressive. Every child deserves access to a BASIS education. The goal of real progressive candidates should be to ensure that they get it.

The Progressive Roots of Charter Schools

with David Osborne. October 2019. Medium.

Listening to the rhetoric of Democratic presidential candidates, one would think charter schools were a Republican initiative opposed by all progressives. Bernie Sanders calls for a halt to all federal funding for charter schools. Elizabeth Warren joins him in condemning for-profit charters.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who served under a president enthusiastic about charters, told the American Federation of Teachers at a forum, “The bottom line is it [chartering] siphons off money for our public schools, which are already in enough trouble.”

Even candidates who have been charter supporters in the past, such as Michael Bennet, Beto O’Rourke, and Julian Castro, have had nothing positive to say about charters. All seem afraid to draw the ire of the teachers’ unions, which contributed $64 million to candidates, party organizations, and outside spending groups during the 2016 election, according to the campaign finance tracking organization, OpenSecrets.

So it may come as a surprise to readers that chartering originated as a Democratic initiative. Democrats spearheaded charter legislation in most of the early charter states, and Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enthusiastically supported charters, pushing through federal legislation to provide funding.

The innovative Democrats who pioneered chartering were looking for a better organizational model for public education — a system designed for the Information Age rather than the Industrial Era. In their new approach, an “authorizer” — usually the state or local school board — grants performance contracts to groups of individuals or nonprofit organizations that apply to open new public schools. Exempt from many of the rules that constrain district-operated schools, they are encouraged to innovate, to create new learning models that will appeal to children bored or otherwise dissatisfied with traditional schools. If a school succeeds, its contract is renewed; if it fails, it is closed. Families can choose between a variety of schools. Districts lose their monopolies on taxpayer-funded education, and their schools can no longer fail students for generations; the competition either takes away their students or forces them to improve.

The new schools are called “charter schools” because their performance contract is a charter. Over the past two decades, cities that have embraced chartering, such as New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Denver, Newark, and Indianapolis, have experienced profound student growth and school improvement. The charter formula — school-level autonomy, accountability for results, diversity of school designs, parental choice, and competition between schools — is far more effective than the centralized, bureaucratic approach that developed more than a century ago.

Teachers at charter schools tend not to unionize, however, so as the charter sector grows, union membership shrinks. By 2000, union leaders and their allies had gone to war against charters. They claim that charters are a product of “corporate reformers,” a right-wing effort to “privatize” our public schools. These accusations are nonsense. More accurately, they are lies born of self-interest, designed to protect the jobs of mostly white, middle-class teachers and union officials at the expense of mostly poor, minority kids.

The Origins of the Charter Concept

In 1988, University of Massachusetts Education Professor Ray Budde, a former principal, published Education by Charter: Restructuring School Districts. He proposed that districts allow teams of teachers to “charter” a program within a school for three to five years.

The following July, Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers, expanded on the concept in his New York Times column, suggesting that teams of teachers charter whole schools, not just programs. Shanker believed that the U.S. needed school systems that provided educators with autonomy and “genuine accountability” for results. He urged school systems to charter schools with a variety of teaching approaches, so that “parents could choose which charter school to send their children to, thus fostering competition.”

In 1995, just two years before his death, Shanker told Republican Congressman Steve Gunderson, who was writing an education reform bill for Washington, D.C., that “every school should be a charter school.”

Democrats Lead the Way in Early Charter States

In 1988, after reading Shanker’s column, members of a nonpartisan civic organization in Minnesota called the Citizens League began working on a report that outlined the framework for charter legislation, led by former League Executive Director Ted Kolderie. In October, when Shanker spoke at the Minnesota Foundation’s annual Itasca Seminar, Democratic State Senator Ember Reichgott Junge and Democratic State Representative Ken Nelson were in the audience. Afterward, Reichgott Junge began drafting charter legislation, with Kolderie’s help, and in 1989 she and Nelson introduced the bill. It passed the Senate but failed in the House, two years running. Finally, in 1991, with help in the House from Democratic Rep. Becky Kelso, a compromise version finally passed. And in 1992, a group of veteran public school teachers opened City Academy in St. Paul, the nation’s first charter school.

In California, conservatives were preparing a voucher ballot initiative that would allow Californians to use tax dollars to send their children to any school they chose, public or private. Democratic State Senator Gary K. Hart, who understood that the electorate was deeply frustrated with public schools, decided the Democrats needed legislation to counter the voucher movement. Hart felt that vouchers relied too much on a free-market approach, threatening the equal opportunity that should be built into public education. A former teacher, he’d already sponsored a bill that gave 200 public schools more autonomy in exchange for more accountability. Chartering was the next logical step: a third way between vouchers and traditional systems.

Democratic Assemblywoman Delaine Eastin introduced a charter bill at the same time, but it required sign-off by the district’s collective bargaining unit for charter approval. Teachers unions pressured Hart to amend his bill to do the same, but he refused. He also stood his ground against demands related to parent involvement and teaching credentials. Hart believed such decisions should be left up to school founders and leaders. He wanted a simple bill that would create a system with limited bureaucracy, in which schools were judged on the basis of student outcomes, not compliance with rules.

Both bills passed the legislature, but Republican Governor Pete Wilson vetoed Eastin’s and signed Hart’s into law. The legislation took effect on January 1, 1993, and that fall, 44 charters opened.

The third bill passed in Colorado, where Democratic Governor Roy Romer was instrumental in pushing it through the legislature. In 1992, Republican Senator Bill Owens and Republican State Representative John James Irwin introduced a bill to create a new, independent school district to authorize and oversee “self-governing” schools. That bill died in the Senate Education Committee, whose chairman, Republican Senator Al Meiklejohn, stood firmly against choice and charters.

Irwin died before the 1993 session, so Owens and his allies reached out to Democratic State Representative Peggy Kerns, to sponsor a new charter bill in the House. The unions and other establishment groups opposed the bill, and Meiklejohn neutered it with amendments in the Senate.

In the House, Kerns and fellow Democrat Peggy Reeves re-amended the Senate bill so that it more closely resembled the original. Gov. Romer met with the Democratic caucus and rallied support on the House floor. The bill narrowly passed, the two bills were reconciled in conference committee, and both houses passed the new version. On June 3, 1993, Romer signed the Charter Schools Act into law.

In Massachusetts, Democratic State Senator Thomas Birmingham and Democratic State Representative Mark Roosevelt, then co-chairs of the Joint Committee on Education, spent several years developing the 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act, which sought to reform the state’s education financing system while increasing academic expectations and school accountability.

In the fall of 1991, a mutual friend introduced Roosevelt to David Osborne, who had recently finished a new book, Reinventing Government. Roosevelt described for Osborne the higher academic standards he planned to include in the legislation. Osborne said, “That’s great; standards are important. But what are you doing to do when districts don’t meet them?”

Roosevelt explained that the state would take over underperforming districts. Osborne pointed out that takeovers would stir up intense resistance, severely limiting their use. You need another strategy, Osborne told him. You need choice and competition.

Shortly afterwards, he introduced Roosevelt and his staff to the concept of charter schools. A few weeks later, when Ted Kolderie told Osborne he was planning a trip to Boston, Osborne put him in touch with Roosevelt, and Kolderie helped Roosevelt and his staff write charter language for the bill. When the teachers unions came out against the charter proposal, Roosevelt and Birmingham introduced a cap on the number of charter schools, as a compromise.

In 2016, Roosevelt and Birmingham urged Massachusetts to raise its cap: “We included charter public schools in the 1993 law to provide poor parents with the type of educational choice that wealthy parents have always enjoyed…. We now have enough data to conclude that charter schools have exceeded expectations. In our cities, public charter schools consistently close achievement gaps. No wonder more than 32,000 children are on charter school waiting lists. Imagine being one of the parents crushed with disappointment when your child is not selected.”

By the end of 1994, seven more states had enacted charter laws. Democrats spearheaded the legislation in Georgia, Hawaii, and New Mexico, Republicans in Arizona and Wisconsin, and there was overwhelming bipartisan support in Michigan and Kansas. Of the next 23 states, which passed bills in the rest of the ’90s, all but three had strong bipartisan support.

Even today, most education reformers are Democrats. A study by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) showed that 87 percent or more of the political contributions made by staff at education reform organizations over the past decade went to Democratic candidates. “The leading participants in the school-reform ‘wars’ are mostly engaged in an intramural brawl,” the authors concluded, “one between union-allied Democrats and a strand of progressive Democrats more intent on changing school systems.”

As reform-minded Democrats attempt to put children first, union-backed Democrats block them. They betray America’s children — particularly those whose parents lack the money to move into a district with strong public schools or send their children to private schools.

Voters should ask this year’s presidential candidates: Which type of Democrat are you?

When a neighborhood spot makes a community feel like home

July 2019. The Washington Post.

It started with a bartender.

For transplants to the District, it can be hard to find a sense of community. On the day my husband and I went to visit the apartment we would end up renting for the next two years, we decided to have lunch around the corner, enticed by the open-air dining room, as well as the menu of Belgian food and beer. The exchange with the bartender was full of pleasantries, nothing more than you’d expect, excellent service with a friendly demeanor. It was, like most beginnings, the kind when you don’t realize that something’s begun.

Six weeks later and two weeks after we moved into the apartment, a friend and I returned to St. Arnold’s Mussel Bar in Cleveland Park. The same bartender served us, and when my friend ordered syrup to go with his waffle burger, the bartender informed him it was a weird choice. We laughed about it, and it became our first running joke.

My husband and I began to frequent the bar: impromptu weeknight drinks, celebrations for job promotions and anniversaries, a standby for taking out-of-town guests. Somewhere in that time, we learned the bartender’s name: Ruben.

He was seemingly always there. Waving to me through the glass windows as I passed by on my evening runs. Smiling at me from behind the bar as I commuted home from work. Serving my husband and me beer and frites and more beer until it was late, and we were the last lingering customers.

And then Ruben died. Right there, in the restaurant, from a heart attack, a year after we’d moved in, when my husband and I were visiting family in Ireland.

The ripples of a life can never be known. The owners of St. Arnold’s held a service on a Sunday afternoon, and members of the neighborhood, who had been following Ruben from bar to bar until he’d ended up at my new locale a few years ago, turned out in large numbers to pay their respects, to say goodbye, to share the loss with all who cared, those such as Paul, a co-owner of St. Arnold’s who knew Ruben well, and those like me, who didn’t.

Shortly after, Paul and Val (Ruben’s co-bartender extraordinaire) began hosting monthly neighborhood dinners, a one-night-only, seven-course menu, for neighbors to come together and get to know each other over well-prepared food. Everyone ate together: the guests, beer distributors and St. Arnold’s employees. Each dinner was different; each dinner was special. Each dinner was the restaurant’s attempt to create a sense of belonging among members of a community.

Friends began to come along; strangers still came, too. There was a dinner before Christmas and another the week of Valentine’s Day. There was one on my birthday. For that special night, they presented me with a shirt that read, “Strong Belgium [Fem]Ale,” and a special dessert, made by Val’s aunt using her family recipe, which they served as course number four because they’d come to realize that I’m always full by course six.

The St. Arnold’s kitchen caught fire last month , with flames so intense that the restaurant has not yet reopened. Walking home that evening, only a few hours after the blaze, we tiptoed into the restaurant, where Paul and Val and a few other employees dwelled quietly, contemplating the damage. Chairs remained stacked on tables, the lights stayed out, and the ceiling fans whirled soundlessly overhead. We treaded lightly upon their tragedy; they welcomed us with literal open arms and let us drink to their sorrows. Then we stood outside in the humid, nearly July summer air, as Paul locked the doors and shut the windows, unsure when he’d open them again.

Each morning since, I walk by and look in. The ceiling fans are still whirling, but the restaurant remains dark. Our empty glasses uncharacteristically left out on the counter. Every community needs a clean, well-lighted place, and I wonder what we will do if ours is truly gone.

Bernie Sanders’ reactionary education plan: He’s attacking charter schools that serve low-income black and Latino families

with Will Marshall. June 2019. New York Daily News.

Central to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ cantankerous mystique is his anti-establishment stance and uncompromising vision for radical economic change. When it comes to public schools, however, Sanders is no revolutionary. On the contrary, he sides with the education establishment in defending a status quo that is failing poor and minority students.

The democratic socialist from Vermont recently unveiled an education “reform” plan that can only be described as reactionary. It calls for rolling back federal support for public charter schools, which are providing millions of black and brown children access to educational opportunity in a growing number of large U.S. cities.

This sets Sanders at odds with the last two Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, as well as progressive state lawmakers and governors who launched the charter school movement a generation ago to give poor and minority families something more mobile and affluent suburbanites take for granted: the ability to choose better public schools for their kids.

Although charter sectors vary in quality significantly from state to state, in places with strong charter laws and well-regulated sectors (like New York), charter schools produce significantly better outcomes for low-income urban children than traditional public schools educating demographically similar students. That’s why tens of thousands of minority families are on charter school wait lists nationwide.

Emerging from these high achieving charter sectors is a whole new way of organizing K-12 public schools in America. The four core features of this 21st-century model are school-level autonomy, parent/student choice, a variety of school types and real accountability for results.

Rather than embrace this evolution, which is at last making our public schools work for disadvantaged kids, Sanders wants to return to the century-old, highly centralized, one-size-fits-all model that has so often failed them.

Sanders can’t have had much first-hand experience with charters or the minority students they serve. Vermont is a largely rural and white state and only one of five without a charter law. In the 2012-2013 school year, at a time when just over half of U.S. public school students were white, 92% of Vermont’s public schools students were white.

But if Sanders is woefully out of touch with urban education realities, he seems perfectly in tune with the sentiments of big teachers’ unions, which feel threatened by the growth of a largely non-unionized charter sector.

His plan duly echoes the unions’ litany of self-serving and bogus complaints about charters: that they drain money from public schools (not possible, because charter schools are public schools); that they increase public school segregation (a real problem, but charters are hardly to blame); and that they represent an insidious bid to “privatize” public schools (also false, because charters are accountable to public institutions and must accept all students, just like traditional public schools).

The Sanders plan would force charter schools to comply with a series of federal requirements designed to dilute their autonomy, which has been crucial to their success. To compel charters to unionize, he would require that they abide by the same collective bargaining agreements that handcuff educators at district-operated schools.

Sanders also calls for a ban on for-profit charter schools, which probably already are on their way out. With a few exceptions, for-profit charter schools have performed significantly worse than their nonprofit counterparts. States with strong charter laws and oversight have already cracked down on for-profit charters.

A recent poll from Democrats for Education Reform shows that over half of both black and Hispanic Democratic voters view charters favorably. Among white Democratic voters, however, that number was just 26%. Charters tend to open in underserved urban areas where they have had a real and positive effect on the lives of minority voters while many white Americans have no first-hand experience with charter schools, because their mortgages purchased a strong suburban school along with a house.

Democratic presidential candidates must decide whom to put first: the students in our public schools or the adults who run the system. By putting the interests of teachers’ unions over those of disadvantaged students, Bernie Sanders has flunked that test.

Ed Reformers Rejoice: New CREDO Report Shows Student Progress In New Orleans Has Continued

May 2019. Forbes.

Nearly 14 years ago, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana’s elected leaders decided to rebuild New Orleans’s failing public education system from the ground up, as a system of public charter schools. Prior to the storm, the district was considered one of the nation’s worst. Half the students dropped out, and four in 10 adults in the city could not read beyond an elementary school level. The district was almost bankrupt, searching for a $50 million line of credit just to meet payroll. Katrina only exacerbated an already dire situation, displacing 64,000 students and creating over $800 million in damage to school buildings alone.

For New Orleans, this catastrophe brought with it an opportunity. In 2003, the governor and state legislature had created a Recovery School District (RSD) to take over the state’s worst public schools, including five in New Orleans, which the RSD had turned into charters. After the storm, the legislature placed all but 17 of New Orleans’s 127 public schools in the RSD. Over the next nine years, the RSD turned them all over to charter operators, and academic progress surged.

In 2015, Louisiana switched to standardized tests aligned with the Common Core standards, which were far more rigorous than the old tests. It began the process in 2014, when it first moved its tests in that direction, and it continued to alter the test after 2015. Not surprisingly, starting in 2014, what had been a steady rise in proficiency leveled off. Education reformers began to fear that this plateau revealed waning effects of the move to charters, rather than just the impact of tougher tests.

But a new report by the Stanford Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) focused on student growth scores reveals that New Orleans’s progress has continued.

While an important metric of academic achievement, student proficiency scores offer a limited perspective on academic improvement. “One of the major problems of looking at proficiency cut-offs is they are a somewhat arbitrary cut-off line,” explains Neerav Kingsland, former CEO of New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO) and now managing director of the City Fund. “For example, if a student started off extremely below proficient, but then improved to one test score question away from being proficient, the student would still show up as not proficient.”

CREDO’s new report compares the performance of New Orleans students against the state average of demographically similar students. The analysis found that nearly every year from 2014-15 to 2016-17, New Orleans outpaced the state in student growth scores for both reading and math. When compared to the average learning gains of the state, New Orleans students gained about 65 days of learning in math during the 2014-15 school year and 42 days during 2016-17. (For 2015-16, math gains were not statistically significant). In reading, students gained an additional 65, 47 and 36 days during the 2014-15, 2015-16 and 2016-17 school years, respectively.

These gains on their own would be impressive enough, but New Orleans’s growth has occurred in a city serving significantly more low-income and minority students than the rest of the state. Approximately 82% of public school students in New Orleans are African-American, while African American students make up only 43% of public school enrollment statewide. Likewise, New Orleans serves a greater percentage of economically disadvantaged students, 85% compared with the state’s 70%.

CREDO’s analysis included all of the city’s public schools where students were enrolled in grades that participate in state exams over those three years – seven traditional public schools and between 78 and 81 charter schools. (Today 98% of public school students in the city attend charters, and the remaining traditional schools are about to be converted.) The report uses the 2016-2017 school year to explore how academic growth differs by sector and subgroups. Researchers found that African American charter students experienced stronger learning gains than the state average in both reading and math for this period, while African American students in traditional public schools experienced gains similar to the state average. Similarly, economically disadvantaged students in charter schools had much stronger growth in both subjects while economically disadvantaged students at traditional public schools posted gains similar to those of their state counterparts.

According to Patrick Dobard, the CEO of NSNO and former superintendent of Louisiana’s Recovery School District, the charter school governance model, in which school leaders are given the autonomy to make most decisions and held accountable for the results, has directly contributed to the city’s educational progress.  

 Prior to 2006, most students in New Orleans were assigned to schools based on their home address, as is the case in many districts today. The highest performing schools were concentrated in the wealthier neighborhoods. Today, however, high-quality schools exist throughout the city, and they are required to accept new students for all open seats in any grade, no matter the time of year. Dobard believes that this has been essential in maximizing equity and progress throughout the city, because it provides families with the greatest number of school options and keeps the highest-quality schools at maximum capacity.  

Because students in New Orleans can attend any public school in the city regardless of where they live, families participate in a unified enrollment system for most public schools. Families rank their top twelve schools in order of preference, on one application. A computer program then matches each student with an open spot at a school, based on their preferences.

In 2018, 82% of incoming kindergarten and ninth-grade applicants received a placement at one of their top three choices. (Most schools in New Orleans are either K-8 or high schools.) Moreover, the number of students attending schools with an “F” rating, as determined by the Louisiana Department of Education, dropped from 62% in 2005 to 8% in 2018. Meanwhile, as the state raised the bar for all grades, the number of schools with an “A” or “B” ranking more than doubled.

Those schools still represent just under a third of all public schools in New Orleans, however. As Dobard says, we still have one “grave problem: we do not have enough of those great schools.” But by continuing to replace the D and F schools with replications of A and B schools or new schools with high potential, the city will continue to make progress.

Without a doubt, difficult work remains to be done in the Big Easy. Still, urban education leaders from across the country should be flocking to New Orleans to figure out how it improved so fast. As Neerav Kingsland puts it: “In most cities, the longer poor children stay in the system the further behind they get. In New Orleans, the opposite is true: the longer you enroll in New Orleans public schools, the closer you get to your peers across the state.”

Bookshare: How One Nonprofit Is Improving The Lives Of Students With 'Reading Barriers'

April 2019. Forbes.

Emery Lower loves to read. She loves Harry Potter, Bridge to Terabithia and Pride and Prejudice. Since beginning sixth grade, she’s developed an interest in graphic novels, especially mangas; in particular, she recommends The Tea Dragon Society. Each year that Emery has taken the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness exams, she’s earned a "masters grade level" score on the reading section.

Only a few years ago, however, Emery couldn’t read. By the end of first grade, she hadn’t finished a book independently. She hated reading and didn’t even like it when her parents read to her because they wanted her to look at the text as they read the story.

“Any time Emery had homework in kindergarten and first grade, it would take hours and a lot of crying – mostly her but sometimes me,” says her mother Brandy Lower. “She was mentally exhausted when she came home from school because she’d spent all day trying to decode words and not being able to do it.”

That’s because Emery, like millions of other children in the United States, suffers from dyslexia, a learning disability that affects areas of the brain that process language. People with dyslexia struggle with decoding: the ability to relate speech sounds to letters and words.

“I would look at the page and say a word out loud, but it didn’t click in my brain,” Emery says. “I didn’t know letters made words, that they had to spell something. I thought that any random group of letters could be a word. Reading was not fun at all for me.”

Then, she found Bookshare, and, slowly, her life began to change.  

 What Is Bookshare?

Founded in 2001, Bookshare is an ebook library designed to make reading easier for those with “reading barriers.” It has delivered over 14,000,000 ebooks to people who cannot read traditional books because they suffer from reading barriers such as difficulty decoding words, seeing text or physically managing a book.

Back in 1996, Congress passed section 121 of the Copyright Act, known as the Chafee Amendment. The amendment states that it is not an infringement of copyright if an authorized entity reproduces a book in specialized formats for people with print-related disabilities. These reproductions can be made without purchase of copyright or permission from the author.

By that time, Jim Fruchterman, the founder of Bookshare, had already spent much of his career developing technology that benefited the visually impaired. While studying engineering at Caltech in the late 1970s, Fruchterman learned how pattern recognition technology guides missiles to their targets. He wondered what would happen if this technology was put to a different use: could it be used to recognize letters and words and create a machine that reads aloud to the blind?

The answer, it turns out, was yes. Using the same technology, Fruchterman developed a machine that could read almost any printed font without human training. Shortly afterwards, he founded Benetech, a nonprofit focused on developing software for social good.

During the 1990s, personal technology advanced rapidly, and Fruchterman thought it presented a new opportunity to make reading more accessible for all. If people could download music directly from the internet to their computers, then couldn’t they do the same with books? With the Chafee Amendment in place, Benetech could now obtain and reproduce books for those who had reading barriers without incurring the copyright costs. How many more people could Benetech reach if Fruchterman created a digital library of books designed specifically for people with reading barriers? He started a new initiative, called Bookshare, to find out.

How Does Bookshare Work?

Funded by an award from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs, Bookshare provides all U.S. students with a qualifying disability (regardless of whether they attend a traditional public, public charter, private or homeschool) with free access to its digital library. Qualifying disabilities include dyslexia, blindness, low vision, retinitis pigmentosa, cerebral palsy and other disabilities that affect a student’s ability to read print. To ensure that only students with a qualifying disability access copyright material, Bookshare users must provide proof of disability signed by a doctor, special education teacher or other professional.

Bookshare produces ebooks in five different formats - digital book file, digital audio, Microsoft Word, braille ready format (BRF) and DAISY - designed to increase text accessibility for students with reading barriers. Some of the formats offer the same features, like listening to words read aloud or seeing text as it is highlighted, but the differences lie in the type of device or application a reader uses.

The digital book file format (.epub) is the standard format for an ebook. It can be read on smartphones, tablets or generic e-readers, and students with reading barriers can customize the entire reading experience – from changing voices to adjusting reading speed to changing the size of the font or color contrast – to increase ease of access.

The audio file format (.mp3) provides audio only, no written text, and gives students a text-to-speech option that is compatible with both current and previous versions of phones and portable music players.  

The Microsoft Word file format (.docx) is the standard format for many screen reader applications, and it is particularly useful because it has built-in navigation tools, which documents in a Portable Document Format (.pdf) often lack. If paired with learning tools like Microsoft’s Immersive Reader, users can listen to words read aloud and follow along with word-level highlighting.

The braille ready format (.brf) can be fed into both a braille embosser and into a braille ebook reader, known as a refreshable braille display. Printing braille books with an embosser has many logistical challenges, such as required shipping costs and storage space, that can limit the variety and number of texts that a school has for visionally impaired students. However, Bookshare’s e-library contains hundreds of thousands of books in the braille ready format, instantly available to visually impaired students who possess a refreshable braille display device. The format can also be used to listen to books with a text-to-speech option which many students find helpful.

DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) books are another digital book format with a lot of customization options and was the original accessible ebook standard. For instance, students with dyslexia benefit from an add-on feature called Beeline Reader that Bookshare has integrated for DAISY files. With Beeline Reader, the words of a sentence are highlighted as the text-to-speech engine reads aloud, which helps with tracking and decoding. The text at the beginning of a line may begin as a dark blue that slowly changes hue until it becomes red at the end of the line. The first word of the next line then starts with red and slowly changes to another color so that students can more easily track each line.

How Bookshare Is Changing The Lives Of Students And Families

Bookshare’s library now contains over 700,00 titles, including educational books, children’s books, literary fiction, New York Times bestsellers, text books, periodicals and career resources. It also has books in over 47 languages.

“There has been nothing that we have wanted to read that Bookshare hasn’t had available, even [Emery’s] text books,” says Brandy Lower. “That’s freed up our time as parents because we don’t have to read everything to her that she wants or needs to read.”

Using Bookshare has helped Emery develop the reading skills that she once envied in her non-dyslexic peers. With dyslexia, “sometimes the letters move. They shift and wobble. They float off the page or ‘dolphin kick’ across it,” Emery explains. “[The DAISY file format] helped me with school because it taught me to track across a page. Now, when I look at a normal book, I skim it first, and then I can read it.”

Bookshare now works with about 35,000 schools and serves about 600,000 U.S. students from kindergarten to college and beyond. Those numbers sound impressive, but, in reality, less than 2% of the approximately 56.6 million K-12 students in America are taking advantage of Bookshare’s free resources while Benetech estimates that approximately 5% of K-12 and post-secondary students are eligible to participate.

In 2017, the American Printing House for the Blind reported that there are approximately 63,000 children, (age birth through 21) who are legally blind (less than 20/200 vision). And in 2016, about 706,000 non-institutionalized children age four through 20 self-reported a visual disability on the American Community Survey.

Reading disabilities, like dyslexia, often go undiagnosed. About 3.5% of U.S. students, approximately 2 million children, receive special education services for a reading disorder, which includes dyslexia; however, scientists estimate that between 5 and 12% of students are dyslexic, suggesting that the majority go undiagnosed or untreated.

Studies have shown that students who do not read at grade level by third grade are more likely to drop out of school, indicating that students who have undiagnosed reading disabilities are at greater risk of academic failure. Early diagnosis and intervention has been shown to help students with dyslexia while students with untreated dyslexia are more likely to drop out of high school, become unemployed or underemployed, or be incarcerated than their non-dyslexic peers. Even if a child has been diagnosed, some reports state that schools often lack staff with the appropriate training to help dyslexic students.

 In partnership with the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, Bookshare is working to expand their reach so that every student in the U.S. with a qualifying print disability has access to its library.

 “Our biggest challenge is making Bookshare visible, especially to teachers and students,” says Brad Turner, the Vice President and General Manager Global Education and Literacy at Benetech. “We present at conferences and share information with district leadership, but we aren’t in the classrooms. We need to find a way to reach every teacher or social worker so that they know about our resources and can help students and families take advantage of them.”

Mac Lower, Emery’s father, cannot imagine how different Emery’s life would have been had the staff at Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children not provided him and his wife with information about Bookshare when they diagnosed Emery with dyslexia. “As a parent, [using Bookshare] gives you your child back in the sense that it lets them be who they really are in a learning environment because they are no longer angry or frustrated every time they are doing school work. It helps [students with reading barriers] begin to see school as a blessing rather than a curse.”

Emery agrees. She knows that school would have been much more difficult for her without Bookshare. However, she also treasures reading for the impact it has had on her as a person. “I don’t think I would have an imagination as big as I do now without all of the stories I’ve read,” Emery says. “Reading them, I envision the characters and imagine their thoughts and feelings. Before using Bookshare, I couldn’t understand those storylines; it was just words on a paper.”

Fixing the Weak Link in the Charter Chain

April 2019. Forbes.

In Washington, D.C., D.C. Bilingual Public Charter School recently celebrated its 15th birthday by throwing a quinceañera for staff, students and families. In the traditional fashion, this coming-of-age Latin American celebration involved a lot of food, music and dancing. 

The school had good reason to celebrate. The Public Charter School Board, D.C.’s charter school authorizer, ranked D.C. Bilingual as one of the top three charter elementaries in the city, with a top score in academic growth.

The dual-language immersion school also ranked first for student achievement among charter elementaries whose students were more than 40% English language learners and first among those with more than 16% special needs students. Not surprisingly, thousands of students are on its waitlist.

D.C. Bilingual’s 15th birthday is a particularly special occasion because just four years ago, it nearly closed due to poor fiscal management.

To clarify, charter schools are public schools operated by independent organizations – usually nonprofits. Freed from many of the rules that constrain district-operated schools, charter school leaders can create unique school models and make decisions that best meet the needs of their students. In exchange for increased autonomy, they are held accountable for their performance by authorizers, who close and replace schools if students fail to learn enough.

In Washington, D.C., a nonprofit board oversees each charter school, and, to ensure that family voices are heard, two board members must be parents of current students.

In 2014, Lester Matlock, who had been a parent board member before he was elected board chair, took a close look at the school’s finances and realized it was on the edge of bankruptcy. “When I became chair, I stopped thinking so much from a parent perspective and began to think about the future of the school itself,” he explains. “And I realized then that no one on the board had been thinking in a strategic direction.”

In the charter world, boards are often the weakest links. Many schools have boards made up of friends and family of the founders. These schools often fail because the board members lack the financial, legal and business acumen needed to govern a nonprofit effectively. D.C. Bilingual nearly became one more casualty.

Fortunately, Matlock reached out to Charter Board Partners, a nonprofit organization that works to strengthen the governance of public charters by recruiting, training and matching board members with schools. With CBP’s guidance and support, Matlock rebuilt the board and solved the school’s financial problems.

Who Are Charter Board Partners?

Founded in 2010, Charter Board Partners (CBP) is the only national nonprofit devoted solely to strengthening charter school governance by helping boards do their jobs. Its co-founder and CEO, Carrie Irvin, was touring E.L. Haynes Public Charter School in 2009 when another visitor mentioned that he had no idea there were public schools with independent boards. At the time, there were 53 public charters in the District.

“There are many well-educated, civically-minded people in the city who want to make a difference in the community,” Irvin explains. “For many of those people, public education had a huge impact on their lives, and they want to pay it forward and help others, but they don’t know how badly needed their skills are.”

The following year, Irvin co-founded CBP with fellow education activist Simmons Lettre, who helped Irvin lead the organization for its first five years. They began by working with three schools in D.C. Since then, Irvin and her colleagues have worked with 150 charter boards and more than 2,000 charter board members, in 14 states.

Irvin’s original plan was to recruit and match talented individuals with charter boards. During CBP’s first year, however, she realized that having the right people wasn’t enough. Board members, who are volunteers, often with their own careers, needed guidance on how to govern effectively. So CBP developed a governance training and coaching program and six standards for effective school governance: focus relentlessly on student achievement; recruit and retain an exceptional school leader; invest in exemplary governance; act strategically and be accountable; raise and use resources wisely; and commit steadfastly to compliance.

“Working with Charter Board Partners taught me that the power of the school is really at the board level,” Matlock says. “I had not fully understood that the board holds the school’s charter, not the principal, CEO, or management organization. That means the board members are the ones responsible for the school’s success or failure.”

Good Governance Matters: D.C. Bilingual Files For A “Divorce”

D.C. Bilingual got its start 15 years ago, when a group of parents at CentroNía– a bilingual early education center in Washington, D.C.– began to think about their children’s future.

“For me, D.C. Bilingual really began with my two-and-a-half-year-old grandnephew,” says Matlock. “We [parents from CentroNía] wanted access to a bilingual school, but at the time, the district’s only bilingual school was for kids who lived in a specific neighborhood. We started thinking, ‘Why not start a bilingual elementary school, available to any child in the city, at CentroNía?’”

Beatriz “BB” Otero, then president of CentroNía, supported the idea, and CentroNía submitted a charter school application. D.C. Bilingual opened its doors in September 2004. CentroNía, acting as the school’s management organization, was in charge of operations, development and human resources, while the school’s principal was responsible for curriculum, teaching and learning.

By 2013, when Matlock was elected board chair, the school had developed a strong academic program and reputation.

Then another board member alerted Matlock to signs of a financial problem. Matlock spoke with Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board (PCSB), who told him they were reviewing the school’s finances, because it was unclear where D.C. Bilingual ended and CentroNía began. He said the school might even face closure because of its deficits.

“We, the founding parents, had let CentroNía handle all of the operations, including finances,” says Matlock. “But representatives of CentroNía wrote the charter, and in it, they had written that only CentroNía was allowed to serve as the school’s management organization and that 15% of the school’s revenue would [be paid] for their services. Almost all of the other board members were connected to CentroNía, and I came to realize that most of them had the best interest of [CentroNía] as their focus, not the best interest of the school. I thought, ‘I’ve got to get these people off this board if this school is going to survive.’”

Through Charter Board Partners, Matlock gained access to a pipeline of talented individuals who wanted to serve on charter boards. As board seats opened up, he slowly began filling them with qualified people who had the skills the board needed.

One of them was current board chair Susie Rosenbaum, a former middle school principal.  Once she joined the board, Rosenbaum began to look deeply into the school’s relationship with CentroNía.  The more she looked, the more problems she found.

“We’d ask [the accountant at CentroNía] questions, and we’d get answers that didn’t make any sense for our school,” she says. “The school had huge deficits – hundreds of thousands of dollars – and no one at [CentroNía] could tell us why.” After a thorough investigation, “it became clear that we needed a divorce from CentroNía. They seemed to be using us for their financial capital. The school was paying a huge sum of money to a management organization, and, given our size, that didn’t seem necessary. The alternative was to run the school ourselves.”

In June 2015, the newly recruited board of directors voted unanimously in favor of a separation, and eventually CentroNía signed off on the change to the school’s charter.

Moving Forward: What Other Schools Can Learn From D.C. Bilingual’s “Divorce”

“By bringing in Charter Board Partners, [Matlock] changed the board from a ‘friends and family’ board to a professional board,” explains Rosenbaum. “We now have a plethora of folks with different personal and professional backgrounds who are focused on governance and the long-term success of the school”—accountants, lawyers, development experts, school parents, former educators and more.

“They’re very different, talented individuals, but they all come to this from an equity standpoint,” Matlock adds. “They’re people who really get that underserved children are underserved in so many ways, and they want to be a part of trying to fix that.”

As part of its board training on best practices, CBP emphasizes that boards need to be diverse in terms of race, gender, professional background and life experience, because these differences help shape the types of questions that board members ask. Being an effective board member means listening to the concerns of the community, digging into data and asking difficult questions. For instance, does the school have an achievement gap between white students and students of color? Why does the school have a strained relationship with the neighborhood? Does the school have a diverse teaching staff? What’s teacher retention like? Do teachers of color leave more frequently than white teachers?

“A board’s job is to ask tough questions that prompt needed changes,” explains Irvin. “Boards highlight problems; they aren’t there to say how to fix them. Micromanaging boards are no better than disengaged boards. The school leader’s job is to address these problems, and the board’s job is to hold the school leader accountable for the school’s performance.”

Hiring and evaluating the school leader is a major responsibility of charter boards. However, Irvin explains that boards also have an opportunity and responsibility to support and develop the leader, something that people in the charter sector often overlook.

When D.C. Bilingual became independent, the board hired Daniela Anello as the first head of school, a position that came with many new responsibilities, since the school no longer had a management organization. Anello believes the board’s oversight and governance has played a critical role in her success.

“The job of a school leader is lonely in a way, because the final say on many important decisions rests on my shoulders,” she says. “When board members are actively-engaged thought leaders, it helps with the decision-making process. When needed, our board members are my best cheerleaders or my devil’s advocates. Because they can do both, they ensure that I move the school in a positive direction.”

And efforts to improve charter boards, like those of Charter Board Partners, ensure that the entire charter sector moves in a positive direction. Quite simply, without strong charter boards, the nation won’t have strong charter schools.

The Montessori Comeback

March 2019. Forbes.

Because Montessori schools are often associated with progressive suburbanites and well-to-do private schools, many people don’t know that Dr. Maria Montessori originally developed her pedagogical approach while running a school for some of the poorest children in Rome. Unfortunately, with the exception of some Montessori magnet schools created as part of desegregation initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s, the Montessori model has been largely relegated to the arena of private schools since it arrived in the United States over 100 years ago. Over the last 20 years, however, the spread of public school choice and charter schools has led to a rapid growth in the number of public Montessori schools.

Only about 500 of the approximately 5,000 Montessori programs in the U.S. are located within public schools. The spread of public school choice has expanded the number of public Montessori programs, from about 130 at the end of the 1980s to around 500 in 2015. Public school choice and charters have allowed the Montessori model to return to its roots of educating low-income students. And because the Montessori model has historically been popular with middle-class families, many districts and public charter school leaders have been using it as a means to create economically and racially integrated public schools. However, as the demand for the model continues to increase, some of these leaders struggle with ensuring that public Montessori schools are serving the children most in need of high quality and different educational options.

What Is A Montessori Education?

In 1886, after pursuing higher education against the wishes of her father, Dr. Maria Montessori graduated from medical school at the University of Rome. She then began to work with special needs students at the university’s psychiatric clinic, and in 1906, she was invited to run a school for low-income students, age two to seven, living in inter-city Rome. Most of the students at Dr. Montessori’s “Casa dei Bambini” (Children’s House) had never been to school. Much of Italian society thought them incapable of learning, yet under her supervision, the students thrived. By 1910, Montessori schools had opened in other European countries, and in 1911, the first Montessori opened in the United States as a private school in the affluent community of Scarborough, New York.

Dr. Montessori based her educational philosophies, including the materials and classroom setup she developed, on her scientific observations. She discerned six distinct stages of development – birth to age three, age three to six, age six to nine, age nine to 12, age 12 to 15 and age 15 to 18 – and thought that children’s learning progresses naturally during these development stages rather than by grade level.

As a result, Montessori classrooms are “grouped” based on these ages; for example, Pre-K3, Pre-K4 and kindergarten students learn together in a classroom overseen by a teacher credentialed for this age group. Because kids learn at different paces, grouping by age can prevent students who learn at a slower but developmentally appropriate pace from being labeled as behind grade level. Dr. Montessori also thought that acknowledging the individuality of each child resulted in better learning outcomes, so student choice, also known as self-directed learning, is an integral part of the Montessori method. Students are free to choose the activity they want to work on from a range of carefully prepared, developmentally appropriate materials.

In many ways, the Montessori method is the antithesis of how people traditionally think of school. For much of the day, students don’t sit at desks or tables. They aren’t expected to follow teachers’ instructions perfectly. And they aren’t constantly given instructions on what to do. However, a Montessori classroom should be a calm, orderly space, and because the research on the Montessori method suggests that its effectiveness largely depends on the fidelity of the implementation, Montessori classrooms, regardless of whether they are public or private programs, should reflect the hallmarks of Dr. Montessori’s design.  

In general, Montessori classrooms have child-size furniture that students can easily move, a large open space so students can move around as they please and low, child-accessible bookshelves. Each shelf contains a small, sensory-oriented activity that corresponds with a developmentally appropriate lesson or skill. The top shelf has the easiest lesson in the unit, the bottom shelf the hardest. Although students can reach all of the materials, they can’t work on an activity unless they’ve had at least one demonstrative lesson from the teacher. And they can’t jump to the hardest shelf first. To pass a shelf (a.k.a. lesson), students have to show the teacher how they solved the activity, which often includes teaching it to another student.

