Children and Youth;Education and Literacy
Over the past few years, Advocates for Children of New York (AFC) has assisted an increasing number of parents who have contacted them with concerns about charter school suspensions and expulsions. In helping parents with these cases, AFC found that charter school discipline policies were not always readily available.
In this report, AFC sent Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests to the three New York City charter school authorizers and, to the extent possible, charter schools opening in NYC during the 2013-2014 school year seeking, among other things, copies of their discipline policies. Charter schools are required to comply with FOIL requests, and most charter schools responded. From the FOIL responses and charter school websites, AFC was able to review 164 discipline policies from 155 of the 183 charter schools operating in NYC during the 2013-2014 school year. These discipline policies came from large charter school networks as well as from small, independent charter schools.
While charter schools should be able to discipline their students, they must uphold the rights of their students and provide them with a fair discipline process. The Charter Schools Act requires charter school authorizers to ensure that charter applications include discipline policies and procedures that comport with the law. Yet, all three authorizers of New York City charter schools have approved charters for schools that have legally inadequate discipline policies.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Northeastern)-New York-New York County-New York City
Policy makers cannot make informed decisions about the regulation of charter schools without first considering the characteristics of the students who are enrolled in these schools. This report -- the first in a three-part series on New Jersey charter schools -- uses publicly available data to explore the differences found between the student populations of charter schools and those of their host districts.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Northeastern)-New Jersey
California has taken the first steps down an historic path that fundamentally alters how its public schools are financed, education decisions are made, and traditionally underserved students' needs are met. The Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), passed with bipartisan legislative support and signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown on July 1, 2013, represents the most comprehensive transformation of California's school funding system in 40 years.
The LCFF significantly loosens the reins of state control over education. It all but eliminates categorical funding streams, subsituting a base of funding for all distraicts and adding dollars for low-income students, English language learners, and foster youth. The new system empowers school districts to determine how to allocate their dollars to best meet the needs of their students. Finally, by requiring all districts to engage parents and other education stakeholders in decisions about how to spend newly flexible funds, the LCFF represents a remarkable experiment in local democracy.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Western)-California
CRPE commissioned Dr. Marcus Winters to analyze the factors driving the special education gap between Denver's charter and traditional public elementary and middle schools.
Using student-level data, Winters shows that Denver's special education enrollment gap starts at roughly 2 percentage points in kindergarten and is more than triple that in eighth grade. However, it doesn't appear to be caused by charter schools pushing students out. Instead, the gap is mostly due to student preferences for different types of schools, how schools classify and declassify students, and the movement of students without disabilities across sectors.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Western)-Colorado-Denver County-Denver
The 2013 merger of Memphis City Schools (with 103,000 students) and Shelby County Schools (with 47,000 students) was the largest school district consolidation in American history. In its first year of operation, the new Shelby County Schools (SCS) commissioned CRPE researchers to perform a critical review of the district's readiness to implement a portfolio strategy for managing its schools. Based on interviews with internal and external stakeholders and analysis against model system progress, this report outlines CRPE's baseline measurement of where SCS stands in relation to the seven main components of the portfolio strategy. The report also provides suggestions for how SCS can seek progress over the next year, and track progress or decline at future intervals.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Southern)-Tennessee-Shelby County
Computers and Technology, Education and Literacy
Blending computer-based and teacher-led instruction promises to help schools meet students' individual needs by organizing and prioritizing staff and technology in more productive ways. However, this fiscal analysis of eight new charter schools that implemented personalized learning this year finds that early difficulty in forecasting enrollment and revenue can undermine implementation of the model.
As a result of missed enrollment and revenue projections:
- The schools spent less on technology and more on personnel than planned: instead of a combined $1.7 million on technology in the early stages, they spent just $650,000
- Student-to-computer ratios were higher and schools spent less than planned on instructional and performance reporting software.
- Projected budget deficits in five of the schools threaten their ability to sustain on public funding.
Among the brief's recommendations for those hoping to implement personalized-learning models in the future:
- Invest in student recruitment efforts up front to ensure enrollment targets are met.
- Develop a 'worst-case scenario' budget where fundraising and enrollment estimates fall 20 -- 25 percent below target.
- Manage contracts proactively: be explicit about needs, establish performance requirements, and negotiate trial periods to make sure products meet the school's needs.
The eight personalized-learning schools included in this analysis were chosen to receive Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) competitive start-up grants. CRPE is midway through a study of twenty personalized-learning schools that received NGLC grants. The study examines how the schools allocate their resources, how they manage the new costs of technology, and whether they can become financially sustainable on public revenues. CRPE will continue to track spending in all twenty schools this year and publish its findings next spring.
This study is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States
Until recently, teacher quality was largely seen as a constant among education's sea of variables. Policy efforts to increase teacher quality emphasized the field as a whole instead of the individual: for instance, increased regulation, additional credentials, or a profession modeled after medicine and law. Even as research emerged showing how the quality of each classroom teacher was crucial to student achievement, much of the debate in American public education focused on everything except teacher quality. School systems treated one teacher much like any other, as long as they
had the right credentials. Policy, too, treated teachers as if they were interchangeable parts, or "widgets."
The perception of teachers as widgets began to change in the late 1990s and early aughts as new organizations launched and policymakers and philanthropists began to concentrate on teacher effectiveness. Under the Obama administration, the pace of change quickened. Two ideas, bolstered by research, animated the policy community:
1) Teachers are the single most important in-school factor for student learning.
2) Traditional methods of measuring teacher quality have little to no bearing on actual student learning.
Using new data and research, school districts, states, and the federal government sought to change how teachers are trained, hired, staffed in schools, evaluated, and compensated. The result was an unprecedented amount of policy change that has, at once, driven noteworthy progress, revealed new problems to policymakers, and created problems of its own. Between 2009 and 2013, the number of states that require annual evaluations for all teachers increased from 15 to 28. The number of states that require teacher evaluations to include objective measures of student achievement nearly tripled, from 15 to 41; and the number of states that require student growth to be the preponderant criteria increased fivefold, from 4 to 20
This paper takes a look at where the country has been with regards to teacher effectiveness over the last decade, and outlines policy suggestions for the future.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States
Productivity is clearly a priority in state education agencies (SEA). The first two volumes of The SEA of the Future made the case for a "productivity mindset" in our country's state education agencies. Authors in these volumes argued that SEAs must fight against focusing exclusively on regulatory compliance to find more ways to provide local autonomy and consistently measure, assess, and hold themselves, their districts, and schools accountable for both performance and costs. Though these essays sharply challenged the traditional work of SEAs, state leaders responded enthusiastically, saying, "Yes. Where do we start?"
In this third volume of the series, we introduce the "productivity infrastructure." The productivity infrastructure constitutes the building blocks for an SEA committed to supporting productivity, innovation, and performance -- from the state chief to the classroom. These building blocks include:
* Policies to expand the flexibility of district and school leaders and allow them to make choices about resource use.
* State funding arrangements that fund students, not programs.
* Information systems that allow district and school leaders to accurately assess the productivity of policies and practices.
The essays in this volume offer a rich discussion of each of these elements.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States
