The $2 trillion CARES Act gives Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos thirty days to propose provisions of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act that should be waived by Congress. Special education advocates have expressed concern, if not outright alarm, that waivers could gut important civil rights protections for students with disabilities. School districts, however, are worried about being held accountable for providing hands-on services during the pandemic that would be impossible without putting the health and safety of their staff at risk.

In this forum, Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at University of Washington Bothell, and John M. McLaughlin, managing partner of McLaughlin Advisors, debate whether DeVos should in fact propose any IDEA provisions to be waived, and if so, which ones, and why.

 

Don’t Waive Rights, Require Districts To Make a Good Faith Effort

By Robin J. Lake

 

 

 

 

Waive Away—But Tackle the Big Longstanding Issues, not just the Immediate Technical Ones

By John M. McLaughlin

 

 

 

The post Should DeVos Ask Congress To Waive Parts of the Special Education Law amid the Coronavirus Pandemic? appeared first on Education Next.

The first Covid-19-related deaths rocked my state, Washington, in early March. More than a month later, Washington’s largest school districts have closed their school buildings and are not providing meaningful online instruction. Ongoing analysis by the Center on Reinventing Public Education shows the same is true for all but 10% of the biggest districts in the country.

Lack of universal broadband access, mass confusion over the best approach to online learning, and other issues no doubt contribute to this delay. But privately, many superintendents acknowledge that the risk of special education lawsuits is one of the biggest reasons for their paralysis.

Vague guidance from state school chiefs and from the U.S. Department of Education contributed to initial concerns that remote learning could leave districts out of compliance with special education laws. But such guidance has since been clarified. In particular, March 24 federal guidance made it clear that special education should not prevent districts from offering online instruction. And yet districts, for good reason, still fear lawsuits. One superintendent told me: “I can’t responsibly put my district in that kind of financial risk.”

Waiving the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, however, is no solution. Under current protocols, it’s not permitted. Even in the event of a national emergency, the Secretary of Education cannot waive the right to free appropriate education. If a school district is open for business, it must serve students with disabilities as outlined in their individualized education plans, or IEPs. This requirement exists for a reason. We cannot set a precedent that schools can simply jettison the rights of their most vulnerable students in an emergency situation.

Though Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has should ask the opportunity to ask Congress to give districts more flexibility about how to meet special education requirements in loosen existing laws in response to this emergency, taking them off the hook for whether to meet the requirements that would be the wrong thing to do. Efforts already underway in public schools across the country show it isn’t necessary. Federal help on the special education front in response to the novel coronavirus is needed—but in the form of funding and information, not repeal of longstanding rights.

A growing number of schools across the country are building remote special education programs that protect students’ rights. These efforts depend on innovation and collaboration.

The first step is effective communication with parents. As Lauren Morando Rhim has noted, charter schools like Paramount School of Excellence in Indianapolis, Friendship Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., and Strive Prep in Colorado, are contacting every parent of a student with an IEP to establish a line of communication and to understand what they need.

Some school districts are moving quickly, too. Henry County Schools in Georgia quickly developed a remote learning plan that spells out clear roles for special educators and classroom teachers supporting students with disabilities. The district will have virtual IEP meetings.

Each community’s solution might look different, but these efforts show it is possible for schools to make the shift to remote learning and still deliver the support that students with disabilities deserve.

Students with disabilities may suffer disproportionately if districts do nothing. Without the structure, routines, and support they receive during normal school days, they can suffer anxiety or lose academic focus.

Indeed, students with disabilities stand to benefit the most if school districts overcome their paralysis. States and the federal government could take steps to allay districts’ fears of lawsuits by offering to pay districts for any compensatory services they’re required to provide families. The goal should be to preserve parent and student rights, while protecting public schools that try their best to serve all students in difficult circumstances.

The Education Department can also help by issuing guidance that clarifies what good-faith efforts to deliver special education remotely should look like. This guidance should provide schools with examples of effective special education practice. This would not have a binding legal effect, but it could help guide any court decisions. Congress should also allocate funding to pay for districts to provide compensatory education, to ensure students who are the most challenging to serve virtually get the services they missed when school reconvenes.

Ultimately, this is a question of leadership. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was recently asked if he was worried about being sued by the Nation Rifle Association for failing to exclude gun shops from non-essential business closures. He shrugged off the concern: “I wish you could become immune to this virus the way I’ve become immune to NRA lawsuits.” State and district leaders should be a lot less worried about being sued for trying to serve kids in a national emergency than being sued for providing subpar services in normal times, which happens all the time.