Dr. Montessori believed that children have the capacity for prolonged periods of concentration, so the Montessori method calls for large chunks of time – usually around three hours – where students work independently on lessons of their choosing. During uninterrupted work time, a teacher might ask students, “Can I watch you work?” and then assess the students without interrupting, taking in-depth notes about their academic ability as well as their interactions with their peers.

Dr. Montessori also observed that children had a sensitivity to their environment. She noticed that they focused better in an orderly environment and believed that if they had some responsibility for the classroom, they would be more likely to take ownership over the learning that went on in it. As a result, the Montessori method includes “practical care” lessons (e.g., sweeping, wiping down tables, dusting). It’s not uncommon for Montessori students to prepare snacks for the class or arrange flowers for the classroom. Practical care lessons help develop students’ self-reliance, civic responsibility and attention. For instance, if students decide to wash dishes after snack time, then they follow a step-by-step procedure, and the teacher assesses whether a student can complete a full cycle of work without breaking it up into smaller pieces or getting distracted.

The Opportunity Gap And The Growth of Public Montessori Programs

Closing the achievement gap – the disparity in academic outcomes between white, middle-class students and low-income students of color – has been a priority of the education reform movement. However, the opportunity gap– the disparity in learning opportunities, resources and experiences available to low-income students – has a tremendous impact on the achievement gap. Part of the opportunity gap is that many low-income students only have access to the cookie-cutter, factory model of education common in traditional public schools, which doesn’t necessarily meet their needs or interests.  When school systems embrace public school choice, it often results in the creation of a variety of public schools with specialized learning models, thereby helping to narrow this aspect of the opportunity gap.

In 2015, around 300 of the U.S.’s approximately 500 public Montessori programs were freestanding schools, and about 200 were specialized programs housed within a non-Montessori school. Yale University's Dr. Mira Debs researches public Montessori programs and compiled a dataset of these freestanding schools. Nearly 100% are schools of choice that use a lottery system to determine which students get in.  And of the 168 freestanding public Montessori schools opened between 2000 and 2015, 82% were public charter schools.

Without public school choice, low-income children in the U.S. didn’t have access to the Montessori model. However, because the model has also proven popular with middle-class families, they now find themselves competing against their more affluent counterparts for seats at open-enrollment public schools.

Overall, public Montessori schools enroll a similar proportion of students of color to that of all U.S. public schools, and, for the 2012-2013 school year (the most recent year for which compiled data is available), they enrolled a higher percentage of African-American students. However, public Montessori schools tend to enroll fewer low-income students than the national average. During that same year, 54% of Montessori students attended a racially diverse school, a school where students of color make up 25 to 75% of the population, compared to 40% of all public school students. However, both district-operated/magnet Montessoris and public charter Montessoris enrolled fewer students of color and low-income students than the districts in which they were located.

As with many public school choice programs, issues of equity and access surround the enrollment processes at Montessori schools. Few school districts nationwide have a universal enrollment system. In districts with universal enrollment, like Washington D.C., Denver and New Orleans, parents fill out one application that includes all district-operated and charter schools as part of a district-wide lottery system. Families rank their top school choices, and an algorithm matches students with available seats.

Many district-operated Montessori schools benefit from being part of a magnet system in which parents can similarly fill out one application for multiple magnet schools. Applications for charters in districts without a universal enrollment system usually have to be mailed or emailed to each individual school. Low-income parents with less “know-how” and free time aren’t as likely to complete multiple applications as affluent parents.

Other barriers to enrollment also exist at public Montessoris — both district and charter — especially for schools located in a district without a universal enrollment procedure. In these districts, some schools state that parents must take a tour prior to applying. Other schools specify that parents must hand deliver, rather than mail, the application. Additionally, many schools don’t provide transportation for students. These regulations often conflict with the day-to-day realities of low-income households.

The Montessori method emphasizes the importance of students enrolling during preschool, but in states that don’t fund preschool, parents must pay tuition for the early Montessori years. While most schools do not give these students priority in the kindergarten lottery, requiring tuition at any point may unintentionally send an unwelcoming message to low-income families. Because of the nature of Montessori education, most schools will not accept students after first grade, even if they have open seats, unless the child has had previously attended a Montessori school. That means there’s a narrow window of time for parents to apply to a Montessori school.

Lottery preferences – determinants that give priority to certain groups of applicants – also influence enrollment demographics. For instance, schools and districts that reserve a certain number of seats for low-income students at choice schools increase the likelihood of having socio-economically diverse student populations at their Montessoris. When choice systems don’t include methods of “controlled choice” as part of the lottery preferences, other preferences can dramatically impact a school’s enrollment. These 300 public Montessori schools have a variety of lottery preferences, including neighborhood preference, school employee preference, founding board member preference, district employee preference, active duty military preference and a “principal’s list” preference, among others, and some of these preferences tip the scale in favor of middle-class students. But the most common enrollment preference by far at both district-operated/magnet and charter schools is a sibling preference.

A sibling preference increases the likelihood of acceptance for applicants who are siblings of currently enrolled students. While a sibling preference ensures that families stay together and makes logistics of transportation easier for parents of all income levels, it also means that once an enrollment trend begins to shift, it’s hard to stem the tide.

Consider the case of Lee Montessori Public Charter School, a diverse-by-design public charter school located in a mixed-income neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The District’s universal enrollment procedure allows for a sibling preference but not a low-income preference. On the Have You Heard podcast, headmaster Chris Pencikowski explained the school’s dilemma.

“We are inundated with middle and upper income families who are interested in a free, quality education for their children – imagine that – and so, if we have five seats in a year, and we’re getting 500 applications from middle and upper income families and 60 from low-income families,” it’s unlikely that the open seats will go to the low-income families, particularly if affluent families already have a child in the school. Despite recruitment efforts, the school has never managed to have above 40% low-income students. However, the school recently received permission to open a new campus. This time, the school leaders are intentionally locating in one of the District’s historically underserved neighborhoods in an effort to revive their mission of bringing the Montessori method to all families.

Appealing to low-income families has also proved difficult for some Montessori schools. Many low-income parents have never heard of the Montessori model, and the method is the opposite of the highly structured model for education – strict rules and lots of test prep – that low-income parents have been told is the pathway to success for their children.

In reality, Montessori schools could and should offset these preconceived ideas about how a rigorous education “looks”  by touting their academic prowess. Previous research has shown that students who attend Montessori schools foster higher levels of executive functioning skills like self-discipline, autonomy over learning, deep focus, critical reasoning and problem solving. Other studies have shown that students who attended Montessori elementary schools significantly outperformed peer groups on high school exams. Although much of the current research on Montessori schools fails to disaggregate by race and income, a recent study shows promising results for elementary African-American students in public Montessori magnet programs when compared with both their peers at traditional public schools and those in other magnet programs.

Although more research is needed, the Montessori method may yet be shown to help to close the achievement gap. Nevertheless, public school choice has already helped in closing the opportunity gap by making Montessori education an option for low-income families.

Why We Need to Make Public School Choice an Easier Choice for Low-Income Families

March 2019. Medium.

Most people who know me know that I’m a big believer in public school choice. To me, it’s a no brainer that when school districts create school attendance zones based on students’ home addresses, they are creating systems in which poor students will most likely attend poorly performing schools. Forcing students to attend a chronically failing school because of where they live sets them up for failure and reinforces cycles of generational poverty. When students have the option to attend any public school that they choose, it helps to unshackle their education — and by extension their future — from their family’s financial history.

But another reason I like public school choice is that it often leads to a variety of school models that can meet the needs and interests of a variety of students. Systems of public school choice usually have many unique learning models — computer-science focused, dual-language, diverse-by-design, arts-based, project-based, policy-oriented, and more — within their public schools. Districts that assign students using their home addresses rarely attempt to create an abundance of schools with innovative learning models. Imagine a district trying to force a parent to send their child to an arts-based school or a single-sex school, and you’ll understand the difficulty. It’s far easier for these districts to create cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all schools and hope that most kids succeed in them.

And so, without public school choice, it’s only affluent families — the ones who can pay for their children’s education or help them test into a selective public school — that have access to this menu of options.

However, because public schools with unique learning models often attract both low-income and middle-class families, some social justice activists worry that as systems of choice with a variety of learning models continue to grow, low-income students will lose out to more affluent students whose parents have the time and “know how” to access information about, and navigate enrollment processes for, the best schools. Indeed, much of the conversation around the equity of public school choice centers on whether low-income families are as well-equipped as their middle-class counterparts to take advantage of the educational opportunities made available by these systems.

The recent proliferation in public Montessori schools illustrates the Catch-22 of choice systems. Because Montessori programs are often associated with progressive suburbanites and well-to-do private schools, many people don’t know that Dr. Maria Montessori originally developed her pedagogical approach while running a school for some of the poorest children in Rome. Unfortunately, with the exception of some Montessori magnet schools created as part of desegregation initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s, the Montessori model has been largely relegated to the arena of private schools since it arrived in the United States over 100 years ago.

Throughout the last 25 years, however, the spread of public school choice and charter schools has led to a rapid growth in the number of public Montessori schools, thereby allowing the model to return to its roots of educating low-income students. Without public school choice, low-income children in the U.S. couldn’t access the Montessori model, but because the model has also proven popular with middle-class families, they now find themselves competing against their more affluent counterparts for seats at open-enrollment public schools.

I researched the enrollment processes at approximately 300 public Montessori schools — both district-run and charter schools, using a data-set developed by Yale University’s Dr. Mira Debs, who researches public Montessori programs. Almost 100 percent are schools of choice that use a lottery system to determine which students get in. Most of the district-run schools are part of magnet choice programs where students who will otherwise be assigned to neighborhood schools have the option to apply for magnet schools that have specialized learning models and enroll students from across the district, regardless of where they live.

Few districts have universal enrollment. In districts with universal enrollment like Washington D.C., Denver, and New Orleans, parents fill out one application that encompasses all district-operated and charter schools as part of a district-wide lottery system. Families rank their top school choices, and an algorithm matches students with available seats.

Many Montessori magnet schools benefit from being part of a magnet system in which parents could similarly fill out one application for multiple magnet schools. Applications for charters in districts without a universal enrollment system usually have to be mailed or emailed directly to each individual school. Low-income parents with less “know-how” and free time aren’t as likely to complete multiple applications as affluent parents.

Other barriers to enrollment also exist at public Montessoris — both district and charter — especially for schools located in a district without a universal enrollment procedure. In these districts, some schools state that parents must take a tour prior to applying. Other schools specify that parents must hand-deliver, rather than mail, the application. Many schools couldn’t provide transportation for students. These regulations often conflict with the day-to-day realities of low-income households.

What I found most disconcerting, however, is that for a handful of the Montessori schools that I researched, I could not find how to apply. And for about 10 percent, I spent over seven minutes looking at either the school or district website before I found either the application or the enrollment steps. This does not include the time it took me to read through enrollment packets or enrollment preferences, which include a combination of priority preferences for siblings of current students, children of school employees, district employees, or active military, and children who live near the school, among others.

I research and write about schools for a living. If I have difficulty finding the enrollment process for a school online, then I assume it must be even more difficult for parents with lower education levels, less free time, limited access to technology, and language differences.

For those who don’t understand the seriousness of this problem, here’s a thought to consider: Ultimately, if I couldn’t find the enrollment steps online after researching and calling a school, I labeled its enrollment process as “unavailable” and moved on to the next school on my list. I gave up because I am in the privileged position to do so. Parents, for whom a public school of choice is their only means of preventing their children from being assigned to a chronically failing school, do not have that luxury.

Perfecting systems takes time. When an education reform like public school choice has had profound and positive impact on the lives of disadvantaged children, cities shouldn’t throw away the progress they’ve made just because new and different challenges have come along with it. Systems of choice need to iron out these accessibility wrinkles, and districts with universal enrollment are working on their dirty laundry. For instance, New Orleans Public Schools requires that all schools provide transportation for students, and it has counseling centers where parents can learn about the choices available, access language services, and receive help with their application. Educational leaders need to listen to the needs of the community and tweak choice systems so that they keep improving by increasing both school quality and equity of access.

Overall, systems of choice help to increase educational equity, but leaders of these systems need to do everything they can to make it as easy as possible for parents to find out information about applying to schools. And they should reserve a certain percentage of seats at choice schools for their most disadvantaged students, as San Antonio Independent School District does for many of its choice schools.

I think it’s great that school choice and the unique school models that come along with it are attracting middle-class families back to public schools, but I also think that public schools of choice need to be sure they’re reaching the children who need them the most, the ones who can’t afford to move to a better neighborhood or enroll in private school should they not win the lottery for their first choice school.

And, considering for whom she originally designed her program, I like to think that Dr. Montessori would agree with me.

Separating Fact From Fiction: Five Important Findings About The Nation's Charter School Landscape

March 2019. Forbes.

Charter schools serve about three million students across 42 states and the District of Columbia. To clarify, charter schools are public schools operated by independent organizations, usually nonprofits. Most are schools of choice, and unlike magnet schools in traditional districts, they are not allowed to select their students. If too many students apply, they hold lotteries to see who gets in. Charter schools are freed from many of the rules that constrain district-operated schools. In exchange for increased autonomy, they are held accountable for their performance through contracts with authorizers.

Each state’s charter law empowers a variety of different agencies to authorize charters. The most common types of authorizers are a local school board, a state education agency, higher education institutions, and statewide bodies set up for the sole purpose of overseeing charter schools. Authorizers vet and approve charter school applications, and they also close or replace underperforming schools.

Based on both performance and sustainability, charter schools have been the most successful education improvement strategy of the millennium, and they’ve been particularly effective at educating low-income students. In places like New Orleans, Denver, and Washington, D.C., the charter formula – school-level autonomy, accountability, diversity of school design, and parental choice – has proven far more effective than the centralized, bureaucratic approach inherited from the 20th century.

However, over the last few years, the growth of charter schools across the nation has slowed. In an effort to understand this decline in growth, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) examined charter school proposals and approvals over the last five years, analyzing 3,000 charter school applications to authorizers in the 20 states that oversee nearly two-thirds of charters nationwide. Their new report Reinvigorating the Pipeline: Insights into Proposed and Approved Charter Schools unearths important facts about the nation’s charter school pipeline, facts that also dispel some of the commonly perpetuated myths about charter schools.

Coinciding with the decline in charter growth has been the emergence of a nationwide anti-charter propaganda campaign, generated by the teachers unions and their allies, that has resulted in widespread misinformation about charter schools. Anti-charter activists decry charters as both a failed educational experiment and a corporate attempt to “privatize” America’s public schools. Unfortunately, previous studies have shown that Americans overall – especially those who have been exposed to charters only through media coverage – don’t have a clear understanding of what charter schools are. As a result, they’re susceptible to these well-trodden myths.

Five New Findings About The Charter Landscape And Why They Matter

Finding One: Proposals For “No Excuses” Schools Have Declined Significantly Over The Last Five Years, Highlighting An Increasingly Diverse Pool Of Charter School Applications

Applications for “no excuses” charter schools – schools with a culture of high expectations, strict discipline policies, and an unrelenting focus on college – fell sharply over the last five years in all 20 states studied. In 2017-2018, “no excuses” schools made up just 7% of all schools proposed, down from 14% in 2013-2014. In addition, the approval rate of “no excuses” schools fell from 65% to 39%, suggesting that authorizers are less likely to approve the model than they were five years ago.

Charter authorizers nationwide actually received proposals for an increasingly diverse variety of school models, including STEM, Classics-based, policy-oriented, dual language, diverse by design and more.

Why Finding Number One Matters

The national media often showcases “no excuses” schools as the typical charter model when, in fact, mature charter sectors contain a variety of educational models to meet the needs and interests of a variety of students.

Kids come from different backgrounds, speak different languages, and have different interests. They also thrive in different educational environments. Cities with robust charter sectors, like New Orleans where almost 100% of public school students attend charter schools and Washington, D.C. where nearly 50% of the public school students attend them, have become fertile grounds for growing schools with innovative learning models. These cities have an abundance of school models – residential, Montessori, computer science-focused, environmental-focused, and more – in addition to the “no excuses” model.

NACSA’s finding highlights that charter sectors provide public school parents and students with access to many different types of schools, a fact which is often ignored in the national discourse.

However, the report also revealed that authorizers still remain more likely to approve some models, like Classics-based schools, than others, like single-sex schools. From 2013 to 2018, Classics-based schools made up 4% of schools proposed but had an approval rate of 57% while single-sex schools made up 3% of proposed schools but had an approval rate of only 21%.

While the report did not include data on proposal quality or parental demand, which authorizers certainly take into account when approving applications, it seems unlikely that all applications for Classics-based schools would be on average twice as good as those for single-sex schools. As such, this finding also suggests that authorizers may need to rethink their capacity for evaluating a wider diversity of school models. After all, authorizers have a tremendous impact on the charter landscape, especially in terms of the types and numbers of schools available to families.

Finding Two: Both Proposals For, And Approval Of, For-Profit Charter Schools Have Declined Significantly Over The Last Five Years

The proportion of proposals to open a charter school affiliated with a for-profit operator, also known as an education management organization (EMO), fell by 50% over the last five years, from 21% of all new school proposals in 2013-2014 to 10% in 2017-2018.

Why Finding Number Two Matters

Unions and other opponents of school reform fixate on for-profit charter operators, whom they accuse of privatizing public education and profiting at children’s expense. In reality, the overwhelming majority of charters are operated by nonprofit organizations. Many states have banned for-profit operators, which manage less than 15% of the nation’s approximately 7,000 public charter schools.

Because the data reveals that most applications had no affiliation with a for-profit institution, this finding shows that for-profit operators – never common to begin with – are becoming less widespread. In general, this is a positive development for the charter sector as most for-profit operators have not been nearly as successful at creating high quality schools as their nonprofit counterparts.

Finding Three: Proposals for “Freestanding” Charter Schools Are At A Five-Year High

Groups of educators, community organizations and parents often submit applications for freestanding charter schools, which NACSA defines as schools unaffiliated with either a for-profit education management organization or nonprofit charter management organization (CMO). The report's authors found that most of the charter applications submitted over the last five years were for freestanding schools. In 2017-2018, proposals for these charter schools made up 55% of all applications for new schools.

Why Finding Number Three Matters

The national narrative around the charter sector tends to focus on large charter networks. Advocates often highlight the success these networks have had at educating disadvantaged students while critics usually condemn the schools for their educational practices since some employ a “no excuses” model. Regardless, this finding shows that most of the charter school applications submitted over the last five years have actually been for freestanding schools.

Freestanding schools occupy an important place in the charter landscape. Recognizing the need for alternative educational models, dedicated educators, community organizations and/or parents often launch a charter in order to provide families with access to a previously unavailable school model that's designed to serve the specific needs of the children in their community. While charter management organizations like IDEA, KIPP and Success Academy have had tremendous success at educating low-income students and have positively impacted the charter sector as a whole, many of the sector’s most innovative learning models are piloted at freestanding charters.

Despite the high number of freestanding applications, NACSA’s report also suggests that school proposals affiliated with a network of any kind are much more likely to receive approval than individual proposals. Over the last five years, 61% of schools approved were associated with a charter network. The quality of proposals from charter network affiliates might be significantly stronger than proposals from independent applicants, but it’s also possible that some authorizers consider a proven operator more likely to succeed than an independent charter school. If authorizers become overly risk-averse and avoid taking chances on new freestanding schools, the charter sector runs the risk of missing out on the innovative contributions of these schools. 

Finding Four: Few Charter School Applications Include External Financial Support

Over the last five years, most charter school applications did not identify any philanthropic support (defined as a commitment of $50,000 or more). Only 15% of school proposals specified such support; however, proposals that had secured these financial commitments were more likely to be authorized, with an approval rate of 52%.

Why Finding Number Four Matters

Anti-charter activists and teacher union representatives love to claim that “billionaires” and “Wall Street guys” open public charter schools, but it’s unlikely that billionaires are submitting proposals for these schools given that most applicants lacked external funding commitments of at least $50,000.

Many charters close for financial rather than academic reasons, so authorizers understandably value signs of financial security and stability in an application. Because most charter schools nationwide do not have access to facilities or local property tax revenue, they receive significantly less funding than their neighboring traditional public schools. Many charter opponents claim that the philanthropic donations charters receive are enough to close the public funding gap between charters and traditional public schools, but this finding implies that most new charters actually lack any substantial philanthropic support.

Finding Five: Charter Sectors Vary Widely From State To State

Previous studies have shown that charter performance varies from state to state, and NACSA's report highlights that the charter landscape likewise differs between states.

The frequency of proposals for each school model varies significantly depending on the state. For instance, in Washington, D.C. one out of every three proposals received over the last five years was for a blended learning model (a school where students spend part of the day learning directly from the teacher and the other part engaged in online learning). On the other hand, authorizers in Connecticut and Massachusetts did not receive a single proposal for a blended learning school during that same time period. Inquiry-based models, like Montessori and Waldorf schools, made up 34% of the proposals in Arizona while in Indiana and Illinois they made up just 3%.

Operator type also differs greatly from state to state. In half the states studied, for-profit operators made up less than 10% of approved school proposals over the last five years; moreover, six states did not approve any schools affiliated with a for-profit EMO. EMOs actually represent a significant portion of approved schools in only four of the states studied: Florida, Ohio, Arizona, and North Carolina.

Why Finding Number Five Matters

Both charter critics and advocates often make blanket statements about charter schools, but, in truth, the quality and types of schools in the charter sector differs considerably between states. When it comes to charter schools, blanket statements have little meaning because the 42 states and the District of Columbia with charters all have different laws and practices. Any idea can be poorly done, and some states have done chartering poorly.  Nevertheless, states that have embraced charter schools, adhered faithfully to the charter formula and put guardrails in place to ensure strong authorizing practices have created much-needed, high-quality public schools that have had a profound impact on both student achievement and the educational options available to families.

Read the full NACSA report here.

The Real Faces Behind The "Corporate Reform" Of America's Public Schools

February 2019. Forbes.

With 2019 barely underway, the nation has already witnessed another set of highly publicized teacher strikes. Teachers unions and anti-charter activists have wasted no time in painting public charter schools as the culprit, blaming them for “draining money from public schools.”

To clarify, charter schools are public schools. They’re supported by taxpayer money and overseen by public organizations—often school districts. All charter students must participate in state tests and related accountability measures. However, charter schools are operated by independent organizations, usually nonprofits, so they’re free from top-down mandates and bureaucratic red tape that often constrain district-operated schools.

In exchange for increased autonomy, charters are held accountable through performance contracts with authorizers, who close or replace them if their students aren’t learning enough. Most charter schools are schools of choice, and unlike magnet schools in traditional districts, they are not allowed to select their students. If too many students apply, they hold a lottery to see who gets in.

Charter leaders have autonomy over school-level decisions about budgets, staffing, the school's schedule, its learning model, and more.  The theory behind school-level autonomy is that those who know students—namely principals and teachers, not central office staff—are best equipped to make most decisions that affect student learning.

Unfortunately, those listening to coverage of the Los Angeles teachers strike received a very different definition of charter schools from National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen García. On MSNBC, she explained that the Los Angeles Unified School District had no money because “they’ve given it away to for-profit charters. If you’re in the charter industry, what do you want to do? You want to create horrible public schools…. The billionaires who are behind this, the venture capitalists, the Wall Street guys, are out to make money on public schools.”

This statement is absurd: California has never had many for-profit charters, and the legislature banned them entirely last year. Nationwide, less than 15% of the roughly 7,000 charters are run by for-profit operators.

This kind of rhetoric not only misleads the public about charter schools, it also insults the thousands of dedicated educators who have founded and/or lead charters. They aren’t “billionaires, venture capitalists, or Wall Street guys;” they’re committed educators who believed they could do more for kids if they had the autonomy run their own schools. Using this autonomy, they have created innovative schools with diverse learning models that are moving the needle for kids in meaningful ways. Some of their schools do receive funding from foundations created by corporate leaders such as Bill Gates, Sam Walton, and Eli Broad, but so do traditional school districts and teachers unions.

In Washington, D.C., almost 48% of public school students attend charter schools. Currently, 99 of D.C.’s 123 charter campuses are defined by the D.C. Public Charter School Board as “homegrown schools": schools that are unique to D.C. and not run by national charter management organizations. Many of them are still led by the visionary educators who founded them.  

It’s time to meet some of the real faces behind the so-called “corporate reform” of America’s public schools.

Meet Deborah Dantzler Williams, Founder And Head Of Inspired Teaching Demonstration School

In 2009, the Center for Inspired Teaching (CIT), a national organization based in D.C. that’s dedicated to teacher professionalism and experiential learning, brought together a group of educators to create a school that showcased its instructional model. Inspired Teaching Demonstration School (ITDS) opened in 2011, with Deborah Dantzler Williams as head of school.

Prior to assuming this role, Dantzler Williams taught at the elementary, secondary, and university level. She also served on the faculty of the CIT’s teacher certification program and directed its strategic partnerships program.

“The center had partnerships with public schools around the city,” she says. “I’d talk with principals, wanting to share CIT’s philosophies, but often, they had looked up my background and seen that I came from an independent [private] school environment. They were suspicious, thinking, ‘Well, you worked in schools that test and pick kids, so how can what you know be relevant to us? Where can we see this type of instructional model being done in a public school? On a typical budget?’ We couldn’t avoid those questions anymore.”

So she and her colleagues at the CIT created a public school where they could share best practices in project-based learning and inquiry-based teaching with educators, policymakers and community members, while also training new teachers.

Through the Inspired Teaching Residency Program, teachers can earn both their master’s degree in teaching and their D.C. teaching license. They combine coursework with a residency year in an ITDS classroom, under the supervision of an experienced teacher.

ITDS is also a member of the Diverse Charter Schools Coalition, an organization dedicated to creating racially and socioeconomically diverse charter schools. ITSD’s pre-K through eighth grade population of 472 is racially diverse: 45% of students are white, 37% African-American, 7% Hispanic, 3% Asian, and 9% multiracial. The school recruits in target communities to keep it that way. And 59% of faculty members are  people of color.

At ITDS, teachers are still considered providers of information, but they are also instigators of student curiosity and provokers of original student thought. In one English class, for example, students had to research a topic, take notes, and communicate what they’d learned by creating a nonfiction text. The teacher let the students choose their topics, but their text had to be “a product with a purpose.” So one student researched allergies and made a brochure about them, which she is now handing out to doctor’s offices.

The school’s leadership believes in teaching students “how to think, not what to think." For all rules, teachers explain the ‘why’ and allow room for conversation about it. This ethos attracted teacher Tamas O’Doughda, who’d gone on several interviews at other D.C. public schools before coming across ITDS.

“From many of those,” he says, “my impression of the culture was: ‘You must follow this lesson plan exactly.' Here, the first question they asked me was ‘What’s your educational philosophy?’ And Ms. Dantzler Williams even said, ‘You have a lack of rigidity. That’s great.’ My last administrator would have seen that as a weakness, but here, the leadership sees the value in exploration.”

Test prep is the antithesis of the school’s model, but ITDS students have consistently outperformed their peers in both DC’s district and charter sector on standardized exams. The school received 1,745 applications for 125 spots for the 2018-19 school year.  

Numerous community members want ITDS to replicate. However, the school's leaders have other plans. “The idea is to get this model perfected to a place where other schools can replicate it,” says Dantzler Williams. “We think we can reach more kids in the District of Columbia that way.”

Members of the school’s founding leadership team admit that being a charter school was really their only option. As a district-operated school, they would have lacked the autonomy to make the school-level decisions about staffing and curriculum that have been integral to the learning model. But Dantzler Williams believes that the essential elements of the are applicable in district schools, especially if their leaders are given sufficient flexibility.

Meet Will Stoetzer, Co-Founder And Interim CEO Of Ingenuity Prep

In January 2012, the Illinois Facilities Fund published Quality Schools: Every Child, Every School, Every Neighborhood, an extensive analysis of public school locations and performance in Washington, D.C.

After categorizing the District into 39 neighborhood clusters, the authors concluded that to provide all public school students (district and charter) a high-quality education, the city would need to add 39,758 seats in high-performing schools. Ward 8, D.C.’s poorest, needed 10,087 of those seats.

Around that same time, two educators at D.C. Bilingual Public Charter School, a top-ranked elementary school in one of Washington’s middle-income neighborhoods, had a conversation about changes they’d like to see in public education.

After reading the report, Will Stoetzer and Aaron Cuny decided to open a school located in Bellevue, a Ward 8 neighborhood in the center of the highest-need cluster. “In pockets across D.C., some schools had shown that when adults got it right, there was success at educating low-income kids,” says Stoetzer. “Their success inspired us.

“When Aaron and I were thinking about starting a school, we wanted to answer the question: ‘When were we doing the best work for kids?’ For both of us, it came down to teaching in a small group setting, where you could think about how to reach kids individually rather than spending the majority of time and mental energy thinking about classroom management,” explains Stoetzer.

They opened Ingenuity Prep, which currently serves 496 students in grades pre-K to 5, in 2013. Its students spend less than 10% of their time learning in groups larger than 15 students, because Stoetzer and Cuny built small-group learning into the school’s design. Small groups of students assembled by ability level rotate through different learning activities.  During literacy lessons, one group practices guided reading with a teacher, another participates in direct instruction with another teacher and a third works independently, using computer-based programs.

“Digital content became a good way for us to deliver high-level, engaging content to kids, but the end goal was never to deliver content digitally,” says Stoetzer, whose background as a special education teacher strongly informed his thinking about small group instruction, personalized learning and differentiation. “All of the pieces of our model were driven by finding the best ways to maximize the time spent in small groups.”

Almost all of Ingenuity Prep’s students are African-American, and D.C.'s Office of the State Superintendent of Education has designated 60% as economically disadvantaged. It has also labeled 66 % as “at risk,” meaning they are more likely to drop out based on their receipt of public assistance, receipt of food stamps, involvement with the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, homeless status or being older than expected for their grade.

In general, D.C. schools with more at-risk students have lower proficiency scores. However, on D.C.’s 2018 standardized tests, Ingenuity Prep students scored slightly above the citywide average for both math and English. Their combined proficiency scores were in the 74th percentile citywide, and student growth scores were in the 92nd percentile.

Eighty percent of these students live within a mile of the school, and 90% live in Ward 8. The two closest neighborhood elementaries had pass rates of 8 and 6% for English and 13 and 9% for math. When compared with the other 35 schools in Ward 8, Ingenuity Prep ranks second highest in terms of test scores, with scores in the 95th percentile for the ward.“The reality is that only a few of these kids are going to travel incredible distances to go to quality schools,” says Stoetzer. “These kids need a better educational experience. What we’re providing here is drastically different than the neighborhood schools.”

Meet Mashea Ashton, Founder And Principal Of Digital Pioneers Academy

After almost 20 years of working in urban education, Mashea Ashton knew she wanted to leverage her experience to positively impact Southeast Washington, D.C. — a historically underserved area where she began her teaching career and where her husband grew up.

In August of 2018, she opened Digital Pioneers Academy (DPA), D.C.’s first middle school focused on computer science. She began with 120 sixth-grade students and plans to build out to 12th grade, one year at a time. At DPA, students take computer science every day, as a part of their core curriculum.

The school occupies the second floor of Washington Heights Baptist Church in the Hillcrest neighborhood of the city’s seventh ward. All but two percent of the students come from Wards 7 and 8, D.C.’s poorest. Two-thirds attended neighborhood elementary schools.

Ashton herself has no computer science background. “I took one computer science course at the College of William and Mary back before they even had email,” she jokes. “Three years ago, when I began thinking about opening a school, I thought about a college prep model, but the more I thought about students and families and options, the more I thought about the importance of being career ready. Then, I saw the data about how many high-paid, high-demand jobs in computing go unfilled every year.”

Today, only 40% of America’s K-12 schools teach computer programming, and computer science-focused schools that do not require admissions tests or screen their applicants are rare. Low-income families often lack access to technology, and the racial achievement gap in the tech industry is well documented. At Google, for instance, less than 3% of the workforce is African American.

“Our mission is very simple,” says Ashton. “We want to develop the next generation of innovators. We want our students not just to consume the digital economy, but to be a part of creating it.”

DPA’s curriculum is a modified version of an academic program developed by RePublic Schools, a southern network of charter schools that teach coding daily as part of their college prep curriculum. DPA students begin by working on elementary programs like Scratch, before learning two of the core internet technologies, the markup languages HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which determines the look and layout of a webpage’s content. They eventually move on to JavaScript, a more advanced language and the third of the core internet technologies. After mastering JavaScript, students will have the opportunity to explore other advanced programming languages.

When designing DPA, Ashton and her team did a lot of research on the best models for a school focused on computer science. And in the spring of 2017, Ashton taught an elective, “Design the Academy of the Future,” to ninth-graders at D.C.’s Washington Leadership Academy Public Charter School, to learn from students what aspects of their education had the greatest impact on their motivation and learning.

Ashton also spoke with the leaders of the Academy for Software Engineering, a computer science-focused school in New York City. The school’s leaders said they had initially recruited tech experts to serve as the teachers, but they ultimately discovered that they needed people who were experts in instructional delivery, classroom management and working with teenagers. The RePublic curriculum, however, is not expert-dependent, so Ashton could recruit widely for her teaching staff.

 “None of our teachers had ever taught computer science as a core part of the curriculum before,” she says. “We recruited educators who believed in our mission, had the best achievement record for working with kids like ours and who were excited to be on a founding team, which is very different from a regular teaching job.”  She says that being a founding teacher means long, hard hours and owning the successes and failures of the school.

 “No one is just a teacher here,” explains STEM teacher Ashley Pettway. “A lot of times in urban education, you feel like you’re a part of a system where you have no control. But here, anything that we dream up for our kids, so long as it’s mission- and vision-aligned, is supported.”

“Mashea is really flexible,” adds her colleague Crystal Bryant, who has been an educator in urban schools for eight years. “If something works, we keep with it. If it doesn’t, we work together and find another way. It’s refreshing to see someone like Mashea come in with a vision to change the trajectory of the lives of kids in this area. When you think about the job quality and the job opportunities that our students will have because they had one hour of computer science each day from sixth to 12th grade, it’s incredible.”

At D.C.’s Ingenuity Prep, Personalized Learning Hasn’t Replaced Teacher Time; It’s Put the Focus Back on Small Groups

February 2019. The 74.

When Aaron Cuny and Will Stoetzer were thinking about how they wanted to structure their own D.C. charter school back in 2012, they kept returning to the same question: “When were we doing the best work for kids?”

“For both of us, it came down to teaching in a small group setting, where you could think about how to reach kids individually rather than spending the majority of time and mental energy thinking about classroom management,” says Stoetzer.

Stoetzer was a special education teacher and Cuny a resident principal-in-training at D.C. Bilingual Public Charter School, a top-ranked elementary school in one of Washington’s middle-income neighborhoods. Both felt the city lacked quality educational options for kids in the neighborhoods that needed them most.

“In pockets across D.C., some schools had shown that when adults got it right, there was success at educating low-income kids,” says Stoetzer. “Schools like KIPP and D.C. Prep have been very purposeful about producing academic results for low-income kids. Their success inspired us, but we had differences in perspective about how that success might be accomplished.”

When they opened Ingenuity Prep a year later with Cuny as CEO and Stoetzer as COO, they located it in Ward 8, Washington’s poorest neighborhood, and built two essential components into the school’s design so that small group learning could be its main focus: co-teaching and computer-based learning.

Computer-based learning and personalized learning are often faulted for taking the teacher out of the equation too much, but in the case of Ingenuity Prep, they have been employed to the opposite effect.

“Digital content became a good way for us to deliver high-level, engaging content to kids, but the end goal was never to deliver content digitally,” says Stoetzer, whose special education background strongly informed his thinking about the school’s design when it came to small group instruction, personalized learning, and differentiation. “All of the pieces of our model were driven by finding the best ways to maximize the time spent in small groups.”

Rarely in groups larger than 15

Ingenuity Prep serves 496 students in grades pre-K-3 to 5, with plans to expand to eighth grade. There are two to three classes per grade, each with between 25 and 30 students (24 in preschool). Each preschool classroom has three teachers, and in kindergarten and above, each classroom has two lead content area teachers, one specialized in math, the other in literacy.

There’s also a literacy apprentice who teaches across two classrooms. When students are in literacy class, the literacy-lead teacher and the apprentice co-teach the content. When students are in math class, the lead math teacher from one classroom comes to the other classroom for co-teaching support.

The school hosts resident teachers from the Urban Teachers program, and school leadership says the partnership has been integral to making Ingenuity Prep’s group model function. Resident teachers already have a bachelor’s degree, but the program allows them to work toward a master’s in education, including certifications in special education and their specific content areas. After the first year, Urban Teachers places its residents as full-time paid staff members in schools — usually the ones where they had already been teaching — where they can finish out the program’s remaining three years. Ingenuity Prep currently has 11 resident teachers.

Ingenuity Prep incorporates computer-based learning into the curriculum, a practice known as blended learning. In kindergarten and above, each student has access to a Chromebook and a student web portal, which contains different online educational programs like Lexia Reading and STMath.  Teachers blend the digital content into the curriculum to target individual student needs and provide students with independent practice in subject-area knowledge.

Aside from the benefits of exposing students to blended learning, the goal of Ingenuity Prep’s learning model has always been more one-on-one time between teacher and student. Students spend less than 10 percent of their time learning in groups larger than 15 students. Maud Cooke-Nesme, a kindergarten literacy teacher, believes the computer-based learning has been important in achieving this.

“The use of technology really helps us as teachers because it gives us the ability to have the differentiated time in smaller groups,” she says.

‘They often feel like they aren’t in class, even though they are’

The implementation of the Ingenuity Prep model looks slightly different depending on the grade level.

In pre-K classrooms, play-based learning takes the place of computer-based learning. Students spend much of the day in “centers,” where they choose from a variety of activity stations like art, music and movement, and dramatic play — in which the preschoolers take on the role of adults in everyday situations and careers. As the students rotate through the centers, the lead teacher pulls out small groups to give them formal, personalized instruction in literacy and math. There are also some large group activities, like “Mindfulness,” a short time after recess during which students practice guided deep breathing and feeling their heartbeats.

From kindergarten to fifth grade, the Ingenuity Prep model for literacy hits its stride. Students spend a significant amount of time in small groups assembled by relatively similar ability level, rotating through different learning activities, from direct instruction to guided practice and independent, computer-based practice. While there’s teacher flexibility in the model’s implementation, all classrooms must have certain components essential to its success: a classroom library, a carpeted open space, a large group instruction area, and small group instruction spaces.

In a kindergarten classroom, three groups are rotating through different literacy practice activities. Six students sit in two rows of desk, facing the front of the room, as they practice reading skills using Lexia on their Chromebooks. These students are on different levels from one another, progressing through the program at their own pace.

“Students like having that independent time on the computers,” says Avi Worrell, a second-grade literacy teacher. “They often feel like they aren’t in class, even though they are. They’re learning, but it’s fun and competitive learning.”

Students D’Leah Roberts and Boston Pope work independently on their computers. (Ingenuity Prep)

A second group of eight students sits at a semi-circle table, facing lead teacher Amber Morales. Morales is conducting guided reading, and she’s targeted both the text and the learning objective to this group’s specific skill level. The students are practicing sight words, with a focus on the word “where.” They follow along, tracking the text with their fingers, as Morales reads aloud and asks them questions about the story.

The last group of 10 students is on the other side of the room in a much more traditional classroom setup. They’re in rows of desks, facing the teacher and the board. Here, Urban Teachers resident Michaura Rivera is using direct instruction to teach phonetics and writing. Students practice drawing their letters on individual whiteboards, and Rivera monitors their progress.

“I really like changing through the groups because we have guided reading and instruction with our teachers, but we also go onto computers to practice on our own,” says Jahari’ Rose, a fifth-grader who has been at the school since kindergarten. “Lexia really helped us learn new sight words, how to read faster, and how to find the meaning of a story.”

In a second-grade classroom, there are still designated spaces for small and large group instruction; however, because these students are more capable of self-monitoring their behavior than those in kindergarten, the library area and open space are larger, creating a cozy, independent reading environment.

In this class, one group of students is working on computer-based programs. Another group is around a table, working on a guided writing project with the lead teacher. And the third group of students are lying on the carpeted space in the library area. They’re practicing independent reading; they’ve chosen books from the shelf marked at their current reading level, as well as two books from the level above.

In a fifth-grade classroom, the setup looks more traditional, with the majority of the desks facing the front of the room and the teachers. There’s a Chromebook on each desk because students are working on writing in a large group activity. There’s still an area for small group instruction and a library area with open space. However, both are much smaller than in the lower grade levels.

