Flawed Report Gives an Inaccurate Picture of Charter Schools

Editor’s Note: This analysis was published by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools on December 11, 2019. The analysis released by NAPCS addresses Still Asleep at the Wheel, a publication released by the anti-charter school group, the Network for Public Education (NPE):

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Bad Data and False Assumptions in Still Asleep at the Wheel

Today, Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, published the following statement regarding Still Asleep at the Wheel, a publication released by the anti-charter school group, the Network for Public Education (NPE):

“Charter schools have been, and are, a lifeline to millions of students—many of them poor, black, and brown. And the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) has provided vital seed funding for charter schools, allowing new schools to open and high-performing charter schools to replicate and expand in communities where there is a desperate need for high-quality public school options.

“The CSP, like every federal program, should be subject to careful oversight and thoughtful review—in order to safeguard taxpayer investments and the education of students. Unfortunately, the NPE ‘report’ is neither thoughtful nor careful. Instead, it is a reckless attack on an indispensable program, substituting half-truths, falsehoods, and unsubstantiated assertions for careful analysis.

“According to the U.S. Department of Education’s own analysis of 5,264 charter schools that have received state or direct Department funding, only 1.7 percent of CSP-funded charter schools close before their second year of operation. The Department’s analysis also found that the start-up success rate of charter schools that received CSP funding has improved as greater oversight has been implemented. Moreover, this report does not include data from grants awarded since the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which greatly strengthened the CSP program. Since 2001, more than 96 percent of all CSP funds resulted in the opening of a charter school.

“The report also frames every closure—regardless of when or why it occurs—as a sign of waste. To the contrary, school closures indicate state charter school laws are working and authorizers are doing their job—closing schools that aren’t meeting their accountability agreements. This feature distinguishes charter schools from district-run schools, which can continue to remain open and spend taxpayer dollars even when they fail to provide a quality education for students. Furthermore, our review of publicly available data finds that, on average, four percent of charter schools close each year—nowhere near the picture this report attempts to paint.

“NPE incorrectly assumes that when a multi-year CSP grant award is made, funding is provided in its entirety up front. This is not true. Schools that never open receive only a fraction of the award amount—typically only utilizing ‘planning’ funds. Thus, if a school never opens it can’t receive its full CSP award. The NPE analysis dramatically overstates the amount of funding allocated to schools that never opened. This is just one example of the multiple problems with the report.

“The false claims contained in the report are unfortunately not surprising. NPE, its board, and its funders have long been more concerned with stopping the progress toward more high-quality public school options than ensuring that every child—regardless of zip code—has access to a high-quality education.

“NPE is a biased organization that is funded by the teachers’ unions, which are notoriously hostile to giving parents and students more choices in public education. In 2018, the American Federation of Teachers reported contributing $35,000 to the Network for Public Education Action. Between 2014 and 2016, the Chicago Teachers Union Foundation gave more than $300,000 to the Network for Public Education. This report is another attempt to put a veneer of data and research on a political effort to deny students public school choices. We would urge all readers to consider the source before embracing the finding.

“We at the National Alliance want the CSP to work well, especially for the estimated 5 million students who would attend a charter school if one were available to them. We are eager to promote an honest and fact-based evaluation of the program’s strengths as well as areas in which improvement is needed. Unfortunately, the NPE report has no place in such an assessment and instead spreads smoke where light is needed.”

For more information on why Still Asleep at the Wheel is filled with bad data and false assumptions, see our full analysis.

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Supporting Charter School Students Experiencing Homelessness

Editor’s Note: This resource was published by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools on December 4, 2019. It was created in partnership with SchoolHouse Connection, a nonprofit organization working to overcome homelessness through education.

How Charter Schools Can Support Students Experiencing Homelessness

Education is a critical tool to address the needs of students experiencing homelessness. For these students, school can be a vital source of stability. The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act is a federal law that provides rights and services for students experiencing homelessness. It applies to all local educational agencies (LEAs) and public schools, including public charter schools.