In the end, school districts can’t escape their legal and moral obligation. There are many people who’d like to help—and a federal government that could help more than it currently is. Let’s go.

Robin Lake is director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at University of Washington Bothell.

This is one half of a forum, “Should DeVos Ask Congress To Waive Parts of the Special Education Law amid the Coronavirus Pandemic?” For an alternate take, see “Waive Away—But Tackle the Big Longstanding Issues, not just the Immediate Technical Ones,” by John M. McLaughlin.

Read more from Education Next on coronavirus and Covid-19.

The post Don’t Waive Rights, Require Districts To Make a Good Faith Effort appeared first on Education Next.

In the spring of 2015, Aleesia Johnson and Brandon Brown met for coffee. They both had new job offers.

Johnson was then a star principal at a local KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter school and had been asked by Lewis Ferebee, the new superintendent at Indianapolis Public Schools, to head up his innovation strategy. It was a critical role: the state legislature had just passed a law making it possible for school districts to partner with charter schools rather than fighting them. New hybrid schools, comprising an “innovation network,” would have the autonomy of charter schools but would operate in district buildings and serve neighborhood students, sometimes replacing the district’s schools that struggled the most. Ferebee had lobbied for the law and now wanted Johnson’s help to put it into action.

As for Brown, after three years of running Mayor Greg Ballard’s charter-school office, he’d been offered a job at The Mind Trust, an Indianapolis nonprofit focused on building school quality and access in the city. Ferebee and The Mind Trust’s then CEO David Harris had already struck a deal to work together on the innovation network schools idea.

If Johnson and Brown both took the jobs, they would be spending a lot of time together. Brown would be incubating the new schools that Johnson would oversee. Johnson remembers that they looked at each other that day and asked, “Are you gonna take the job?” “I don’t know. Are you gonna?”

Today, Johnson is superintendent of Indianapolis Public Schools and Brown is CEO of The Mind Trust. The city has 21 innovation schools serving one in four of its public-school students. Two new rigorous studies point to promising student-achievement gains. These autonomous district schools stand against a backdrop of a thriving public charter sector and a private-school voucher program that fill the gaps.

What made this all possible? Indianapolis is a story of good people, good politics, good local and state policy, and some small-town goodwill and good luck. The mayors led, state policy provided backbone, and civic leaders and philanthropies stepped up. They broke down institutional barriers in support of what most education-policy people will tell you is the unifying goal in the city: good choices for all families.

Mayors Lead the Way

In the late 1990s, Indianapolis faced a schooling crisis: the landlocked, post-industrial city suffered brain drain; as a result, its schools and students also suffered. There were 11 separate school districts and no citywide approach. (Since 1970, the metro area has had a consolidated city-and-county government that encompasses the city itself and 10 other Marion County communities that retain some autonomy but fall under the control of the Indianapolis government. More than 75 percent of Indianapolis Public Schools students are black, Hispanic, or multiracial, and about the same proportion qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. The other 10 communities are largely suburban in character and have more affluent populations.)

Bart Peterson, a Democratic candidate for mayor in 1999, saw education as a way to build consensus on economic development. People had been trying to fix the ailing public schools for a long time, and Peterson believed a catalyst from outside the system was needed.

At the time, Peterson says, education reform was a contentious issue. “People couldn’t sit in the same room with each other,” he remarks. He believed that charter schools could provide the common ground, since they offered independence to principals but were still fundamentally public schools.

Candidate Peterson hired a young lawyer named David Harris, who jumped in to craft an education agenda, reading up on charter schools and following developments in states like Minnesota, where Democrats were supporting innovation and experimentation with charter laws.

Peterson won, and in September 2000, he made his case for charters in a speech to Indianapolis-area school superintendents. The atmosphere in the room was tense, but Harris says that coming out early on this controversial issue allowed the administration to control the narrative: “After that speech, no article about charter schools was written without a quote from the mayor.”

State Policy

Republican legislators had tried to pass a charter bill for seven years but had been thwarted by a Democratic-controlled House. Republican state senator Teresa Lubbers, the bill’s main champion, says she thought hard about the details of the bill, such as who would authorize charters and how schools would be held accountable: “I never thought it should be easy to start a charter school,” says Lubbers, now Indiana’s commissioner for higher education. “It should be hard, because there had to be a compelling reason why, for the students’ sake. It was an experiment, after all.”

A provision in the law would empower mayors to authorize charter schools in their cities; the mayor of Indianapolis subsequently became the first such official in the country with that authority. Peterson’s backing of charters and his willingness to play a central role as an authorizer proved important to winning Democratic support for the bill.