Overall, math lessons schoolwide involve more large group instruction than literacy; teachers want a more heterogeneous group in terms of student ability level so that struggling students can learn by watching stronger students solve problems. Classes still incorporate the rotational model and blended learning, but often the lead teacher will perform direct instruction with a larger group while the assisting teacher pulls out small groups of students who need extra help.

“The school isn’t super descriptive on how to implement the model,” says Stoetzer, who recently stepped into the interim CEO role at Ingenuity Prep. “We make sure we have excellent teachers who are familiar with the model, but there’s adaptability in how to make the best use of it. After all, they know their students’ needs best.”

Intensive coaching, listening to teachers

“I’ve never been in a school that puts so much attention to detail in terms of content, organization, and planning,” says Ashleigh Coleman, a pre-K-4 teacher. “The leadership really values [teacher] feedback here, and they encourage work-life balance. At other places where I’ve worked, teachers are workhorses. They’re expected to do whatever it takes to get the job done, but they aren’t listened to.”

School leadership admits that balance wasn’t always there; they’ve been very intentional about creating it. They use surveys to measure the adult culture in the building. They’ve allotted extra time for planning during the school day. And they have a robust teacher-coaching program in which school leaders observe teachers once a week.

“I worked at another school where I received pretty much no coaching whatsoever,” says kindergarten teacher Cook-Nesme. “One of the main things that attracted me here was the frequency of coaching. The coaching is specialized for literacy or math, so the feedback I receive makes sense to where I am in my development as a teacher.”

Ingenuity Prep teacher Morgan Miller works with student Jaylen Smith. (Ingenuity Prep)

The coaching also helps create a uniform culture of high expectations.

“I previously taught at a Head Start program,” says Molly Karsh, a pre-K-3 teacher. “I have really come to appreciate the high expectations for both students and staff here. There, my kids left for kindergarten without being able to write their names. Here, my students talk about paleontology. There, my kids could not sit quietly on the carpet and learn with minimal distractions because we didn’t have that culture set in our classrooms, and I didn’t know it was possible to set it because I didn’t have the coaching or tools for handling distractions.”

This embedded culture of coaching develops a special relationship between leadership and teachers. All of the instructional leaders were once teachers, and many were once teachers at Ingenuity Prep. JaQuan Bryant, the co-principal of kindergarten through second grade, came to Ingenuity Prep as a first-grade teacher. He believes he benefited greatly from the coaching.

“But it’s interesting because some of my cousins are also in education,” he says. “When I first started here, I told them that leadership videoed me, and they freaked out. They said, ‘I would never let them do that. I’d have the union rep come in.’ But I think you need to have that sort of relationship between instructional leadership and staff to move the needle for kids. They’ve got to be able to hop into a classroom at any time. There’s got to be that trust.”

Teaching kids in trauma

“They let us have fun here, like on pajama day I got to wear my Batman onesie, but they ask us to think about our actions too,” says fifth-grader Jaiden Robinson. “The only downside about this place is the food.”

“Especially the pancakes — you can make Play-Doh out of them,” adds his classmate Dajon Walker, who has been at the school since third grade. “At my old school, the food was good. I can’t lie about that. But there was a lot of chaos. There were fights every day; it was a rampage. We didn’t listen to teachers. We just ran around and did what we wanted.”

His peer Marcellus Dyson also came to Ingenuity Prep in third grade. “In second grade, I got into a lot of fights because people kept messing with me,” he says. “There’s less fights here because they take care of it here right away and send kids to behavioral support.”

Ingenuity Prep has six full-time behavioral support specialists. If a student causes a disruption in class, the teacher texts one of the specialists, who then removes the student. The aim is to return the student to class as quickly as possible. However, there is a “reset room,” which students call behavioral support, for those who aren’t ready to go back to class immediately. There, students reflect on their behavior.

“I’ve been to behavioral support, and it’s effective,” says fifth-grader Zainah Williams. “They ask you why you’re in there, and you have to complete this worksheet about what you’d do better next time. Then, they ask you if you’re calm enough to go back to class. It helps me calm down so I can go back.”

Ninety-seven percent of Ingenuity Prep students are African-American, and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education has designated 60 percent of its students as economically disadvantaged. The state office also labeled 66 percent of students “at risk,” meaning they are more likely to drop out based on their receipt of public assistance, receipt of food stamps, involvement with the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, homeless status, or being older than expected for their grade.

Many of the school’s students experience trauma at home, and their behavior is not always a reflection of what’s going on in class. Every teacher at the school has been trained in crisis intervention management. Student and family support specialists, special education teachers, the speech therapist, and counselors also complete a deeper-level training. There’s also a full-time social worker and psychologist, and there are no security officers. The school screens staff during hiring to ensure that their values align with the school’s mission to educate low-income students with empathy and understanding.

“I grew up low-income in this neighborhood,” says third-grade teacher Davian Morgan. “But then my mom went back to school and then I went to school, so I understand the power education had in lifting us above the poverty line and into the middle class. I want for these kids to see how many doors open if you take your education seriously.”

Bryant, the K-2 co-principal, grew up in a similar neighborhood in East Oakland, California. “What keeps me at this school is that we believe every kid deserves access to an education equivalent to that of their affluent peers, an education that will allow them to be the architects of their own futures.”

The problem with replication

Back in January 2012, around the time Stoetzer and Cuny were talking about starting a school, the Illinois Facilities Fund published Quality Schools: Every Child, Every School, Every Neighborhood, an extensive analysis of public school locations and performance in Washington, D.C.

After categorizing the District into 39 neighborhood clusters, the authors of the report concluded that to provide all public school students, both district and charter, with a high-quality education, the city would need to add an additional 39,758 seats in high-performing schools. Ten neighborhood clusters – three of them located in Ward 8 – would need 68 percent of those seats.

After reading the report, Stoetzer and Cuny intentionally opened Ingenuity Prep in Bellevue, a Ward 8 neighborhood in the center of the cluster that the Illinois Facilities Fund had declared the District’s highest-need area. Ward 8 needed 10,087 additional quality seats, and the Bellevue cluster alone needed 5,969 of them.

Eighty percent of Ingenuity Prep students live within a mile of the school. Ninety percent live in Ward 8, and 95 percent live east of the Anacostia River, in D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods. On the 2018 Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) exams, 38 percent of its students tested proficient or above in English and 34 percent in math. The two neighborhood elementary scores had pass rates of 8 and 6 percent for English and 13 and 9 percent for math.

When compared with the other 35 schools in Ward 8, Ingenuity Prep ranks second highest in terms of PARCC scores, with student scores in the 95th percentile for the ward. Of the District’s 113 schools where more than 50 percent of the students are economically disadvantaged, Ingenuity Prep’s test scores ranked seventh.

In general, D.C. schools with more at-risk students have lower student proficiency scores than the citywide average. However, on the 2018 PARCC exams, Ingenuity Prep students scored slightly above the citywide average for both math and English. Their combined proficiency scores were in the 74th percentile citywide, and student growth scores were in the 92nd percentile.

Despite its success and the overwhelming need for more seats in high-performing schools, Ingenuity Prep cannot replicate under the current regulations of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, the District’s charter authorizer. To do that, the board requires that a charter school have a tier-one ranking on its performance measurement framework. Ingenuity Prep currently has a tier-two ranking. When judging school performance, the charter board compares charters citywide, which presents difficulties for schools like Ingenuity Prep that serve a larger percentage of at-risk students than many of their charter peers.

“It’s a more challenging experience on this side of the river, and I think our colleagues who run high-performing charter schools elsewhere would agree with that,” says Stoetzer.

For instance, Ingenuity Prep has one of the lowest in-seat attendance rates in the city for charters, at around 89 percent, slightly below the 90 percent citywide average for all public schools. However, the two traditional neighborhood elementary schools, which serve similar student populations, have attendance rates of 89 and 92 percent. There’s a high correlation between the number of at-risk students and absenteeism, according to Ingenuity Prep’s leadership.

Because the school is located 1.5 miles from the closest Metro station, about one-third of students take the bus, which is not as reliable as the Metro, and cold winters also negatively affect attendance among those students who walk from either home or the Metro station. Moreover, many of the students come from single-parent households with multiple siblings. Often, when one child is sick or has a doctor’s appointment, the parent will keep all of the children at home because it’s not easy or convenient to take the others to school.

Ingenuity Prep has done a variety of things to increase attendance: free Metrobus passes to parents (in D.C., kids ride for free), internal incentives for students, phone calls home to students chronically absent, and listing the amount of instructional time lost because of absences on each report card. Regardless, attendance rates have increased by only 1 percent.

“I respect and appreciate that the board wants to hold a high bar for low-income students, but I think demanding that a school be tier one to replicate ignores the reality of the limited options available to kids in neighborhoods that are historically underserved,” says Stoetzer.

“The reality is that if more D.C. Preps, KIPPs, and Ingenuity Preps don’t open on this side of the river, only a few of these kids are going to travel incredible distances to go to quality schools. We are doing a disservice to our kids by not being more open to considering schools without a tier-one ranking for replication,” he said. “These kids need a better educational experience. What we’re providing here is drastically different than the neighborhood schools, and we’ve got to consider that in how we think about schools and replication.”

Correction: Resident teachers with the Urban Teachers program are eligible for various forms of financial aid. An earlier version of the story included incorrect information about tuition reimbursement by Urban Teachers. 

Creating the Next Generation of Digital Innovators at Washington, D.C.’s First Computer Science-Focused Middle School

January 2019. The 74.

“When I finish writing the statement, that cat will move,” promises Deshaunte’ Goldsmith, a sixth-grader at Digital Pioneers Academy Public Charter School. She presses enter on the keyboard and, sure enough, the animated cat on her screen begins to pace back and forth.

Goldsmith is a member of the founding class at the school known as DPA, Washington, D.C.’s first computer science-focused middle school. Opened in August, the school is small, serving about 120 sixth-grade students across four classes, but has plans to build out to 12th grade. Every day, students take computer science as a part of their core curriculum.

Today, in computer science, Goldsmith is learning how to write conditional statements — such as if the space bar is pressed, the cat will jump — using MIT’s animation-based platform Scratch. First, the students have to identify conditional statements, and then they have to write their own. At the end of class, they have to find and correct the error intentionally planted in the teacher’s code.

“The error’s in the third line of code,” Goldsmith says. “It’s missing part of the conditional statement.”

DPA occupies the second floor of Washington Heights Baptist Church in the Hillcrest neighborhood of the city’s seventh ward. Ninety-eight percent of the students come from wards seven and eight, D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods, and, because DPA’s leadership recruited heavily in the local area, two-thirds of the students went to the neighborhood elementary schools.

“My decision to go to this school was sort of last minute,” says Goldsmith. “I was waitlisted at Friendship Charter School. Then I heard about this school, and I decided I wanted to come here and learn about code. All of the teachers here have really supported me, and this is one of my favorite classes. I’m happy I ended up here.”

Lamontae Allen, Goldsmith’s classmate, or teammate as they are known at DPA, also loves the computer science curriculum.

“Computer science is my favorite class,” he said. “I like to play video games. When I grow up, I want to be a famous YouTuber, but if that doesn’t work out, I might make my own computer game, and learning all of this will help with that.”

Today, only 40 percent of America’s K-12 schools teach computer programming, and computer science-focused schools like DPA that do not require admissions tests or screen their applicants are rare. Low-income families often lack access to technology, and the racial achievement gap in the tech industry is well documented. Less than 3 percent of Google’s workforce is African American.

“Our mission is very simple,” says Mashea Ashton, DPA’s founder and the head of school. “We want to develop the next generation of innovators. We want our students not just to consume the digital economy, but to be a part of creating it.”

A veteran educator embraces comp sci

With almost 20 years of experience teaching in and running public charter schools, Ashton knew she wanted to leverage her experience as an educational leader to positively impact Southeast Washington, D.C. — a historically underserved neighborhood she cares deeply about. Ashton began her career as a special education teacher just down the street from DPA’s current location, and her husband, a sixth-generation Washingtonian, grew up in the neighborhood.

Ashton herself has no computer science background. “I took one computer science course at the College of William and Mary back before they even had email,” she jokes. “However, three years ago, when I began thinking about opening a school, I thought about a college prep model, but the more I thought about students and families and options, the more I thought about the importance of being career ready. Then, I saw the data about how many high-paid, high-demand jobs in computing go unfilled every year.”

DPA’s curriculum is a modified version of the academic program developed by RePublic Schools, a network of charter schools throughout the South that teaches computer coding daily as part of its college prep curriculum. With this curriculum, DPA students begin by working on elementary programs like Scratch before learning two of the core internet technologies, the markup languages HTML and CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, which determines the look and layout of a webpage’s content. They eventually move on to JavaScript, a more advanced language and the third of the core internet technologies. After mastering JavaScript, students will have the opportunity to explore other advanced programming languages such as Python and R.

Two Digital Pioneers Academy students collaborate on a computer science task (Digital Pioneers Academy)

Although DPA currently holds a charter only for a middle school, Ashton plans to apply to expand the school through high school, building up one grade at a time. During high school, students will be expected to pass the Advanced Placement computer science exam in 10th grade, she said, and become fluent in two coding languages by the time they graduate. Juniors and seniors will also participate in internships and work-study programs that allow them to gain real-world experience in the tech sector.

DPA is already building a pipeline of partnerships with tech firms, like Microsoft and Deloitte, and three times a year, middle schoolers will have “expeditions,” three-day experiences where they demonstrate some of the coding skills they’ve learned to tech experts before visiting the experts’ workplaces.

“When you think about the job quality and the job opportunities that our students will have because they had one hour of computer science each day from sixth to 12th grade … it’s incredible,” says Crystal Bryant, a STEM teacher at DPA. “It’s refreshing to see someone like Mashea come in with a vision to change the trajectory of the lives of kids in this area.”

Founding a school that celebrates science

When designing DPA, Ashton and her team researched broadly to learn about the best models for a computer science-focused school. In the spring of 2017, Ashton taught an elective, “Design the Academy of the Future,” to ninth-graders at Washington Leadership Academy Public Charter School, a technology-focused high school in D.C. She heard from students about the factors of their education that have had the greatest impact on their motivation and learning. Understanding the real-world application of the skills they were learning ranked at the top of the list.

“Students didn’t need to be told about the number of high-paying computing jobs available; they needed to have real-world experiences, to see the real-world connections for what they were learning,” says Ashton. “They wanted to know the ‘why’ for everything. ‘Why am I taking notes? Why am I reading Shakespeare? Why am I doing Scratch?’”

Ashton also spoke with the leaders of the Academy for Software Engineering, a computer science-focused school in New York City. The school’s leaders said they had initially recruited tech experts to serve as the teachers, but they ultimately discovered that they needed people who were experts in instructional delivery, classroom management, and working with teenagers. The RePublic curriculum, however, is not expert-dependent, so Ashton could recruit widely for her teaching staff.

“None of our teachers had ever taught computer science as a core part of the curriculum before,” she says. “We recruited educators who believed in our mission, had the best achievement record for working with kids like ours, and who were excited to be on a founding team, which is very different from a regular teaching job.”

What being a founding teacher means, Ashton says, is long, hard hours and owning the successes and failures of the school. “There’s the opportunity for growth, but there’s also going to be some failing forward, which is an important part of growth and a value we attempt to impart to our students,” she says. “I do think our teachers are feeling the success of what it’s like to work together on a team with a shared mission and vision where everyone is accountable.”

Bryant, the STEM teacher, came to DPA because she felt that in urban education, science often isn’t considered as important by school administrations as math and English, the major testing subjects. She wanted to move to a place that celebrated science and computer science, rather than treating it as an elective. At DPA, she was given the opportunity to build a STEM program.

“A lot of people warned me about joining a founding team. ‘It’s a lot of work,’ they kept saying, but I think it’s going to be rewarding to look back and see all of the computer scientists that our school has produced and know I helped create that,” she says.

“No one is just a teacher here,” adds STEM teacher Ashley Pettway. “A lot of times in urban education, you feel like you’re a part of a system where you have no control, but here, anything that we dream up for our kids, so long as it’s mission- and vision-aligned, is supported. We can do it. I’ve never worked in a place like that.”

High empathy, high expectations

DPA’s classrooms have arched attic ceilings and an airy, homey feel. The school renovated the second floor of the building before moving in, creating four large classrooms and some smaller meeting rooms. Backpacks are hung along the classroom walls, and there are comfortable sitting areas for students in addition to more traditional desks.

“Our scholars learn better when the environment is conducive to learning,” says Ashton. “I hope they feel like these are their rooms.”

To minimize transition times, students don’t switch classrooms; instead, the teachers do. Each class always has two adults, the classroom teacher and an assistant, who is often a dean or another member of the administrative team.

The school day runs from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., except on Wednesdays, which are half-days. Students have study hall, math, computer science, social studies or science, an intervention period for struggling students, two classes of English Language Arts, and recess, daily. There’s a break in the morning and a second one in the afternoon. There’s also an a.m. and p.m. community meeting and a mandatory enrichment activity — like kickball, dance, creating holiday cards, and more — from 4 to 5 p.m. It’s a long day, but many of the students come in significantly behind grade level, so there’s a lot of work to be done. When the school year began, only 20 percent of the founding class was on grade level in both reading and math.

“We tell our scholars that if they want to achieve, then they have to outwork everyone, and they’re learning and beginning to own that,” says Ashton.

Classmates give each other “snaps,” impromptu snapping, to celebrate when a teammate does something well. There’s also a school-wide hand sign for “giving magic,” which is wiggling fingers at a teammate to send good them vibes.

“We are team, so we want to support one another, but we don’t have a lot of spare time. Our silent celebrations give students a lot of joy, but they aren’t disruptive to learning,” says Ashton.

Digital Pioneers Academy head of school Mashea Ashton gives a student a hug on the first day of the 2018-19 school year (Digital Pioneers Academy)

Students can also earn a “professional” point each class period if they demonstrate behavior, like optimism, empathy, and growth, that reflects the school’s values. Professional behavior earns a point; unprofessional behavior, like talking back to a teacher or putting your head down in class, loses a point; and neutral behavior results in no change. Students can redeem themselves throughout the period; it’s what they’ve done by the end of class that matters. The system promotes the idea that students have control over, and can change, their behavior. Every morning students fill out their daily behavior goals for each period, and every afternoon they reflect on whether they met those goals.

“Professional and unprofessional is language that kids really understand,” says Bryant. “They know adults have to be professional, so they see the real-world connection. It’s very clear cut, which makes it easy for them to articulate reflections on their behavior and even write things like, ‘I was slouching in my seat and not participating yesterday so I wasn’t being professional.’”

If a student has a “community violation” — swearing at a teacher, starting a fight, etc. — then they receive an automatic “unprofessional” and are removed to the “reset room” for the remainder of the period. There, they fill out a reflection on their behavior and brainstorm how to make amends to the teacher and the community before returning to their next class.

Students can spend professional points at the school store. They can purchase dress-down days, Subway cards, a chance to visit friends in another class during break, and more. However, the four students who have the most professional points at the end of the week get a pass to “The Lab,” where video games, a movie projector, a basketball hoop, and more await. Staff asked the students what they wanted prior to stocking The Lab.

“There are Xboxes and TVs and everything,” says Pettway. “The first time I went into The Lab, I thought, ‘It looks like a Dave & Busters.’ I took photos of it to show the kids. It’s such a positive, consistent motivator for them. Ms. Ashton plays Fortnite [a phenomenally popular online game] with them in there. It’s great.”

“School and learning should be fun,” says Ashton. “We do want them to develop intrinsic motivation, but we also want them to understand that hard work and positive actions ultimately have positive consequences.”

“I appreciate that this is a very different experience for our kids than many are used to,” says Bryant. “I have been an urban educator for eight years, and I feel like our kids are constantly being punished for being children or for the things they don’t have. I appreciate that I’ve found a school where the goal is to remove all obstacles that keep kids from learning and then hold them accountable for their learning.”

“It’s called ‘high empathy, high expectations,” says Pettway. “And it’s a model that’s working for our kids.”

A, B, C, F: Why This High School Never Gives Ds and Teaches Its Students to Think Like Lawyers

January 2019. The 74.

“Coats off, scarves off, hats off! Belts on; shirts tucked,” Stacey Stewart, Thurgood Marshall Academy’s director of student affairs, yells at the two lines of students waiting to check in and begin the school day.

“Ms. Stewart, I’m early today,” a student says as he approaches check-in.

“It’s 8:29. You are not early; you are on time,” she says, exasperated and amused. Check-in runs from 8 to 8:30 a.m. After students check in, they head downstairs for breakfast.

Nothing about morning check-in at Thurgood Marshall Academy (TMA) hints that there’s anything exceptional about the school, but a glass case near Stewart, filled with academic awards, reveals the truth: This is an extraordinary school.

Consistently ranked as a top-tier public charter school in Washington, D.C., Thurgood Marshall Academy is a law-themed school that serves about 400 students in ninth through 12th grades. Over 90 percent of students live in Wards 7 and 8, the city’s two poorest neighborhoods. Nearly 100 percent are African-American, and 61 percent are designated “at risk” by the Office of the State Superintendent, meaning they are at greater risk of dropping out based on their receipt of public assistance, food stamps, involvement with the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, homeless status, or being older than expected for their grade.

The average ninth-grader enters TMA three to four years behind grade level.

Nevertheless, since TMA graduated its first class in 2005, 100 percent of graduates have been accepted into college, over 90 percent have enrolled in college within a year of graduating from high school, and 94 percent persist in college from freshman to sophomore year. The school’s cohort four-year graduation rate (a city calculation that also includes the status of students who have withdrawn or moved to different schools over the past four years) is 78.5 percent, higher than the statewide average of 68.5 percent, and significantly higher than the neighborhood’s district-run high schools, which have rates of 50 and 55 percent. For the past three years, student scores on D.C.’s standardized exams have been among the highest citywide for nonselective high schools.

“As a nonselective, freestanding high school, we don’t have a feeder pattern,” explains TMA’s executive director, Richard Pohlman. “We’re ready to take all kids who come through our doors, so our program has to be diverse enough to take both kids highly prepared and those significantly behind. Our systems and structures are a decade-plus old, but they’ve produced consistent results over that amount of time. What we’re doing works.”

So, what are they doing?

They’re exposing students to law-infused curriculum.

They’re increasing learning by supporting students and teachers.

And, they’re not giving Ds. The grading scale at TMA goes A, B, C, F.

Mastering the 5 essential legal skills

TMA’s goal is not for every student to become a lawyer but for all students to gain competency in the skills that lawyers rely on. The “five essential legal skills” — advocacy, argumentation, critical thinking, negotiation, and research — are woven into the curriculum for all classes.

“We’re always learning about and growing our law theme,” says Pohlman. “It’s not easy to know what a broad mission statement looks like in practice, so we have to work at it. How do we teach skills that are useful for civic engagement? Skills that get kids into college and careers, but also help them become actively engaged democratic members of society? Our history teachers have been remarkable about that.”

Each year in history class, students must complete a law-related project that emphasizes the five legal skills. Previous projects include mock trials, soapbox speeches, issue-to-action projects, and studies of the impact of federal legislation on D.C. Council legislation. In the 2017-18 school year, the social studies department arranged 18 educational trips for students, including a visit to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Students also participate in the school’s law-related programming. In ninth grade, students have Law Day six times a year, when they attend legal workshops hosted at and by local law firms. Sophomores spend eight half-days at Howard University, learning from professors about how law is present in their everyday lives.

During their junior year, students get to know a legal professional through the Law Firm Tutoring mentorship program. TMA partners each junior with a mentor at a local firm. Once a week, students travel to the firm (which provides meals and transportation) and have dinner with their mentor, who helps them with scholarship writing, SAT prep, college research, etc.

“Understanding the law and my rights has made me a better person outside of school,” says Devin Halliburton, a junior at TMA, whose Law Firm Tutoring mentor Yasmine Harik is an associate at Arnold & Porter.

Fellow student Ashleigh Miles agrees. “I’m not going to turn law into a career, and neither is Devin, but the information is good to know,” she says. “The law part, that’s what makes Thurgood unique. We get to meet new people and make connections in that world and learn from them.”

For those students who become interested in pursuing a law career, TMA offers more in-depth law courses. For instance, in Peer Court, students learn about how laws affect school policy, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Act and special education, and court cases, such as Morse v. Frederick, involving students’ free speech. In the 2007 case, the U.S. Supreme Court found a school official had not violated a student’s First Amendment rights by suspending him for displaying a banner proclaiming “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” Another component of the class involves volunteering on a student-run court, which coordinates with the Office of Student Affairs to assign and monitor consequences for students who have committed minor disciplinary infractions.

“We teach students to advocate for themselves, so we want to listen to them when they do,” explains Pohlman. “Peer Court is a way of doing that. It lets students think about logical consequences for behavior.”

Peer Court, portfolio assessments, and food if you’re hungry

“Ms. Odu!” a student shouts. “Do you want to hear a joke?”

“Hmm. Do I want to hear a joke?” Ms. Odu, her ninth-grade English teacher, pauses. “Yeah, OK, go on, Kamani.”

“What’s the hottest place in a cold room?” Kamani asks. “The corner, because it’s always 90 degrees.” The class laughs, but no one louder than Kamani. Ms. Odu laughs with them.

“That was cute,” she says. “But now, we have to settle down and finish this assignment from the last class in 25 minutes because we can’t spend six years on it. And, remember, your quiz is on Monday. We don’t have school on Friday, so some of you will probably forget. But that’s OK. Because that’s your problem.”

Kome Odu came to TMA in 2012 after teaching in Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland. “The standards here are so much higher than at my old school. That matters to me. There’s more rigor and organization and an expectation that kids do more, can do more,” she says. “The administration supports teachers. I like teaching literature to black kids, these kids. That’s what keeps me here.”

The school’s leadership believes that too often in urban education, teachers are asked to perform multiple roles beyond teaching, making it impossible for them to focus on improving their craft and, by extension, student learning.

“The foundation of our school is made from what happens in classrooms,” says Pohlman. “Our teachers’ job is to make sure instruction is great all day long. They need to be supported in that.”

Math teacher Christina Camps works with sophomore Raymani Rhodes. (Thurgood Marshall Academy)

At TMA, deans are in charge of managing school culture and student behavior while the heads of school focus on instructional delivery. Instructional leaders are made aware of behavioral issues, but the deans are responsible for handling those issues.

“We have people whose jobs are very distinct. Everyone needs to have a laser focus on their job to do it well, so we don’t expect teachers to be doing everyone else’s job,” says Pohlman. “We all talk and coordinate, but we have a place — a specific person — to send students to for specific issues and questions.”

Stacey Stewart, the director of student affairs, believes that this division helps assuage behavioral problems. “A lot of our kids have a lot of stuff going on at home, and their behavior is not always a reflection of what’s going on in the classroom,” she says.

The Office of Student Affairs supports students outside the classroom so that they’re prepared to learn in the classroom. Stewart anticipates potential causes of decreased motivation or disruptive behavior. Her office has boxes of snacks, toothbrushes, deodorant, and other things. “If a kid’s upset because he doesn’t have clean clothes, I get him clothes,” she says. “If a student’s hungry, I get her a snack. I take that stuff away from them so that they can focus on learning.”

When behavioral issues do occur, TMA differentiates consequences based on both the seriousness of the infraction and the student. Peer Court assigns consequences for violations of TMA’s “no-brainers” — chewing gum, using devices in school, uniform violations, etc. — while Stewart’s office handles higher-level violations, such as fighting and willful disobedience.

“Some kids respond well to a call home,” Stewart says. “Others will move for one teacher because they have a relationship, but not for another, so bringing in that teacher to mediate a circle conversation helps. A lot of it is understanding what works to move that kid.”

But TMA’s leadership also expects students to own their behavior. The school uses a merit and demerit system. While students can work off demerits by gaining merits, if, at the end of the year, a student has more than 20 demerits, he or she won’t be promoted, regardless of academic performance. However, because grade-level deans host opportunities for students to earn merits over the summer, like classes focused on community service for the school or building positive relationships, this rarely happens. For the past three years, no student has been held back because of behavioral infractions.

Students also reflect upon their yearly progress through a portfolio assessment. Each spring, they give a formal presentation to three faculty members during which students examine their academic performance as well as their behavioral record and overall contribution to the school. And they turn in a portfolio of the materials they intend to speak about.

“I get so nervous for portfolio,” says Halliburton, the junior. “It can be in front of teachers you don’t know, and you’ve got to talk for, like, 45 minutes. They don’t talk. They just write stuff down and look through your binder. You’re explaining everything you did — like your school work and behavior — and why. But it actually really helps me. I save my portfolio projects and look at them to improve.”

A school without Ds

“When I came here in ninth grade, I was behind in reading,” Halliburton says. “My first semester, I got a 69 in English on my report card. At my old school, that would have been a D, but here I was seeing an F. That was like, whoa, I need to start tightening myself up. I’m supposed to be preparing for college.”

Halliburton’s reaction is exactly why TMA grades on an A, B, C, F scale, where anything less than a 70 is an F. The school’s leadership believes that if students don’t know at least 70 percent of the material, they won’t be prepared to pass at the next level. The lack of Ds is not a punishment; it’s a success strategy.

“It’s stressful for freshmen,” Pohlman admits. “Many are accustomed to always just getting by, and suddenly, sliding by is failing. We have a lot of resources to support kids when they’re failing, but they’ve got to work hard.”

Math teacher Matthew Schorr and, from left, sophomores Niara Middlebrooks, Kaydince Hall, and Mya Barnhart (Thurgood Marshall Academy)

Mills, Halliburton’s classmate, knows exactly what he means. “At my middle school, they just passed you on. It didn’t really matter if you got the curriculum or not,” she says. “When I came here, I failed Algebra I the whole first year. But then when I did get to geometry, I went to office hours. I got more help. I didn’t fail geometry.”

Students are eligible to take up to two courses per summer if they fail their courses. If students do not retake a failed course over summer, they either receive an alternative schedule for the following year, which includes the retake, or they retake the course in a subsequent summer. However, for courses that have a specified order, as in Mills’s case, students must pass the prerequisite before moving on to the next level.

Since most ninth-graders enter TMA below grade level, freshman and sophomores take double-block English and math classes. They have twice as much classroom instruction as their peers at traditional high school programs. These double-blocks are a cornerstone of TMA’s success at raising student achievement. Other academic supports include a Summer Prep program that helps students transition into TMA’s rigorous academic environment, an SAT prep class, and a Senior Seminar in which students receive intensive coaching on the college application process, help with scholarships, and lessons on transitioning to college life. The school has a robust college counseling department, with three full-time college counselors.

“Our college acceptance rate is [far] higher than the national average for low-income communities, so we tell parents what our system looks like and ask them to trust it,” Pohlman says. At the end of the first quarter, many parents call him, upset or angry, because their student has never had an F before. “Well, they have an F now,” he tells them. “Let’s help them get out of it.”

“Our ultimate goal is not to have kids take remedial classes in college,” says Stewart. “Because that’s debt on top of debt.”

One national study that looked at 911 two- and four-year colleges found that 96 percent of students there were placed in remedial classes in 2014-15. Remedial classes carry no credits, but enrolled students who cannot pass freshman-level course entrance exams must complete and pay for them before they can enter into credit-bearing courses. Research has shown that a large percentage of students placed into remedial courses drop out before graduating college, and often before even finishing the course.

Both Halliburton and Mills agree that “Thurgood is hard,” but, by the second year, students adjust to the rigor. Moreover, they regard the high standards as the manifestation of the faculty’s belief in their abilities.

“Everyone here wants me to succeed,” Halliburton says. “Teachers have office hours before and after school, and they’ll come to you to make sure you’re straight with their class if they think you need help.”

It’s this combination of rigor and support that draws many parents and students to TMA. The school’s success with students, as well as the demands placed on them, are well known in the community.

“We don’t lure families here under the false pretenses that everyone passes,” Pohlman says. “The part of school choice that really matters is that you have a system with a lot of different choices and that you provide families with as much transparency as you can so that they can make a choice. We’re an important part of that system in D.C.”

A D.C. School Meant to Inspire Teachers and Students

January 2019. The 74.

Artwork and projects decorate the light blue walls of Inspired Teaching Demonstration School, an inquiry-based learning public charter school now in its eighth year.

A colorful “body map,” with the organs labeled, covers the door of one prekindergarten classroom. On the wall outside the other pre-K classroom hang drawings of guitars because the class read a picture book about the childhood of Jimi Hendrix when learning about musical instruments. Down the hall, the 3-year-old class has been experimenting with paints, both watercolors and temperas.

Everything displayed on the walls of the three-story building on Douglas Street NE in D.C.’s Ward 5 is student-made.

“Teachers really value our creativity here,” says Takhari Millner, a seventh-grader who has been attending ITDS since kindergarten.

Ranked a tier-one public charter school by the D.C. Public Charter School Board, ITDS opened in 2011 and serves 472 students in prekindergarten through eighth grade. There’s two classes per grade, except for seventh and eighth grade, which will each expand from one class to two when the school reaches its roughly 525-student capacity in 2020. For the 2018-19 school year, ITDS received 1,745 applications for 125 spots. Its waiting list currently has 913 students.

ITDS students have consistently outperformed their peers in both the public charter school sector and District of Columbia Public Schools on state exams, yet test prep and standardization are the antithesis of the school’s model. Born out of a partnership with the Center for Inspired Teaching, ITDS operates a demonstration school for the best practices in inquiry-based teaching and active learning methods.

For teachers by teachers

In 2009, the Center for Inspired Teaching, a national organization based out of D.C. that’s dedicated to teacher professionalism and experiential learning, brought together a group of educators to create a school that showcased the center’s instructional model.

Deborah Dantzler Williams, the founding head of school, previously worked as the center’s director of strategic partnerships.

“The center had partnerships with public schools around the city,” she says. “I’d talk with principals, wanting to share CIT’s philosophies, but often, they had looked up my background and seen that I came from an independent school environment. They were suspicious, thinking, ‘Well, you worked in schools that test and pick kids, so how can what you know be relevant to us? Where can we see this type of instructional model being done in a public school? On a typical budget?’ We couldn’t avoid those questions anymore.”

“Being a charter school was really our only option,” says Kate Keplinger, ITDS’s chief operating officer and lead author of the school’s charter. “Our mission is focused on public education, but we needed a place where we could be innovative and different. Within DCPS, we wouldn’t have the same freedom and ability to make the kinds of decisions that we needed to make about how we were going to teach within and staff our school.”

The Center for Inspired Teaching wanted to create a school that could be a changemaker in the realm of public education — a place where they could share best practices with educators, policymakers, and community members. Part of that goal meant creating a place that could serve as a training site for teachers. Through the Inspired Teaching Residency Program, teachers can earn both their master’s in teaching and their D.C. teaching license through coursework and a residency year spent working in an ITDS classroom, under the supervision of an experienced teacher.

Teacher residents follow a “gradual release” training. First, they observe the experienced teacher; then they begin teaching small portions of the class; and finally, they take over the teaching entirely. During the second year of the program, teacher residents obtain a full-time teaching position in a D.C. public school. After successful completion of the residency, they must work an additional four years in D.C. public schools to receive full tuition reimbursement.

How to think, not what to think

To explain inquiry-based learning, ITDS’s leadership compares schooling to a taking a trip. At a traditional school, teachers decide where the journey (the learning) will start and end, but they also decide the vehicle needed for travel as well as all the sites that will be seen. At an inquiry-based school, teachers still pick the starting point and the destination, but the class helps choose the mode of travel and the route. Teachers navigate (keep students on track) without controlling the entirety of the expedition.

ITDS relies on outside curriculum – including Creative Curriculum, a research-based preschool curriculum that features exploration and discovery as pathways for learning, and Readers-Writers Workshop, where teachers act as reading-writing coaches showing students how to read and write rather than telling them — but there are no prescribed lesson plans. The curriculum and standards drive what students need to know; teacher and student interests determine how to get there.

For instance, in Ash Moser’s English language arts class, students had to meet a writing standard that required them to research a topic, take notes, and communicate what they’d learned by creating a nonfiction text. Moser didn’t assign topics. Instead, he let the students choose. However, their nonfiction text had to be “a product with a purpose.” So one student researched allergies and made a brochure about them, which she is now handing out to doctor’s offices. Another student researched porcupines and created a placard for a zoo exhibit. She’s currently attempting to obtain permission to post it at D.C.’s famed National Zoo.

“When students get to see that there’s value in what they’re doing — a purpose to their education beyond getting a grade of passing a test — they see why education matters. Here, teachers are encouraged to make learning highly motivated and purposeful,” says Moser.

In the inquiry-based learning model, teachers are still considered providers of information, but they are also the instigators of student curiosity and provokers of original student thought.

“Our teachers are really kind,” says sixth-grader Tara Roberts. “They actually care about what you’re doing and how you do it. Before I came here, I was at a school where you could do the work you were assigned, and when you’d finished, you could play with Legos. I didn’t like that at all. The teaching style here is that you can do things in different ways, and that your choices matter.”

“A pillar of our school is very much how to think, not what to think,” says Monisha Karnani, ITDS’s director of demonstration and outreach. “For instance, students don’t wear uniforms here. That was an intentional choice. As an adult, most professions don’t require uniforms. You have to decide for yourself, ‘What is appropriate dress in this context, and why?’ For all our rules, we explain the ‘why’ to students and allow room for conversation about that ‘why.’”

This ethos attracted teacher Tamas O’Doughda to the school. He’d gone on several interviews at other D.C. public schools before coming across ITDS. “From many of those, my impression of the culture was: ‘You must follow this lesson plan exactly,’” he says. “Here, the first question they asked me was ‘What’s your educational philosophy?’ And Ms. Dantzler Williams even said, ‘You have a lack of rigidity. That’s great.’ My last administrator would have seen that as a weakness, but here, the leadership sees the value in exploration. Everything doesn’t have to be mapped out. You don’t have to teach students in just one way.”

“The freedom to have some more out-of-the-box ideas in how to let students learn has really kept me here,” says science teacher Jodi Ash. “We’ve had a lot of fun teaching and learning science, and that’s had an impact on me as an educator and how my kids feel about science. They burst into songs when they hear words from the periodic table. There’s a lot of joy in learning here.”

William Guzman and Lenox Copeland observe their self-created machines produce artistic scribbles during a first- through fourth-grade robotics Intersession. (Inspired Teaching Demonstration School)

Liane Alves, an ITDS prekindergarten teacher and former teacher resident, agrees. “Teaching here is both very fun and very challenging,” she says. “Because of the inquiry-based model, learning here is bottom-up, based on what students are interested in, rather than top-down, based on what I know. So I have to learn a lot because I have to research what they want to learn. I’ve researched robots, vehicles, and city planning. This year, there’s a lot of interest in space.”

This school does everything differently

At ITDS, there isn’t a heavy reliance on technology. From third grade up, each student has their own tablet, but devices are only used if they can enhance learning, never merely to check a box, and the school has no SMART boards — another intentional choice.

Regardless, the Partnership for 21st Century Learning has identified ITDS as an exemplar school. The designation signals that the school uses 21st century learning initiatives that are successfully preparing students for college, career, and life. At ITDS, that preparation comes from a school-wide emphasis on project-based learning as a method for enhancing students’ critical and creative thinking.

Each trimester, students complete culminating projects in their core subjects. At the end of the trimester, students show off their projects at “Learning Showcase,” an evening event where families come to see what the classes have been working on. It’s a great community builder, and school leaders say family participation is above 90 percent.

Makenzie Johnson highlights her schoolwork and inquiry process with her family at a Learning Showcase. (Inspired Teaching Demonstration School)

In Courtney McIntosh-Peter’s sixth-grade math class, students finished their study of ratios by examining Cubist artist’s Piet Mondrian’s Composition With Red, Blue, and Yellow (1921). First, they determined the ratios of the colored squares in his art. Then they had to create art using assigned ratios. Finally, they had to create an original work of art and explain the ratios that they chose.

Last year, when Black Panther came out, Jodi Ash’s sixth-graders were working on their chemistry unit. As a class, they debated where, given what they knew about its composition, vibranium, the fictional metal from the film, would be located on the periodic table. Then Ash assigned each student a single element from which they had to derive a superpower. Based on the element’s properties, students created their own superhero franchise, complete with comic books, costumes, and theme songs. They paraded through the school, singing their theme songs and wearing their costumes.

