charter schools

Controversial charter operator knocking on Texas’ door (Corrected)

(Corrected: The hearing this week is on Great Hearts’ application to add campuses in Dallas, not San Antonio, as previously posted.)

The new state law that will expand the number of charter schools in Texas over the next several years also includes provisions supposedly designed to make it easier for the state to clamp down on bad charter operators and screen out less-than-desirable applications. One of those provisions is about to be put to its first significant test with an application from a controversial, private Arizona charter operator with a history of serving mainly affluent white students – not the low-income minority children that the self-styled education “reformers” claim to want to help.

One of the “reform” provisions in Texas’ new charter law takes the primary authority for granting charter applications from the elected State Board of Education and gives it to the appointed state education commissioner. Acting under his new authority, state Education Commissioner Michael Williams will hold a meeting in Austin later this week to interview several charter applicants, including the Arizona operator, Great Hearts Academies.

Great Hearts is scheduled to open its first Texas school – in San Antonio – next year under an application approved by the State Board of Education, acting under the previous law. In its latest application, Great Hearts is seeking to add campuses in Dallas.

Last year, the Metro school board in Nashville voted four times in about three months to deny Great Hearts’ applications there, despite pressure from the Tennessee Department of Education to admit the operator (see the story linked below). The Nashville board had reservations about several issues, including Great Hearts’ commitment to assuring diversity in student admissions. Initially, Great Hearts proposed separate schools for students of different economic backgrounds – a decidedly backwards step in equality of educational opportunity and a throwback to the bad old days of separate-but-unequal segregation.

In San Antonio, Great Hearts has been hitting up wealthy donors to help get its first campus up and running and has been promising that private donations – plus its per-pupil charter school allotment of state tax dollars – will make it unnecessary to charge tuition in the Alamo City. But it has been a different story in Arizona, where Great Hearts operates several charters.

At least one Great Hearts school in Phoenix is seeking an average $1,500 contribution from each student family during the current school year to meet the gap between public funding and other donations. How many families in San Antonio’s economically disadvantaged community – those whose children supposedly are the primary beneficiaries of charter education – can afford that kind of money?

You know the answer, and so, presumably, does Commissioner Williams.

So, just which students – besides those with deep-pocketed parents — is Great Hearts targeting?

The headmaster of that same Phoenix school, perhaps not so incidentally, sent an email to school parents last year strongly opposing an Arizona ballot initiative that would have raised at least $800 million for education funding, including charter schools. The initiative failed.

http://nashvillecitypaper.com/content/city-news/metro-school-board-rejects-great-hearts-defies-state-order-again

Changing the charter approval process

The new state law that raises the cap on charter schools in Texas also transfers the approval of charter applications from the State Board of Education to the Texas Education Agency. Whether that makes a bad idea worse remains to be seen, but the same legislator who wanted more charters – Senate Education Chairman Dan Patrick –also was behind the transfer. So, keep your fingers crossed.

According to The Texas Tribune article linked below, Patrick was concerned that the elected, part-time board, which meets only five or six times a year, wouldn’t have the resources to adequately wade through an expanded number of applications. Yes, this is the same board with a vocal, ideological minority that periodically attempts to destroy public education. I doubt that figured into Patrick’s thinking, but who knows?

In any event, one of that vocal minority, board member David Bradley, already is vocal against the change. Noting that the ultimate control over who gets charters now will be vested in the state education commissioner, a political appointee of the governor, he told the Tribune, “If you want to see a political selection process that is going to create great stories for reporters, hang tough.”

I can hardly wait, although topping some of the ridiculous headlines generated by Bradley and his colleagues over the years will be difficult.

As I noted in a previous blog post, raising the cap on charters from the current 215 to as many as 305 by 2019 comes while charters in Texas, as a whole, continue to under-perform traditional public schools. In the new school accountability ratings released by the Texas Education Agency last week, 95 percent of 1,026 public school districts met state standards, compared to only 80 percent of charters – 161 of 202.

The new charter law also strengthens – at least on paper – state oversight of charter schools, which some legislators hope will make it easier to close down bad charter operators.

Maybe. But we will have to wait and see about that too.

http://www.texastribune.org/2013/08/15/sboe-will-no-longer-approve-charter-applicants/

The charter school performance gap

Although it was easy to miss in last week’s Texas Education Agency announcement, there was a distinct performance gap between traditional public schools and charters in the new school accountability ratings. The traditional public schools overall performed significantly better.

Some 975 of 1,026 public school districts met state standards. That was 95 percent, compared to only 80 percent of charters – 161 of 202. About 5 percent of public school districts required improvement, compared to about 15 percent of charters. Eleven charters and one public school district weren’t rated.

This is more proof, unfortunately, that it was a bad idea for the Legislature – at the behest of Sen. Dan Patrick and other school privateers – to raise the cap on the number of charters that Texas can grant. That new law, which TSTA opposed, will gradually increase the number of charters from the current 202 to 305 by 2019.

Had Patrick had his way, he would have removed the charter cap entirely, despite earlier studies showing that charter schools, as a whole, are largely overrated. An education “reformer” in his own mind, Patrick wouldn’t know true education reform if it came up and bit him on the nose.

Throwing more water on Texas charter schools

A bad idea just got worse. The bad idea was the Legislature’s recent enactment – over TSTA’s opposition – of Senate Bill 2, which will significantly expand the number of charter schools in Texas over the next several years. Potential problems with the new law just got highlighted with the release of a new study from Stanford University showing that the existing charters in Texas, on average, are still performing more poorly than traditional public schools.

According to the study by Stanford’s Center for Research on Education, the average charter student in Texas received the equivalent of 22 fewer days of learning in reading and 29 fewer days of learning in math per year than students in traditional public schools.

The study, which covered several school years through 2010-11, measured the impact of charters on academic growth for Texas, 24 other states and the District of Columbia. Nationally, charter students realized an average of eight additional days per year of learning gains in both reading and math, but results varied widely among the states that were studied, with Texas among those on the short end.

You can read the entire report, including its methodology, by clicking on the link at the end of this post. The bottom line is that charters are still unproven for many states, including Texas, and are not the magical solution for educational problems, as supporters of SB2 claimed.

SB2 will allow the granting of as many as 305 additional charters – some with multiple campuses – in Texas by 2019. This would more than double the number of charters Texas has now, at a time when the Texas Education Agency doesn’t have enough resources to adequate regulate existing charters.

This expansion also was approved at a time when traditional public schools, which is where the vast majority of Texas students will continue to be educated, remain underfunded.

http://credo.stanford.edu/documents/NCSS%202013%20Final%20Draft.pdf