Advocates also won key Democratic votes when Republicans agreed to rescind a mid-1990s law limiting collective-bargaining rights in the school system, a measure that had been backed by then mayor Stephen Goldsmith.

The charter school bill passed the Senate in April 2001 and was signed into law by Governor Frank O’Bannon, a Democrat and charter school supporter. Determined to create as many reform tools as possible, the state kept up the pressure. Over the next decade, under Governor Mitch Daniels and state schools chief Tony Bennett, state legislators passed a whole package of reform bills: launching a voucher initiative, expanding charters and giving them rights to unused district buildings, allowing virtual charters, and overhauling teacher accountability. A public-school-choice law allowed students to move from district to district and forced districts to start marketing and fighting to keep their students. According to the House education committee chair, Bob Behning, the state’s early commitment to providing student aid for its 30 private universities further helped establish choice as a normal way of operating.

State representative Todd Huston (at the time, Tony Bennett’s chief of staff) credits Governor Daniels for bringing state officials together around the charter school policy: “A lot of it was Mitch,” he says. “None of this works if you don’t have a committed governor.”

Innovation Network Schools

Huston was a key figure in the passage of several bills, including the innovation network schools bill that would eventually transform the Indianapolis schools. A former school-board member, he understood the challenges involved in transforming school systems. Like many Hoosier education reformers, he had read about, and was inspired by, Milwaukee’s education reforms.

During the first dozen years of the new millennium, competition from inter-district choice and charter schools, along with the threat of state takeover of poorly performing schools, created an urgent sense that change was needed in the Indianapolis Public Schools.

Mayor Peterson’s early commitment to charter schooling held fast throughout his two terms in office. David Harris, his aide-de-camp, created one of the nation’s leading authorizing offices. Bucking national trends, Harris’s office drew on outside expertise to help develop a stringent review-and-oversight process for mayor-sponsored schools. Peterson was actively involved. Harris recalls late-night meetings with the mayor to decide specific performance metrics to use for accountability, for example. Before long, Harris saw the need to create a strong pipeline of charter operators by recruiting new talent to Indy and incubating new schools. In 2006 Harris left the mayor’s office and created The Mind Trust ( see sidebar).

In 2007, Bart Peterson lost his reelection bid to Republican Greg Ballard in a major upset. A retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and plainspoken former businessman, Ballard took office in January 2008. Unexpectedly to some, Ballard chose not only to stay the course on his predecessor’s charter-school strategy but to take it further. In 2012, during his second term, he recruited a young Teach for America alumnus named Jason Kloth to serve as deputy mayor of education, and elevated the charter office to the Office of Education Innovation. It didn’t take long for Kloth to see that educational improvement in Indianapolis would require more than just an outside push.

At the time, the school system was caught in a downward spiral, with enrollment having fallen to about 30,000 students in the mid-2000s from more than 100,000 in 1969. This drastic drop resulted from a combination of factors: students enrolling in neighboring-city school districts, the rapid expansion of charter schools, and the city’s changing demographics (see Figure 1).

The city’s school superintendent at the time, Eugene White, had little credibility with state policymakers, and state superintendent Bennett was threatening to take over the city’s low-performing schools under the authority of a law passed in 2000.

In response to a request from Bennett, The Mind Trust put out a report in December 2011 calling for the elimination of elected school boards and the empowerment of educators at the local level. Though controversial, this “Opportunity Schools” plan laid out a vision for transforming the city’s schools and paved the way for the innovation schools law. At the same time, Stand for Children, an education advocacy nonprofit, was raising money to get reform-friendly school-board members elected, and much of the public debate centered on The Mind Trust’s proposal. Over the next two years, 2012 through 2014, a series of events would set a bold new district strategy in motion. A new board was elected in 2012 (the same year Mike Pence became governor) and the board quickly recruited a young new superintendent, Lewis Ferebee, to start in September 2013.

A Civic Triangle

Ferebee was unknown on the national scene and had never run a school system before. He had served as a school principal at Guilford County Schools in North Carolina and then as chief of staff at Durham Public Schools, where he led a successful school-turnaround effort. Ferebee came to Indy with an open mind and no preconceived change agenda.

Jason Kloth in the mayor’s office approached Ferebee with an idea to present to the state. Informed by The Mind Trust’s Opportunity Schools report and the experience of other cities with district-charter collaboration, Kloth had been developing a plan that could help the Indianapolis school system transform itself while also enabling local charter schools to become more sustainable. Charter market share exceeded 30 percent, but growth had stalled, primarily because of lack of access to facilities. Community members saw The Mind Trust as closely aligned with charters and antagonistic to the district. The narrative had to shift.