Ash Moser’s class also held a funeral procession for all the “dead words” they would no longer use in their writing. On the wall of his classroom is “Moser Hill Cemetery,” where lifeless words are laid to rest, marked by paper cutouts of tombstones that bear names like “Good,” “Bad,” “Awesome,” and “Cool.”

In Matthew Wong’s second-grade class, students created campaign posters for different characters from Roald Dahl’s books. In November, they held an election to determine the school’s favorite character. The winner, in a landslide victory, was Matilda. The standard the class was studying? Character development.

Second-graders selected characters from Roald Dahl books and created campaign posters to garner votes for the “Best Character.” Raquel Smith and Anna Isaacs picked the Pelly from The Giraffe, the Pelly, and Me, highlighting his helpful and noble personality. (Inspired Teaching Demonstration School)

“This school does everything differently than other schools I’ve been to,” says fifth-grader Alexis Brown. “No other school that I know of does intersession.”

Intersession is the highlight of the school year for many students. During the week before winter and spring break, every adult in the building picks a topic they’d like to explore in depth with a small, mixed-grade group of students for four school days. Students then sign up for the session that interests them most. Previous options have included: martial arts, photography, creative writing, cooking, T-shirt design, winter engineering, improv, student newspaper, and more.

But can it be replicated?

Many ITDS parents want the school to expand through 12th grade. Numerous community members want it to replicate. However, neither growth nor replication are in ITDS’s plans.

“The demonstration model was not meant to be replicated by us, but to be replicated by other schools,” says Karnani.

“The idea is to get this model perfected to a place where other schools can replicate it,” says Dantzler Williams. “We think we can reach more kids in the District of Columbia that way.”

The school welcomes visitors. This year, they’ve already hosted teachers and principals from DCPS, Montgomery County Public Schools, and the Alpine School District in Utah. However, questions remain about the practicality of widespread replication.

“CIT has always believed that teachers are the key agents for change,” says Keplinger. “But the real question is, how do they compare to the human resource person in a big central office? We only let people work here who are philosophically inclined to our beliefs, and we screen our staff heavily for that. You can’t replicate our model in a school that lacks the ability to make those decisions.”

ITDS is also a member of the Diverse Charter Schools Coalition, an organization dedicated to creating racially and socioeconomically diverse charter schools through advocacy, research, and outreach. Its student population is racially diverse: 45 percent of students are white, 37 percent African-American, 7 percent Hispanic, 3 percent Asian, and 9 percent multiracial. Fifty-nine percent of the faculty are people of color. The leadership works via recruitment efforts to keep it that way. However, only 22 percent of the students are designated as economically disadvantaged, a much lower number than both the 77 percent for all DCPS schools and those of many struggling district schools where teachers face challenges specific to educating children in poverty.

However, Dantzler Williams believes that the essential elements of the school — teacher voice and professionalism, the core beliefs, and project-based learning — are applicable in schools throughout the District. And former teacher residents bring the training, philosophy, and practices that they’ve learned at ITDS with them when they accept positions at the city’s other public schools.

“We still very much believe this model can be replicated,” says Dantzler Williams. “But we are still figuring out a lot of the key pieces. Like our students, we are learning on a regular basis.”

Inside One of America’s First Catholic-to-Charter School Conversions: ‘Intentionally Small,’ Built Around Character & Thriving

January 2019. The 74.

Three rows of second-graders stand facing the front of the classroom. A speaker emits sounds. First, a door creaking. Then, footsteps thudding and a wolf howling, all followed by the unmistakable opening riff of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

The students put their hands on their knees and take four big steps forward before swinging their arms quickly from side to side. When they’ve finished performing this simplified version of Jackson’s choreography, many fall to the floor, giggling.

Jordan Daugherty teaches dance at Center City Public Charter School’s Petworth campus. Today, her second-grade class is learning the difference between improv and choreography.

“That’s great,” Daugherty says. “Now face me upstage. That was choreography. Remember, improv is when you feel the music and move with it. Choreography is when you make up the moves in advance to match the song.”

At Center City Petworth, all students take dance year-round as a part of their regular schedule. It’s an enrichment course, along with STEM and physical education, all components of the school’s commitment to providing every student with a comprehensive education.

“We believe that we need to develop good citizens and well-rounded people, as well as scholars,” says Principal Nazo Burgy. “To do that, our students need to be socially and emotionally healthy. Play is really important to early childhood, and this is a place where kids can be kids. We have schedules, procedures, and routines, but our hallways are not silent.”

Christopher Alvarado (second grade) learns how to echappé in dance class. (Courtesy Center City Public Charter Schools)

Center City Petworth is part of Center Public Charter Schools, a network of six intentionally small schools operating in four of D.C.’s eight wards. Each school has between 200 and 270 students in grades pre-K through eight and only one class of about 25 students per grade.

The Center City network began when a group of private Catholic schools, experiencing financial problems, was on the verge of being shuttered. Many of these schools, like Petworth, had occupied an important place in the community for nearly a century.

“Families wanted the school to survive,” says June Felix, a kindergarten teacher at Center City Petworth and the last remaining teacher from the school’s era as a Catholic institution. “Teachers and parents rallied behind it becoming a charter school.”

In 2008, as part of the first Catholic-to-charter school conversion in the country, the Petworth campus, along with five other Catholic schools, became Center City Public Charter Schools.

“It’s been a great change,” says Felix. “As a Catholic school, we could not take all students. Our community had started to change, and community members who wanted to come to our school couldn’t afford it. We didn’t have the funding to help students with special needs, either. As a charter, we can serve all of them.”

Today, Center City Petworth’s student population is approximately 45 percent Hispanic and 46 percent African-American, with 60 percent of students designated as economically disadvantaged. Currently, 25 percent of Petworth’s students are English language learners, a number that has been increasing each year.

“Our schools are like small neighborhood schools, so they mostly reflect our local community. Our size and the supply and demand of the school lottery, as well as the sibling preference, influences that,” says Alicia Passante, Center City’s ESL program manager. “At Petworth, almost all of our Spanish-speaking students’ families come from El Salvador. We also have a lot of families from Ethiopia and the Philippines.”

After the conversion, the schools’ new leadership removed all religious elements, but they decided to keep the schools small so that teachers could continue to emphasize character development and relationship-building, in addition to providing a high-quality educational program.

For the past three years, the D.C. Public Charter School Board has awarded Center City Petworth a Tier 1 ranking. Although the overall percentage of students scoring at or above proficiency on state exams is on par with the average score for all D.C. public schools, a larger percentage of the school’s “at-risk” and Black/African-American students achieve proficiency than the district-wide average, according to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education’s newly released school report card system. In addition, Center City Petworth boasts a higher in-seat attendance rate, a higher re-enrollment rate, and a lower rate of chronic absenteeism than the district-wide averages.

Following the script — and not following the script

“Because of our size, teachers really get to know students,” says Hannah Groff, the schools’ language access coordinator. “They watch them grow up from kindergarten. Often, they know the family well before they even teach a student, and they often teach siblings.”

Center City Petworth prescribes Common Core-aligned curricula and materials for teachers, like Wit and Wisdom, a K-8 English Language Arts curriculum that emphasizes writing, language, speaking, and listening standards by focusing each unit on an essential question and thematic text set, and Eureka Math, a pre-K–12 curriculum that stresses daily fluency lessons, conceptual learning, and rigor. While the units and day-to-day lessons are provided, teacher creativity is still valued.

“We want teachers to follow the script and not follow the script,” says Passante. “For instance, Eureka Math was too advanced for many of our kids at first, so teachers had to find creative ways to scaffold it. And Wit and Wisdom is a very rich curriculum, but it needs hooks for student buy-in, and hooks come from teacher experience. They’ve got to make it their own by bringing their personalities into it.”

Because of the low teacher-student ratio, students receive a lot of individual attention. Pre-K to first grade is self-contained, taught by a lead teacher and instructional aid. In upper elementary school, teachers have looped classes — they teach the same students for two grades. From second through fifth, students take humanities with one teacher and math and science with another. In middle school, teachers teach all three grades, and there’s both a science and a math teacher. For all grades, the content area teacher usually co-teaches with an inclusion teacher, who specializes in English as a Second Language or special education, depending on the needs of the students in the class.

Sixth-graders Angela Perdomo and De’niyla Young complete an assignment in science class. (Courtesy Center City Public Charter Schools)

“There’s pros and cons to every teaching model,” Passante says. “The pro here is that teachers become masters in their content area, but it’s a lot of work because they prep for multiple grades. The big pro for our students is the building between grade levels. When a second-grade teacher also teaches third grade, that teacher knows exactly where the students need to be standards-wise at the end of second grade to be successful next year.”

Teachers also chose what electives the school offers. Middle school students take a different elective each quarter, usually choosing from three or four offerings. This quarter, some students are taking tap dance while others are taking robotics, where they use Lego Mindstorms kits to build and program their own robots. During the first day of the art elective, P.E. teacher “Coach Sam” Daniel taught students about the minimalist line drawings of Pablo Picasso before they created single-line drawings of their hands, in pen, so that they couldn’t erase. Teachers have to be informed about their elective subjects but not necessarily experts in the subject matter.

Ashley Rubio-Guevara (sixth grade) poses in the science classroom. (Courtesy Center City Public Charter Schools)

School leaders also encourage teachers to make time for their “passion projects.” Fifth-grade humanities teacher Shannon Nuzzelillo loves animals, so she partnered with the Washington Animal Rescue League to provide kids with volunteer opportunities. Her students have learned how to approach animals, and they’ve also practiced their reading skills by snuggling up with, and reading aloud to, a canine friend.

Middle school science teacher Mark Joyner’s classroom is decked out in Star Wars memorabilia. A bookcase behind his desk is filled with action figures. Stickers of C-3PO, R2-D2, Boba Fett, and others cover bulletin boards. At the beginning of the year, he asks students to decide whether they want to join the Light Side or the Dark Side. Then the battle begins. Each day, they compete in “Science Wars”: trivia questions based on the week’s lessons. A drawing of light sabers on the wall, with a scale ranging from Sith apprentice to Sith Lord and Youngling to Jedi Master, marks whether the Light Side or the Dark Side is the week’s winner. Joyner’s love for Star Wars is apparent throughout his classroom, except for the turtles. They are named after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; he let the students pick those.

Strengthening the small school community 

“Being a small school is a blessing and a curse for students,” says Principal Burgy. “Everyone gets to know each other very well. The downside is you’ve got to learn to get along with your peers even if you don’t like someone very much. We focus a lot on social and emotional learning to help strengthen our community relationships.”

Each morning begins with a school-wide, student-led meeting. The students play games, talk about character, and practice mindfulness. Each week, the meetings emphasize a different virtue that benefits the community, like patience, generosity, and honesty. Every Friday, school leaders honor a student who demonstrates that week’s virtue.

Each grade also has monthly socio-emotional lessons. Fourth-graders recently had a lesson on “thinking before speaking” while fifth-graders focused on self-regulation and calming strategies, such as deep breathing, getting a drink of water, and internal counting.

Because it can be challenging to have 3-year-olds and 13-year-olds in the same building, students participate in a “little buddies” program to promote cross-grade community. The older students partner with younger students as reading buddies, and together they read a book one month and then complete a project on it the next. At the end of the school year, they also work together on a school beautification project, such as painting the playground fence or creating a mural for the hallways.

“The ‘little buddy’ system helps us improve our social interactions with the younger ones,” says eighth-grader Chelsea Lazo. “It makes me happy. I like how we get to teach them and help out the community. It makes me think that when I grow up, I might like to do something where I help others.”

Her classmate, Nash Campo, agrees. “Even by reading with someone, I can build small relationships, and it helps me get to know my community better,” he says.

Staff members also conduct home visits to strengthen relationships with students and families. For the 2018-19 school year, the staff’s goal is to conduct a home visit to 90 percent of families. Lazo thinks that home visits are especially helpful when a new teacher or student comes into the community. “My mom felt relieved after the new teacher visited because she got to know her and felt better about sending my little brother into her class,” she says.

“Parent buy-in is the first big outcome. I can see that many parents feel more comfortable,” says Mike Bailey, a first-grade teacher and leader of the school’s family engagement program. “Once they see we have the best intentions for their children, they trust us. Once that trust is built, then we can work together to grow the child.”

Throughout the year, the school has many events — cultural heritage nights, family potluck dinners, a visit to a pumpkin patch, family breakfasts, and more — that they encourage parents to attend.

“Parents become really trusting of this school because of the small community,” says Groff, the language access coordinator. “If they have issues, even when they aren’t school-related, this school is often the first place they come because they feel safe saying, ‘I need help.’”

“My parents, especially my mom, really like this school,” says Campo. He began attending Center City Petworth in second grade when his family moved to the U.S. from the Philippines. “It took awhile for me to speak English, but my teachers were supportive. Over time, my parents got to know everyone at the school — all the teachers and staff — because everyone is really kind. In fourth grade, I had a mild stroke, and Ms. Burgy was really helpful. She took me to the hospital and explained everything to my mom, so she wouldn’t panic.”

The challenge of saying farewell

The transition from the small environment of Center City Petworth to a large-scale high school can be difficult, but the school’s staff works with students so that they’ll know what to expect.

“We really teach our kids how to be their advocates because we know that they’re used to this small school, and that high school could be a rude awakening for them. We hope that by teaching them to advocate for themselves from the start, they’ll understand how to use their voice to get what they need to be successful,” says Passante.

Eighth-grade students have a high school prep class each week with a counselor. The counselors work hard to assist students with getting into the best schools. They do research to match GPAs and test scores with selective and private school requirements to figure out which schools they’re eligible for. The students go on shadow visits to schools where they shadow other students, which helps them find schools where they’re a good fit. Each student applies to five schools through the class. Students participate in mock interviews with counselors. They write application essays and, for private schools, complete scholarship applications.

“It’s nerve-racking,” says Lazo, who hopes to attend either The School Without Walls or Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School next year. “All the applications and the essays, wondering if and where you’ll get in, but it’s also good because when you apply for high school, you’ll get used to how it feels and what to do when you apply for college.”

Counselors also work with families to help educate parents on why a convenient neighborhood school might not be the best option for their child. Many parents don’t like the idea of sending their son or daughter to a school outside the local community. Often counselors have to explain to parents why taking a bus for 40 minutes to a school across town will benefit their child in the long run.

“Our goal is to send 80 percent of our students to Tier 1 charter schools, private schools, or highly selective DCPS schools. Last year, we were just shy of that, with 76 percent,” says Passante. “In general, we try to steer our kids away from the neighborhood high schools, but some do go there and are successful.”

Most students are excited about the prospect of starting high school, but they also realize that they’ve been fortunate to have such a homey environment during their early school years.

“Everyone here is a part of my second family,” says eighth-grader Ashley Velasquez, who has been attending Center City Petworth since kindergarten. “Everyone is so open, and the teachers are there whenever you need them.”

Campo agrees: “Years from now, I’ll still remember how we were like a family here.”

Who is Lewis Ferebee, D.C.’s Next Chancellor?

with David Osborne. The Washington Post. December 2018.

After 11 years of centralization, Lewis D. Ferebee, the choice of D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) to be the next D.C. schools chancellor (subject to confirmation by the D.C. Council), will bring a fresh perspective to D.C. Public Schools. As superintendent of Indianapolis Public Schools, his signature strategy was empowering principals and teachers.

Tall and bespectacled, Ferebee is an affable, soft-spoken leader with an easy smile and a low-key manner. A former public school teacher and assistant principal in his native North Carolina, he says his leadership journey began when, at 25, a superintendent asked him to become principal of his worst elementary school. “He gave me the keys and said, ‘Lewis, you have carte blanche authority. If anybody comes to you about a decision you made, have them come to me.’ ”

That autonomy was the key to his success, Ferebee says. “At the end of the day, if principals feel handcuffed, if teachers feel handcuffed, you’re stifling their creativity. Your best teachers are your most innovative and creative teachers, and they know their learners. So when you don’t give them the full opportunity to make informed decisions about what they know, you’re limiting the opportunity for them to be successful.”

Ferebee also discovered that empowering teachers was his best recruitment tool. His teachers recruited others into the building because they were excited.

Watching his students move on to a failing middle school, he asked his superintendent if he could run that school. When he turned it around, too, the superintendent invited him to oversee all district middle schools. Then a new superintendent came in and made him regional superintendent of a feeder pattern of elementary, middle and high schools that were struggling. Under Ferebee’s leadership, they outperformed the district in academic growth.

When Durham, N.C., hired the district’s chief of staff to be its superintendent, he brought Ferebee along and asked him to turn around all the district’s low-performing schools. Again, Ferebee empowered his principals and teachers. He was telling their story at a national conference when several school board members from Indianapolis, who were looking for a new superintendent, heard him. The next thing he knew, they were inviting him to Indianapolis for an interview.

One thing he discovered in Indianapolis will sound familiar to educators in the District: a “real thick dividing line between traditional public schools and charters.” There was “a lot of finger pointing” and “no collaboration,” he says. The district was “struggling with underutilized facilities, and charter schools were being incubated in old grocery stores and old factories. The whole financial model of that division didn’t make sense to me. We’re still talking about public schools.”

Ferebee also found an unusual degree of centralization within the Indianapolis Public Schools: Principals didn’t even select their assistant principals and teachers. Principals told him their schools weren’t as strong as they could be because they didn’t have enough autonomy, so he empowered them, eventually giving them far more control over their budgets and hiring than traditional public school principals usually enjoy.

He also helped pass state legislation that gave the district authority to create “innovation network schools,” which have the same autonomies charters enjoy and operate outside the district’s union contracts. Most have five-year performance contracts with the district and use district buildings. If a school doesn’t fulfill its contract terms, the district can terminate it or refuse to renew it, but otherwise it cannot interfere with the school’s autonomy.

Some innovation schools are start-ups, some replace failing district schools, some are charters that wanted district buildings and funding and some were existing schools whose principals and teachers chose to convert.

They are nonprofit organizations with their own boards, which hire and fire the principals, set the budgets and pay scales, and choose the school designs. The district has 20 innovation schools (of about 70 district schools), a number expected to grow. After three years of state tests, they are the fastest-improving group of schools in the district.

Though Ferebee turned all district-operated high schools into choice schools, with specialized learning models, most innovation schools are neighborhood schools. Ferebee believes in public school choice, but he also wanted to give access to quality schools to those whose parents don’t choose. In addition, he believes “there is a symbiotic relationship between a neighborhood and a school.” When a school is abandoned, the neighborhood tends to go downhill. He wanted innovation schools to revive neighborhoods.

Teachers and principals in D.C. should welcome Ferebee’s enthusiasm for empowering educators, and parents should welcome his willingness to create new models — even partnerships with charters — if that’s what it takes to produce quality schools for their children.

“My philosophy is this,” he says. “You can have a bad year, but we know those schools, and they exist all across the nation, where every year is a bad year. The outcomes and challenges of those situations are very steep to overcome for the students and their families. It’s typically the neighborhood schools, where students are required to attend. That’s a social justice issue, an equity issue. I am of the belief that we get students out of those situations by any means necessary.”

The “Dating App” That Helps Teachers Find A Best-Fit School

October 2018. Forbes.

After two years of teaching pre-kindergarten, Cristina Guadalupe was ready to transition to the elementary level. Dedicated to working with low-income students, she began applying to schools in underserved communities across Camden, New Jersey. She sent out application after application but heard nothing back.

“Each application took me hours to complete, and I couldn’t even be sure someone read it. It was getting hard to stay hopeful,” she says.

Then, she found Selected.

Launched in 2016, Selected is a hiring tool for schools, but Waine Tam, the app’s developer and company’s CEO, describes it as a “dating app for teachers and schools.”

Teachers fill out a profile where they relay their qualifications and experience. Then, they answer questions about desired school culture and pedagogical preferences.

These questions ask about instructional models, discipline, classroom systems, and curriculum. For example, do you prefer inquiry-based learning or direct instruction? Should curriculum be teacher-created or school-provided?  Should student discipline procedures have roots in a primarily restorative justice or a “no excuses” approach?

Schools fill out a similar profile, providing basic information (location, school type, grades served, staff and student demographics, etc.), a description of what makes them unique, a fun fact and a sketch of their ideal candidate. Schools also answer questions about their culture and pedagogy.

Selected then uses algorithms similar to those used by dating apps to match a teacher with best-fit schools. The schools receive a list of candidates who meet their staffing requirements, and those teachers who are the best “cultural fits” appear at the top of the list.

Tam explains that Selected is designed not only to create a streamlined hiring process for teachers but also to help them find a best-fit school. The service is always free for teachers, and schools and districts only pay once they hire a candidate who they found through the platform. On average, five compatible schools contact a candidate within the first week.

“On Selected, I filled out one application, described my ideal working environment and within two days I received a message from the director of ECO [Environment Community Opportunity] public charter school, asking me if I’d like to come in for an interview” says Guadalupe, who now teaches first grade at ECO.

“Schools were able to see right away that I didn’t have experience at the elementary level, which meant that the ones that connected with me knew that I’m still at a phase of my career where I need mentorship,” says Guadalupe.

That wasn’t an issue for ECO. The school has a strong mentorship program for teachers in their early years and a pipeline of professional development specifically targeted at helping teachers with less experience achieve success.

“ECO is a school where I’m a good fit,” says Guadalupe. “It’s a small school with a tight sense of community, and the leaders focus on the whole child. We don’t use only test scores to determine how well a child is doing. I believe in holistic teaching, and the rest of the faculty does too. We all have the same vision for success.”

“Looking for a job is like dating,” says Tam. “With dating, you have to meet a lot of people to see what you like. With job searching, you need to see the breadth and the diversity of workplaces available to know where you’ll fit.

We found that unlike other professionals, teachers didn’t have means to easily access that information. We wanted to create that for them.”

Making Autonomous Schools Visible

When researching and developing Selected, Tam and his team talked with school leaders, district representatives, and teachers.

Tam discovered that many large urban school districts don’t feel pressured to actively recruit top-quality talent. “A lot of district representatives that we spoke with had this monopoly-like attitude, essentially saying, ‘Why bother? Where else are teachers going to apply?’” says Tam. “So early on, we partnered mostly with public charter schools because they were responsive to trying Selected in a way that most districts weren’t.”

Charter schools are public schools operated by independent organizations, usually nonprofits. Most are schools of choice, and unlike magnet schools in traditional districts, they are not allowed to select their students. Freed from many rules and top-down policies constraining district-operated schools, charter school leaders have direct control over most school-level decisions. In exchange for increased autonomy, they are normally held accountable for their performance by their authorizers, who can close or replace them if their students aren’t learning enough.

While many principals at district-operated schools must choose teachers based on whoever’s next on the district-approved hiring list, charter school leaders can be selective about the teachers they hire. Yet, Tam and his team found that public charter schools often struggle to make themselves discoverable to teachers. They usually don’t have the money for headhunters or widespread advertising. They lack the manpower of a human resources department, and school leaders spend hours shifting through low-quality resumes, looking for top-quality candidates. Many rely on job board postings, a strategy known among these leaders as “post and pray.”

“Individual charters needed visibility, and the lack of centralization made them easier to work with,” Tam says. “The school leaders were willing to be innovative about hiring, and they had the autonomy to do it.”

David Rosas is the head of Heketi Charter School, a dual-language immersion school in the South Bronx. Prior to finding Selected, Rosas went to job fairs and attempted to recruit teachers.

“I’d be in the middle of talking to a candidate, and then they’d realize we’re located deep in the South Bronx, and the person either didn’t want to travel out there or didn’t want to work with our kids. I wanted to find people who want to teach in the Bronx. I didn’t want to have to convince someone to take a job at our school; that’s insulting to our kids,” he says.

Rosas now uses Selected as his main recruitment tool. It’s productive because he can see which candidates fit in culturally with the school and then start a conversation to see if they’re a good fit in other areas, too. Rosas seeks teachers who want to become imbedded in the community and whose pedagogical beliefs are rooted in positive discipline as well as recognizing the humanity of each child.

“There’s a lot of stereotypes about who goes to school in the South Bronx,” says Rosas. “We want to make sure those stereotypes don’t influence how our educators engage with families, the community, and each other. The warmth of our school comes from the staff trusting and respecting all members of the community. We’re very protective of that warmth.”

Through Selected, Heteki has found teachers, a current school leader, and a reading specialist. So far, all have been successful placements.

Creating A Teacher-Centric Approach To Hiring

However, many teachers don’t realize that employment opportunities outside their district, like working in public charter schools, exist.

“Despite having some of the most unique teaching and learning environments in the country, individual public charter schools have been in a tough recruitment spot when compared with districts or large CMOs [charter management organizations],” says Tam. “A lot of teachers don’t even realize that charter schools are public schools, and they certainly aren’t aware of the variety of learning models that these schools offer.”

Because charters are schools of choice and their leaders have the autonomy to set school culture and curriculum, they often utilize unique learning models – Montessori, project-based, dual-language, residential, etc. Being able to choose from a variety of learning models increases the ability of teachers to find a best-fit school.

“For a lot of teachers, there’s an air of desperation when job changing, and many places take advantage of that by making teachers feel like they only have one option and that they’d better take the offer before it expires,” Tam says. “Teachers make suboptimal choices about where to work because they don’t think they have the time or know-how to find a best-fit school.”

Some teachers told Tam that they had stayed at schools where they were unhappy because the springtime hiring window overlaps with the timeframe for contract renewal, and they feared they might not get a different placement.

“These were quality teachers,” says Tam. “It was amazing that they didn’t see themselves as a scarce resource. I thought, ‘we need to find a way to put quality teachers into schools where they’re happy before they leave teaching altogether.’ Schools needed to be approaching these teachers, not the other way around.”

“Honestly, it was just luck that I came across Selected online,” says Zenon Mills, a special education teacher at Monument Academy Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. Mills had recently finished his teacher training outside of downtown Chicago, and he was looking for a job in the District. “I used Selected concurrently with the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) application process,” Mills says. “Selected was easy and intuitive; the DCPS system was exhausting.”

Monument Academy is a weekday boarding school that serves students who have experienced trauma at home, especially those who are currently in, or at risk of being placed in, foster care. As part of his teacher training, Mills taught at a residential therapeutic school.  Many of that school’s students were sent there in lieu of jail sentences, and Mills felt that Monument’s focus on a student’s ability to grow mirrored his values as well as those of his previous school.

“Selected let me list what I wanted in a school, and I think that helped guide Monument’s choice in me,” says Mills. “I fit in really well with the culture because the school focuses on what I think are the important issues around students’ well-being. There’s also a lot of support in terms of professional growth, which I like. I get observed every three weeks or so.”

Monument hired Mills over a full month before DCPS entered him into its “preferred teachers pool,” which is the part of the hiring process when principals can contact candidates.

According to Tam, that’s not uncommon. “Many of our single-site schools contact candidates quickly, and they aren’t required to go through a central system first,” Tam explains. “Human resources representatives at a central office often take a lot longer to respond to a candidate than an eager principal would. We had one district tell us that our candidates weren’t responsive, but when we looked at our data, we found that our candidates had accepted other job offers in the time that it took for that district’s central office to make initial contact.”

However, Tam has worked with some forward-thinking principals at district schools. These principals create accounts on Selected, find a best-fit teacher, and then instruct that person to apply to the district. It’s a creative strategy, but it still forces teaching candidates to go through an extra layer of bureaucracy.

“It’s not that there aren’t unique school models within districts – there absolutely are – but they’re often a part of a highly centralized hiring process,” says Tam.

Districts that continue to rely on such a hiring process baffle Tam. “The hiring process is the first aspect of a future work environment that a potential employee experiences,” he says. “It influences your reputation as an employer. With a good recruitment process, people will say, ‘This place chases quality. They value teachers and treat them with respect.’ And that builds a pipeline for recruiting future talent. Shouldn’t every district and school want to make a good first impression?”

Selected now partners with over 650 schools across urban areas in seven states, and it’s beginning to partner with more districts, too. Unfortunately, many districts do have a highly centralized hiring process. In these districts, the central office hiring team uses Selected as a way of finding high-quality candidates for the district pool rather than focusing on finding a best-fit teacher for each school.

While Selected is an innovative tool for recruiting best-fit teachers, it’s not a substitute for organizational change. After all, utilizing Selected has been the most beneficial to teachers and schools when principals have had control over staffing decisions.  School districts need to give their principals the same hiring autonomy granted to those at charter schools so that all public schools leaders have the ability to find teachers who best fit the needs of their school and, by extension, the needs of their students. 

From Troubled School to Turnaround to Texas ‘Teaching Lab’

October 2018. The 74.

“Good morning, scholars!” principal-in-training Jackie Navar yells, kicking off the community meeting at Ogden Elementary School, part of the 78207 zip code on San Antonio’s struggling West Side.

Hundreds of children echo Navar’s salutations.

“What’s a college-ready word for ‘good’?” Navar asks the room. Hands shoot up into the air: “Amazing.” “Fantastic.” “Great.”

“Excellent. Here’s a new one for you — ‘phenomenal.’ Can we all say that together?”

At Ogden, each school day begins with breakfast followed by community meetings like this one. Preschoolers eat in their classrooms, kindergartners through third-graders in the cafeteria, fourth- and fifth-graders in the gym, and sixth-graders upstairs. Ninety-eight percent of Ogden’s 650 students qualify as economically disadvantaged, and every one receives a free school breakfast.

“The community meeting helps our scholars start the day with a positive mindset,” says Tim Saintsing, executive director of teaching and learning labs at Relay Graduate School of Education, which was brought in to run the school after years of poor performance. “It lets students and staff reflect on our core values and our sense of self as a school. It gives us a chance to celebrate our successes and discuss our challenges.”

Today, a first- and second-grade class are being honored with attendance awards. As a prize, the students get to sing their homeroom chants, and then, in what’s known as a “thunder clap,” the room simultaneously brings their hands together once — loudly — in their honor.

“Remember,” Navar yells across the cafeteria, “If you miss school, you…”

“Miss out!” the kids shout back in unison.

It’s a vastly different atmosphere from the Ogden Elementary of 2016.

Back then, the Texas Education Agency labeled Ogden Elementary as an “improvement required” school for the fourth consecutive year. Students were significantly behind grade level. Inside the school, chaos reigned, according to staff who were there. Teachers struggled with classroom management, and students often ran in and out of class, making the hallway their playground.

With a state-enforced shutdown of the campus looming, the leadership of the San Antonio Independent School District invited the Relay Graduate School of Education to help them reimagine the school. At the start of the 2017 school year, Relay began a partnership with the district and Ogden through which Relay provided supports to the school. Relay trained and coached the principal, placed 25 resident teachers in Ogden, and helped select the new curriculum.

In the spring of 2018, the San Antonio school board voted to give Relay Lab Schools Texas operational authority over Ogden, which, beginning this school year, also includes management responsibilities.

With Relay at the helm, chaos has been replaced with structure, staff members say, discipline with engaging curriculum, and teacher turnover with a teacher pipeline.

Chapter 1: A meaningful partnership

The Relay Graduate School of Education began in New York City and became an independent accredited graduate school of education in 2011. Relay prides itself on having an approach that thoughtfully combines theory and practice. At Relay, aspiring teachers spend an entire year in K-12 classrooms, compared to a typical 10-week student teaching experience, developing effective instructional delivery, building meaningful student relationships, and honing their student engagement skills.

The graduate school has a two-year residency program — the Relay Teaching Residency — in which teacher residents spend their first year under a master teacher, who acts as a mentor, while they earn their teaching certificate. In the second year, they transition to full-time, lead teachers with the support of the master teacher, while simultaneously earning their master’s degrees in teaching.

Over the last seven years, Relay has begun operating in 13 states. Having heard about the success of Relay, San Antonio ISD Superintendent Pedro Martinez decided to visit a Relay campus in Houston.

“He wanted to develop a teacher training and talent pipeline for SAISD,” Saintsing, Relay’s executive director of Lab Schools, explains. “We began to have discussions at length about what a meaningful partnership looks like. Ogden was the second-lowest performing school in the district, and the kids were really far behind. He wanted to work together to figure out a creative solution.”

The solution? Transform Ogden into a Relay Lab School. Under this partnership model, Ogden has 21 master teachers, each with a teaching resident in their classroom. One-third of the teaching residents come from the district, one-third come from the state, and the other third come from throughout the country. The program is tuition-free upon the condition that graduates work in San Antonio ISD for three years after completing the program. All of Ogden’s teachers remain school district employees.

“We are deeply embedded in the partnership with the district,” Saintsing said. “We worked closely with SAISD human resources to find our master teachers; all of Ogden’s previous staff members were invited to reapply for their position. Not all chose to do so, but those that did, received master teacher positions at Ogden.”

Chapter 2: Successful instruction needs strong school culture

“The first year has been all about resetting culture in the building, for both students and staff,” Saintsing says.

During the summer, Ogden’s staff members attend four-week training sessions. The goal is to come together and set the vision for the “weather” of the school. Ogden’s teachers learn the importance of developing routines with students and families. Teachers have to teach kids “what school looks like,” meaning how to greet teachers, how to organize their backpacks, how to have classroom discussions. They communicate with parents every night to let them know how their “scholar” did that day.

The school day now runs from 7:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Monday through Thursday. On Fridays, students dismiss at 12:30 p.m. so teachers can have the afternoon for professional development and collaborative planning.

“I can’t overstate how important the reset is,” says Saintsing. “You can’t do successful instruction without school culture. If you create a strong learning environment, and set the table for high quality instruction with it, you’ll see academic gains.”

During a tour of Ogden this spring,a kindergartener comes out of the cafeteria, struggling to carry his breakfast while wearing a cast. Saintsing carries his tray, and walks Jordan to Lauren Almand’s class.

Today, Felipe Alvarez, the resident teacher working under Almand, is teaching the whole group for the first time.

Jordan sits at table at the edge of the classroom where two other students are already eating their breakfasts. Late for school that morning, the pair likewise missed breakfast in the cafeteria and the community meeting. Neither teacher calls attention to Jordan’s lateness. When the girl sitting next to him finishes her breakfast, she quietly moves from the table to her desk – an established classroom procedure for tardiness.

The class is watching a video of a science experiment. Alvarez points at the gloves and goggles that the scientists are wearing. “Goggles protect our…”

“Eyes,” the class shouts.

“Glove protected our…”

“Hands,” they call back.

“Tomorrow, we’re going to do this experiment together. I’m going to alter it first so that it’s safe for you,” Alvarez says. He then holds up a beaker and explains that it has sodium bicarbonate in it, which is the scientific name for baking soda.

As he’s talking, a boy sitting near the back of the classroom becomes antsy. He stands and sits and stands again. Before long, he walks away from his desk and begins to wander around the room.

“Come here,” Alvarez says. “Looks like baking soda, doesn’t it?” The boy looks in the beaker and nods. “Good, David T. confirms that it’s baking soda. Now, go sit down so I can show you what we’re going to do tomorrow.”

Using his classroom management, Alvarez transforms what some would consider a classroom disruption into an opportunity for encouraging a student’s curiosity, perfectly showcasing Saintsing’s description of one of Relay’s core beliefs: “Teachers control the weather in their classrooms.”

Chapter 3: Changing curriculum to change student outcomes

“A lot of the magic is our curricular choices,” Saintsing says. “If curriculum isn’t consistent schoolwide, you’ll have pockets of greatness, but not greatness as a whole.”

At Relay’s lab schools, teachers focus more on instructional delivery rather than curriculum design, leveraging pre-made lesson plans from research-based curriculum.

Because so few students were on grade-level when Relay began its work with Ogden, the school’s curriculum focuses heavily on improving fundamental reading and math skills.

Younger elementary students have three hours of literacy learning each day — one for guided reading, one for reading skills (phonetics and all things fundamental), and one for writing. Students have 90 minutes of math. There’s art and fitness daily.

Each student also has a Chromebook. Computer-based assignments are used to help students learn digital skills and self-management, not replace teacher instruction. Older students spend 80 minutes a day on reading, math, science, and writing. The first 40 minutes are spent with a teacher; the second 40 are working on a Chromebook.

Because each classroom has a master teacher and resident teacher, students receive a lot of individual attention and often learn in small groups. In one first-grade class a small group of students was reading aloud with the master teacher, while another was working on phonics with the resident teacher, and a third was working on Chromebooks.

Chapter 4: Miles to go before we sleep

The West Side of San Antonio has historically been one of the poorest zip codes in the country. Generations of families have gone to Ogden, and it’s an important part of the community. The school currently only has one school bus for special need students; most of the kids walk because they live within the surrounding blocks.

“It was important to me that this remain a zoned, neighborhood school,” Saintsing says. He believes that every child should be entitled to a quality neighborhood school, regardless of where they live.

Keeping the school a community-centered place was an integral part of Relay’s vision for Ogden’s future. The school’s leadership seeks out unsung heroes from West San Antonio and shines a spotlight on their achievements. They invite them to be guest speakers at the community meetings.

In May, Xelena González, a children’s book author who writes stories inspired by her upbringing on the West Side, talked to the fourth- and fifth- graders at a special assembly. Not only had González grown up in the neighborhood, but she had also attended Ogden as a child.

She told the students how her fifth grade teacher made her diagram sentences — and how she hated it. She thought it “so boring.” But it helped her later, she told her young listeners, when she began learning to write more complex sentences.

These efforts are a part of the leadership’s commitment to changing the public narrative about the West Side while simultaneously inspiring students about their futures.

The school’s administration is determined to raise expectations and permanently expel the belief gap — the internalized belief that low-income students can’t excel academically —both from staff and students.

“We have a focus on college and postsecondary education because that’s where we believe our kids belong,” Saintsing says. “We refuse to celebrate kindergarten and middle school graduations. High school graduation is the minimum bar; college graduation is the expectation.”

The school is making progress. Both student test scores and school culture are moving in the right direction. Last year, the district introduced the Northwest Evaluation Association’s Measure of Academic Progress exams for kindergarteners through eighth-graders. Students take the exams three times a year: at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end. In the 2017-2018 school year, 100 percent of kindergarteners made expected growth on the exams and students in first and second grade saw double-digit gains. After the first year of the partnership, teacher retention at Ogden was over 90 percent.

Because of its success so far, the Relay partnership model at Ogden is being replicated at Storm Elementary, another San Antonio ISD school labeled “improvement required” for multiple years in a row by the state.

Saintsing admits that there are still challenges ahead — and that progress will take time. Resetting culture has been more difficult with older students. Habits have become embedded; student buy-in is harder to come by. Teachers who work on the second floor, in the fourth- to sixth-grade classrooms, have jobs that look extremely different than those on the first floor.

These teachers focus intently on creating positive student-teacher relationships and demonstrating that the expectations for Ogden students have changed dramatically from years past..

“We’ve made progress,” Saintsing says, “And we’re proud of that, but we have miles to go before we sleep.”

Where Politics Make Charters Difficult, 9 Tips for How Urban Districts Can Create Charter-like Schools — and Improve Their Success

with David Osborne. September 2018. The 74.

Over the past 15 years, the fastest improvement in urban public education has come from cities that have embraced charter schools’ formula for success — autonomy, choice, diversity of school designs, and real accountability for performance. To compete, many districts have recently tried to spur charterlike innovation and increase student achievement by granting their school leaders more autonomy.

District-run autonomous schools are a hybrid model, a halfway point between charters and traditional public schools. They’re operated by district employees, but they can opt out of many district policies and — in some cities — union contracts.

Our recent analysis of state exam scores from 2015 and 2016 in Boston, Memphis, Denver, and Los Angeles showed that public charter schools outperformed both traditional public and in-district autonomous schools on standardized tests in three of the four cities studied. In the one exception, Memphis, the district concentrated its best principals and teachers in, and provided extra funding and support to, its autonomous iZone schools.

However, when the political landscape makes chartering difficult, in-district autonomous models may be the second-best option. Districts can increase the success of these schools if they heed these nine lessons learned by the four cities in our study.

Protect unrestricted autonomy

When autonomy is limited, so is principals’ ability to meet students’ needs. Districts need to give these schools unrestricted staffing and budgeting authority.

Staffing autonomy allows school leaders to hire effective staff who believe in their school’s vision, and to evaluate staff based not only on performance but also on cultural fit. Forced placement of teachers not only harms student learning; it can also undermine a school’s culture. As one autonomous school principal in Los Angeles said, sometimes a principal needs to “lose a teacher and save a school.”