This toolkit was developed in partnership with SchoolHouse Connection and is intended as a charter school-focused resource that explains the basic legal requirements of the McKinney-Vento Act, while highlighting a few examples of best practices from the charter school community. The toolkit includes three main components for practitioners: (1) Introduction to Student Homelessness, (2) Enrolling Students Experiencing Homelessness, and (3) Supporting Success for Students Experiencing Homelessness.

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What the 2020 Primary Candidates Get Wrong About Charter Schools

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published here on November 19, 2019, by the Wall Street Journal. It was written by David Osborne who leads the education work of the Progressive Policy Institute.

The Big Lie About Charter Schools

When Sen. Elizabeth Warren released her education plan, she trotted out a familiar charge against charter schools: that they “strain the resources of school districts.” To fight this supposed scourge, she promised to end federal financial support for new charter schools. And she’s not an outlier among the Democratic presidential hopefuls. Her fellow progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders had already charged, in his education plan, that charter schools’ “growth has drained funding from the public school system.” Even Joe Biden —who served under President Obama, an enthusiastic charter supporter—has picked up the refrain. “The bottom line” on chartering, he told an American Federation of Teachers town hall, “is, it siphons off money for our public schools, which are already in enough trouble.”

To begin with, charters themselves are public schools. The only difference is that they are operated independently of district bureaucracies, with more freedom to design their programs and choose their teachers but also more accountability. If charters fail—if their students fall too far behind—they are usually closed.

The same arguments made about charter school funding don’t make sense in other contexts. When a family moves out of a district, the district loses state and federal money for its child’s education, but no one accuses the family of draining funds from the district. When parents move their child to a private school, no one accuses them of sabotaging public schools.

So why are leading Democratic presidential primary candidates lambasting charters as a threat to public education? Because no interest group has more clout in the Democratic primaries than teachers unions. In the last presidential election, the AFT and National Education Association combined spent $64 million.

Whether charters drain money from public school districts depends on the state. In over half the states with charters, when students decamp some or all districts get to keep their local tax revenue but no longer have to educate the children, so they actually increase their spending per pupil. In Massachusetts and New York (outside New York City), the state cushions any revenue loss. By law, Massachusetts districts should be reimbursed 100% of the state money for the student for a year, then 25% for the next five years—though the state has only met about 60% of that funding since 2015.

The unions and their allies ignore these realities and focus on costs the districts can’t cut even as they lose students: pensions, principals’ salaries, building maintenance and utilities. These costs are real, but in a majority of charter states local revenue or the state-provided cushion covers most or all of them.

And the pension problem is exaggerated. As districts lose students, they reduce their number of teachers, which also reduces payments to the pension fund. If the pension system has been properly funded, there’s no negative impact. The real problem is that most states have fallen behind on their funding obligations, and now some districts are being forced, as in California, to play catch-up.

Mitigating the cost of building maintenance and utilities takes a little creative thinking. Districts can rent empty classrooms to preschool and adult-education providers. Once their schools are down to 75% capacity or below, they can lease the extra space to charter or private schools. In cities that aren’t afraid of charters, such as Washington and Denver, many school buildings house both a charter and a district school. When that’s not enough, districts can close buildings that are more than half empty and lease or sell them to charter schools.

None of this decreases the public education available to students, and it often improves the quality. But leaders of the teachers unions scream when school boards contemplate any of it.

That’s because unions shrink as charters grow. Charter schools are free to unionize, but as of last year only about 11% chose to do so. That doesn’t threaten teachers, who have more potential employers as the charter sector grows, more opportunity to choose a school that fits. But it does threaten the handsome pay union leaders receive—more than $400,000 a year for leaders of the NEA and AFT as well as more than $200,000 for other staff members.

Charter schools give millions of children—two-thirds of them nonwhite—the opportunity to get an education, go to college and move up the socioeconomic ladder. Even the unions’ favorite source of charter studies—they keep calling back to an outdated report of theirs—Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, has found that by their fourth year in a charter, students learn about 2.5 months more in reading every year and around two more in math than demographically similar students with the same past test scores who stayed in local district schools. In urban districts, by their fourth year students are gaining a little under half a year in reading and a little over in math—every year—over their district peers.