The Mind Trust brought school-board members and local civic leaders to New Orleans, which was implementing the portfolio model—characterized by broad school choice for families (based on a “portfolio” of charter and district-run schools), plus autonomy paired with accountability for educators. The Indianapolis leaders hoped to apply the concepts of school-level innovation and empowerment to create an approach tailored to Indiana.

Kloth and his colleagues developed a legislative proposal to give district schools full charter-like authority as called for in The Mind Trust report. Governor Pence liked it. Key legislators liked it. So did a politically diverse civic organization called the Lewis-Hubbard Group, which had originally convened to develop citywide facilities recommendations. While the idea came from Kloth in the mayor’s office and The Mind Trust, the mayor’s staff worked through the statehouse and with the school system, and Ferebee took the lead. “It was very powerful to have the superintendent lobbying for it,” Ballard says.

Ferebee, Harris, and Kloth formed what one observer called a civic triangle to focus on creating high-performing schools. They were acting out of an immense urgency to avoid state takeover: charter growth showed signs of slowing, the school board was looking for a strategy, and the community was calling out for change. Innovation network schools held promise for addressing this predicament.

A Pivotal Decision

Despite growing support for the innovation schools proposal, getting the bill passed in the legislature was no slam-dunk. Civic activists were still angry and mistrustful over The Mind Trust’s Opportunity Schools report, and the teachers union was strongly opposed: innovation schools would operate outside of the union contract. Even Indiana’s committed choice advocates weren’t a sure bet for support, as many were wary of attempts to bring charter schools under the district umbrella.

By all accounts, Ferebee’s backing made all the difference in the bill’s passage. He asked that its name be changed to align with a district initiative he had underway (originally the bill was called the Freedom to Teach Act), but otherwise he ran with it, meeting with legislators and local opponents and explaining how autonomy could improve district schools. He was only months into his new job.

“Ferebee wants what’s best for kids,” says Ken Britt, dean of Marian University, calling him “the quintessential gentleman.” “He’s gone on the record saying, ‘If we can’t serve this child well, what gives us the right to keep a child in a failing school?’ He put courage and political capital on the line.”

The Innovation Network Schools bill passed in the spring of 2014. Shortly thereafter, Ferebee and Harris agreed to work together to create a strong supply of new innovation schools through The Mind Trust. Philanthropies supported innovation network fellows. Brandon Brown from Mayor Ballard’s office was recruited to take on an important challenge: create a new function at The Mind Trust, working with the school system and developing school models that could succeed in the district context.

Ferebee knew he’d need someone to help him oversee the innovation schools program and rejigger his central office to fully support autonomous schools. He met a highly capable young KIPP principal who might fit the bill: Aleesia Johnson came onboard and handled the technical and political challenges of launching the new-schools initiative while also managing the internal dynamics and turf issues in the central office. One of her early decisions helped smooth the challenges of implementation. The law gave the district a turnaround strategy by allowing it to replace low-performing schools with charters. Johnson decided, however, to expand the initiative by also inviting good district schools to apply for innovation status, thereby giving effective district educators the same freedom and autonomy that charters enjoyed. This approach created a natural internal constituency for the innovation schools program and ensured that the “brand” would include high-performing district schools, not just new charter schools.

Mariama Shaheed Carson, a local teacher and principal, was one of the first to open an innovation network school. She had tried to start her dream dual-language charter school—the Global Preparatory Academy—in another Indianapolis district but was turned down. She applied for The Mind Trust fellowship and opened her school in partnership with the Indianapolis schools. Shaheed Carson’s school brought early credibility to the program and helped spur interest from other local educators. The Mind Trust and Stand for Children informed families about the law in a series of community forums that helped build grassroots political support.

New Life for New Schools

Nationally, many charter leaders dismiss the concept of district-charter collaboration as a waste of time. If charters can be successful on their own, some have argued, why not just invest in their continued expansion? Indianapolis shows why such collaborations, when done thoughtfully, can be a win for charters, for districts, and, most importantly, for families.

Without the Innovation Network Schools law, Indianapolis charter-school expansion might well have hit a wall. Growth was likely to slow as The Mind Trust struggled to find and finance new buildings for charter school operators in the city. And if other cities are predictive, public perception might have eroded to the point where people started to blame district financial woes on charter schools. The Innovation Network Schools law has allowed the city to tap a new pool of innovators and has enabled charters to get greater access to district-owned buildings by taking over the operation of low-performing schools.