Budgeting autonomy enables principals to hire staff according to their schools’ unique needs — for example, bringing on additional guidance counselors rather than a dean. Leaders who control their own budgets can fund hands-on learning, purchase tablets for blended learning, hire a full-time substitute teacher, or employ any of a hundred other innovations.

Create a district office or independent board to support and protect autonomous schools

Autonomous school leaders spend a significant amount of time fighting to exercise the autonomies they have been promised. Sometimes, they get so frustrated, they leave. Districts with autonomous schools should create a central unit dedicated to supporting them, defending their autonomy and advocating on their behalf when disputes arise.

An alternative is to create a 501(c)3 nonprofit board, as Denver has. These boards are appointed, not elected, so they are free to make decisions that benefit students and schools without fear of political backlash. The boards oversee school progress, provide financial oversight, select school leaders and evaluate their performance, and protect them from district micromanagement.

Articulate a district-wide theory of action and secure buy-in from central office staff

Changing the mindset of the central office requires a huge cultural shift. Autonomous schools necessitate that many parts of the central office do things differently, so employees need to believe in the connection between school autonomy and student success, rather than seeing autonomous schools as an inconvenience and/or a challenge to centralized authority. District leaders need to openly discuss why they believe school autonomy will produce better performance, share this information publicly with school leaders, central office employees, teachers, and the community — and constantly reinforce the message.

Turn some central services into public enterprises that must compete with other providers for schools’ business

The fastest way to change the mindset of central office staff who provide services to schools — such as professional development, food, maintenance, and security — is to take away their monopoly. When internal service shops have to sink or swim in a competitive market, they almost always swim, because they are much closer to their customers than private competitors are. But, in the process, they increase their quality and reduce their costs.

Authorize district-run autonomous schools like charter schools

Rigorous authorization has been essential to the success of strong charter sectors. Districts should use similar processes to authorize their own autonomous schools — allowing only the most promising applicants to open schools and removing those that prove ineffective. A careful authorization process weeds out weak proposals at the beginning, reviews performance along the way, and replaces schools that fail with stronger operators.

Ensure continuous improvement by using a clear system of accountability to close and/or replace failing schools

A common shortcoming among districts with autonomous school models is their failure to impose consequences that create real urgency among teachers and principals — closing and replacing failing schools. Every district should implement a performance framework that requires schools to show academic growth. If they fail, the district should provide additional supports during a probationary period but replace them if they still don’t meet targets. If a school is successful, the district should provide resources and incentives to encourage it to open another campus, as Denver does with its Innovation Schools.

Invest in developing autonomous school leaders

Giving schools autonomy does nothing to help student achievement if school leaders follow district procedures rather than looking for ways to be innovative. Districts need to invest in developing school leaders so they can take advantage of their freedoms. Careful selection of and support for principals has been a large part of the Memphis iZone’s success. Novice principals there are placed in partnerships with experienced principals, meeting over the summer and throughout the year to collaborate on strategies for leveraging autonomy to achieve results.

When possible, give families a choice of autonomous schools

Families and students who can choose their school tend to show more commitment than children who are assigned to one. Choice empowers them, and people who feel empowered are more likely to give their best efforts. In addition, systems of choice allow for the creation of schools with a variety of learning models, so students can select a school with the culture and curriculum that best fit their needs.

Explore district-run autonomous models from other cities

By examining a variety of successful strategies, districts can find and adapt the model that best fits their political climate and meets the needs of their community.

In addition to the four cities we studied, Springfield, Massachusetts, and Indianapolis, Indiana, have launched interesting in-district autonomy strategies.

The Springfield Empowerment Zone Partnership, created as an alternative to a state takeover of several schools, contains nine struggling middle schools and one high school that have been given significant autonomy, overseen by a seven-member board of four state-appointed officials and three locally appointed members. The teachers union negotiated a new contract that includes longer hours, increased pay, and some compensation based on performance.

Indianapolis’s Innovation Network Schools, which start with full charter-like autonomy rather than with waivers from district rules, are the fastest-improving in the district. They have the same exemption from laws, regulations, and contract provisions as charters, and while the schools operate in district buildings, the principals and teachers are employed by the nonprofit corporation that operates the school. Each school’s board hires and fires the principal, sets the budget and pay scale, and chooses the school design. The nonprofits have five- to seven-year performance contracts with the district. If schools fail to fulfill the terms of their contracts, the district can refuse to renew them; otherwise, the district cannot interfere with their autonomy.

By following the recommendations above, districts can create self-renewing systems in which every school has the incentives and autonomy to continuously innovate and improve. At the same time, they can offer a variety of school models to families, to meet a variety of children’s needs.

Whether school boards will have the courage to close failing autonomous schools full of unionized district employees will always be a question. The long-term sustainability of in-district autonomy after the leaders who championed it have left is another Achilles’ heel. But if done well and sustained, such schools have the potential to improve public education in urban America.

An Unlikely Alliance: Here's What Can Happen If Teachers Unions Embrace Charter Schools

September 2018. Forbes.

For the past six months, education experts have speculated at length about the role of teachers unions after the Supreme Court decision in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). 

Some argue that the inability to charge all teachers agency fees, even if they don’t join the union, will force the unions to focus more on the needs of teachers and less on influencing election results. Others suggest that to attract new members the unions will need to highlight and increase the professional development opportunities – continuing education, technology training, leadership conferences, etc.– that they offer.

While the loss of agency fees may hurt teachers unions in the short term, it clearly presents an opportunity for them to reinvent themselves, to evolve and find their place in 21st-century education systems.

In Minnesota, two local union leaders have spent the better part of the last decade doing just that. In 2011, Louise Sundin and Lynn Nordgren helped form The Minnesota Guild of Public Charter Schools, a union-backed charter school authorizer created to oversee schools that promote teacher leadership and professionalism.

As far back as 1988, Al Shanker, the former president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), began to envision transforming the professional roles of both teachers and their unions, and charter schools had a place in that transformation. In Shanker’s vision, AFT delegates would advocate for reducing the central office bureaucracy that surrounded teaching and replacing it with small, teacher-led learning communities.

Having come across the work of University of Massachusetts’s professor Ray Budde, Shanker grew interested in a new structure for public education– one in which school boards would enter directly into contracts, known as “charters,” with the teachers at each school. The teachers would have autonomy over the school, controlling the decisions that directly affected their daily work and student learning, and they would be held accountable for results. 

In 1988, the AFT proposed that local school boards and unions take the first step towards this structure by jointly developing a procedure that allowed teams of teachers to run autonomous schools within the schools where they already taught. By 1994, Shanker had come to realize the importance of holding charter schools accountable for performance, and he stressed the need for statewide curriculum and assessment frameworks. However, with those guardrails in place, he asked, “Why shouldn’t every school be a charter and enjoy the kind of autonomy now being offered only to a few?”

Unfortunately, many present-day union leaders have turned their backs on Shanker’s vision. Public charters operate independently of school districts and their union contracts. Historically, few teachers at public charter schools have opted to unionize, so union leaders fear that the creation of more charter schools will lead to falling membership and revenue. Instead of encouraging new membership by developing services that meet the needs of these charter teachers, in the years since Shanker’s death, national leaders have focused instead on condemning charter schools .

However, Sundin and Nordgren decided to go against the grain and turn charters from foe to friend. After spending decades working on efforts to professionalize teaching within the current public school system, the two have spent the last few years working to help the Guild authorize charter schools that embody Shanker’s vision– not schools run by large charter management organizations but teacher-led schools where teachers take on truly professional roles, controlling the decisions that directly affect school operations and student learning.

A Lifetime of Professionalizing Teaching

In 1991, after 20 years of teaching in Minneapolis Public Schools, Lynn Nordgren left the classroom and began working full-time with then-Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) president Louise Sundin. They wanted to professionalize teaching through union-sponsored programs.

Utilizing research-based best strategies on human growth and development, Nordgren along with teacher, union, and district leadership started a peer assistance and review program called the Professional Development Process, through which teachers developed personalized, professional goals and worked with teams of colleagues to achieve them. Teachers' goals focused on student-centered learning strategies, and the team review process emphasized peer coaching, collaborative planning, and keeping portfolios of progress. Through this process, the MFT helped increase the rigor of the teaching profession. The program included professional support and intervention for poor performing teachers. District mentors were brought in to work with these teachers and help them improve their practice. Teachers who were unwilling or unable to improve ultimately either resigned or were released from their positions, with the MFT ensuring due process was upheld. The Professional Development Process removed more ineffective teachers from the classroom than the previous system in which principals were in charge of teacher evaluation.

From 1997 to 2008, Nordgren created a variety of promising programs like this one, only to see them undermined by the district bureaucracy.

“The peer assistance and review system was really great at first,” she says. “Teachers and other school staff could pick the areas that they wanted to get better at and really take ownership over their professions. Then the district decided that everyone should have a reading and a math goal, even if those weren’t the teacher’s chosen improvement areas ... even if the teacher was a physical education or art teacher. Then it was decided that everyone needed the same district-set number of peer evaluations. Then the district decided that everyone needed principal evaluations again, and the peer aspect fell by the wayside. Eventually, the program went a from teacher-driven work of joy to another form of centralized, mandated labor.”

Louise Sundin ran into similar problems during her two decades as MFT president. She spent years advocating for the creation of schools where teachers controlled the school-level decision making. In the 1990s she helped start six innovation schools, places of unique pedagogy and teacher empowerment. Within six years, however, top-down regulations had transformed them back into schools that looked and functioned just like all others in the district.

In 2005, she led a union-backed push for site-based schools that gave teachers more autonomy, but the district was reluctant to relinquish control.

In 2009, after Nordgren was elected as its president, the MFT went to the state legislature to ask that they expand school-level autonomy by allowing for the creation of in-district “self-governed schools.” Once again, the central office prevailed with regulations that made implementing aspects of the legislation difficult.

“The idea was to get us out from under the crushing weight of top-down decision making,” Nordgren says. “We spent nearly a decade working towards these self-governed schools. But once we got them, things kept changing at the central office– curriculum mandates, scheduling policies, etc.– and with those changes went the autonomy. Every change in district leadership also affected our autonomy.”

Nordgren knew that the time had come for a new strategy. Teacher-powered schools were growing steadily within the state’s charter sector. If there were ever going to be public schools that offered teachers authentically professional roles, teachers would have to create them, outside district control. And the union could help with that.  

“For 15 years, we’d been saying, as a union, ‘Kill the charters,’” Nordgren says. “Then we wanted to transition to be authorizers because we, as professionals, were looking for ways to be more creative than we currently could be. We had to keep moving forward, not just for progressive unionism but for progressive education, for kids.”

Embracing Charters and Fleeing the Bureaucracy

In 2010, Nordgren applied for grants from the American Federation of Teachers Innovation Fund to start a charter school authorizer.

“Conventional wisdom suggests that the interests of teachers unions and charter schools are at odds. I believe that’s wrong,” Nordgren wrote in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. In 2011, the MFT sponsored the Minnesota Guild of Public Charter Schools, the first union-led authorizer in the nation. Since then, the Guild has received over $500,000 in grants from the AFT.

The Guild wants the charters in its portfolio to be as teacher-powered as possible. Not all of its 14 schools are fully teacher-powered, but even its more traditional ones encourage giving teachers a voice in school-level decisions such as creating discipline policies, developing curriculum, and selecting new staff members.

“Lynn and Louise are two of the most progressive and forward thinkers about the role of unions in professional development,” explains Alex Vitrella of the Teacher-Powered Schools Initiative. “The Guild has worked with teachers at these schools to show them strategies for following teacher-powered initiatives.”

Teachers have the right to organize at every Guild-authorized school, but they don’t have to; it’s a decision left up to the professionals at the school.

So far, only three schools have done so. Each charter school essentially functions as its own district and must develop its own union contract, bylaws, etc. That’s a lot of work for a small school; however, there are benefits, too. Each school can design a contract that takes into account the input of its staff, thereby creating a union-school relationship that meets the specific needs of the professionals working in that building.

“Of course we want all of our Guild schools to organize. Why wouldn’t we?” asks Nordgren. “I’ve been a union member all of my life. For me, the union has been a wonderful professional resource and having union representation in my schools has always contributed to a stronger, better work environment. But part of our job as union representatives is to show others what the benefits of organizing are, to understand what the needs of our teachers are and to seek to meet them.”

A Relationship in Jeopardy?

Unfortunately, since her election in 2016, Nordgren’s successor Michelle Wiese has fought to win battles in an us-vs.-them labor-management system, rather than promoting a new organizational structure with teachers at the helm of schools.

“It’s unfortunate that under this current leadership, the MFT has taken a step back from these opportunities for teachers to lead their schools,” says Nordgren.  

Meanwhile, the Minnesota Guild has fallen out of favor with the local union. For its first few years, it shared office space in the MFT building, free of charge, but the MFT voted it out in 2016. Likewise, an active union representative no longer sits on the Guild’s board.

Union leadership in a post-Janus world could learn a lot from the efforts of Nordgren and Sundin. While both are proud of the union’s history, they, like Shanker, have been looking ahead and changing the status quo in education. With their vision for teacher professionalism and progressive unionism, these two former presidents of the MFT found a third way in the war between anti-union education reformers and anti-charter union activists.

Their efforts could serve as model for teachers unions looking to reinvent themselves in a post-Janus world. But will other union leaders be brave enough to walk the line? Or will they stand their ground and become as outdated as the industrial-age school systems they originally organized against?

Five Reasons Why Independent Charters Outperform In-District Autonomous Schools

August 2018. Forbes. 

Over the past 15 years, cities across the country have experienced rapid growth in the number of public charter schools serving their students. Charter schools are public schools operated by independent organizations, usually nonprofits. They are freed from many of the rules that constrain district-operated schools. In exchange for increased autonomy, they are normally held accountable for their performance by their authorizers, who close or replace them if they fail to educate children. Most are schools of choice, and unlike magnet schools in traditional districts, they are not allowed to select their students. If too many students apply, they hold lotteries to see who gets in.

The charter formula – autonomy, accountability, diversity of learning models, choice and operation by nonprofits – is transforming urban education. In states with strong charter laws and equally strong authorizers, charter schools have produced impressive students gains, especially in schools with high-minority, high-poverty populations.

Recently, districts from Boston to Los Angeles have tried to increase student achievement by replicating parts of this formula, in particular giving their school leaders more autonomy.  

District-run “autonomous” schools are a hybrid model— a halfway point between charters and traditional public schools. They’re still operated by district employees, but school leaders can opt out of many district rules and, in some models, union contracts.

The Progressive Policy Institute’s recent analysis of state exam scores from 2015 and 2016 in Boston, Memphis, Denver, and Los Angeles shows that public charter schools outperformed both traditional public and in-district autonomous schools on standardized tests in three of the four cities studied. In the one exception, Memphis, the district concentrated its best principals and teachers in, and provided extra funding and support to, its autonomous schools.

The analysis reveals that district-run autonomous schools in these cities sometimes performed better than traditional public schools, but they seldom performed as well as independent public charters. So the big question is: what do independent charter schools have that district-run autonomous schools are missing?

Below are five reasons why public charter schools outperform district-run autonomous schools.

1. Most Independent Charter Schools Have True Autonomy

Charter school leaders have true autonomy over staffing, school models, curriculum, budgeting, school calendars and schedules and professional development. Without the constraints of district policies, charter leaders can create educational models that work best for their students – whether Montessori, project-based, dual-language, or others. They can choose curriculum and materials that engage their teachers and students. They can manage their own school budgets, using money creatively and effectively and to meet the unique needs of their students. If needed, they can extend the school year.

Many in-district autonomous schools allegedly have these freedoms too. In reality, however, the long reach of the district’s central office sometimes hamstrings them, making their autonomies little more than paper promises.  

2. Most Charter Schools Are Schools of Choice

Because independent charter schools are schools of choice, charter leaders can develop schools with specific educational models and cultures. Children learn differently, come from different backgrounds, speak different languages, have different interests, and thrive in different environments. Having multiple learning models allows parents to choose the schools that best fit the needs of their children.

When a district assigns children based on their neighborhoods, as some do, it’s much harder to have diverse school designs. Most parents would object to being told their child must attend a specialized school – such as Montessori school, a STEM school, or a performing arts school – so neighborhood schools often rely on the traditional one-size-fits all model.

In contrast, schools of choice can specialize. And when families have choices, both parents and students are more likely to “buy-in” to the school’s culture and academic philosophy.

Giving families the choice to attend a variety of schools also creates a second layer of accountability for independent charters, because the public dollars follow that choice. School operators are in direct competition for funds, and parents have much more leverage in demanding what their children need, because they can send their children elsewhere and the money will follow them.

3. Most Independent Charter Schools Are Held Accountable for Student Performance

Unless forced to by the state, elected school boards rarely close or replace failing schools – because it’s political suicide. Teachers unions often initiate district-wide protests over school closings, and parents and community members often join in. Because turnout in school board elections is often under 15 percent, their votes may determine the winners. For a school board member, closing or replacing a failing school often means losing the next election – even if it benefits children.

Most charter schools are not unionized, however. They answer to authorizers, which often have appointed boards. Even when an elected board closes a charter, it may trigger a protest from one building, but not from all teachers in a city or district.

If they are doing their jobs, authorizers hold schools accountable for student achievement benchmarks laid out in their charters, which are essentially performance contracts. Every few years, authorizers review their schools. If the students aren’t learning, the school will undergo a period of probation – after which time, if student performance does not improve, authorizers will close or replace the failing school.

When authorizers fail to hold schools accountable, charter schools generally don’t perform much better than traditional public schools. Studies show that, in states where authorizers consistently close low-performing charters, charter students far outpace their district counterparts on standardized tests. Where they don’t close schools, charters often underperform their district counterparts.

4. Most Independent Charters Go Through a Careful Authorization Process

Strong authorizers also investigate charter operators prior to allowing them to open schools. Not all parents have the ability to assess schools, so effective authorizers ensure that the schools available to their children are of high quality. This requires evaluation of performance and replacement of failing schools, but also scrutiny of applications to ensure schools have a strategy for success before they open. As part of the authorization process, charter applications undergo a thorough vetting process before authorizers grant applicants a charter and allow them to open a school.

5. Independent Charter Sectors Are Sustainable

The Achilles heel of most in-district autonomous approaches is sustainability. In a large district, the autonomy agenda often rests with one or two innovative leaders at the district level. When they depart (as they always do), the bureaucracy usually reasserts its control. People in bureaucracies tend to resent any special privileges given to those in “autonomy zones” – in all sectors of government. Education is no different. In-district autonomous schools are vulnerable to shifting political winds and changes in attitudes at district headquarters, either of which can endanger their autonomy. In contrast, independent charters operate outside of school districts, so it would take a change in state law, rather than district leadership, to infringe upon their autonomy.

Can Urban Districts Get Charter-Like Performance With Charter-Lite Schools? The Answer Lies in Autonomy

with David Osborne. August 2018. The 74. 

Over the past 15 years, cities across the country have experienced rapid growth in the number of public charter schools serving their students. In states with strong charter laws and equally strong authorizers, charter schools have produced impressive students gains, especially in schools with high-minority, high-poverty populations.

According to the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) 2015 study on 41 urban regions, the academic gains made by students in charter schools increase with each year students spend at the school. Those who have spent four or more years at a charter gain the equivalent of 108 more days of learning in math and 72 more days in reading each year than their traditional public school peers. In other words, they learn about 50 percent more every year than those with similar demographics and past test scores who stayed in a district school.

Urban districts have spent a lot of time and money trying to compete with the charter sector’s formula for success — autonomy, choice, diversity of school designs, and real accountability. Recently, however, many districts have attempted to replicate parts of it instead. Districts from Boston to Denver to Los Angeles have tried to spur charter-like innovation and increase student achievement by granting school leaders more autonomy.

District-run autonomous schools are a hybrid model, a halfway point between charters and traditional public schools. They’re still operated by district employees, but they can opt out of many district policies and — in some cities — union contracts.

The big question: Can urban districts get charter-like performance with these charter-lite schools?

Our new analysis of state exam scores from 2015 and 2016 in Boston, Memphis, Denver, and Los Angeles showed that district-run autonomous schools in these cities sometimes performed better than traditional public schools, but they seldom performed as well as independent public charters. The exception was Memphis. However, the district launched its autonomous “innovation zone” schools by recruiting its best principals and teachers, then gave them extra funding and support. This worked, but it undermined the schools they left behind. It probably explains why Memphis was an outlier.

Overall, our analysis reveals a positive relationship between school autonomy and student achievement. Students can achieve more if those who understand their needs best — principals and teachers, not the central office — make the decisions that affect their learning.

However, not all autonomies are created equal. Most school leaders agree that some kinds of autonomy prove more essential to student success than others. Ranked in rough order of importance, the categories include autonomy over:

1. Staffing: Do school leaders have the power to select and remove their teachers and other staff and determine how to evaluate and pay them?

2. Learning model: Are the schools free to adopt different focuses (arts, STEM, etc.) and learning models, such as Montessori, blended learning, project-based, and dual-language immersion?

3. Curriculum: Are school leaders free to determine their own curricula, textbooks, software, and the like?

4. Budgeting: Can school leaders spend their resources to best serve student needs, or are budget formulas determined by the central office?

5. School calendar and schedule: Are schools allowed to set the lengths and schedules of their school days and years?

6. Professional development: Do school leaders and staff decide what professional development they need, or does the central office?

The amount and type of autonomy available to in-district autonomous schools in our four cities varied. For the most part, these schools had less than independent charters enjoyed. And even when they had autonomy on paper, their leaders often expressed frustration because the district failed to honor all its promises.

At Los Angeles Unified School District’s pilot schools, which had the most official autonomy over staffing of any school model in the district, multiple principals expressed frustration over the district violating their autonomy through the forced placement of unwanted teachers at their schools.

Union contracts often require that districts continue to employ unwanted teachers. When principals don’t hire them, they sit in the district’s reserve pool, collecting salary and benefits. That gets expensive, especially when ineffective teachers remain in the pool year after year. To save money, districts often force principals to hire these teachers.

One L.A. principal also complained about his inability to dismiss an ineffective teacher, despite his alleged autonomy in this area. “The district makes it very difficult to move a teacher once you give them an unsatisfactory performance,” he said, “You have to hold on to that lemon. It takes four to five years to move that teacher. They have damaged a whole cohort of kids by that time.”

The principal of an innovation school in Denver ran into similar problems when he tried to use the budgeting autonomies outlined in his innovation plan. According to his plan, he had the authority to make purchasing decisions. Using a price list provided by the district and one from outside providers, he could decide where to buy transportation, food service, facility management, maintenance, and student services.

Unfortunately, the central office never provided price lists and continued to force its services on the school. When the principal contracted with Mental Health America of Colorado to provide services, the district ordered the company to stop. Officially, the principal had a lot of autonomy, but the reality was very different. Tired of constantly fighting with the central office, he left the district.

In Boston, former superintendent Tommy Chang explained that principals of different autonomous schools reported different experiences with their central office overseers. “Some pilot school principals may say some of their autonomies are being infringed upon; other principals will say they are getting a lot more support from the central office,” he said. This was true in Denver as well: Some central office staff respected school autonomy, while others never quite got the message.

Although principals at iZone schools in Memphis did not feel the district encroached upon the autonomies it promised them, some complained about not having enough. Principals didn’t control most of their budgets, for instance, and they could choose their own curricula and assessments only if their test scores were above a certain level. One former principal of an iZone school said he had only half the important autonomies an independent charter school principal would enjoy. He didn’t have the budgetary freedom to put aides in every classroom, for example. He wanted a full-time psychologist, but the district gave him one only one day a week. And he needed an operations manager but couldn’t move money to fund that position. If he had all the autonomy he needed, he said, “I could do some amazing things.”

The struggle for independence at in-district autonomous schools can be endless, and — even for dedicated school leaders — exhausting. True autonomy appears to be one of the primary reasons that charter schools outperform district-run autonomous schools.

The Teacher-Powered Schools Movement: Transforming Teachers From Industrial Workers To Professionals

July 2018. Forbes.

Julie Cook was ready to leave teaching. She’d worked in both urban and suburban districts and in three different states. No matter where she taught, she ended up frustrated with the lack of autonomy given to, and professionalism expected from, teachers.

Top-down policies dictated what she taught, on what timeline, and how her students were assessed. Supervisors didn’t understand why she wanted to create a curriculum. And her colleagues treated teaching like a by-the-hour job, rather than a profession.  

“They clocked in and out, presented information, and left the rest up to the powers that be,” she says.  

In 2002, just as she’d finally decided to leave the field, Cook was offered a position at Souderton Charter School Collaborative, a teacher-powered school in Souderton, Pennsylvania.

“Teachers at our school have full or partial autonomy over our professional development, budget, curriculum, assessments, teacher evaluations, school policies, scheduling, and hiring,” she explains. “I was invited to create, decide, collaborate, and lead. I no longer felt crushed.”

She’s been teaching there ever since.

What Does It Mean To Be Teacher-Powered?

Despite the number of highly educated people who become teachers, the traditional system treats teachers like industrial workers rather than professionals. The bosses (superintendents and their staffs) send out directives that the workers (teachers) must follow while under the watchful eye of a foreman (principal). Even though teachers have little control over the decision-making process, they’re responsible for the product that comes off the assembly line (student learning).

In contrast, educators at teacher-powered schools take on truly professional roles, controlling the decisions that directly affect school operations and student learning. These schools are modeled after the partnerships common among most white-collar professions—where a group of professionals own and operate a firm or practice and are accountable for its success or failure.

Richard Ingersoll, professor of Education and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, has done extensive research on teacher retention and quality. His work reveals that most teachers have little input into the decisions that affect their work, and this lack of control drives many out of the classroom. In 2014, Gallup reported that of 12 professions surveyed, teachers were the least likely to agree with the statement, “My opinion seems to matter at work.”

A recent report from the Consortium for Policy Research in Education shows that schools with higher levels of teacher leadership – the amount of input teachers have in school decision-making – and higher levels of instructional leadership – the extent to which school leaders focus on the core activities of teaching and learning – produce greater student achievement, making the teacher-powered model a win for students and teachers alike.

According to the report, many schools fail to emphasize the areas of instructional and teacher leadership that matter most for student achievement. For instance, schools often grant teachers authority over areas specific to the classroom, such as control over instructional practices, but the research shows that student achievement is more strongly correlated with the role of teacher decision-making in school-wide policy, particularly in establishing student discipline policies and crafting school improvement plans. The data suggests that when teachers have input into the larger decisions that affect a school’s climate and ethos, the school performs better.

Overall, the findings show that schools with both higher teacher accountability (an area of instructional leadership) and teacher decision-making (an area of teacher leadership) have higher student achievement, which indicates that school leaders should regard teachers as partners. Effective school leadership means holding teachers to high instructional standards while actively involving teachers in school-wide decision-making and fostering a shared vision among faculty and administration for the school.

The teacher-powered model embodies this concept.

Teacher-powered schools aren’t “anti-principal.” All teacher-powered schools have leaders. Usually, teacher teams select the leaders and hold them accountable for performance, deselecting them if their performance is unsatisfactory. Some schools have a principal, some have rotating lead teachers, and others have a teacher leadership committee. But the final decision-making authority lies with a collective group of teachers, and leaders are there to help carry out their decisions.

The advocacy group Education Evolving has identified 15 different autonomies associated with teacher-powered schools, including selecting and deselecting colleagues, controlling budgets, determining school-level policy, and others. But not all teacher teams want every autonomy.

Avalon Charter School in St. Paul, Minnesota, is one of those rare schools where educators have all 15. They make decisions as a group and all have some administrative duties, but they select two lead teachers to handle the bulk of administrative responsibilities, in exchange for a smaller teaching load. Teachers make all spending, compensation and teacher evaluation decisions; there’s no tenure, seniority or union. During the 2008 to 2011 recession, for instance, the faculty voted to cut their fringe benefits and went without cost of living raises; their sacrifices kept the school going during a difficult economic period.

The school uses “360-degree evaluations” where teachers evaluate one another, parents and students anonymously evaluate teachers and teachers evaluate the current leadership. The evaluation system is designed to support professional growth, but some teachers have been fired. However, the close working relationships inherent in the teacher-powered model means that usually faculty members who don’t mesh with the school’s culture opt to leave before they’re asked to.

Likewise, the school’s leaders use their staffing autonomy to hire people who understand the demanding yet rewarding nature of the teacher-powered model. As a result, teacher retention at Avalon hovers around 95% each year.

Growing The Teacher-Powered Movement: Spreading The Model From Public Charters To School Districts

Over the last decade, the number of teacher-powered schools in America has grown to 120. They are spread across 19 states, serving students from prekindergarten to age 21.

Prior to 2015, the majority were public charter schools, because charters have the autonomy teachers need to organize and run a school. However, in the last three years, there’s been a dramatic increase in the number of teacher-powered schools operating within traditional school districts.  

The Teacher-Powered Schools Initiative, a collaborative effort between Center for Teaching Quality and Education Evolving, aims to inspire teacher teams to take charge in their schools and advises them on best practices.

“We have to remember that there are a lot of teachers who aren’t teaching in charters, who aren’t interested in starting their own school, but who want autonomy,” says Lars Esdal, executive director at Education Evolving. “So even if it’s a ‘lighter’ version of autonomy, so to speak, we want to support the needs of teachers in the district sector, too.”

Amy Junge, one of Esdal’s colleagues, explains that the goal of their work is to let teacher teams make the professional decision about how much autonomy they want, then help them to secure it from the powers that be. They can secure autonomy from the district in a variety of ways: memoranda of understanding, elect-to-work agreements, participating in innovation zones, and so on.

 However, district schools run into barriers far more often than charters do. Local politics, the district’s openness to innovation, and the flexibility of local union leaders all influence whether teacher teams can successfully create and sustain a teacher-powered school.

“For many problems, school districts already have the solutions they need in the people working there, but the bureaucracy and culture prevent the district from accessing that talent,” Junge says. “It takes a shift in the mindset at the central office to trust the people at the schools.”

Change in district leadership is the biggest challenge for in-district teacher-powered schools. Unlike at charter schools, the loss of a supportive superintendent can endanger the autonomies granted to teacher teams.

For instance, teacher-powered pilot schools in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) had staffing autonomy, but after Superintendent John Deasy left, the re-establishment of the central control made their promises of autonomy little more than ink on paper.

Part of the problem in districts like LAUSD is that union contracts often require that districts continue to employ unplaced teachers. If not hired, these teachers sit in the district’s reserve pool, year after year, collecting their salaries and benefits. To save money, districts often force all principals to hire teachers from this pool, irrespective of the teacher’s quality or any staffing autonomy previously agreed upon.

Teacher-powered pilot schools in LAUSD have an elect-to-work agreement (EWA) written by teachers at the school. In theory, the EWA prevents forced placements of unwanted teachers. It outlines the expectations for teachers, including faithfulness to the school’s mission and pedagogical model, as well as the work required beyond what’s listed in the union contract. If teachers fail to meet these expectations, the principal can decline to offer them an EWA for the following year, effectively dismissing them back to the district’s pool.  However, a teacher forced on a school isn’t required to sign the EWA or commit to the extra work or mission-driven vision that makes teacher-powered schools operate successfully.

“One of the autonomies we have is over hiring, except we don’t really,” said one principal. “We’re only one of the models in the larger system, and the needs of the system often outweigh the needs of our model. It is not directly stated that our autonomy is taken away from us, but it’s not honored, because if the district has teachers that they need to place, they will place them here.”

In a worst-case scenario, LAUSD force-placed a principal at a teacher-powered school, despite an agreement that the teacher team had the autonomy to select the principal. The principal tried to re-impose a traditional, hierarchal management style, and when the school’s founding teachers challenged him, he retaliated by refusing to offer them EWAs for the following year.  

“There are just no statutes that protect teacher-led reforms,” another LAUSD teacher-powered principal concluded.

Despite the growing support for the teacher-powered schools among district-employed educators, the model remains easier to implement and more sustainable in a truly decentralized system—a system of public charter schools.

Following New Orleans’s lead on charter-school education

July 2018. The Washington Post.

The big moments of historical importance don’t go unremarked, but quieter milestones often pass with little notice unless we stop to commemorate them and note their significance. On July 1, one of those modest but meaningful events will occur when New Orleans marks a change that might sound like a dry bureaucratic reshuffling, but is in fact a remarkable event in the history of American education.

Recall that nearly 13 years ago, one of the effects of the Hurricane Katrinacataclysm was to largely wipe out the city’s abysmal public schools. New Orleans’s educational system was essentially rebuilt from the ground up as a laboratory for charter schools — not a school district with a few charters sprinkled among traditional institutions, but an almost wholly charter-filled system largely run by the state of Louisiana.

The Recovery School District experiment proved successful; New Orleans public schools have improved faster than those of any other city in the nation over the past decade. But 80 percent of the schools were run by the state’s Recovery School District. An indication of the RSD’s success — and of New Orleans’s resurgence as a thriving metropolitan center — is the state’s decision to hand over responsibility for the school district to a locally elected school board on July 1.

The school board will then oversee a district where 98 percent of students attend a public charter school. No other school district in America comes close to that distinction. By 2020, the last two district-operated schools will have converted to charters, and the Orleans Parish School Board will oversee the nation’s first school district composed entirely of charter schools.

The contrast with pre-Katrina education in New Orleans is dramatic. In 2005, Orleans Parish public schools ranked next-to-last in performance among Louisiana’s 68 parishes. In 2004, 60 percent of public school students in New Orleans attended a school with a performance score in the bottom 10 percent of the state.

The schools needed change; the district needed reform. Progress would come from a most unlikely starting point. Hurricane Katrina’s flooding and winds damaged schools, destroyed materials and displaced 64,000 students. The damage to school buildings alone was estimated at more than $800 million. Even before the storm, the district was broke, and had been looking for a $50 million line of credit just to meet payroll.

Louisiana turned this dire situation into an opportunity. In 2003, the governor and state legislature had created a Recovery School District to take over the state’s worst public schools, including five in New Orleans, which the RSD had turned into charters. After the storm, the legislature placed all but 17 of New Orleans’s 127 public schools in the RSD. In 2006, when 25,000 students returned to the city’s public schools, 54 percent enrolled in a charter.

Over the next nine years, the RSD handed virtually all its schools over to charter operators, and academic progress surged.

In 2004, 54 percent of public high school students graduated within four years. In 2017, 73 percent did. In 2004, only 37 percent of high school graduates enrolled in college. In 2017, 61 percent of graduates did. Before the storm, only 33 percent of students scored at grade level or above on state exams. By 2017, that number had increased to 59 percent, an improvement rate almost three times as fast as the state’s average.

During the transformation between 2004 and 2017, one characteristic has remained constant: the majority of students in New Orleans are economically disadvantaged.

The Orleans Parish School Board won’t directly operate schools; school leaders will handle day-to-day operations at charters, so those who know students best will make the decisions that affect their learning. But the district will still play a central role, setting policy and overseeing school quality. It will authorize new charters and hold existing schools accountable for performance, replicating successful ones and replacing those that fail with stronger operators. The board will also oversee the distribution of resources and facilities, trying to ensure equal opportunity for all families. And it will run the citywide enrollment system, called OneApp.

Traditional public-school systems are often bureaucratic behemoths, with administration costs sapping funds that would be better dedicated to students. By contrast, in New Orleans, the district’s central office and budget will be a lean operation, required by state charter-school law to devote 98 percent of funds directly to schools, spending only 2 percent on central office administration — because those running schools, not central office staff, know best how to educate children.

As charter schools proliferate across the country, their organization into New Orleans-style charter-only school districts under local control may be the next step in the continuing evolution of American education.

Mohammed Choudhury on Empowered Educators, Controlled Choice And The Third Way For Urban Districts

June 2018. Forbes.

Big things are quietly happening in San Antonio Independent School District (SAISD).

Ever since Pedro Martinez became superintendent in 2015, creating innovative schools and putting kids first have been at the heart of the district’s values.

Under Martinez’s leadership, the district has begun to create real change and build a system of great schools that provides educational opportunities for all families.  

One of the district’s crucial steps in this educational journey was hiring Mohammed Choudhury as Chief Innovation Officer. Before coming to San Antonio, Choudhury served as the founding director of Dallas Independent School District’s Office of Transformation and Innovation.

In the year and a half since he’s been in San Antonio, Choudhury has been overseeing a new innovation zone through which the district is using a growing network of in-district charters as a vehicle to build socioeconomically diverse learning environments and to ensure that all students have access to best-fit schools. In order to prevent the creation of “islands of affluence” and ensure that high-needs families have equitable access, the district has implemented controlled choice for its open enrollment choice schools and programs.

SAISD now has over 15 in-district charter schools that offer a range of instructional models (expeditionary learning, Montessori, single-gender, early college high schools, and more). Some are operated in collaboration with nonprofit partners, including the Center for Applied Science and Technology, Trinity University, Relay Lab Schools, and the Culinary Institute of America. The district recently partnered with Democracy Prep, a charter management organization, to take over Stewart Elementary, a neighborhood school that has been consistently rated as failing by the state.

I sat down with Choudhury to talk about the big changes that have taken place in the district. Over the course of our conversation, one thing became clear: Choudhury and his team are going to put kids first.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Emily Langhorne: Can you tell me a little about your school experience growing up?

Mohammed Choudhury: I was born and raised in Los Angeles. I went to public schools all my life, all 75% or more Title I, because my parents didn’t know better so I went to the zoned school. My parents are originally from Bangladesh. I was basically a minority among minorities.

Even though it was about 75% economically disadvantaged, my high school was really racially diverse. Fairfax High School has always done right by kids that are economically disadvantaged despite the resources it got. It really invested in socio-emotional learning before it was the fad that we call “socio-emotional learning” right now because they had people coming from all walks of life. I think the interactions from having people from different walks of life and cultural backgrounds have really shaped who I am. It’s shaped my thinking and my work.

Langhorne: Why did you decide to come to San Antonio?

Choudhury: First I fell in love with Superintendent Pedro Martinez’s mission and vision, and then I fell in love with the board. One of the things said to me was that this board was on board with the superintendent’s mission and vision, and every vote since he’s arrived has been seven-zero. When I was first told that, I thought, “You’re lying.” So I looked every vote up – every single one – before I applied, and here I am.

Langhorne: That’s so unusual. Why do you think that is?

Choudhury: We spend a lot of time, especially Pedro, having workshops and sessions with board members to explain this strategy, why what we’re doing – what they’re doing – matters. Why this particular vote matters for the community.

There are transactional superintendents and transformative superintendents. Transactional means if you have nine board members, you’ll implement nine different ways of doing an initiative just to get it passed, but at that point, you’ve lost your overarching strategy. Pedro is a transformative superintendent. A transformative superintendent understands that when you have nine million dollars for nine regions, some will get more, and some will get less, and a transformative superintendent takes the time to explain to each board member why that is and what that matters for the entire system.

This board understands that the decisions they make now with a superintendent who’s bold and transformative will have ripple effects and change the trajectory of San Antonio. That hasn’t been the case for the longest time.

Langhorne: You are incredibly passionate about school design and learning models. What drives that passion?

 Choudhury: The root of it is having empowered educators at the schools. And I don’t mean that as a feel-good thing; I mean formalizing that in policy and operationalizing that in practice. When you have empowered educators, who have different visions of and philosophies for learning –ranging from personalized learning to Montessori to competency-based to STEM – you’re going to get different school models.

In the schools that I taught at, we took ownership of our school. For example, in the spring, we completely redid the schedule to make sure that we struck a balance between reviewing with kids for state exams while making sure we didn’t turn into test-prep factories. We cared about little things – like how kids entered the hallway and how we greeted them. Those little things, which are a part of school design, make a huge difference. I love school design because it has ripple effects on how our kids feel at school.

When educators at autonomous schools have control over how they use talent, time and resources, it enables them to take ownership of their job and put everything they have into it. The vast majority of them didn’t get into it because they were looking for a six-figure salary. They wanted to change lives and impact kids in both the short term and long term. I think having schools where educators have autonomy gives them the satisfaction of saying, “I created this. I’m responsible for this.” For me, as a part of the system that holds them accountable, I think they feel more accountable for the school because they built and designed it.

 Langhorne: Can you say a little bit about your passion for integrated schools, too?

 Choudhury: One thing I have helped shape entirely in San Antonio Independent School District is the enrollment of our autonomous schools of choice. There was no controlled choice here. That was a non-negotiable of mine because that’s the form of choice I most believe in. The free market has not done right for the vast majority of the country.