Graduation rates, college-going rates and college completion rates are also higher among students who enroll in charter schools. And as a handful of studies have shown, competition from charters can push district and school leaders to improve their schools, to make them more attractive to parents.

Presidential candidates should worry about how to get Americans the most bang for our education buck. The data show that the answer is to grow the best charters, as Sen. Cory Booker proudly did when he was mayor of Newark, N.J.—something he had the courage to say when debate moderators asked him the charter question. In Wednesday’s debate, other candidates should follow his example.

Mr. Osborne, whose latest book is “Reinventing America’s Schools: Creating a 21st Century Education System,” leads the education work of the Progressive Policy Institute.

Correction
New York state cushions the revenue loss when students transfer to charter schools only for school districts outside New York City, and Illinois has not done so since 2009. An earlier version misstated this.

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What’s Next for Charter School Authorizer Greg Richmond?

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published here, on November 19th, by The 74 and was written by Beth Hawkins, senior writer and national correspondent at The 74.

‘Testifying Before Congress … Not as Fun as Working With People to Talk About a New School’: Charter Authorizing Guru Greg Richmond on Past 20 Years & What’s Next

For an admittedly small pond, it was quite the ripple: Greg Richmond has resigned from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. Richmond had been with the organization for 20 years, first as its founding board chair and for the past 15 years as its president and CEO.

Vice President of Research and Evaluation Karega Rausch will serve as acting president and CEO while a search for a new leader takes place.

If you’re unsure why Richmond is a big fish, know that he is credited with pushing — no matter how much it meant swimming against the tide — to make sure the accountability part of public charter schools’ autonomy-for-accountability bargain is meaningful. As the entities that grant or deny the schools permission to open and then stay open, charter school authorizers need to set and — much more difficult — stand behind high standards, he insisted.

It will not surprise anyone, then, to hear that it’s a role that meant years of friendly — and not-so-friendly — fire. Three years ago, for example, the association was given the “rotten apple” award by Expose Liberal Charter School Turncoats, a group with ties to for-profit online charter schools, presumably for Richmond’s vocal role in insisting that states clamp down on the schools’ poor performance and questionable business practices.

Richmond “always believed that charter school authorizing, when practiced well, can improve the education and life outcomes of millions of children,” said Scott Pearson, association board chair and executive director of the DC Public Charter School Board. “We are enormously grateful for his service.”

In a recent exit interview with The 74, Richmond said he simply felt it was time for him to do something different and for the association to have new blood. “I don’t think it’s good for an organization to be led by the same person for too long,” he said. “It’s a good time for me, personally, to make changes.”

Specifically, Richmond said, he’s interested in spending more time talking to educators who have promising ideas for new schools. Which is exactly what he did in the early years of the charter school movement, as head of Chicago Public Schools’ New Schools Office.

At that time, there was tremendous excitement, particularly among teachers, about the idea of opening new schools. But not much attention was paid to the role of charter school authorizers, he recalled.

“It was viewed as a power, like a political power,” he said — but Richmond wanted policymakers to look beyond that control over who got to open a school and where, to the role authorizers could play in ensuring the new schools met high standards.

“There’s nothing automatically good about being a charter school. The school opens and then the work starts,” said Richmond. “A few years down the road, a decision has to be made whether the school is good enough to stay open.”

People were less eager to engage in this discussion, he recalled, even though for many of them, not tolerating poor performance indefinitely was a key ingredient of the charter school concept.

“Closing a school is incredibly difficult, and yet that’s one of the cornerstones of the charter school model,” Richmond said. “If it doesn’t work, we close it.”

Thus the association was born, with Richmond serving as founding board chair. The organization has pushed states to tighten charter school accountability laws and urged professionalization of the authorizing sector.

Partly as a result, he said, for each of the past few years, some 200 underperforming charter schools have closed. In the process, it’s become clearer how to minimize harm to students when a school shuts down. Criteria for closure must be clear and understood well in advance.

“We’ve learned that if the school and the authorizer reach that decision mutually, that’s the best place to be,” said Richmond. “Then the school and the authorizer can work together to figure out what best to do for kids.”