At the same time, the schools brought a new level of credibility to education reform in Indy and blunted political pushback. David Harris, initially skeptical about collaboration with the district, notes, “Educators are often upset about the innovation schools but then meet the leaders and see they are credible and have a long history in IPS. Importantly, successful schools have converted to innovation status, choosing autonomy over union protections, and are some of the strongest advocates for the law.”

Aleesia Johnson took over as superintendent after Ferebee left in December 2018 to run the Washington, D.C., public schools. As a former charter-school leader, Johnson saw autonomy as an enabler for great educators. In order to spur innovation, she reasoned, the district needed to free those educators; it also needed to find ways to reset toxic dynamics in chronically low-performing schools. Today, one out of four Indianapolis public-school students is enrolled in an innovation school (see Figure 2), but Johnson does not have a prescribed vision for how many such schools will eventually open. She plans to leave it up to educators to ask for the conditions to innovate and will force those conditions only when low performance demands it. In that way, she reasons, the innovation schools will continue to be what educators want, not what they fear.

Gains in Student Learning

More than a third of all public-school students in Indianapolis now attend a charter school, and the vast majority of the charters are authorized and overseen by the mayor’s office. The Indiana Charter School Board oversees the rest. Twenty-one public schools operate as innovation network schools.

Compared to district-run schools across Indiana, Indianapolis charter schools serve a student population with more challenging academic needs, more students who identify as members of a racial minority, and fewer students for whom English is a second language or who qualify for special education and an Individualized Education Plan. These same trends hold at the local level (see Figure 3).

Promising new results from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, known as CREDO, show that in 2016–17, both charter schools and the new innovation network schools in Indianapolis had stronger reading and math gains than the city’s traditionally run schools (see Figure 4). The results were especially strong for black, Hispanic, low-income, and English language learner students. Compared to state averages, the results show more variation, with both innovation network schools and traditional public schools in the district showing weaker growth in math. The study, released in January 2019, compares each student’s gain to gains of similar students in district schools.

Another study conducted by researchers at Indiana University and released the same week as the CREDO study looked at elementary-school students who enrolled and stayed in Indianapolis charter schools sponsored by the mayor and found they outperformed their peers in all 11 Indianapolis school districts.

While Superintendent Johnson is pleased with the improvements in student performance, she cautions that early growth is to be expected in the innovation schools, given how low the scores were at baseline. She is looking to see sustained growth over time. She also notes that because the innovation schools label includes so many types of schools with different starting points and contexts, the trajectories of individual schools will provide more meaningful data than will performance averages.

Lessons Learned

The unique civic dynamics in Indy and the state of Indiana help explain why education reform in the city has been less contentious and more pragmatic than in many other places. Indianapolis is a small city where people know and like each other. Individuals may move to different organizations, but they stay committed to the mission. And then there is the “Hoosier Way,” a general belief that people should treat each other with respect and kindness.

Against this backdrop, leaders took a number of intentional steps to build and sustain political and technical supports for the expansion of choice. Some of the most important were:

Building trust and credibility. Several key charter advocates made it clear early on that expanding choice was not enough: quality was also paramount. The authorizer role was to establish and enforce clear quality standards. The Mind Trust’s role was to create the conditions that would ensure an ample number and variety of school options for families.

Focusing on quality and local authorizing would be best for students, these leaders believed, but it would also help build credibility. In the early days, nasty politics abounded. Superintendents were adamantly opposed to the mayor authorizing charters, but quality helped blunt their arguments.

Jason Kloth says many people initially thought there was a secret plan to take over the school district. But when the state, the school board, and the superintendent agreed to champion the Innovation Network Schools law, “we built trust and credibility,” he says. “It was the way we approached it: It wasn’t ‘let a thousand flowers bloom.’ Quality really mattered. People couldn’t say that we had a huge portfolio of mixed quality and were trying to blow things up. Credibility breeds trust. Quality builds trust.”

Continuity of smart and brave leadership. Leaders and advocates at every level strongly agree on what has driven progress in Indianapolis and what’s needed to move forward. A key factor in effecting change in the schools was the fact that four successive mayors, Democratic and Republican, maintained the same strategy over nearly two decades. And David Harris has been a constant throughout.

Peterson and Ballard credit Stephen Goldsmith, Peterson’s predecessor, with establishing a strong link between education and economic development in the city.

Peterson believed that charter schools “had the potential to save urban education,” he says. “My support was solely for policy reasons, not political, but it did not hurt me politically. In fact, it helped me.” Democrats denounced him on the policy but agreed with him on everything else, so it “didn’t hurt me with Democrats, and I won the support of reform-minded Republicans.”