When you do controlled choice, in a nutshell, you are putting in equity guardrails and indicators to ensure that students of certain socio-economic backgrounds have high likelihood of getting into those schools or to guarantee that there will be a certain percentage of low-income students at a school. I did not want to do school choice in a way where the people who had the most resources, who knew who to navigate it, were going to get what they want. I don’t want to be that statistic. I don’t want to be in that report.

While we can do high-poverty schools well – and I know we can do them well, I’m a product of them, I’ve taught in them – this notion that we should keep recreating high-poverty schools given the decades of research around the benefits of integrated environments is absurd. Integration isn’t everything, but it has effects. When’s the only time we cut the achievement gap almost in half in this country on the National Assessment of Educational Progress? At the height of desegregation.

Langhorne: SAISD’s decision to allow Democracy Prep, an independent charter operator, to take over a continually failing district-operated school has caused some controversy with the teachers association because the school's employees won’t be employees of the district. How do you feel about working with independent charter operators?

Choudhury: What chartering has taught me is that when you cut the bureaucracy and give schools more autonomy to be schools that are truly community-driven with a strong authorizer at the helm, amazing things happen. That authorizer piece is important though because there’s Detroit, then there’s D.C. and then there’s Massachusetts in terms of authorizing quality.

I’m excited about the partnership with Democracy Prep. It’s an important disruptive innovation for our system, but it also has very strong guardrails because my board is the authorizer. It’s personal to me to have one of the tightest performance contracts in the country. I am inspired by Massachusetts’s authorizing division and the work that D.C. has done because those two are the best authorizers in the country.

Democracy Prep’s entry into San Antonio allows us to further think outside of what we think are our constraints in terms of what schools can be for families and educators. It enhances the conversation about what kind of environment our educators can thrive in and what kinds of schools our communities want. This notion that all educators need tenured protections in exchange to want to teach is just not true. If the right pieces are there in terms of educator support, and there are due process pieces in place too, educators won’t care if it’s at-will or tenure; they will stay where they can enact their expertise and are supported to do that.

We are also partnering with folks whose values align with our values. When we say to an operator you’re here to educate all kids, we mean all kids. Our non-negotiable is that we control enrollment. It’s the same ground rules for expulsion at Democracy Prep as our other schools, and the same ground rules for how a kid is withdrawn from the school. My office has final say in that area.

Urban districts need to find a third way. We serve the majority of kids in this country. For the first wave of reformers, chartering was basically a way to get the hell out of the system and avoid bureaucracy so they could the work that matters done. Then people realized that school districts weren’t going to go away. The fight between districts and charters is outdated and silly. We can reach more kids better, smarter and faster if we stop fighting. So the question is: how do we go back in and rethink the relationship so that we serve kids together?

D.C. Graduation Fraud? Not in the Charter Schools

June 2018. The Washington Post. 

For the past six months, scandal after scandal has come to light in the nation’s capital as the media’s interrogation lamps have shone on D.C. Public Schools.

In November, WAMU exposed a graduation scandal at Ballou High School, leading the Office of the State Superintendent to launch an investigation into DCPS.  The investigation revealed district-wide complicity in a systemic culture that pressured teachers to pass students regardless of their attendance or academic performance. The report concluded that one in three 2017 DCPS graduates were awarded diplomas in violation of district policies.

Best-case scenario, 67 percent of the class of 2018 graduated. That’s a significant drop from the 73 percent rate the district claimed in 2017.

What’s happened in DCPS is tragic — not only that the number of students graduating declined but also that DCPS has been graduating students who aren’t prepared for life beyond school.

Yet there is a story of real academic progress in the nation’s capital. It’s the story of the other public schools, the ones educating nearly 50 percent of public school students. It’s the story of D.C.’s charter schools.

Charter schools are public schools operated by independent organizations, usually nonprofits. Most are schools of choice, and unlike magnet schools in traditional districts, they cannot select their students. Freed from many rules constraining district-operated schools, charters exchange increased autonomy for increased accountability. They are normally held accountable for their performance through contracts with authorizers, who close and replace them if students aren’t learning enough. The D.C. Public Charter School Board (PCSB) has closed more than 40 failing schools since 2007.

In 2017, D.C.’s 21 charter high schools graduated 73.4 percent of their students in four years. Since the PCSB audits every graduating student’s transcript, that number is an accurate reflection of student achievement.

That number also includes two alternative high schools: one for students involved in the criminal justice system and another for “at-risk” and overage students. Knowing it will benefit students in the long term, charters often encourage students to stay for a fifth year if they aren’t ready to graduate in four. In 2017, the sector’s five-year graduation rate was 78.8 percent.

The PCSB audit is done in partnership with the schools. A PCSB auditor and a school representative review the documentation together. In addition to looking for credit competition and course requirements, PCSB auditors check for discrepancies between students’ report cards, grade change forms and transcripts. The PCSB also audits a random sample of ninth grade students’ transcripts. If they find any discrepancies, they’ll the audit the transcript of every ninth grade student at that school.

While no system is cheat-proof, it would take extensive effort to cheat this one. A PCSB audit is not like having a principal look over records. The charter board is an outside entity concerned with data, quality, regulation and oversight; it has no motivation to claim a school is succeeding when it’s failing. Unlike DCPS, in some recent years the charter sector has reported declining graduation rates. In 2013, charters’ four-year graduation rate fell from 77 percent to 75.3 percent, then again to 68.9 percent in 2014. Since 2014, the sector’s rate has slowly increased back to 73.4 percent.

Other data confirm the very real outcomes D.C.’s charters are delivering. In 2017, for instance, 95.8 percent of charter graduates were accepted into four-year universities. And D.C. charter students have made some of the last decade’s largest gains on the National Assessment for Educational Progress, widely considered the best test for measuring student achievement. It’s no wonder that more than 11,000 children in the nation’s capital are on waitlists for public charters.

DCPS expects steep declines in the number of graduates at its non-selective high schools. In Ward 8, the city’s poorest ward, Anacostia and Ballou High Schools have projected graduation rates of only 25 percent and 33 percent, respectively. In contrast, the three public charters in Ward 8 had an average graduation rate of 78 percent last year.

Even Wilson, DCPS’s highest-performing non-selective high school — and the only public high school in affluent Ward 3 — expects only 62 percent of students to graduate. That’s lower than all but two of the 17 charter high schools (excluding alternative schools) that had graduation rates in 2017.

Amid all the negativity surrounding DCPS, we should remember that 43,340 of the district’s 91,322 public school students attend charter schools. Many of these students walked across a stage this month, and each diploma they received stands as a testament to the true progress of D.C.’s other public schools.

Teachers Village: One City's Innovative Solution to the Problem of Teacher Retention

June 2018. Forbes.

 

In many cities across the nation, home values and rents have risen so high they are pricing teachers out of the market. Young teachers either spend the majority of their paychecks on rent, deal with long daily commutes, or leave the profession. In a survey of public school teachers who left the profession in 2012, two thirds of those who said they would consider returning rated increased salaries as an important factor in that decision. 

Raising salaries is difficult for districts, given the twin burdens of state funding cuts since the Great Recession and skyrocketing costs for health care and pensions. But innovators in Newark, New Jersey, have found a solution: a new “Teachers Village” that gives teachers subsidized rents in the center of the city.

Teachers receive discounts of 7 to 15 percent off units’ market rate, and currently seventy percent of the residents are educators. Twenty percent of the apartments are discounted for individuals earning up to 80 percent of Newark’s Area Median Income, while the remaining 10 percent are rented at market rates. 

“Teachers Village was an attempt to recruit and retain teachers by providing them a place to live near where they work,” says Linda Morgan, vice president of project partnerships at RBH Group, the firm that built it. Before it opened, only about 15 percent of the teachers working in Newark lived in the city, says Morgan. Many lived in the suburbs. 

RBH, a real estate development company focused on urban renewal projects, operates with a triple-bottom-line philosophy, under which the goal is to generate a profit but also to have a positive social and environmental impact. Ron Beit, its CEO, dreamed up Teachers Village to provide housing for teachers while also redeveloping the central city.

It was Newark’s first ground-up residential development in almost 50 years. Previously five blocks of empty parking lots and dilapidated buildings, near Newark’s Penn Station, the village is home to 203 luxury apartments, 65,000 square feet of street-level retail space, three public charter schools, and one early childhood learning center. 

Beit wanted the schools to create the weekday buzz of activity that attracts retail, restaurants, and residents. And the city needed affordable apartments so teachers would come to Newark and stay. It was a classic win-win opportunity.

Living in Teachers Village

For Sanjana Hoassain, an English teacher at Great Oaks Charter, one of the schools in Teachers Village, moving to the village was an easy decision. “The buildings are beautiful and luxurious and a three-minute walk from work,” she says. She and other teachers who live there often stay late and plan lessons together because they don’t have to commute. Compared to other housing in the region, she says, the apartments are affordable on a teacher’s salary, especially since she doesn’t have to factor in commuting costs.

There’s always a lot going on in Teachers Village, she adds. They’ve had a Halloween party and a Thanksgiving dinner. There are yoga and belly dancing classes, movie nights, bar crawls, and walking tours. This spring there’ll be a coding class for teachers, and in the summer, they have outdoor concerts. 

“The Q,” a lifelong learning center, will open this year. There, Teachers Village will host adult classes and Ted-talk style seminars on education. The residents will suggest and create curriculum, but all teachers and the local community will be welcome to attend. 

“It’s really symbolic that you have a center of teaching and learning in a prominent part of the city,” says Irene Hall, a village resident and founder and director of Discovery Charter School, another of the schools at Teachers Village. “It sends the message that K-12 education is important.”

RBH is slowly filling the retail space with stores. Current tenants include Closet Savvy, Provident Bank, Bella Nail Lounge and Beauty Spa, Krauszer’s convenient store, and Tonnie’s Minis, which sells cupcakes and baked goods. This year, they hope to bring in more businesses, including restaurants. “You’ll notice there’s not a lot of ‘big box’ stores,” says Linda Morgan of RBH. “Bringing them in would have been faster and cheaper, but that’s not our style. We want owners that are attached to the community.” 

This community-centered ethos is another component of the triple-bottom-line approach. RBH works with retail tenants to help them write business plans and get small business loans. The shop owners design and fit out their space with the in-house architect. Many of them are from the community, and they employ other locals. Tonnie of Tonnie’s Minis lives in the village with his family. Most afternoons, his shop puts out samples of cupcakes or other goodies for the students as they leave school.  

Facilitating Charter School Growth

The development of Teachers Village in Newark coincided with the emergence of public school choice and charter schools—public schools operated by nonprofit organizations. They have the freedom to innovate, and they face real consequences for success and failure, including closure if the students are falling too far behind. 

“The whole idea behind Teachers Village came about because I was invited to a KIPP school in the West Ward,” says Beit. “I walked into a classroom, and I was so inspired by teachers there – the engagement between them and their students. I wanted to tap into that energy and use it for an economic development project.”

By 2011, charter networks KIPP and Uncommon Schools were producing exceptional outcomes for students and looking to expand, to help other students. The political leaders at the time – Mayor Cory Booker, Governor Chris Christie, and State Commissioner of Education Chris Cerf – were all so impressed with the city’s charters that they decided to support their growth. The state department of education authorizers all charters in New Jersey.

When looking for school tenants, Beit didn’t care about school type. He wanted the district to put a school in Teachers Village, but its student population was shrinking; it was consolidating schools, not expanding. Public charters, on the other hand, needed space.

Because RBH had already designed a school for KIPP SPARK Academy, Beit knew it would need more space as its enrollment grew, so it was a natural fit. 

Discovery Charter School was in the basement of the United Way building, two blocks away. It had become known for its strong family-oriented culture. Beit knew of the school’s positive reputation and knew that it would benefit from having more space without moving too far.

Great Oaks Charter came to Newark when principal Jared Taillefer decided he wanted to start his own school. At the time, he was a math teacher at Match Charter Public School in Boston. Massachusetts has a cap on public charters in any city and wasn’t allowing new schools to open or existing schools to replicate in Boston. The grass looked greener in Newark, where the charter sector was growing. 

When Taillefer launched Great Oaks, it occupied the fourth floor of a 100-year-old district building. “There was no elevator, no AC,” he says. “We couldn’t hang things on the wall because of asbestos. We didn’t have access to the cafeteria, so kids had to eat in classrooms, and staff had to bring lunches up four flights of stairs. There were mice everywhere.” 

What made Great Oaks successful despite these conditions is its high-dosage tutoring. The school has an extended day, and students receive an hour of small group tutoring in each of English and Math. The school recruits AmeriCorps tutors who work with teachers to develop tutoring plans that dovetail with class curriculum. 

“We knew Teachers Village was going to be here, and we thought that would be a great fit for our tutoring model,” says Taillefer. “It’s been such a huge game changer in terms of the morale of our tutors. They can now live where they work, which makes them feel more a part of the community. For students and staff, the emotional piece of having the new building was also huge.”

There are also five universities, where teachers can pursue further education, less than two miles away. Eventually, Beit would like to bring their services – including recertification courses for teachers – onsite.  

Great Oaks’s building has large open spaces and collapsible walls – ideal for its tutoring model. The classrooms are big; only six rooms on two floors. 

Discovery Charter School has even fewer walls; its learning spaces are divided by bookshelves. The open-space model matches the school’s philosophy of exploration and open-mindedness. The entire school occupies only one floor and feels like one large room, with a stage in the center. The walls are purple. Class sizes are small and mixed by grade level, which creates a close and interactive community of students, regardless of age.

 “Environment is so important to what we do,” says Irene Hall. “I always wonder why they bring in architects to design schools, but they don’t have a teacher’s input. It’s like remodeling your kitchen and not letting the person who does the cooking have any say.”

Beit understood this. Each of the three schools worked with an architect to design their interior layout. “The use of space in education is integral to curriculum and culture,” Beit says. “As a developer, I would never try to tell a school anything that needs to be done beyond budget constraints.”

Building Connections Between Teachers and the Community

Living in Teachers Village helps teachers build connections with students and their families, because they all live in the city.

“They [the students] all want to visit my place,” Sanjana Hoassain laughs. “But more importantly, I am a person who lives in their community. I see their siblings when I’m buying groceries. I recognize their families. I’m not just their teacher; I’m a member of their community.” Taillefer agrees that it matters to the students that they see their teachers in the neighborhood on the weekends. 

The charter schools are open six days a week. On Saturdays, they have remediation classes as well as special programs, like music and art. After Saturday school, the kids often start a pick-up basketball game at Teachers Village’s communal gym, and teachers often join because they’re around. If there’s a cheerleading competition in the evening or on the weekend, teachers are more likely to go because they don’t have a long commute home and back.

Irene Hall thinks the positives of Teachers Village go further than just student-teacher interaction, however. Teachers also interact regularly with Newark citizens. “When people live out in suburbia, they hear all of these negative rumors about the city,” she says. “The reality of living here helps change that perception.”

While teachers across the country struggle to afford living in urban areas, Teachers Village is luring them to Newark. One current resident decided to leave her teaching job in Atlanta for one in Newark because she wanted to live in the village. But she didn’t come alone; she convinced friends to come with her. Now, they all live in Teachers Village. 

Even better news: other cities have been paying attention to Newark’s success. RBH is already in the process of developing “Teachers Corner” in Hartford and “Teachers Square” in Chicago, variations of the Teachers Village model designed for the unique needs of each city. California passed the Teacher Housing Act of 2016, which bypasses many of the development regulations surrounding state and federal low-income housing credits by permitting school districts and developers to receive these funds for buildings restricted to teachers and district employees. If more cities begin to emulate this innovative approach, urban America might find a solution to at least one part of the complicated problem of teacher retention. 

Independence, Assertiveness, Ability to Correct Others — Behavioral Traits of Top-Performing Teachers

June 2018. The 74. 

When asked about my education in a traditional public high school, I always talk about Mr. Gebler’s pre-calculus class. I remember it well for two reasons. One, I struggled to earn a C. Two, his standards — like his eccentric behavior and dedication to students — were so exceptional that I actually retained the content after the school year ended.

A draft research report by workplace survey company Pairin confirms what I’d always known: Mr. Gebler was a top-tier teacher.

Pairin recently analyzed survey results from 9,359 teachers in traditional public schools and 390 in public charter schools. It found that certain behavioral attributes — motivation, independence, and the ability to correct others — correlate with high performance. Mr. Gebler had all of these.

Today, however, many educators who share these behavioral qualities aren’t working in our nation’s traditional public schools. They’re working in charter schools.

“When we look at the aggregated survey results, more charter school teachers share the qualities that we’ve found in all top-performing teachers,” says Pairin CEO Michael Simpson. “What we’re trying to figure out is why trends in behavior differ between these two sectors and how we can help teachers overall be more successful.”

High-performing schools have to attract and retain high-performing teachers; the report indicates that schools designed to encourage teacher leadership and empower educators to take initiative do just that.

Unfortunately, that’s the opposite of what most of America’s traditional public schools do.

The data suggest we need a very different type of school system.

The survey begins with a seven-minute questionnaire that evaluates 102 soft skills and mindsets. Participants are given a list of 300 adjectives, complete with definitions, from “touchy” to “humorous” to “spendthrift.” They select those that describe them, then go through the list again and choose those that they wish described them. Pattern-matching algorithms then build participants’ behavioral profiles.

Many charter schools have teachers take the survey and then provide Pairin with a list ranking them by their performance. This helps the algorithm target behavioral attributes common among the top-performing teachers.

Top performers have a high intensity for” “independence,” “assertiveness,” and “personal power: the drive to impact others and the world.” In general, they think creatively, manage relationships positively, and focus on making a difference over being compliant.

The biggest disparity in behavioral attributes between top-performing teachers and others is that they have much higher intensity for the “ability to correct others.” Overall, traditional public school teachers surveyed had lower intensity for “correcting others” than charter school teachers surveyed.

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When compared with other professionals, teachers from all sectors have high intensity for “enriching others” — the ability to help people develop their potential.

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Interestingly, high intensity for “enriching others” accompanied by low intensity for “correcting others” can be a bad combination. Teachers with these qualities are often cheerleaders for their students, but they’re unlikely to hold them to high academic and behavioral standards. Likewise, teachers with higher intensity for “correcting others” might struggle to succeed in districts with uniform grading policies that force them to lower their standards.

Simpson believes that workplace environments can change the behavior and mindsets of employees, including teachers, over time. These “can be the deciding factor between thriving and failing,” he says. “Teachers who are creative and independent might not thrive in an environment where the school policy dictates that everything must be uniform across classrooms.” He worries that, when placed in the wrong environment, idealistic, motivated teachers will become complacent or become frustrated and leave the profession.

“What we’re finding is that systems that use job security as a recruitment tool either attract employees that are change-adverse or create an environment where being resistant to change brings rewards. The workplace mentality becomes ‘keep your head down and don’t make waves,’ ” he says.

In that case, our bureaucratic education system might be to blame for the differences in behavioral attributes related to teacher performance.

Traditional public school teachers tend to have behavioral profiles similar to those of state and federal government employees, Pairin found. They have high intensity for “deference: yielding respectfully to the wishes of authority” and “self-restraint,” defined as “the degree to which one holds instinctive desires in check and refrains from giving full expression to them in conduct.” People high in “deference” tend to be passive, resigned, and reluctant to share ideas; similarly, while moderate self-restraint can be a positive attribute, people with high self-restraint won’t express themselves for fear of “making waves.” As result, they often suffer from internalized stress, leaving them prone to burnout. Top-performing teachers have lower intensity for both self-restraint and deference than other teachers.

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Yet, the survey results also show that most teachers — both charter and district — have high intensity for “initiative”; they’re self-starters who don’t wait to be told what to do. They also have high intensity for “problem-solving,” as well as “vitality,” the desire for a life full of zest and warm relationships.

The data tell us that most teachers are independent, lively thinkers dedicated to their students. School environments, however, can either reinforce or hinder these behaviors.

The traditional model for school districts, like all hierarchical bureaucracies, disempowers employees, ties them up in rules and red tape, and treats them all the same. To attract top-performing teachers, we need to change traditional public education from a bureaucratic system that prioritizes stability — “don’t rock the boat” — to one that embraces innovation, empowers its teachers to take initiative, and supports those willing to demand more from their students.

NAEP Scores Show D.C. Is a Leader in Educational Improvement — With Powerful Lessons for Other Cities

with David Osborne. April 2018. The 74.

The latest edition of the Nation’s Report Card — the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress — got a lot of ink last week. While results nationally were a yawn, the scores from Washington, D.C., hold powerful lessons for other cities. Together, D.C. charter and district public schools have improved faster than those of any state over the past decade, by far, while district schools have improved faster than those of any other urban district that takes the exam.

NAEP is widely considered a more reliable measure than state tests because there are no stakes attached, so schools have no incentive to cheat or spend time preparing their students. But because the random sample of students who take the test changes every two years, short-term results tend to bounce around. Looking at a decade or more smooths things out and provides a more trustworthy gauge.

In D.C., that takes us back to the pivotal year of 2007, when the city council did away with the elected school board and gave power over D.C. Public Schools to the mayor, who appointed Michelle Rhee as chancellor. Since then, DCPS has embraced some of the most profound reforms of any traditional district.

Meanwhile, D.C.’s charter sector, which has grown to educate 47 percent of public school students in the city, has won plaudits as the “healthiest charter sector” in the country from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

So D.C. provides a fascinating laboratory. We can compare a rapidly improving traditional district to a vibrant charter sector.

When we do so, two clear lessons emerge. First, a charter sector where authorizers close or replace failing schools and encourage strong schools to replicate produces the most rapid growth, particularly for poor and minority children. Second, competition from such a sector does not disable a traditional district, as many fear, but spurs it to improve.

(Lest one think these realities are limited to D.C., we see exactly the same dynamics in other cities with strong charter authorizers, such as Boston, Newark, Indianapolis, and Denver.)

This is evident from all four NAEP exams: fourth- and eighth-grade English and math. Since 2007, DCPS scores have improved an average of 13 points, outpacing all the other 26 districts that participate in the Trial Urban District Assessment, as well as the national average for cities with more than 250,000 residents. (New Orleans, the most rapidly improving city on other metrics, does not participate in TUDA.) D.C.’s closest competitor has been Chicago, which averaged just under 12 points over the decade.

To put these numbers in perspective, researchers consider 10 points to be roughly the equivalent of a year’s gain in learning — meaning 2017’s test takers in D.C. are about one year and three months ahead of where they would have been back in 2007. D.C. and Chicago have made substantial strides.

D.C. has also improved more than twice as fast as any state over the past decade. (When comparing D.C. with states, NAEP counts both district and charter scores; here D.C.’s improvement has averaged 14 points.) Some of this has been due to demographic changes in the mix of students taking the NAEP test, as white and Hispanic populations in D.C. have grown and the city has become more affluent. Two separate studies have suggested that these factors account for between a quarter and a third of the progress. But even if we discount D.C.’s district/charter gain of 14 points by a third, it still outpaces any state’s.

Charters and district schools have improved at roughly the same pace, as the graphs below show.

But the real insight comes when we dive into these demographics, because charters have done substantially better with African-American students — who make up 68 percent of public school students in D.C. — than DCPS has.

DCPS has far more white students than charters: in 2016–17, 14 percent of DCPS students were white and 62 percent were black, compared with 5 percent and 76 percent of charter students, respectively. DCPS had a higher percentage of English language learners (12 percent versus 8.6 percent), while charters had a higher percentage of students with disabilities (16.3 percent versus 14 percent). Charters received roughly $6,000 to $7,000 less per student than district schools.

Yet, as you can see from the graphs above, charter and district students performed about the same in fourth grade, while charter students usually performed better in eighth grade.

DCPS’s greatest progress has been with white and middle- and upper-income students. DCPS has seen large gains in average scores across all subjects and all grades for white students and students not eligible for free and reduced-price school lunch. Indeed, of 25 TUDA districts that measured this in 2017, DCPS had the highest scores for whites and the highest gap in scores between white and black students, on all four tests. Eighth-grade black students still ranked 22nd in math and 21st in reading.

The data for low-income students is murky, because NAEP uses eligibility for subsidized meals as a proxy for low income. But since 2012–13, D.C. has given all students in schools with more than 40 percent “at-risk” students free lunch. NAEP data say public charters have performed far better than DCPS with these students, with a smaller achievement gap between those eligible for subsidized meals and those not eligible, but it’s hard to know how accurate those numbers are.

There is no such confusion in the data on race. As the graphs below show, charters have consistently outperformed district schools with African-American students. (We did not include Hispanic students because the samples are small enough that the numbers bounce around, rendering them less trustworthy.)

The final graph raises the question: What is happening with eighth-grade reading scores in D.C., particularly in charters?

Unfortunately, NAEP scores can’t tell us. Our best guess is that the mix of students changes after elementary school, because so many white families peel off for private schools. In 2017, whites made up 11 percent of fourth-graders who took the test but only 9 percent of eighth-graders.

Looking back 10 years, Washington, D.C, has made a lot of progress, though it still has a long way to go. Amid the central office scandals and the graduation inflation epidemic, growth on NAEP is something of which educators and students in our nation’s capital can be proud.

More important, D.C. has important lessons to teach other cities, if they’ll listen. First, they should embrace public charter schools, while limiting charter authorizing to one or two strong authorizers. Second, they should welcome the competitive effect on their traditional district, because experience suggests it is likely to wake up and change for the better. And as that happens, more and more middle-class families will stay in the city, creating a healthier, safer, more vibrant place.

Texas Has Ambitious Plans to Transform Urban Schools

with David Osborne. April 2018. U.S. News and World Report.

In public education, the nation's fastest-improving cities have embraced both charter schools and charter-like "innovation" or "renaissance" schools: public schools with real autonomy (some run by nonprofit organizations), real accountability for performance (including closure if their students are falling too far behind), and a variety of learning models from which families can choose. Those rapidly improving cities include New Orleans, Washington, Denver, and Chicago.

Imagine the progress possible if a state decided to push its urban districts to emulate such models. Texas is doing just that, using carrots – including $120 million in grants and assistance over two years – and sticks to convince urban districts to embrace the new approach.

"I think Texas has used district-level incentives and implementation support for districts who want to move more towards 21st century school systems in a far more thoughtful way than any other state," says Chris Barbic, who ran Tennessee's Achievement School District for its first four years and now invests in state efforts to turn around struggling districts and schools through his position at the Houston-based Laura and John Arnold Foundation. 

"What is most striking to me is how the Texas Education Agency has created a compelling district operating vision, then supported it by not only applying pressure through the ability to close low-performing schools and take over low-performing districts, but also by thoughtfully creating incentives through grant dollars and implementation support."

Perhaps the most ambitious carrot offered by Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath is called a "Transformation Zone." In a statewide competition, six urban districts have won planning grants to create such zones, which will have independent governing boards that oversee autonomous public schools. The zones can turn failing schools over to nonprofit organizations, including charter management organizations, create partnerships between such management organizations and failing schools, and create new schools, whether district- or charter-operated. Using seven percent of the state's federal Title 1 funding (for schools with a majority of low-income students), TEA will grant $1 million per school to these zones.

A second carrot comes from Senate Bill 1882, which creates incentives for district-charter partnerships. This is modeled to some degree on Indianapolis Public Schools' "innovation network schools," which are district schools in district buildings operated by nonprofit organizations. Some are charter schools and some are district-operated schools whose faculty have voted to convert to nonprofit status, because they want full operational autonomy. These 16 schools are the fastest improving in Indianapolis Public Schools' jurisdiction. 

In Texas, where they are called "partnership schools," they will be operated by charters or other nonprofit organizations, such as universities, but overseen by the local school district. They will receive the per-pupil funding amount of a charter or a district school, whichever is higher, plus a two-year exemption from the state accountability system.

This is the stick that comes with the carrot: Under House Bill 1842, passed in 2015, if a school is labeled "improvement required" by the state's accountability system for five years, the state must close it or take over the entire district, appointing a new school board. By creating partnership schools, districts will get a two-year hiatus before such draconian sanctions are imposed. 

Nonprofits selected as partners must have acceptable academic performance and financial ratings for the last three years. For them, partnering will bring access to district facilities and often better financial deals. 

The Texas Education Agency will approve partnership applications with a process modeled on the charter authorization process. Districts must demonstrate that their proposed partnership schools have autonomy, independent boards, and real performance goals and measures. 

Another carrot comes from House Bill 1842: designation by the TEA as a "district of innovation." These districts can use waivers to opt out of two-thirds of the Texas Education Code.

To win such designation, districts must develop, with community input, innovation plans approved by their school boards. Associate Education Commissioner Joe Siedlecki says that while 300 districts have become districts of innovation, "Only a handful have taken the most waivers possible."

Morath's first major step in encouraging districts to rethink the way they oversee schools was the Lone Star Governance program, which aims to teach board members to focus more on student outcome goals. A second was a System of Great Schools Network. TEA invited eight districts, as part of a two-year cohort, to implement strategies to "empower educators to design and lead high-quality schools, support families to access desired best-fit school options, and focus central offices on school support, innovation, and oversight" rather than just operating schools. Recently it added a second cohort of five more districts.

The agency matched each district with an experienced advisor who had firsthand experience with the transition to a decentralized system of choice. For example, San Antonio Independent School District (SAISD) partnered with Paul Pastorek, who as Louisiana superintendent of education led New Orleans' transformation. Spring Branch partnered with Alyssa Whitehead-Bust, former Denver Public Schools' chief academic and innovation officer.

SAISD is perhaps the boldest of the first cohort. Led by Superintendent Pedro Martinez, it is creating a variety of new in-district charters with different learning models, from Montessori and dual-language immersion elementaries to a career-tech high school. It has partnered with 10 different organizations to help with the latter and Trinity Universityand Relay Graduate School of Education to help run "lab schools," which bring extra teachers into the classroom by helping train future educators. 

The school board recently voted to invite Democracy Prep, a charter operator, to take over one of the district's lowest-performing elementary schools as an in-district charter. The district will provide the facilities and central office support; Democracy Prep will hire new staff and implement its own curriculum. 

Other states have pursued aggressive strategies to transform public schools in one city. After Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana's Recovery School District took over all but 17 public schools in New Orleans and gradually turned them over to charter operators. Tennessee's Achievement School District took over about 30 failing schools in Memphis, while the state also empowered the local district to create its own innovation zone, where struggling schools get more autonomy, support, and money. And New Jersey took over the public schools in Camden and is partnering with successful charter operators to turn many of them around, as "renaissance schools."

But no state has made as concerted an effort as Texas to change how urban public education is organized and delivered. Its efforts could result in the transformation of half a dozen districts. It seems the old expression is true: Everything is bigger in Texas.

The Hidden Piece of Good News in Congress's Budget Deal

with Juliet Amann. March 2018. The Washington Monthly.

The bipartisan budget deal that Congress agreed to last month failed to solve the plight of the Dreamers and extends tax cuts that will add billions to the deficit. Still, quietly buried in the text of the law is much-needed good news for low-income mothers and their children: a provision reauthorizing federal support for home visiting programs that help prepare young children for school.

The new spending bill provides $400 million a year for five years to the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program (MIECHV), passed by Congress in 2010. The program provides at-risk pregnant women and new parents with services such as home medical care, parental training, and nutrition guidance. Giving low-income children a more stable start ends up significantly diminishing future public expense on healthcare and supplementary education. In short, home visiting programs help alleviate inequality while creating positive long-lasting results that reverberate throughout whole communities.

Under the home visiting model, nurses—called “mentors”—visit young parents in their homes and coach them one-on-one on everything from how to play with their children in a way that teaches basic skills to providing tips on discipline to how to cook healthy meals. Because home visiting programs create an environment that supports a child’s health and education, the child then is more likely to enter preschool or kindergarten “school ready”—with age appropriate knowledge and a sense of self-efficacy—and can meet her peers on equal footing. When a child has someone at home who interacts with them regularly and cultivates a positive, supportive environment, the child’s self-esteem grows. Mentors also teach parents how to play with their child in ways that promote intellectual development, so that kids learn basics such as the ABCs, numbers, and colors.

The program provides parents with a person they trust and can turn to for advice about the frustrations of parenthood. Mentors teach mothers how to cope with the stress of motherhood in productive ways that help keep them in good mental health, while also helping them find resources like low-sugar baby formula and access to continuing adult education that ultimately increase the quality of life for families.

These kinds of home visiting programs are both effective and inexpensive. Teaching parents to support and nurture a child’s academic progress at home can decrease the chances a child will have to repeat a grade, saving taxpayers up to $72,000 by the time a child completes high school.

In Fairfax County, Virginia, for example, families enrolled in the Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY) program receive weekly visits from mentors, who bring books and supplies and coach parents through a set curriculum. One of the nation’s largest home visiting programs, HIPPY—which is partly funded by MIECHV—serves 16,000 children and families in the United States, as well as thousands more globally.

Some MIECHV programs, such as the Nurse-Family Partnership, even help at-risk mothers foster the self-sufficiency needed to return to their own education. For example, 31 percent of mothers participating in the partnership who lack high school degrees either gain a diploma or GED by the time their child turns one year old.

As a Fairfax County Public Schools teacher, I can testify to the importance of preparing children to enter school. Students who come to school “school ready” enter the classroom with a better understanding of behavioral expectations and academic rigor. Students who aren’t prepared to enter school as children often struggle—behaviorally, socially, and academically—adjusting to the newness of the classroom. In turn, they start beneath their peers, and risk falling further behind.

The spending deal passed by Congress leaves many, many vexing policy problems unresolved. Still, it’s refreshing to see that, at least in one respect, Congress is recognizing the societal benefit of low-cost, high-reward programs that work to reduce inequality and create opportunity for low-income kids.

To Help Troubled Students, Teachers Need Support Not Guidance

March 2018. RealClear Education.

Three students stabbed in one week. That’s how 2018 began for New Rochelle High School in Westchester, New York. These school stabbings came just months after the highly publicized, fatal stabbing of a student at Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation in the Bronx.

As Americans try to understand the increase of violence in their public schools, the Obama administration’s 2014 school discipline reforms have received a lot of attention. The policy, written by the Department of Justice and the Department of Education, took the form of a discipline guidance letter. It warned school districts that if their disciplinary procedures showed a disparate impact on students based on race, then the federal government could investigate them for civil rights violations. It also encouraged districts to use alternative discipline programs and classroom management practices in place of traditional discipline policies.

Although the guidance never became a formal regulation, schools districts across America began to implementcontroversial reforms in an effort to reduce their rates of out-of-school suspensions.

The letter had good intentions. As a former high school teacher in the Fairfax Public Schools, I don’t favor out-of-school suspensions for low-level, first offenses; most of the teachers I know don’t either. Disparities between the out-of-school suspensions of white students and students of color are well-documented, and teachers are acutely aware of the pipeline that runs from out-of-school suspensions to prison.

However, teachers also don’t want their hands tied.

The unintended consequence of discipline reform is that teachers have been hamstringed by hierarchal directives that deprive them of the agency needed to do what’s best for the majority of their students. The top-down message has been clear: Keep disruptive students in your classes at all costs or it will be taken as evidence of poor classroom management and teaching ability.

Four years later, we must face the question: Are these reforms actually harming the learning environment for the majority of low-income and minority students? Teachers and students across the country have reported a less safe school climate, particularly in low-income schools.

Consider the case of Bruce Randolph High School in Denver. Employees there sent an open letter to the superintendent of Denver Public Schools, speaking out against the district’s efforts to reduce suspensions and increase classroom time. Teachers said that since the discipline reforms, student learning had suffered. Even more alarmingly, students had threatened to bring guns to class, harm teachers, and blow up the school without facing meaningful consequences.

Policy directives were unrealistic. One required that teachers call parents prior to sending disruptive students to the counselor's office — an impossible demand when you’re in the middle of teaching 30 other students. “Time and resources that in the past would have been spent on improving instruction,” school employees wrote, are “instead spent by our entire staff … on habitually disruptive students that continually return to our classrooms.”

In October, the Consortium for Policy Research and Education (CPRE) released a report on discipline reform in the School District of Philadelphia. The majority of teachers CPRE researchers surveyed agreed with the following statement: “OSS [out-of-school suspension] is useful for removing disruptive students so that others can learn.” The majority of administrators, on the other hand, viewed the district’s discipline reforms favorably and agreed with the district’s policy banning out-of-school suspensions.  

Teachers and administrators might work in the same buildings, but they live in different worlds.

When a school complies with a top-down initiative, the school’s administrators win favor from higher-ups in the school district. If a school’s out-of-school suspension rates decrease, then it looks as if the district’s policies have led to positive outcomes for the school — at least on paper.

Teachers, on the other hand, must cope with continuously disruptive students in their classes. When administrators don’t value teacher feedback, educators feel unsupported, and an “us v. them” environment develops and damages school climate.

Centralized discipline policies might keep students in the classroom, but they also drive good teachers out. Without good teachers who have the autonomy to manage their classrooms effectively, students won’t receive a quality education, no matter what discipline policies a district embraces.

Since the Obama-era discipline reforms, there’s been a lot of talk about the need to train teachers in the best practices for emotionally supporting challenging students. Like all teachers, I had some challenging students. Moses makes that list.

Moses was on the verge of failing every class, including mine, and, in his other classes, he acted out, resulting in regularly assigned in-school suspension (ISS). Many teachers, like me, support the use of ISS because we believe that students need to be held accountable for missed learning in addition to taking responsibility for disruptive behavior. Although not as widely studied as other discipline methods, if implemented well, ISS can have positive results on student behavior.

Unfortunately, at Moses’s school, in-school suspension was not a well-run program. He once confessed to me that he liked in-school suspension because he could sleep there without teachers bothering him.

I began stopping by the in-school suspension room to “bother” Moses. I usually found him eating Fritos and watching racing videos on his phone instead of doing his assignments. I’d give him a stern talking-to, after which he’d complete the work. It wasn’t stellar, but it reflected basic understanding and some effort. Persistence eventually paid off: Moses learned enough English to pass my class. I had shown him that I cared about his academic success and that I believed he could succeed.

I did not, however, teach him how to cope with personal traumas that might be the source of his disruptive behavior. I was not qualified to do so nor did I want to be. Not all teachers want to be counselors. Many teachers have positive relationships with their students, an understanding of pedagogy, and expertise in their content area. They shouldn’t be required to fulfill the role of a social worker too.

Nearly half of America’s public school students have experienced trauma, but three of nation’s largest urban districts employ more security staff than school counselors and social workers combined. Often, in the absence of such professionals, their responsibilities fall to teachers, who are only qualified to identify signs of trauma, not help students deal with trauma.

If we want highly qualified teachers, we need to create environments where they can engage the majority of their students with content. Instead, we’re effectively insisting that they become emotional caregivers for their most challenging students.

If we want to improve behavioral intervention in schools, we need to direct more resources to schools with large populations of “at risk” students. They can then hire specialists — such as social workers and child psychologists — with the professional training necessary to help disruptive students.

The Trump administration will likely rescind the Obama-era guidance on school discipline. However, the administration has not proposed alternative solutions for addressing the school-to-prison pipeline. Defaulting to “zero tolerance” policies will inevitably harm low-income students of color, and it won’t solve the behavioral problems in our schools. As the administration looks to restore classroom agency to teachers, it should also prepare to provide low-income schools with more resources to support the emotional needs of “at-risk” students.

Stop Asking Teachers If They'll Kill Children

March 2018. The Hill.

Whenever we had lockdown drills, I’d get angry with my students. The lights were off, the door was locked, and students were seated silently under their desks. For about three minutes.

Then, the whispers began. Muted laughter followed; Phone screens flashed as students texted their friends, taking advantage of this “break” from learning.

After the drill, I tried to impress its importance upon them, but the routine would play out the same next time.

I couldn’t blame them. The majority of these students weren’t even born when Columbine happened. They were a generation who’d grown up with mass shootings and a 24-hour news cycle.

They regarded lockdown drills with the same flippancy that my high school friends and I had regarded fire drills, “Relax, Ms. Langhorne. We’re all fine; there’s not going to be a real fire.”

What my students didn’t realize, as they tried to secretly Snapchat from the dark corners of the classroom, was that I, and probably most teachers, spent the 15-minute drill surveying the room and thinking about our odds.

In the wake of every school shooting, in the midst of the rhetoric about gun control and senseless violence, we hear stories about educators who sacrificed their lives to save their students.  These stories remind us of the better parts of humanity when faced with the worst.