When Ballard took the helm, he pushed the choice initiative forward and now cites the mayor’s office as modeling “the gold standard” for quality authorizing. “Less than 25 percent of those who apply get approved,” he notes.

As superintendent, Ferebee was, by all accounts, artful in building good relationships and inviting opponents to the table. Early in his tenure, he took time to look closely at the district budget; he found pots of money that he was able to repurpose toward supporting the innovation schools. This bought him a lot of goodwill among teachers and likely helped him keep innovation schools under the radar.

Local and national investments. Indianapolis, though small, has attracted significant local and national philanthropy over the years. The combined investments, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, have supported talent recruitment, school incubation, community engagement, technical assistance for the district’s central-office transformation, and political advocacy for key policies.

Not long after the charter law passed in 2001, the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation, an Indianapolis-based philanthropy, supported a “lead and seed” initiative to try to attract national charter-management organizations to the city. When the national organizations declined to come, the foundation shifted toward seed funding to start The Mind Trust and help the city grow its own charter schools. Also stepping in with support were the Lilly Endowment, the Casey Family Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.

Highly cultivated, aligned supports. Through The Mind Trust, the city invested early on in talent and school incubation and other citywide supports, sparking rapid growth in charters and innovation schools. The Innovation Network Schools law allowed the city to “build a partnership that is advantageous for both district and charters,” in the words of Representative Huston, “but it doesn’t work without The Mind Trust.” Teach for America provided an essential talent pool, and that organization’s alumni now run half of the city’s innovation schools.

Unified front on choice. Over the years, Indiana policymakers and advocates have not gotten hung up over which kind of choice or regulation is “best.” Whether they prefer inter-district choice, charter schools, tax credit scholarships, vouchers, or innovation network schools, they have not let specific ideology undermine each other’s efforts. The overarching goal of “good choices for all” is the unifying mantra in Indy, and reform is not seen as a zero-sum game.

Commissioner Lubbers, who originated the state charter law, says it was more than a sense of civility and the “Hoosier Way” that created such harmony. Advocates for change also shared a true commitment to the power of choice. “There was the potential for charters and vouchers to be adversarial,” she says. “That didn’t really happen. People were brought together by the sense that students were being left behind.”

Civic leaders stepped up. The idea that a strong education sector is central to a vibrant city has motivated local leaders to push for change in Indy schools. As noted above, bipartisan mayoral leadership has been critical to effecting education reform—and right behind the mayors stood the city’s most-respected business, civic, and education leaders. The Mind Trust board includes some of the most influential people in the city, who backed Ferebee and helped him make his case for innovation network schools to the community. Civic advocacy was key in putting forth the mayors’ priorities.

State pressure and cover. A series of important state policy moves over the last two decades paved the way for a third-way approach in Indianapolis. In 2011, when the city schools were under the greatest threat of state takeover, new legislation created the voucher program and enabled charter school expansion. The year ended with The Mind Trust’s controversial report, and the groundwork was laid for the 2012 school-board elections. With the passage of the Innovation Network Schools law in 2014, leaders like Ferebee, an educator and a “gentleman” with no stake in the warring ideological camps, could pursue a new strategy.

Missteps and Challenges

Deep community engagement came late. The key actors in this story can be described as elites—and many of them are white men. It was not until recently that a more representative set of actors came to support reform and get deeply involved in these efforts. Inattention to community engagement was, by all accounts, The Mind Trust’s greatest misstep. It wasn’t until after the Opportunity Schools report that the organization invested in meaningful community engagement. Despite support from local newspapers’ editorial boards, the black community recoiled and many people saw The Mind Trust as a group of elitists writing plans to take over the local schools. According to Brandon Brown, “We needed to engage with people on the front end and build more internal team capacity for that engagement. You can’t ignore the community. Plans can’t exist in a vacuum.”

In 2013, The Mind Trust hired Kameelah Shaheed-Diallo to change its approach to community engagement, finding ways to more effectively listen to people and respond to their concerns. Shaheed-Diallo led many dozens of difficult meetings with opponents of The Mind Trust’s Opportunity Schools plan. David Harris says it was a challenging but critical process. Following nearly two years of targeted engagement, black leaders showed public support for the innovation network schools plan by attending the public event announcing the first participating schools.