However, the role of teachers in school shootings might change drastically with President Trump’s proposal to arm and train 20 percent of teachers.

I don’t believe that arming teachers will deter a shooter — mass shooters aren’t rational criminals; many of them are suicidal and/or prepare to die in the attack. I do, however, understand one part of the proposition: A teacher can save a lot more lives by pulling a trigger than standing in front of a door.

But what happens to the teacher after she pulls the trigger?

While not a mandate for every teacher, Trump’s plan still puts educators in a terrible position. By suggesting to teachers that they take up arms, we are no longer asking them to protect students by sacrificing their own lives, we are asking them to protect students by taking someone else’s.

This difference cannot be understated. The latter forces teachers to ask themselves: If I’m not capable of killing, will it be my fault if children die? Will the students next door stand a better chance because their teacher volunteered to have access to a gun?

Movies and television often paint killing and dying to save others as equally heroic acts, but acts of violence are often considered honorable by everyone except those who committed them.

Taking a life, even in self-defense, has damaging psychological effects on the person who did the killing. Military members undergo intense training to overcome their reluctance to kill, but most veterans still report suffering extreme Post Traumatic Stress after killing in combat.

The armed teacher who encounters a school shooter will inevitably have to make a terrible choice: Do I kill this person? Do I kill this child?

Remember, school shooters are often minors. The youngest school shooter on record was 11-years-old when he helped kill five people at Westside Middle School in Arkansas.

The teacher who answers yes to these questions will not only suffer psychologically from the act of killing, but will also likely undergo a trial, with her decision publicly scrutinized. Unlike those who enter the military or the police force, teachers should never have to make this kind of decision.

America, we need to do better than this. We need to do better for our students and our teachers.

Conservatives have discussed placing more armed officers in schools and rethinking discipline reforms with unintended consequences. Liberals have talked about strengthening gun control — banning assault weapons and increasing background checks, for starters — and addressing adolescent mental health more aggressively.

These are the conversations worth having. These are the policies worth discussing. Debating whether teachers should be licensed to kill is not the discourse of a civilized society.

Teachers today play the role of social worker, parent liaison, nurse, and more. We already ask them to do so much for their students; please don’t ask them to consider killing, too.       

As a Teacher, I Was Complicit in Grade Inflation. Our Low Expectations Hurt the Students Were Supposed to Help

January 2018. The 74. 

In November, NPR uncovered a graduation scandal at Ballou High Schoolin Washington, D.C., where half the graduates missed more than 90 days of school. Administrators pressured teachers to pass failing students, including those whom teachers had barely seen.

Policy wonks have had a field day with the report, adding graduation scandals to their lists of top 2018 education stories to watch and questioning the value of a high school diploma.

The one group of people who were not surprised by the scandal: teachers.

George W. Bush once claimed that as president, he would challenge the “soft bigotry of low expectations” in our nation’s classrooms by raising the K-12 education standards for of all America’s children. But in the past two decades, the soft bigotry of low expectations hasn’t been challenged; it’s been masked by grade and graduation inflation. And these low expectations are not isolated in our nation’s most impoverished schools.

Four years ago, when I began my teacher training, a tenured teacher gave me some advice: “Just give them a D; it’ll be so much extra work for you to fail anyone.” At the time, I thought it was strange wisdom, but soon I learned that it’s part of the “common sense” of survival in the world of teachers.

I worked in Fairfax County Public Schools, a more affluent, higher-performing district near Washington, where pressure to inflate grades and ensure students pass was ingrained. These district-encouraged, sometimes administrator-enforced grading policies still make me cringe.

In these policies, teachers are:

  • Discouraged from having “hard” deadlines or assigning penalties for late work

  • Discouraged from giving a student less than 50 percent on an assignment (regardless of the quality of work or level of completion)

  • Encouraged to allow retakes to on all major assignments if a student earns less than an 80

Not only do these policies create extra work for already overworked teachers, they also promote an attitude of low expectations that does a disservice to our students in the long run. They teach students that deadlines aren’t important, that you can receive half the credit for none of the work, that achievement is detached from practice, and that you can always bank on a second chance.

The justification behind these policies is that a student’s final grade reflects his ultimate mastery of skills or content knowledge, uninfluenced by earlier academic struggles or behavioral issues.

I could almost believe in this educational philosophy, if it weren’t for quality points.

Usually, a student’s final grade is the average of the previous quarters’ marks. When a student is at risk of failing, a teacher must determine if the student passes on quality points. On a 4.0 scale, an A is worth 4 points, a B is 3, a C is 2, a D is 1, and an F is 0. The teacher takes the total number of quality points the student earned for the year and divides it by 4 (the number of quarters) to determine whether the student passes. Simply, if a student scored an A in the first quarter (4 quality points), but failed the next 3 (0 quality points), the teacher divides 4 points by 4 quarters so the student receives 1 quality point for the year; she passes with a D.

You can read about the math here. To me, passing while failing three-fourths of the year doesn’t align with a “grading for mastery” philosophy.

The central office pressures schools to embrace policies like these, and administrators pressure teachers to do the same, even if the grades go against a teacher’s professional judgment. Ironically, the grading guidelinesalso state: “All grades reflect the teacher’s professional judgment of student achievement. Teachers are responsible for justifying their grades whenever the need exists.”

Grading policies like these are not unique to Fairfax County. Districts across the country have begun to impose similar policies on teachers.

In my experience, being complicit in this system eventually weighs on you. Teachers know it’s unethical, and they know that the students will suffer the consequences when they leave high school misinformed about their abilities and unprepared for college and the workforce. I can only imagine that the 21 teachers who left Ballou High School before midyear felt similarly.

No teacher wants students to fail. I didn’t, but I also believed students could reach my expectations and, more important, exceed their own, if they were held to certain criteria and received help along the way. Weakening expectations for behavior and academic achievement was not the way I had envisioned “helping” students when I decided to become a teacher.

Working in a system that discouraged having expectations demoralized me, and I think it disadvantaged my students. Different kids need different types of assistance, but creating a uniform policy of low expectations hurts the majority of students. Having never experienced it, students do not know how to cope with, and learn from, failure. Moreover, they have little incentive to grow academically when A’s aren’t earned through thinking, learning, and persevering, but are instead handed out like participation stickers.

In Virginia, students have to pass a standardized assessment to graduate from high school. That assessment is set at an eighth-grade level. The bar is low, but at least it exists. Only 12 states require that students pass such a test. Ballou High School graduated the majority of its students even though none tested proficient in math and only 9 percent tested proficient in English on D.C.’s standardized exams. Again, such inconsistencies aren’t news; they’re happening everywhere.

We are becoming a society where students no longer earn diplomas; they receive them. When state lawmakers attempt to increase the rigor of high school graduation requirements, they’re lambasted until they relent and weaken the criteria.

As a nation, we’re afraid. Administrators, educators, parents, school board members, and other elected officials fear that if we raise the bar, our students won’t be able to reach it. We’re afraid that our kids will fail, so, instead, we fail them by sending them off to college and the workforce, knowing that they’re underprepared.

They’re paying the price for our complicity in a system that perpetuates low expectations.

Is Chicago Really America’s Fastest-Improving Urban School District? Why Claims Made by the NYT & Others Are Misleading

with David Osborne. January 2018. The 74. 

A recent New York Times article suggested that Chicago had the nation’s fastest-improving large urban school district. In it, reporters Emily Badger and Kevin Quealy summarized data from a new study by Sean Reardon of the Stanford University Center for Education Policy Analysis.

For many, that was surprising news, since the district has received heat for inflated graduation rates and three years of flat scores on PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) tests, which reveal that only 1 in 4 CPS elementary students reads at grade level.

A look at more comprehensive data makes it clear that while Chicago did improve from 2009 to 2014, New Orleans and Washington, D.C., have improved faster. A key reason for rapid improvement in all three cities appears to have been aggressive replacement of failing schools with stronger schools, most of them charters. Unlike in New Orleans and D.C., however, Chicago’s leaders virtually halted charter growth five years ago — which could explain the stalled growth since 2014.

Unlike other studies, Reardon’s study uses cohorts of students — following all third-graders through to eighth grade, for instance. Reardon used 2009 to 2014 scores on the Illinois Standard Assessment Test (ISAT), Illinois’s pre–Common Core test, to conclude that “Chicago’s students’ scores improved dramatically more, on average, between third and eighth grade than those of the average student in the U.S.”

That statement is surely true. Reardon demonstrated that Chicago’s students gained six years of learning in five years between third and eighth grade. In 2008–09, third-grade students scored, on average, about 1.4 grade levels below the national average in math and English language arts (ELA), but in eighth grade that same cohort scored only 0.4 grade levels below the national average.

Chicago deserves credit for this progress. But a Times chart showing Chicago with the highest academic growth of any American city — along with its statement that Chicago students “appear to be learning faster than those in almost every other school system in the country” — is quite misleading. This is true for several reasons: test scores tell different stories depending on how they are analyzed; third- through eighth-grade scores capture only part of the picture; and test scores are only one measure of success.

Let us start with the first point. Reardon groups all of a city’s public schools into “geographic school districts” and then records the estimated mean state test scores in math and English language arts for all students. He compares cohort proficiency scores over time (e.g., the scores of third-graders in 2009 to those of fourth-graders in 2010 to those of fifth-graders in 2011). However, when the estimated mean test scores of the geographic school districts are used to compare the scores of third-graders in 2009 with those of third-graders in 2010 with those of third-graders in 2011, and so on, Reardon’s data show both New Orleans and the District of Columbia improving faster than Chicago between 2009 and 2014.

Other Test Score Data: New Orleans Ranks First

Now let us consider other grade levels and other test scores.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana turned a desperate situation into an opportunity. Two years prior to the 2005 storm, the governor and state legislature had created a Recovery School District (RSD) to take over the state’s worst public schools. After the storm, the legislature placed all but 17 of New Orleans’s public schools in the RSD, and over nine years, the RSD handed them to charter operators. In the decade after Katrina, New Orleans schools improved faster than those of any other city in the nation, by most important metrics.

Before Katrina, 60 percent of New Orleans students attended a school with a performance score (based largely on test scores) in the bottom 10 percent of the state. A decade later, only 13 percent did.

In the RSD schools in New Orleans, only 23 percent of students tested at or above grade level in the spring of 2007, the first full school year after the storm. Seven years later, 57 percent did. RSD students in New Orleans improved almost four times as fast as the state average.

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The Orleans Parish School Board, which got to keep only those schools performing above the state average (many of them selective magnet schools), also turned most of its schools into charters. Adding its students into the mix still reveals extremely rapid improvement over the period Reardon studied.

In his study, Reardon focused only on growth in grades three through eight. In New Orleans, students in grades three through eight went from 37 percent testing at grade level or above in 2007 to 63 percent in 2013, the last year before the test began to change to align with Common Core standards. (These figures average math, ELA, and science scores.) That’s almost a doubling in the percentage of students testing at grade level in just six years.

Illinois’s ISAT test began to change in 2013, so a fair comparison would stop in 2012. In Chicago, between 2007 and 2012, the percentage of third- through eighth-grade students testing at grade level or above grew from 64 to 74 (also averaging math, ELA, and science scores). In high school (where the test remained the same), 29 percent tested at grade level in the spring of 2007, compared with 32 percent in 2013. This was improvement, but nothing close to what happened in New Orleans.

Beyond Test Scores

America has been obsessed with test scores since the No Child Left Behind Act passed in 2002, but most education researchers, including Reardon, acknowledge that other metrics are important in judging a district’s success. Perhaps the most important are high school graduation rates and college-going rates.

Before Katrina, roughly half of public school students in New Orleans dropped out and fewer than 1 in 5 went on to college. In 2015, 76 percent graduated from high school within five years, a point above the state average. In 2016, 64 percent of graduates entered college, six points above the state average.

From 2005 to 2015, Chicago Public Schools’ five-year graduation rate (for district and charter schools) increased from 52 percent to 70 percent, which remained 18 points below the state average. College enrollment rates rose from 50 percent of graduates in 2006 to 64 percent in 2015 but remained six points below the state average. Again, significant improvement, but not as rapid as in New Orleans.

Douglas Harris, a professor of economics at Tulane University and director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, lead a research studyto determine whether the reforms there had driven improvement or if other factors, such as demographic shifts, were responsible. Harris found that demographic change accounted for only 10 percent of the progress, at most. His 2015 conclusion: “We are not aware of any other districts that have made such large improvements in such a short time.”

How About Washington, D.C.?

To test his conclusions from Illinois’s ISAT data, Reardon also analyzed how Chicago performed on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP is given every two years in fourth and eighth grade to a random sample of students representative of each state and 21 large urban districts. NAEP is widely considered a reliable standardized assessment, because there are no stakes attached. No one is rewarded or penalized based on how students perform, so there’s no teaching to the test or test prep.

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New Orleans is not one of the 21 urban districts, but the District of Columbia is. Reardon again used cohorts of students, this time from fourth to eighth grade, to measure growth. Unlike ISAT, however, NAEP is not given to the same set of students each year. If an entirely different sample takes the test the second time than the first, is it realistically possible to show growth within a cohort?

Ignoring cohort growth and looking simply at scores every two years, Chicago has shown significant growth on NAEP, but progress in D.C. has been faster.

If the four scores above are averaged out, District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) averaged 18.5 points of growth over those 12 years, while CPS experienced 15.75. (Ten points is considered roughly the equivalent of one year of learning, so both cities improved rapidly.)

In 2009, NAEP began to include public charter schools authorized by districts in its results, which means that Chicago’s data from 2009 on includes charter students. D.C.’s charters, which educate 47 percent of public school students in the city, are authorized by a Public Charter School Board, not by the district, so they were not included in the chart above.

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Comparing district plus charter schools in both cities shows an even larger lead for D.C.

The average improvement across all four scores in DC was 19.75 points, compared with Chicago’s 15.75.

Did Chicago Peak Before PARCC?

Because Reardon used ISAT scores as the basis for his analysis, he looked only at Chicago’s results before 2015. But in the three years since Illinois switched to the PARCC tests, district scores have been flat at best.

Only about 25 percent of third- through eighth-grade students in CPS are ready for the next grade, based on the results of their math and reading PARCC tests. When grouped as cohorts, as Reardon did with the ISAT data, the percentage of students unprepared for the next grade level has often increased, as the table below shows.

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The trend of Chicago’s students being unprepared for the next grade level appeared to continue through high school, because almost two-thirds of the graduating class of 2015 who were enrolled at community colleges had to take remedial courses, 17 percentage points higher than the state average.

DCPS students also take the PARCC tests, and a large portion of them are also behind grade level. But as the table below shows, DCPS has shown steady reductions in this number. Public school students in New Orleans took PARCC exams in 2015, which the state board then changed slightly in 2016 and 2017, though they are still somewhat comparable to PARCC. The results for all three cities are shown below.

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Why Has Progress Stalled in Chicago?

Without a doubt, Chicago Public Schools improved over the five-year period that Reardon studied. But over the past few years, test score improvement has stalled. Part of the reason may be that PARCC tests are far more demanding than their predecessors and put low-income students at a greater disadvantage. But part of the explanation may lie with Chicago’s freeze on charter schools.

After Katrina, New Orleans gradually converted its public schools to charters — a process that will culminate when the last four schools convert next summer. Many failing schools were closed and replaced by stronger school operators, and Douglas Harris and his colleagues concluded that 25 percent to 40 percent of the improvement resulted from such replacements.

The District of Columbia also embraced charters. Not only have D.C.’s charter schools shown consistent growth, but the competition they created led to reform of the district, which has also improved rapidly. Both sectors have replaced many failing schools.

For many years, Chicago was also a leader in chartering; when it hit state limits on charter numbers, it created “contract schools” — charters by another name. In 2004, Arne Duncan, then superintendent, announced “Renaissance 2010,” an improvement plan that closed more than 60 failing schools and opened 92 (of an intended 100) new schools — many of them charters — on performance contracts with the district. The first cohort of Renaissance 2010 schools opened in 2005, and by 2010, the district had opened all 92. Because the school board authorizes Chicago’s charter schools, their success boosted CPS’s test scores.

A 2015 Urban Charter School Study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) showed that while students who attended public charters in Chicago learned about as much in English language arts as demographically similar CPS students with the same past test scores, they learned the equivalent of 14 days more in math every year. Students in poverty attending charters gained 27 days in math and 34 days in ELA.

Similarly, a new report by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research found that charter high school students scored significantly better on standardized tests in 10th and 11th grade than similar students in district schools. The charter students had higher rates of attendance and graduation, and enrollment at four-year colleges and universities was significantly higher among students graduating from charter schools. The study also commented on school climate at public charters in Chicago — a crucial aspect of a creating a positive learning environment, especially in a district where security guards outnumber counselors in public schools. It noted that both teachers and students reported feeling significantly safer in charters than in non-selective traditional public schools. (Charters are also non-selective.)

The contract schools and others that replaced failing schools also performed well in Chicago. In all three cities — and nationally, according to numerous studies — replacing failing schools with stronger operators has been far more effective than trying to turn around failing schools.

But in 2013, when Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel decided to close 47 schools for financial reasons, he promised not to give any of the empty buildings to charter operators, effectively ending charter expansion. Just last year, Emanuel agreed to a new labor contract that will limit the growth of charter enrollment to 1 percent over three years.

The surge, then halt, in charter expansion might help explain why Chicago’s public schools improved so rapidly from 2009 to 2014 and then leveled off. By stifling charters, the city may have stifled the academic growth of its students.

If Chicago wants to once again be a rapidly improving district, it should continue to replace failing schools with autonomous, accountable public schools of choice, operated by nonprofit organizations — whether it calls them charter schools, contract schools, or something else. In the 21st century, such schools are producing urban America’s most rapid growth, in New Orleans, in D.C., and in other cities with strong charter laws and practices.

The Truth About "Segregated" Charter Schools

December 2017. U.S. News and World Report. 

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS recently published an analysis that claims charter schools increase segregation in America's public schools. 

Charter schools are public schools operated by independent organizations, usually nonprofits. Freed from many of the rules that constrain district-operated schools, they can craft programs that meet the needs of their students. In exchange for increased autonomy, they are normally held accountable for their performance by their authorizers, who close or replace them if their students are falling too far behind. Most are schools of choice, and unlike magnet schools in traditional districts, they are not allowed to select their students. 

The AP's analysis relies on the previously discredited methodology of UCLA professor Gary Orfield's 2012 study. Education reformers and civil rights activists have already spoken out against the report and its unfair condemnation of charters. But one can't help but fear that such falsehoods will be turned into "truths" by anti-charter crusaders, especially those – like American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten – who were quick to promote the badly done analysis as "damning evidence" of the failure of public charter schools. 

The truth is that public charter schools are giving long overdue opportunities to minority children by providing high quality educations. America should be praising them. Instead, crusaders like Weingarten use their lies to influence Americans and disempower thousands of minority families. 

Truth #1: Residential segregation, not charter schools, increases "racial isolation" in public schools. Orfield and others compare the average racial makeup of charter schools to the average racial makeup of traditional public schools, nationally. This is misleading, because so many charter founders have located their schools in the inner city, to serve poor, minority children. The admirable mission of these schools inevitably means that they will serve a high number of students of color. But studies that compare them to nearby traditional public schools, serving the same neighborhoods, find them only slightly heavier in minority enrollment.

In America, decades of racist housing policies have created neighborhoods that are residentially segregated. In many districts, boundary lines based on students' home addresses still determine where they'll attend school. Buying a home for your family can also mean buying access to a good public school for your children. In this neighborhood-based system, school populations inevitably reflect the living patterns of the district: The more affluent and racially isolated a neighborhood is, the more affluent and racially isolated the schools are, and vice versa. 

Roughly two-thirds of suburban children are white. Where are the protests over public school segregation at schools predominately composed of white and Asian students? Where are the criticisms of white families that access high quality schools by moving to the suburbs, thereby increasing racial segregation?

The truth is that in recent years segregation has been increasing across all of America's public schools. Racially and socioeconomically segregated neighborhoods have led to racially and socioeconomically segregated schools. Blaming public charter schools for the re-segregation of America's schools is a distraction created by critics who can no longer deny the success these schools have had in educating low-income and minority students.

Truth #2: Choice is not equal to force. When Gary Orfield originally called public charter schools "segregated" and termed schools with more than 99 percent of one race "apartheid schools," he was using code words as a political tool. It's impossible to separate the word "segregation" from Jim Crow laws and images of the violent history of racism that has plagued our nation.

However, "segregated" public charter schools differ from our nation's history of segregation in a major way: Minority families are choosing these schools. 

In a charter system, parents choose the educational model and academic climate they feel best fits the needs of their children. Schools of choice transcend boundary zones by accepting students from anywhere. In residentially segregated America, school choice empowers minority families by giving them options. Conflating their freedom to make a choice for their children with a history of imposed segregation is disingenuous.

Bill Wilson, the first African-American elected to the St. Paul City Council, and Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change, put it well: "Some critics don't seem to understand the huge difference between forcing people because of their race, to attend a school, and giving new options to people, especially those from low income families and families of color. … As a child growing up in southern Indiana, one of us knew far too well what segregated schools were. He was bused past three all-white schools in order to attend the one designated for children of color."

Minority families are choosing charter schools, regardless of their demographic makeup, because in so many neighborhoods, charters are the only quality schools. 

Responding to the AP's analysis, activist Howard Fuller tweeted: 

Integration is not THE goal. It may be yours. It’s not mine nor is it the goal of so many Black children who real goal is surviving while people like you are talking about integration.

Truth #3: Questioning the right to school choice disempowers minority families. For years, America's public education system has denied low-income families a say in where their children go to school. Families with means have always had the option to choose the best education available; they've sent their children to private schools, moved to the suburbs, paid for SAT prep courses and more.

Low-income minority families should also have the right to make choices for their children. Questioning their right to choose a high quality charter school over a failing neighborhood school hinders social justice.

Criticizing minority families when they choose high-performing schools with predominately black and brown student bodies is patronizing. As Fuller writes, "Why should people who have been denied a great school in their neighborhood now be criticized for attending one because it's all Black?"

Truth #4: Academic success is as important as diversity. Virtually all research shows that students at public charter schools in low-income urban areas significantly outperform their demographically similar peers at district schools. The 2016 Brookings Institute report on charters and segregation concluded, "Charter schools with strong academic focus and "no-excuses" philosophy that serve poor black students in urban areas stand as contradictions to the general association between school-level poverty and academic achievement. These very high-poverty, high-minority schools produce achievement gains that are substantially greater than the traditional public schools in the same catchment areas."

A 2015 report from Stanford University's Center for Research on Educational Outcomes revealed that after four years in a charter school, the typical urban student was getting half a year more learning every year than demographically similar peers, with similar past test scores, in district-operated schools. 

Ignoring the academic success of these schools and focusing instead on their lack of diversity serves the agenda of the teachers unions' anti-charter propaganda machine. It also promotes a dangerous stigma about schools mostly comprised of students of color, suggesting that the academic achievements of these schools are less meaningful than those at schools with a portion of white students. 

This is false. In fact, at many "integrated" urban schools, day-to-day life is actually quite segregated, with most white students in honors and AP classes and most minorities in standard classes, going anywhere but college. Diversity is a goal the nation should strive for, but not if it means sacrificing academic excellence for our most undeserved students. 

Public charter schools have done what traditional public schools have failed to do for decades: educate our most disadvantaged kids. America should be celebrating them, not crucifying them for their lack of diversity.

Truth #5: Low-income and minority children need access to high-quality education now. Without question, integration is good for students. Students who attend socioeconomically and racially integrated schools do better academically, while developing a variety of cognitive and social skills from their experience in a diverse environment. They develop empathy for and understanding of people who look or talk differently than they do. 

In today's atmosphere of increasing intolerance, America needs more empathy and understanding. Integrated education should remain our ultimate goal. School choice and charter schools offer several avenues for reaching this goal, as David Osborne and I have written in previous articles. 

However, disadvantaged children cannot wait for nation-wide integrated public school systems; these students need access to a high quality education now. Public charter schools are providing it to them. 

Dr. Kenneth Clark, the first black president of the American Psychological Association and a civil rights activist whose psychology research was integral in the Supreme Court's Brown v. The Board of Education decision, believed strongly in integration. Ten years after the Brown decision, however, Clark was disappointed in our progress. In 1968, he argued that the path to integrated public schools had two steps. The first was to ensure that all African-American children had access to high quality education, regardless of each school's demographics. 

More than 50 years after Brown, charter schools are working to make that happen. Let's stop derailing this movement by condemning school leaders who have dedicated their lives to educating our most underserved students. 

Let's stop hurting minority children by creating roadblocks – such as calls for moratoriums on charter schools and efforts to cap charter expansion – that prevent them from attending quality schools. 

Let's stop falling victim to the anti-charter propaganda machine, run by those with power and means who continually disempower black and brown families by questioning their right to choose the best education for their children, all the while knowing that their children will never have to suffer such indignity.

 

 

A Bright Spot in School Diversity

with David Osborne. November 2017. U.S. News and World Report. 

THE ALBERT SHANKER Institute recently released a report that analyzed the negative effects of private schools on integrated public education in Washington, D.C. 

While only 15 percent of students in the nation's capital attend private schools, 57 percent of white students do. Private schools essentially create the segregation equivalent of white flight to the suburbs, without the physical "flight." 

In America, socioeconomic status and race are highly correlated, and parents with means often choose private schools. A 2013 Friedman Foundation study found that parents cite a series of reasons: increased safety, better discipline, smaller class sizes, improved learning environments and more individual attention. 

Urban public schools are usually hamstrung by centralized rules and budgeting, but many public charter schools can replicate the elements of a private school climate: Each school has the autonomy to craft its own culture. Public school choice can increase integration by income and race, as we argued in a recent column, and charters can also create "diverse-by-design" schools to attract parents of all races.

Charter schools are public schools operated by independent organizations – usually nonprofits – and freed from many of the rules that constrain district-operated schools. With this autonomy, they can create school climates and programs that meet the needs of their students. In exchange for increased autonomy, they are normally held accountable for their performance and closed if their students are falling too far behind.

Diverse-by-design schools are growing in popularity. The Diverse Charter Schools Coalition now has 38 members, more than double the number when it was founded in 2014.

Multiple models in D.C. Diverse-by-design schools have to recruit middle-class and affluent parents who might otherwise send their children to private schools. They do so by creating rigorous curricula, small class sizes, character education and strong educational programs. 

Consider Latin American Montessori Bilingual Public Charter School, which has one of the most diverse elementary school student bodies in the district. By fourth grade, its students are fluent in English and Spanish. "Because of the city we live in," principal Cristina Encinas tells us, "and because of the model [dual language], it's an advantage to us to have that diversity." The idea is to have native speakers of both English and Spanish each make up 30 to 50 percent of the student body. The school's goals for students include academic growth and bilingual fluency, but also multicultural competence.

Because Latin American Montessori Bilingual is also a Montessori school, the students have freedom to pursue their own interests. School leaders want them to develop an intrinsic desire for knowledge by pursuing their interests through active learning. That can make some parents – particularly low-income parents, who typically aren't familiar with Montessori – uncomfortable. After all, most of the 4,000 Montessori schools in the United States are private and only 150 operate in urban centers. 

Encinas noted that some parents also fear that Montessori is "too soft" on kids – that students won't listen without being yelled at. She disagrees. "Children want to be treated with respect," she says. "Just some children have never been exposed to it. I don't believe in bad children; I believe in children who have been trained to feel bad about themselves." 

Lee Montessori Public Charter School also works hard to promote the Montessori model to families of all economic and ethnic backgrounds. On the "Have You Heard" podcast, headmaster Chris Pencikowski discussed the challenges of maintaining a diverse population in an area where affluent white families are more likely to enroll their students in Montessori schools. His recruiters struggle to dissuade low-income families from the belief that their children will only succeed in a hyper-structured, test-heavy, no-excuses school, he said. Once they enroll their kids, they are usually happy with the school, even though the classroom looks less than traditional, with some students writing stories and some painting pictures while others put on chef's aprons and prepare the morning snacks. 

Washington Latin Public Charter School, another member of the Diverse Charter Coalition, uses a very different educational model. Encompassing fifth through 12th grades, it has a demanding, classics-based curriculum and a discussion-based pedagogy focused on the "big questions" of human experience.

Such discussions are enriched by voices from a variety of backgrounds, so Washington Latin seeks racial and socioeconomic balance. The students come from all eight wards of the city, and the school charters buses for students who live farther away to ensure that they can attend.

The principal, Diane Smith, believes that structure is liberating for many children, but at her school, structure comes from relationships based on respect and warmth rather than rigid discipline policies. "The culture that we're aiming for is warm, boundaried and intellectual," she said. Adults never yell at children; instead, they treat children with respect and humanity. The students learn that respect is an exchange process of giving and getting.

The teachers also have a professional dress code (no jeans, ties for men, business attire for women), which helps students understand why they must wear uniforms. The dress code also symbolizes to children that the pursuit of knowledge is serious work and those in the service of public education are professionals. 

Washington Latin's school leaders are dedicated, according to their website, to "remove any barriers that might deter a family from fully participating in the school's programs." Affluent parents can make donations so that disadvantaged peers of their children have equal access to books, field trips and clubs – making poverty a community issue rather than an isolated problem faced by certain students.

Despite their different models, Washington Latin, Latin American Montessori Bilingual and Lee Montessori all face one similar challenge: They don't qualify for federal Title I funding, which provides extra funds to schools in which at least 40 percent of students qualify for subsidized meals. At all three schools, about 25 percent of students qualify. Keeping a commitment to diversity while meeting the needs of disadvantaged students creates extra challenges, but these schools are dedicated to doing both. 

Other challenges faced by diverse-by-design schools. Engineering diversity is often a challenge. Jennie Niles, deputy mayor for education in the district, founded the diverse-by-design E.L. Haynes Public Charter School. In the beginning, she says, recruitment was difficult. The parents who approached her weren't necessarily the ones she wanted to target. Language barriers and busy work schedules often made it difficult for parents to meet with school recruiters. 

Finding a location that works for different income groups is also a challenge. When racial and socioeconomic demographics are so heavily correlated with ZIP codes, a school's founders must look for a place that is easy to access from different communities. In low-income families, parents with less flexible work hours may not be able to accompany their children to schools outside the neighborhood. On the other hand, more affluent parents are less likely to send their children to schools in neighborhoods they perceive as dangerous. 

Public charter schools often open in the poorest neighborhoods, because they serve a high percentage of at-risk kids who would otherwise be trapped in failing schools. But if the goal is to move towards integrated public schools, wealthier communities must encourage charters to open in their neighborhoods, and make an effort to ensure that students of all races feel welcome there.

The good news. Regardless of these challenges, diverse charter schools are in demand and are spreading. The district has several with waitlists, which indicates that many families want integrated schools, as long as they are of high quality. If there were more diverse-by-design schools in the city, more white children might attend public schools. 

In this year's PDK International poll, 70 percent of U.S. parents said they would prefer to send their child to a racially diverse school, all else being equal. Those results, combined with the growth of diverse-by-design charter schools, are a small ray of light in the dark and ongoing history of segregated education in America.

Taking Away $250 Tax Deduction for School Supplies Speaks Volumes About How We Value Teachers

November 2017. The 74. 

When I was a teacher, I didn’t have a “cute” classroom. My colleague upstairs designed a reading space for students, complete with comfortable seats, a special carpet, and twinkle lights.

I was lucky if my posters stayed on the wall (which often they didn’t because of the school’s erratic temperature changes).

Regardless, most students loved my class as much as they loved my colleague’s. I think they actually developed an affectionate spot for the chaos of the room. Some generously told me that it mirrored the personality of my energetic teaching.

Despite outward appearances, both my colleague and I spent hundreds of our own dollars, as well as a lot of our free time, to make our classes fun and welcoming places where students wanted to go to learn.

My colleague’s expenses were obvious. She created a place where children want to go to read. That’s money well spent.

My expenses weren’t so obvious. You couldn’t tell from looking around my classroom, but it was also money well spent. No amount of colorful paper or pretty lights would have helped me keep a tidy and cute classroom, but I too purchased things to keep my students engaged in learning. These were my hidden costs of teaching.

I stocked my classroom library — a concept strongly encouraged but not funded by our district — with books I thought my students would want to read, like Looking for Alaska and Feed, rather than leftovers from the “one dollar/free” bins.

Even though I taught English, I purchased and put up a beautiful world map when I realized my ninth-grade students didn’t know that Great Britain was an island.

At the beginning of the year, students bonded over naming the classroom fish (Finley), and they took turns feeding him. They did the same when I bought the second fish (Dobby the House Fish) and a better fish tank, after the first one — the fish, not that tank — died.

I created a game for vocabulary practice that used board games and a cowbell. It was as delightfully bizarre as it sounds. It was also effective, though: the students learned their roots and words. They had to do their homework if they wanted to play.

Before winter break, we did a community-building activity involving toothpicks, marshmallows, and paper plates. 145 students participated. It was a competition to design and build igloos. On the daily agenda, I labeled it “spatial reasoning test,” just to mess with the kids before class started.

There was more too, of course. I didn’t regret a penny I spent (well, except for the third fish, Little Sebastian; alas, there’s a time to cut your losses) because I believed that my work mattered, that every creative choice I made had an impact on the lives of students.

Unfortunately, the GOP’s tax plan just sent teachers a different and disheartening message: Your work doesn’t matter. We don’t value your money. We don’t value your time. We don’t value your dedication to children.

The GOP’s tax plan cuts the $250 deduction that teachers were allowed to take to compensate for their personal spending on school and classroom supplies.

For me, the subtext behind this move is equally as upsetting as the monetary loss that comes from eliminating the deduction.

Many teachers actually spend a lot more than $250 on their classrooms, but the deduction embodies a symbol that society values teachers, their ingenuity, and the sacrifices that they make out of their commitment to the kids.

Allowing the GOP to cut this deduction will send a strong message about the value that we, as a nation, place on those who attempt to make a profession out of educating America’s youth.

It’s no secret that teachers make a lot less money than other similarly educated professionals. After all, no one goes into teaching for the money, but, surprisingly, teachers also don’t leave teaching because of the money.

The pay wasn’t the reason I left teaching. I left teaching because I felt that, despite my education and expertise, society didn’t regard the work I did as equal in value to that of other professions requiring similar education levels and skills.

Teachers teach because they love their students and their subject matter. That’s always the silver lining, but, for many people, being a teacher means knowing that policymakers don’t include your voice in their decisions. Parents, school districts, and school boards undermine your authority and take away your autonomy in the classroom. You won’t receive raises based on your merit, and tenure laws not only protect the jobs of your ill-qualified colleagues, but also ensure that they receive larger paychecks.

For a lot of teachers, the GOP’s slight will be just another in a very long list of unacknowledged frustrations. It’s another sign that those who should regard teachers as equals actually don’t respect their profession. Politicians either praise teachers as heroes or use them as scapegoats, but they rarely listen to them or support their professionalism.

We live in a society where school districts increasingly expect teachers to have a master’s degree and simultaneously expect these educated professionals to sacrifice the right to go to the bathroom. It’s not surprising that we have a hard time attracting talented people to the profession.

Ultimately, our country needs a strong education system to be successful, and a strong education system needs the best teachers. Shouldn’t the federal government work to incentivize the best candidates to go into teaching, not further discourage them?

When I told my students I was leaving teaching, a few started to cry. One student was particularly upset. I tried to comfort her by reminding her that I wouldn’t even be her teacher the next year, but she kept crying and saying: “You don’t understand.”

Maybe she’s right. Maybe we don’t understand. Maybe the only people who truly value and understand the importance of having good teachers are the ones who experience the difference they make on a daily basis. Indeed, they’re the ones that stand to lose the most as the nation continues to struggle to recruit highly qualified people into teaching.

Unfortunately, they have no voice, and the people that do are speaking loud and clear in a familiar tone that reminds me of why I left the profession.

The Best Hope for School Integration

with David Osborne. November 2017. U.S. News and World Report.

COULD CHARTER SCHOOLS and school choice be the best hope for integrating our public schools by race and income?

Charter schools are public schools operated by independent organizations, usually nonprofits. They are freed from many of the rules that constrain district-operated schools. In exchange for increased autonomy, they are normally held accountable for their performance by their authorizers, who close or replace them if they fail to educate children. Most are schools of choice, and unlike magnet schools in traditional districts, they are not allowed to select their students. If too many students apply, they hold lotteries to see who gets in.

Not everyone acknowledges the potential of public charters and school choice to spur integration in America's schools. Last summer, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten went so far as to label the school choice movement "the only slightly more polite cousin of segregation." 

In most charter schools, teachers choose not to unionize. Union memberships have shrunk as charter sectors have grown, so it's no surprise that teachers unions hate charter schools and, by extension, school choice.

But as is often the case, Weingarten's words were about 180 degrees from the truth. Traditional districts without public school choice often reflect the racial segregation that exists in their neighborhoods. In contrast, charters and school choice offer several avenues to integrate our schools.

Rick Kahlenberg, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, has spent years exploring these avenues. "The social science consensus is that integration is good for kids," he says, "and yet we haven't made much progress." Students who attend socio-economically and racially integrated schools develop a variety of cognitive and social skills from their experience in a diverse environment. When low-income and minority students learn in a classroom with affluent peers, they increase vocabulary skills, experience fewer disciplinary issues, and internalize new visions for their future. When children engage with others who are different from themselves, all students, including white and middle-class kids, encounter new viewpoints, which results in increased problem solving and critical thinking skills. 

Unfortunately, segregation in America's public schools has actually increased in recent years. 

A conversation about integration quickly runs into this brick wall of residential segregation. Most of the previous methods for integration implemented by our traditional public school systems have failed. For instance, boundary shifts have spurred animosity between neighborhoods, and busing accelerated "white flight" rather than promote inclusion and increase integration.

But districts that have embraced 21st-century strategies such as school choice, common enrollment systems and charter (and charter-like) schools are in the unique position to encourage integration in new ways.

Ultimately, Kahlenberg argues: "Choice is the optimal way to achieve integration."

While most states mandate some form of intra- and inter-district choice, each state has its own complicated regulations, and in many districts a student's parents have to request a transfer. This process can be intimidating for parents with less time and "know-how," which increases the likelihood that schools in more impoverished areas will mirror the socio-economic – and, by extension, racial – demographics of their neighborhoods. 

However, districts that have shifted to a common enrollment system that includes almost all public schools – traditional and charter – give students the opportunity to attend almost any school in the district without navigating complicated processes. 

In Denver, the District of Columbia, New Orleans and Newark, families only need to fill out one application for each student. On the application, families list their school preferences, and their application is entered into the district-wide enrollment system, where a computer program matches students with available seats at each school. The computerized system equalizes the chance of enrollment for students of all races and socio-economic backgrounds.

In New Orleans, which calls its common enrollment system "OneApp," 71 percent of students got their first choice and 80 percent got one of their top three choices for the 2014-15 school year. After a district moves to a common enrollment system, it can ensure equity by creating places where parents can sit down with counselors and sort through their options. Families with lower education levels and language barriers often need help with the process. The Recovery School District in New Orleans set up four centers around the city to help parents trying to decide which schools to list on their applications.

n 2011, Denver Public Schools rolled out its common enrollment system, "SchoolChoice." Before then, parents who wanted their children to attend a school other than their neighborhood school had to research and apply to multiple schools. The district had more than 60 enrollment systems for its own schools alone, plus many more for charter schools.

Community organizations such as Metro Organizations for People pushed for a common enrollment system, arguing that it was an equity issue. Many low-income parents didn't have the time or language skills to fill out multiple applications, and they found the previous process intimidating, so they were less likely to apply. In addition, before the switch, unlike the charters, district-operated schools weren't required to use a lottery for enrollment. Research showed that many parents got their children into their preferred schools by going directly to the principal, circumventing the "required" procedure.

After the introduction of SchoolChoice, the Center on Reinventing Public Education surveyed families and discovered that parents found the new application system much easier. It has clearly increased equity, leading to a jump in the percentage of low-income students and English-language learners attending in-demand schools. 

It has also minimized parents' ability to game the system. One local parent wrote on a blog after it went into effect, "This is the dumbest system ever! I used to be able to bake brownies for the principal and get into the school, and now I can't do that!" For many families, making that sort of favoritism more difficult has finally leveled the playing field.

Going a step further, some schools use weighted lotteries to maintain diversity. While the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that no public school can select for students or reserve quotas based on race, some states allow use of a weighted lottery that reserves a certain percentage of seats for low-income students, and that usually leads to racially diverse student populations. 