Blind eye to existing talent, district leadership. For years, Indy education-reform advocates dismissed the idea of partnering with the Indianapolis school system, viewing it as hostile and defensive toward charter competition. But The Mind Trust leaders now see that they were naive to believe they could import all the talent needed to improve the city’s schools. They also realize now that they couldn’t expect charters to grow indefinitely without working with the district to tackle the barriers to such growth. Investing in district change strategies and relationship building proved necessary.

To be sure, the collaboration has hit some snags. Some schools complain of transportation logistics problems and other issues. But talented district educators who once lacked autonomy now have an avenue to start their dream schools, and the charter sector is reinvigorated. The Mind Trust has learned that investing in local talent pays off in many ways. Says Brown, “Once respected leaders experience the benefits of autonomy, they have conversations with their colleagues, which leads to more opportunities.” Seventy percent of The Mind Trust’s innovation network schools fellows are leaders of color, reflecting the city’s demographics and thus contributing to more community goodwill.

Inattention to special education and other supports. Indianapolis charter schools, which must provide their own special-education services, have sometimes struggled to meet the needs of all students. Some people allege that charter schools have “counseled out” students and, more broadly, that their lack of capacity simply causes families of children with disabilities not to consider them as viable options. About 14 percent of those enrolled in Indy charter schools are students with special needs, compared to 18 percent in the Indianapolis Public Schools. Too many charter schools in the city are good enough to be renewed but lack incentive and knowledge to continue to innovate for instructional improvements. Under the leadership of Brown and others, this is changing: a new special-education collaborative effort is underway to allow innovation network schools to access the district’s special-education services. The Mind Trust now provides curriculum audits to help schools identify gaps in instructional rigor. Still, these are both nascent efforts, and other citywide challenges loom for the increasingly decentralized school system, including transportation and facilities access.

The Work Ahead

Study results on innovation network schools prompt many in the city to say: “We’re doing well, but not well enough.” Continued sustained progress is the goal, but it is not assured. Reform advocates still hold a majority on the school board, but it is narrower than in 2012. Superintendent Johnson and her team must complete the difficult work of transforming central-office practices to support autonomous schools while also providing strong supports for the schools they manage directly. Schools that have made initial gains by improving their academic quality now must turn to tougher challenges that impede students’ learning, such as trauma, poverty, and opioid addiction. Marian University recently revamped its teachers’ college to focus on content experts, in-school training residencies for teachers, and more diversity to further fuel school improvement in the city; the need for this kind of retooling and rethinking will persist.

New statewide and local pressure on the schools to increase their focus on career pathways creates opportunities to help education leaders reimagine and rethink everything, but it also runs the risk of reinforcing tracking. Higher education commissioner Teresa Lubbers says, “We need to move students to where they want and need to be to have a meaningful life, within an economy that’s transforming all the time,” with many jobs changing and some being eliminated.

A $272 million tax referendum, led by Ferebee and backed by the Urban League and other civic organizations, passed in November 2018; the new funding will pay for teacher raises and capital improvements. (Some believe that the reformers’ decision to back the referendum rather than invest in board elections was a mistake and a reason that more union-backed school-board candidates won than were expected.)

Many state and local leaders are concerned that none of the other 10 school districts in metro Indianapolis have taken advantage of the Innovation Network Schools law. The state finance system allocates education dollars on a per-pupil basis, taking into account student-need factors such as poverty. As a result, school operators are more interested in opening in the city’s downtown core, where the money is, than in the outskirts. The policy is meant to concentrate funding in areas that most need new options, but students in the other districts have their own unmet needs. Poverty is increasingly shifting to the surrounding districts as the city revitalizes, and some wonder whether the changing demographics will eventually lead to a change in funding and more new schools opening in the other districts.

As the school system and its schools continue to evolve, so too must their supporting institutions. The Mind Trust has demonstrated its ability to do this by backing new designs for turnaround schools and others. By all accounts, the quality of incubation keeps getting better, but new challenges lie ahead as the organization tries to figure out how best to further school improvement without imposing on school autonomy and parent preferences. Momentum for attention to career-relevant learning and solutions for students with unique needs may give rise to new constituencies and new school designs.

Amar Patel, head of Teach for America Indianapolis, would like to see an organization like the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research provide third-party analysis by drilling down on the data and learning what’s working. He also notes that despite all the investment, the talent requirements in the Indianapolis schools are still “a bottomless pit.” Patel says Teach for America could place four to five times more people in the pipeline than they currently have.

State politics have shifted under the new state schools chief, Jennifer McCormick, who is perceived as hostile to reform. (McCormick will complete her term in December 2020 and will be Indiana’s last elected superintendent; beginning in 2021, the position will be appointed by the governor.) Without the aligned efforts of the governor and state superintendent, local reformers are counting on continued commitment from the legislature. Still, the success of reform efforts in the city to date demonstrates that strong local leadership is also an essential element for change.