Weighted lotteries or common enrollment systems are especially important for schools that are high performing and in-demand. In Denver's common enrollment system, for example, Denver School of Science and Technology is allowed to reserve at least 40 percent of the seats at each school for students who qualify for subsidized meals. A charter network with 14 middle and high schools, it holds students to the standards of a private prep school: the curriculum emphasizes core academics and students must pass all classes with a 70 percent average to be promoted to the next grade. Though 69 percent of its students come from low-income families, all graduates earn college acceptance, and the network has the lowest rate of required college remediation of any public schools in Denver.

Giovanni Venzor Melendez, a Denver School of Science and Technology graduate, spoke no English when he began kindergarten, and when he was a senior, his family still spoke Spanish at home. Denver School of Science and Technology is a "very diverse school, where you know the people in your class," he said. "You just form these amazing bonds with people, and you start to love them." The only segregation at the school, he said, was between grade levels – not by race or income but by age. 

High Tech High, a source of inspiration for the Denver School of Science and Technology's founders, is a network of charter schools in San Diego, California. Although the district doesn't have a common enrollment system, these charters use a lottery weighted by zip code for their applicants. In the area, residential segregation is so prevalent that reserving a certain number of seats for students from each zip code results in a racially diverse student body. 

Cambridge Public Schools in Massachusetts has designed its own version of a common enrollment system, called "controlled choice." Families rank their school preferences when students register. Then, in January, the district uses a computer program that aims to match families to their school of choice but also to create socio-economically integrated schools. A district of about 7,000 students, Cambridge Public Schools only uses this system for elementary schools. Incoming and transferring students must apply directly to schools with open seats. 

Each elementary school feeds into a specified middle school, and the district only has one high school. Regardless, the district's controlled choice system has been considered a success. Most students attend schools that are racially and socio-economically balanced. To promote integration, other districts – from White Plains Public Schools in New York to Lee County Public Schools in Florida to Berkeley Unified School District in California – employ their own versions of controlled choice.

Common enrollment systems make permeable the arbitrary geographic boundary lines that have stalled integration efforts. Allowing families to choose their public schools and implementing common enrollment systems in school districts across America would be a tremendous step towards promoting equal access for all students. Districts that go one step further and embrace charters will also be able to offer families meaningful choices among a variety of different types of schools, designed to meet the needs of different kids. 

Unfortunately, many districts still aren't seeing the light: New York City Public Schools recently unveiled its newest School Diversity Plan, from which a K-12 common enrollment system that includes charters was disappointingly absent.

This Detroit Charter School Has Just 1 Mission That All Charters Should Adopt: 'Excellence'

October 2017. Reinventing America's Schools Blog. 

“The building used to be a tomato factory. This space was where the trucks would pull up to unload the produce,” Ralph Bland said as he gestured around the large, airy room that is now the cafetorium — the combined cafeteria-auditorium — of Detroit Edison Public Academy School, a PK-12 public charter school in Detroit, Mich. 

Bland is DEPSA’s superintendent. This campus he leads consists of one building for pre-K through eighth grade, a separate building for the high school, and a community garden. 

It’s picture day. Elementary school students wearing uniforms file by. The kids wave to Bland or reach out to shake his hand. 

“The pre-K to second graders wear red ties, the rest of the elementary school wears plaid, and the middle school wears black,” Bland explains. “It makes it easy to spot someone who isn’t in the right place.” 

This type of thoughtful design permeates the entire school. The environment is deliberately crafted to encourage excellence through structure and rigor. It’s a warm place, but it’s also an environment designed to promote scholarship.  

“A school has to be a place for students to learn and teachers to teach. Teachers want to be able to teach, and they can’t do that in a chaotic environment,” Bland said. “Kids will be kids, but teachers shouldn’t have to deal with what I’ll call ‘intense behavioral issues’ in the classroom.”

Bland understands that kids don’t innately value structure; it’s something they must learn to appreciate. Each student begins DEPSA by attending a two-week “Character Camp” that focuses on culture-building and norm-setting. 

It’s also a time for DEPSA to orient students to the school’s philosophy: high school graduation is not the goal. It’s a stop on the path towards excellence: college graduation. 

“The school places you in an environment to exceed expectations ,and the teachers push us to perform beyond what we believed our capacities are,” DEPSA senior Jahari said. “When everyone around you is striving for excellence, you absorb that greatness too.”

Her classmate Dae’von is a case in point. He came to DEPSA from another public charter school because his mom felt he wasn’t being challenged. 

“When I first got to DEPSA, I learned ‘you will struggle,’” Dae’von said. “But even when you don’t make the grades you want, you’re gaining knowledge, and that’s the important thing.” 

Dae’von embraced the struggle. He’s on track to receive the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme diploma, and he even attended a summer program at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

DEPSA’s student body is 100 percent black, and 65 percent receive free or reduced-price lunch, an indicator of poverty. Near the high school’s locker bay, acceptance letters from each of DEPSA’s first three graduating classes are proudly displayed. Each class had a 100 percent college acceptance rate, and 82 percent of DEPSA’s first graduating class, now college seniors, are still enrolled and on track to graduate.

As high school seniors, all students take a college seminar course where they learn about filling out admissions and financial aid applications. Each student is also assigned an alumni advisor who they can reach out to with questions or concerns during college.  

“College has always been in the plan for me,” DEPSA senior Asha said. “For friends and family at other schools, college is an option for them. For me, it’s always been the plan.” 

Asha came to DEPSA in the second grade form another Detroit Public School that has since closed. She said that it’s been her home ever since, “My friends at other schools don’t feel that way about their schools,” she said.

Asha’s twin sister struggles academically. “At my other school, I was doing fine, but the teachers sort of left her behind,” Asha said, “My sister is really creative. Here teachers encourage that. DEPSA values her.”

DEPSA began as a part of the Edison Project, a for-profit entity where part of the school model meant returning any of the year’s leftover funds to the parent company. In 2010, DEPSA’s board decided to transition to a nonprofit model, believing the move would benefit students. Bland became the CEO of New Paradigm for Education, the nonprofit management company that now runs DEPSA and five other public charters in Detroit. 

The autonomy that comes with being a public charter school has contributed to DEPSA’s success. Kim Motley Bland, chief academic officer for New Paradigm for Education, said that having a CMO — rather than a central office — run the schools makes a big difference. 

“We’re here,” she said, “The staff gets the opportunity to interact with us.  Having the ability to be hands-on and determine the curriculum needs of students gives us the opportunity to build programs not because someone tells us to but because we use data and teacher feedback and best practice to determine what students need.”

Basing decision off students’ needs has led to many innovative, student-centered programs.

Each morning, all students from pre-K to second grade participate in an early-reader program for 90 minutes where students go to a class designed for their reading level. If a kindergartener is reading at a second-grade level, she proceeds to the second-grade level reading room. If a student is reading below grade level, she is assigned a tutor who stays with the student until she is able to read at grade level

The goal is for all students to enter third grade reading at or above grade level.

DEPSA also offers special classes in its clinic for students who have health needs. For students who have asthma and diabetes, for example, the clinic has courses that teach students how to manage their condition. It also holds nutrition and weight management courses for students who struggle with obesity. 

In addition to AP classes and dual enrollment opportunities, DEPSA is the only school in Detroit with a sixth-through-12th grade full I.B. program. 

The Michigan Department of Education ranks the school in the 87th percentile for the state (based on the MDE accountability system), making it the highest-ranked school in Detroit. Not the highest-ranked public charter school; the highest-ranked school in Detroit, period.

In a state notorious for weak charter schools, DEPSA stands out as an exemplar of what public schools could be if the state held its authorizers accountable for school success. Michigan has 14 charter school authorizers who are held accountable only to parents. The result has been that authorizers allow weak operators to open schools and then let failing schools continue to operate, rather than replace them with stronger operators. 

Weak authorizing is not only harmful to the students in those failing schools, but also to public school students in general. Having an abundance of weak charter schools in the sector creates difficulties for strong operators who are trying to grow their networks.

“I think it does cause a greater challenge when you don’t have a certain amount of ‘strong players.’ It makes what the strong players are trying to achieve more difficult, some roadblocks, barriers may appear,” Bland said. “It gives people who don’t necessarily favor choice [or] charter schools more leverage at the end of the day, strategically.”

Despite this challenge, New Paradigm Education, which currently serves about 2,400 students, will continue to grow. It recently received a 5 million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Education. With these funds, New Paradigm hopes to establish a cluster of schools of the same quality and grow enrollment significantly.

That’s good news for Detroit Public Schools parents because DEPSA is in demand. Like many high-performing charter schools across the county, DEPSA has a waitlist and must rely on a lottery for selection. 

As I got into my Uber to leave DEPSA, my driver began waving to school’s secretary. He told me that his son went to DEPSA. He told me how happy he was with the school. The school challenges his son, the teachers set high standards, and the staff knows him and keeps him involved in decisions about his son’s education. 

Throughout my visit, and during our ride, I was left with one thought: This is what public charter schools in Detroit could be.  

Detroit needs to find ways to hold their authorizers accountable for the success and failure of public charter schools. Replication of high-performing schools should be a priority. It’s time to put politics aside and put kids first. Every kid deserves the option to attend a school like DEPSA, and right now, Detroit, and many of America’s other cities, don’t have enough of them to go around.

 

Q&A: At D.C.'s Washington Latin Public Charter School, 'the Greatest Success is the Culture'

September 2017. Reinventing America's Schools Blog.

Diana Smith, principal of Washington Latin Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., received a lot of press this summer when her No-Tech Tuesday Challengecaught the interest of the media, educators, and parents. 

At the end of the last school year, Smith challenged the 160 eighth and ninth grade students at WLPCS to stay off of their screens, including televisions, all day every Tuesday during the summer — from June 13 to August 22, 2017. She promised to give each successful student $100 out of her own pocket.

Last week, when WLPCS opened for the new school year, Smith awarded $3,400 dollars to 34 of the 38 successful students.  (Four students declined the momentary reward, but all students gained something).

WLPCS is a Classics-based school with a clear mission and impressive reputation. A Tier 1 public charter school, the school uses a classical approach to education to help students distinguish between information and knowledge, to engage in public forums and Socratic seminars, and to develop character, which WLPCS defines as the intersection of intellectual and moral development.

And, yes, each student must take Latin. 

The success of the school comes from the hard work of many educators and involved parents, but no one can overlook the role that Smith — imbued with creativity and sense of purpose like her No Tech Tuesday Challenge — and her strong leadership plays in the school’s achievements.

Reinventing Schools’ Emily Langhorne recently spoke with Smith to discuss what makes WLPCS unique. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: You weren’t the principal of Washington Latin Public Charter School when it was founded in 2006, but you came on board when the school was still in its infancy. How did you find your way to Washington Latin?

A: I came on board in July of 2008. I had been in independent schools, and I was consciously looking for a different experience. I wanted to work with public school kids, but I knew that I wasn’t going to work in a school where the class sizes were over 20, and I knew that I wasn’t going to work in a school where I had to go back and get courses. I’d been in education for over 25 years at that point, and I wasn’t certified. So I didn’t go the normal public school route. 

I interviewed at four or five charter schools, and this was the one that was most closely aligned with my beliefs and background. I have a background in Classics, so it was a very interesting experience for me to have someone actually say, “Here’s a school devoted to everything that you believe in.”

This devotion to a Classics-based education makes Washington Latin a unique place in terms of school culture. Can you describe the school’s culture and explain how the school works to mold and maintain that culture?

I think the culture of the school is the most salient characteristic of the school. The culture that we’re aiming for is warm, boundaried, and intellectual. I think all three of those are very intentionally developed. We just had a new employee who said after a week of being here that the “thing most obvious to me here is the intentionality.” 

The warm is through a variety of, well edict isn’t the right word, but my wish is that adults do not yell at children, ever. I am very strict about that. Boundaried is just what it sounds like: I believe that limits are freeing. And the intellectual part is the part that I think a lot of traditional public schools are missing, and that is the idea that we are in the service of some really extraordinary ideas so you need to create culture through allowing the faculty to talk about and think about the things that excite them and drew them to the intellectual life in the beginning. 

How has being a public charter school, versus a traditional public district school, allowed you to create this special school culture?

First of all is the class size. It’s the most expensive thing we offer and so we have an average class size of 16 to 17, and we really try not to have classes go over 21 [students]. From what I know [in a traditional district school], I wouldn’t have had any control over that. 

I hand-schedule every single child in this building — that’s 700 kids. That also wouldn’t have been possible [as a traditional district school]. We do that in order for us to be able to put kids together in combinations that would be productive for them and with teachers who would be good for them. That’s another really intentional part that I don’t think would have been possible.

We talk about controversial issues; we actually lean into them on purpose. I don’t know that that would have been possible in a traditional public school, maybe I’m wrong. 

I think the biggest issue is size. I think that one of the reasons our high school has been so successful is that it’s small, and kids who at that age are yearning for anonymity aren’t able to be anonymous here. 

You mentioned hand-scheduling the students. Are there other things you do like that which are unique to Washington Latin?

Yes. Socratic seminars, which are a part of our pedagogy that is deeply imbedded now, which can only really happen with small classes — everything we do is an extension of small size. That’s one thing. 

We do have an advisory program, which is homeroom for older kids, basically, where every adult has 10 to 17 student advisees that they are responsible for. 

The other unique feature of this school that people overlook often is that every single administrator in this building teaches. So every adult that is in this building is either teaching a class, running a club, proctoring a study hall. But all of the administrators are teachers. 

If you had a chance to talk with people who were anti-charter, for whatever reason, is there anything specific you’d want to tell them?

“Come visit,” I think is the first thing I always say when I enter into conversations about people who are anti-charter — I happen to have some in my own family — and I’ve just said, “Come see and see if you think it’s working.” It just does a whole lot more to put them around the kids than to talk to them about it. 

But I think that the freedoms that I’ve had as a principal here I wouldn’t have had in other areas. It’s crucial that I have the ability and autonomy to hire who I want to hire and to devise an evaluation system that allows me to remove the people who aren’t doing what they’re suppose to be doing.

Because I’ve only spent my life in independent schools or public charter schools, I don’t know what it’s like to not have the autonomy of a leader in a school building. I can’t imagine what that would feel like. 

Giving me the autonomy to create a culture that I know works is a good thing. One of the things that we’re trying to do here is to create that private school atmosphere with public school students, and we’re trying to do it in a socially responsible way. That works. Small schools work for private schools; it’s actually the thing that they’re selling. I just couldn’t do what I’ve done without the autonomy that I’ve had. 

How do you feel about school choice and the role that it should play in public education?

I think choice, despite that it might have some flaws theoretically, in practice is an extremely healthy and necessary thing. I’ve seen the [traditional] public schools in this city respond in some way, in many ways, to what the charter sector is doing, and I feel that there is a good relationship between [traditional] public and charter in this city.

The charter school movement was really started as the R&D department of education, right? It was started as an educational idea so that people would experiment and figure out ways to educate. There are many who are worried that there is something about charter schools that is not public. I can’t tell you how many people come into the building and say, “So what are your admissions criteria?” who don’t understand that charter schools are entirely public schools. 

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve face in running a public charter school?

You know, I’m down on the ground and in amongst the kids, so always on my mind is the students who are struggling. I think the more I do this the more I realize the biggest challenge is parent education. First of all, we have to get beyond the discussion about whether it’s a school’s responsibility to help parents know how to be better parents such that kids will get an education. Once you have that conversation, then having to figure out exactly how to help parents be better parents is not an easy thing. The at-risk kids here, I would like to be able to help their parents help us, and I would like to be able to form a partnership. That’s a challenge, working with the parents of our at-risk kids.

The other challenge is just financial. That is making sure that we can maintain this small-class-size model. We give up a lot for that in terms of help. One administrator in this building has an assistant, one, so that’s one of things we have given up. And that’s a challenge. The facilities continue to be challenge: not having enough space and then the cost of creating more space. Those are the three that have been most on our minds. 

What would you consider the greatest success of Washington Latin?

I think the greatest success is the culture. I think we’ve allowed faculty to be autonomous in such a way that we are able to work on the autonomy of the children, which is what we’re after. I think the greatest success is a sense of purpose and mission, and a culture that is in line with that.

Let Schools Judge Teachers

with David Osborne. August 2017. U.S. News and World Report. 

 

SINCE PRESIDENT BARACK Obama's Race to the Top competition made teacher evaluation systems based in part on academic growth a central requirement of winning, most states have mandated them. 

Making teachers accountable for student success is a laudable goal, but district-wide approaches don't usually work. Most teachers regard evaluations as part of a bureaucratic checklist that creates unnecessary paperwork and presents an incomplete picture of the work they do. And recent research shows that in the majority of states, the number of teachers rated "unsatisfactory" remains less than 1 percent, even in struggling school districts. 

The data on school performance suggests that it's far more effective to hold schools accountable for student learning than individual teachers. Districts should replace schools where students are falling too far behind and expand or replicate schools that succeed. If they face such consequences, most schools will figure out how to evaluate their teachers in ways that fit their cultures and goals. 

In other words, it should be the school's job to ensure that teachers are successful and the district's job to ensure that schools are successful.

The problems with centralized approaches to teacher evaluations. Top-down mandates simply aren't very effective. Often school personnel jump through hoops to comply with rules without truly embracing their purpose. Teacher evaluations designed by a central office become at best a bureaucratic hoop and at worst a tremendous time commitment that undermines teacher morale.

Evaluation processes vary by district, but they usually include a component to be completed by teachers. In some districts, teachers must complete lengthy paperwork, such as writing self-reflections on each of a half dozen assessed standards: professional knowledge, instructional planning, instructional delivery, learning environment, professionalism, student academic progress and so on. 

Sometimes they must keep an online portfolio containing evidence of how they've achieved each standard.

And teachers are all too aware that no one at the central office reads these documents. They know they're being given a "completion grade" for busy work, and they resent it.

Beyond the teacher's contributions, centralized approaches to teacher evaluations tend to rely heavily on two components: test scores and classroom observations. These can push teachers away from creative instruction and towards evaluation-safe, teach-to-the-test, cookie-cutter lessons. Worse, both often fail to provide a realistic portrayal of a teacher's performance in the classroom. 

Standardized tests have long been debated as a means of measuring teachers' success. In most states, the majority of teachers teach subjects in which there are no standardized tests. And test scores often reflect more about the student or the school than the teacher. A student's performance does not reflect only his current teacher, but also his previous education, background skills, self-confidence, work ethic, general attitude towards school and level of motivation on the day of the test. 

Brief observations only a few times each year have similar problems. Teachers who have more disruptive students – behavior most often correlated with low-performing and low-income students – tend to receive lower scores on observations than teachers with well-behaved students. And unless students are accustomed to regular visitors, the dynamic of a classroom changes drastically when someone comes in, especially an authority figure. 

Without seeing a teacher at length and consistently throughout the year, it's difficult to determine their strengths and weaknesses or provide them with meaningful feedback. 

William Johnson, a special education teacher, wrote about his experience with classroom observations in The New York Times. During one observation, a student began throwing things. He sent her to the dean's office. He received an unsatisfactory rating because he "had sent this student to the dean instead of following our school's 'guided discipline' procedure."

"I was confused," Johnson wrote. "Earlier last year, this same assistant principal observed me and instructed me to prioritize improving my 'assertive voice' in the classroom. But about a month later, my principal observed me and told me to focus entirely on lesson planning, since she had no concerns about my classroom management. A few weeks earlier, she had written on my behalf for a citywide award for classroom excellence. Was I really a bad teacher?"

Studies also show that principals are more likely to grade teachers "unsatisfactory" on low-stakes surveys than on high-stakes personnel evaluations. Principals admit to inflating teachers' ratings for multiple reasons: fear of being able to find a better replacement, personal discomfort with giving a negative rating, desire to allow the teacher to improve without pressure and a lack of time to do the documentation required to remove an unsatisfactory teacher.

Neerav Kingsland, the former head of New Schools for New Orleans, pointed out that roughly 4 percent of charter schools close each year and 7 percent are closed during formal evaluations, whereas only 2 percent of teachers are terminated every year and less than 1 percent are rated in the lowest evaluation category. 

Why? Human nature. "Charter schools are evaluated by outside entities that are separated by governance structures," he explained. "Teachers are evaluated by their bosses, who work with them every day. As a manager, I get it. It's very difficult to give extremely low ratings to employees, especially those you don't plan on firing."

The solution. Data, logic and experience all suggest that states and districts should hold individual schools, not teachers, accountable for student learning. 

But without a mandated evaluation system, how can we be sure that schools will weed out the failing teachers? Not a problem. In the charter world, when authorizers close or replace failing schools, most schools routinely weed out their weaker teachers. 

Their principals, deans and teacher leaders spend a great deal of time observing teachers and giving them feedback, often more than once a week. They invest in coaching teachers, so they can improve. They also know the students well, and they routinely hear from students about the best and worst teachers. They know where the weak links are. 

Successful schools create cultures in which teachers feel committed to the mission and values. That requires a team made up of strong links, who are concerned with the success of the school, not individual evaluations. Weak links endanger the mission, not to speak of the school's survival. So other teachers are usually happy to see them go.

We should give all public schools the autonomy they need to design their own evaluation systems. We also have to allow them to let weak teachers go, something that will require changes in teacher tenure rules in most states. 

If we're going to hold them accountable for student learning, and replace schools that fail, we also have to let them create their own school models. It is unfair to hold school leaders and staffs accountable when they lack the power to redesign their schools. 

Consider the District of Columbia Public Schools' evaluation system, widely considered the very best. Studies show that, combined with the nation's highest teacher salaries, that system has helped weed out the worst teachers and retain the best. Yet its schools still can't equal D.C.'s charter schools, which have no mandated evaluation system, in educating the city's majority black and poor students. 

Rather than continue to insist on centralized evaluation systems, in other words, we should emulate the charter sector. We should redesign our public school systems, so they hold schools accountable but give them significant autonomy, including the power to hire, evaluate and fire. As healthy charters sectors have proven in New Orleans, Washington, Denver, Indianapolis and elsewhere, in the right system, effective teacher evaluation happens without central mandates.

When Pursuing Education Becomes a Crime, It's the System That Should Be Scrutinized, Not the Students.

August 2017. The 74. 

In a recent article, Derrell Bradford mentioned New Jersey and the state’s practice of having off-duty police officers follow students home to make sure the students are attending school in their assigned district.

“When we’ve criminalized the pursuit of a good school, we must ask whether the mission and intent we ascribe to public education are really being served,” Bradford writes.

It is a thought-provoking sentence. I assume that Bradford would have liked for me to think about how children’s ZIP codes are the largest predictor of the type of education they’ll receive (the subject of his excellent article); instead, I thought about Emilio.

Emilio (not his real name) was a student in my ninth-grade ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) English class. Although I couldn’t claim he was one of my better students or that he possessed a particularly strong work ethic, he was prompt and polite, engaged while in class, and gifted with a wonderful sense of humor.

Prior to reading Shakespeare, the class studied literary devices — pun, oxymoron, simile, etc. I have never seen a student laugh so hard at the sign for “Dry Creek Water Park.”

Around the beginning of February, Emilio told me he would miss the next class because his family was moving.

In March, I pulled Emilio into the hallway to discuss his tardiness, which had gone from nonexistent to unacceptably frequent. Emilio’s class was first period. Because of the class’s demographics, it was not unusual for students to get a nighttime job to help support their families. I asked Emilio if this was the case. Ever polite, he explained that no, he did not have a nighttime job, but he now had to take two public buses to get to school and it took 75 minutes if the buses ran on time.

Only then did I realize: Emilio had moved out of our school’s boundary region. He might have even moved out of the school district altogether.

Teachers are expected to report students like Emilio. My former school district employs people to make sure that all of the students attending the school are currently living in-district as well as in-region, and that they’re not using an outdated or false address, or putting down a relative’s address. It’s not an easy task, but it is an important one.

Illegally enrolled students do cost individual schools money. The number of legally enrolled students, not the number of students physically present in the building, determines the school’s funding. Often, these numbers do not align. As a result, these illegally enrolled students contribute to problems of increased class sizes and thinly stretched resources, but they don’t bring any tax money along with them. Also, non-native speakers like Emilio are more expensive to educate than other students.

This issue is not new. A 1991 New York Times article examined the growing number of expulsions of illegally enrolled students in suburban areas. Unfortunately, in the current system of property taxes and geographic school boundaries, schools truly can’t afford to educate students from outside their districts, and so those students have to be removed and sent back to their neighborhood schools, regardless of the difference in school quality.

Sadly, it’s been over 25 years, and we still haven’t fixed the inherent and obvious problems with this system of using geographic boundaries to assign students to schools.

What if we had a different system?

What if Emilio could choose where he went to school? What if the taxpayer money followed him to the school of his choice rather than staying in the district where he lived? What if he were allowed to openly admit that he wanted to attend our school rather than feeling forced to sneak in like a criminal?

Having input into your education is empowering and motivating, especially for students who usually feel as if they have no voice.

Students should not be denied the opportunity of a good education because of where their parents live, and a system of school choice allows students to pursue that opportunity without fear of committing a crime. In this system, taxpayers fund students, not schools, so the money follows the student to the school he chooses to attend rather than staying in the school closest to where he lives.

I didn’t ask Emilio any questions about where he lived; I didn’t want to know. I continued to teach him as before — with a chuckle and a lot of patience.

In most cases, following district procedures is important. Sending away a faceless illegally enrolled student to his assigned school district might be the proper thing to do.

But forcing a 15-year-old boy who laughs at puns and has a good group of friends to leave his school for one with fewer educational opportunities is, to me, what’s criminal.

Union's Retrograde Report Earns Failing Grade

with David Osborne. July 2017. The Progressive Policy Institute.

Last week, the National Education Association (NEA) voted to adopt a new policy statement1 on public charter schools. Ignoring mounting evidence that the best charter systems are finally giving urban children a shot at a decent education, the NEA calls for a moratorium on the creation and expansion of public charter schools.

The NEA says it based this new statement on yearlong research conducted by its Charter Taskforce. Unfortunately, the taskforce report2 is a shoddy piece of work that echoes the same old falsehoods about public charter schools, including that the schools “counsel out” the worst students and that they increase segregation. The former has been heavily refuted3. The latter is also unproven. Charter schools’ demographics are not significantly different than their neighborhood public schools4(They do, however, produce significantly better academic results with a similar student composition5).

And, of course, the NEA beats its favorite drum, claiming that public charter schools drain resources from public schools—which is impossible, since charters are public schools.

The report concludes that charter schools are a “failed and damaging experiment.”

This is fear mongering worthy of a prize. But it’s the NEA that’s actually afraid – for its future. The NEA no doubt fears that a growing charter sector means a shrinking teachers’ union. That need not be the case, however, if the union evolves to fit into 21st century school systems rather than block the progress of charter schools with policy statements and moratoriums. 

The statement makes the following questionable assertions:

1. Only locally elected public school boards should have the power to authorize charters.

Locally elected school boards have proven problematic as charter authorizers because the employees in their districts hold school board members politically captive.

Elected school board members who vote to replace failing public schools with charters, or to open new charter schools, are often punished by union members at the next election. Remember, turnout in school board elections is often only 10 or 15 percent, and most school staff vote. Hence few elected board members take the risk of offending the unions, and their school districts improve very, very slowly, if at all.

Restricting charter authorization to locally elected school boards would severely limit the expansion of charters. That won’t help disadvantaged kids trapped in low-performing district schools.

The NEA wants you to believe that the growth of charter schools has resulted in “separate and unequal education systems” that “are disproportionately located in, and harm, students and communities of color by depriving both of the high quality public education systems that should be their right.” They claim these “separate systems of charters are inherently unequal.”

They are unequal, because charters are much more effective. Well-authorized charter sectors –such as those in D.C., New Orleans, Denver, Newark, and Boston— are much better for impoverished students and those of color6. That’s why low-income parents turn out in force to protest when political elites try to take away their right to choose a charter rather than be assigned to their neighborhood school.

The NEA's statement seeks to block any charters run by high-performing networks such as KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools, despite the overwhelming evidence7 that these “no excuses” charter schools produce the greatest results for high-poverty, high minority communities.

2. All charters must be subjected to the same labor laws, collective bargaining contracts, accountability measures, and employment regulations as district schools.

For instance, the statement says, “When a charter is authorized in a public school district that has an existing collective bargaining agreement with its employees, the authorizer will ensure that the employees will be covered by a collective bargaining agreement.”

Most charter schools are not unionized, because the ability to make autonomous decisions about staffing – to hire, fire, promote, and reward employees based on the needs of their students – is crucial to their success.

Subjecting charters to the same employment regulations as traditional public schools would of course eliminate that autonomy. Union contracts in most traditional public schools prohibit performance pay, termination of failing teachers, and promotion of teachers on the basis of performance rather than seniority. They require lockstep pay systems based on seniority.

Effectively, the NEA will only accept charters that function like traditional public schools. The union fears that if teachers continue to have a choice, they will opt to forgo the collective bargaining agreement and union membership to work in public charter schools that treat them like professionals and give them a say in running the schools.

The industrial union model is the antithesis of professional status. Most charter school leaders believe that industrial unionism, with its labor vs. management paradigm, is a poor fit for education. They prefer to view teachers as professionals, giving many of them decision-making roles.

3. Charters, on average, do no better than traditional public schools in terms of student learning, growth, or development.

Of the hundreds of studies of charter school effectiveness, the vast majority find that charters perform better than traditional public schools. For instance, studies by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) show that students who spend four or more years in charter schools gain an additional two months of learning in reading and more than two months in math every year, compared to similar students in traditional public schools.

When it comes to charter schools, however, “average” has little meaning, because the 43 states and the District of Columbia with charters all have different laws and practices. Any good idea can be done poorly, and some states have proven it with weak charter laws and lax oversight. One has to look beyond the averages to see the truth: In states and cities where charter authorizers close or replace failing schools—a central feature of the charter model

charters vastly outperform traditional public schools, with students gaining as much as an extra year of learning every year.

4. Competition does not improve public schools.

The NEA claims that the rapid growth of charter schools has created a damaging competition for students and money. In reality, competition is good for schools: as in other industries, it forces them to improve, because if they don’t, they may shrink or even die.

Letting charter schools compete for students, and the money that follows them, forces traditional schools to pay more attention to what families need. Parents have much more leverage, because they can choose to send their children to another school.

Monopolies – whether in the public or private sector—are rarely a good thing. Traditional district schools, like monopolies, feel no urgency to make changes. Their funding isn’t going anywhere. They have no competition.

5. Charter schools are not held accountable like traditional public schools.

Unlike the others, this assertion is true, but not in the sense that the NEA means. Traditional public schools are held accountable for following lots of rules, while charter schools are held accountable for their performance.
Failing charter schools are at much greater risk of being shut down than other failing traditional schools. From the beginning, the charter concept was to give schools more autonomy while holding them accountable for performance. Under charter authorizers who do their jobs, no charter is allowed to fail its students year after year, as traditional public schools are often permitted to do.

In a traditional public school, teachers may know the students are failing, but turning that around – particularly with poor, inner city students – is very difficult, especially when centralized rules hamstring principals and teachers8. Maintaining the status quo is the easier option.

Independent charter authorizers have no reason to preserve the status quo. Their agenda is straightforward: if students aren’t learning, the school will close.

In Conclusion

NEA leaders fear that the growth of charter schools threatens the health—and wealth—of their union. When they made their previous policy statement on charter schools, in 2001, there were fewer than 2,000 public charter schools. Today there are almost 7,000. The NEA’s leaders know that when parents have a choice, they often pick charter schools.

Their union faces particularly tough times ahead. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Mark Janus in the upcoming case Janus v. AFSCME, the NEA expects to lose 20,000 memberships in the 20 states where traditional public school teachers are required to pay union fees in order to keep their jobs.

It’s disappointing to see the nation’s largest teachers’ union taking a retrograde stance against meaningful and positive education reform. The NEA should not hold back the overdue evolution of America’s K-12 school system, but instead adapt to a changing environment. Low-income children have greatly benefited from the creation of charter schools, and the NEA should not sacrifice the futures of those children for the welfare of its members.

As 21st century school systems continue to emerge, low-income parents will continue to regard public charter schools as the means through which their children have equal access to quality education. It’s time for the NEA and other teachers’ unions to reconsider whether standing in the charter schoolhouse door and shouting “no” is the best way to serve America’s children.

The Danger of Centralized School Discipline

with David Osborne. July, 2017. US News and World Report

IN 2013, EMPLOYEES AT Bruce Randolph High School sent an open letter to the superintendent of Denver Public Schools, complaining about the district's mandatory discipline policies. "The disproportionate amount of time and resources that in the past would have been spent on improving instruction is instead spent by our entire staff, including administrators, instructional team, support staff, and teachers, on habitually disruptive students that continually return to our classrooms," they wrote.

Five years earlier, Bruce Randolph's leaders had sought and won increased autonomy, so they could turn around the failing school. One change was a disciplinary crackdown: If students continued to disrupt their classes, after efforts to help them change, the school expelled them. 

Free of constant disruption, student learning improved. Then in 2011 to 2012 the district – intent on reducing suspensions and expulsions – adopted centralized policies that made it difficult to use those tools. Expulsion and suspension rates dropped, but so did the quality of education in some schools.

By 2013, students at Bruce Randolph had threatened to bring guns to school, kill teachers and blow up the school, then received only a few days of suspension. In 2015, when the teachers union in Denver surveyed its members, a third said they felt unsafe in their schools, and almost 60 percent said they would hesitate to send their own children to their school because of discipline issues.

One Denver Public Schools policy required teachers to call parents prior to sending habitually disruptive students to the counselor's office. In a resignation letter to the school board, a teacher asked, "With 30 students in class, how is it possible for us to make that kind of a call home in the middle of instruction? All of our teachers here are exhausted as we continue to deal with the same issues and same students over and over due to the lack of support and ineffective consequences." District discipline policies were creating a "dangerous and destructive" environment.

This is the price we pay for centralization. If we want effective schools, such policies are misguided. In low-income, urban areas, our most effective schools control their own operations – including discipline policies – within broad parameters set by a district or charter authorizer. 

Advocates of centralization fear that without uniform rules, minority and impoverished children will be treated unfairly: suspended and expelled more frequently than their white, middle-income classmates. 

President Barack Obama's Department of Education pushed districts to re-examine their discipline policies because data showed that African-American and Hispanic students were being suspended and expelled at higher rates than whites. No one knew whether those students were disrupting class at higher rates, so there was no way to tell if the difference was due to racial discrimination. But many states and districts responded, limiting such practices.

Racism, both conscious and unconscious, remains a significant problem, and when it occurs, the punishment should be swift and sure. If a school is discriminating by race (or any other factor), authorities should fire the guilty parties, and if it happens again, they should replace the entire school. But they shouldn't hamstring all other schools by taking discipline decisions away from educators. 

The problem with centralized policies is not their intentions: Keeping students in school, alleviating racial bias and finding alternative means of discipline are admirable goals. But too many districts opt for a one-size-fits-all approach to discipline, rather than giving each school the authority to implement practices that best fit the needs of its students. The result is often increased disruption – as in Denver – that hurts every student.

In a 2012 survey, more than a third of U.S. teachers said student behavior problems and tardiness interfered with their teaching. And studies prove what common sense tells us: Disorder and violence in school undermine all students, often for the rest of their lives. 

When it comes to education, one method – whether it is instruction, assessment or discipline –never works for every student. Some students need a rigid class structure with consequences such as suspension; others need less rigid learning environments and the opportunity to talk through their issues.

Decentralized strategies work better. Charter school critics such as the NAACP claim that charters with suspension-heavy, "no excuses" discipline procedures expel troublesome students so their test scores look better – leaving district schools with a disproportionate number of challenging students. Yet there are ways to hold schools accountable for their discipline rates without dictating their practices. 

When Washington, D.C.'s charters came under fire because of their suspension and expulsion rates, the city's Public Charter School Board worked with the Office of the State Superintendent of Education to develop annual "equity reports," which publicize each school's discipline rates (among other data), broken down by race. This put the spotlight on schools with high rates, nudging them to use alternative disciplinary methods, such as in-school suspensions and restorative justice, in which students discuss their behavior with teachers and peers and the community decides how they can make up for the damage they have caused. If a school had particularly high rates of suspensions or expulsions, charter board staff sat down with school leaders to discuss the issue and help them find solutions.

Since equity reports were first published, in 2013, suspension rates have declined every yearand expulsion rates have been cut to less than half what they were; today they are within national norms. By focusing attention on the problem but leaving decisions in schools' hands, the charter board encouraged the evolution of disciplinary practices that didn't sacrifice student learning.

In contrast, the local school district, D.C. Public Schools, imposes standard discipline policies. It discourages expulsions so strongly that they almost never occur. District schools have the option of transferring students or giving them long-term suspensions, served at an alternative school, but both are discouraged and the process is time consuming.

"It's an extremely laborious process," Rachel Skerritt, former principal of D.C.'s Eastern High School, says. "I feel like a part-time lawyer when I go [in front of a judge]. It's a huge time away from your building." The slow pace of decisions can also endanger students, when a quick transfer needs to occur because two students need to be separated. "When things are urgent and you know what this means for the safety of your building, it can be really challenging," she adds.

When we saddle teachers with centralized rules that don't allow them to remove disruptive students from their classrooms, we undermine their ability to teach. When we saddle school leaders with centralized processes, we at best undermine the culture they are trying to create and at worst endanger their students.

We also drive experienced teachers out of high-poverty schools – hurting poor, minority students. Experienced teachers use centralized seniority rules to migrate to middle-class schools, where it is easier to teach.

n the high-poverty schools they leave behind, where disruption is more frequent, teacher retention rates plummet. Middle class parents avoid those schools, often opting for private schools. As the students left behind feel more unsafe, learning becomes extremely difficult. 

New Orleans finds a balance. New Orleans, where 95 percent of students attend charters, offers another example of a decentralized approach. To ensure that charters did not expel or counsel out difficult students, the city's two districts – New Orleans Public Schools and the Recovery School District – banned expulsions for lesser offenses, such as "willful disobedience," and required discipline conferences with a district officer prior to any expulsions. Within these parameters, however, they left most decisions about discipline up to each school.

New Orleans is a very poor city: 83 percent of its public school students are "economically disadvantaged," and 82 percent are African-American. Within two years of adopting these policies, however, the city's expulsion rate fell below the state average.

Many charter schools in the city began with strict discipline, but they are gradually developing alternatives to suspension and expulsion. Collegiate Academies, a group of public charter high schools founded in 2008 by Ben Marcovitz, provides a good example. For years, it had strict rules and used one-day suspensions heavily, usually for the rest of the day after an incident. Often its schools had the highest self-reported suspension rates in the city.

In 2013, almost 100 students walked out of two of its schools to protest being "disciplined for anything and everything," and some community members picked up their cause. Marcovitz surveyed parents and found that 93 percent of them were satisfied with their children's education. After all, Collegiate's flagship, Sci Academy, was the highest scoring nonselective high school in the city, even though 92 percent of its students were low income. 

Some students also came to Collegiate's defense. Troy Simon, now a graduate student at Yale University, wrote a column for the local daily paper. "I initially disagreed with the level of discipline … that the school expected," he wrote. "My teachers told me that the system increased efficiency and responsibility to maximize learning, but I didn't believe them." Simon transferred to non-charter school, only to realize he had made a mistake: "[S]tudents ran up and down the stairwells … and got to class late without being penalized. When teachers tried to get our attention and actually teach, students talked, texted, or pretended to sleep. Most of my classmates dropped out." 

So Simon decided to return to his charter high school, Sci Academy. "It became clear why Sci Academy had a challenging educational and strict disciplinary system – to help students like me who came from low-performing schools and needed extra attention," he wrote. "The system really did help students learn, despite what some in the press have claimed."

Still, Marcovitz took the criticisms to heart. He implemented in-school "Positive Redirection Centers" and restorative justice strategies, which ask students to talk through problems and take responsibility for their behavior. The following year, only 2 percent of students were suspended, but the culture of the school remained intact. 

Collegiate's story demonstrates the importance of letting school leaders decide what changes to implement and when. Marcovitz made the decision to change the policies of his schools because he felt he could design a better system based on the needs of his students – not because of a district mandate. 

Continuous improvement like this only becomes the norm when decisions are left to those who best know the students: the people who run the school.