Local politics are fragile, and school-board dynamics could create more hostility to reform. The mayor is up for reelection in a year. Aleesia Johnson believes this is a natural inflection point for Indianapolis. The mayors and the state set the conditions, she says, but now it is up to the community to make the most of it. Brandon Brown agrees: “How do you move from community engagement to community empowerment?” he asks.

The common refrain in Indianapolis is that the reform efforts to date have set important conditions but will not be enough to achieve excellence. Sustaining progress for students will require continued commitment from adults, says Jason Kloth. “We have the best public policy framework in the country. We are one of the best capitalized with local philanthropy. We have all of the institutions in place that people think are needed. . . . It took a long time to get people aligned. Now we need to genuinely and authentically implement.”

Robin Lake is director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at University of Washington Bothell. Shannon Murtagh, Erik Luk, and Roohi Sharma contributed analysis and data to this article.

 

The Mind Trust New-school incubation, talent recruitment “We saw relatively quickly that progress would always be limited without a focus on a human capital strategy,” says David Harris, the founding CEO of The Mind Trust. Like many industrial cities, Indianapolis had suffered from years of brain drain, as talented young people left for greater economic opportunity. To address this profound challenge, Harris recruited Teach for America and The New Teacher Project (now TNTP) to bring new teachers—and especially entrepreneurial leaders—to Indianapolis. The early strategy created Education Entrepreneur Fellowships to attract non-educators to the city. Fellows receive a $20,000 stipend plus full salary and benefits for two years to develop their idea for a new school or nonprofit. The Mind Trust moved quickly toward supporting teams rather than individuals through what became an intensive school-incubation process: designing, building, and launching new schools. The organization has helped create 12 new public charter schools and, in partnership with the school district, 17 innovation network schools. It has helped create nearly a dozen new nonprofit school-support organizations and placed more than 1,500 teachers in city schools. As the city’s needs have evolved, so has The Mind Trust. Community engagement activity has progressed from a “grasstops” strategy that engages respected civic leaders in education to a grassroots approach that focuses on building widespread support. The organization has partnered with the United Negro College Fund to provide bus tours for local residents that showcase effective practices in Indianapolis charter schools and to host community discussions. The Mind Trust has increasingly concentrated on instructional quality and professional development for existing schools. It also supports the school system through such initiatives as the creation of a unified enrollment system; Teach Indy (a collaboration between The Mind Trust, the schools, and the mayor’s office to recruit effective educators to the city); and a new effort to explore how charter schools can work with the school system on special education. More than $100 million in funding has underwritten these activities, and some of Indy’s most prominent business and civic leaders sit on the organization’s board.

The post The Hoosier Way appeared first on Education Next.

Hurricane Maria’s wrath created new urgency to address Puerto Rico’s long struggling education system. As soon as electricity was back on, policy types immediately started making analogies to New Orleans. Indeed, new legislation created sweeping new authorities to restructure public education and create new public school options, including charter schools and vouchers. Puerto Rico’s secretary of education made headlines for closing more than 200 underenrolled schools before the 2018–2019 school year.

I recently had the opportunity to visit the island and learn about the unique challenges and opportunities there. I came away with a picture that is much more complex than what is portrayed in the national news. Unlike New Orleans, the island hasn’t seen a surge of volunteers, Teach for America recruits, or new donations from philanthropists on the mainland. Teachers have not been fired. School choice is a relatively small part of the picture. The existing public school system, though under heavy strain, remains in place.

Puerto Rico’s efforts to improve opportunities for young people are rich and varied and locally driven. I came away with the strong belief that people on the island have at least as much to offer us back on the mainland as what we can offer to help them.

First, a bit about the context of Puerto Rican public education.

• Declining enrollment: The student age population of Puerto Rico has been on the decline. The birth rate is now lower than the death rate. The number of school-age children was down to 340,000 in 2017; just 300,000 students remained after the hurricane. Projections show further declines in coming years.

• Hurricane impact: 82 percent of households suffered damage from Hurricane Maria. School-age children missed an average of 78 days of school. More than 20 percent of children were reported to have suffered attention and emotional problems post-hurricane.

• Intensive needs: 35 percent of students qualify for special education services—more than double the rate on the mainland. Eighty-one percent of students are below the poverty line.

• Undervalued workforce: The median worker in Puerto Rico earns about half as much as the median worker on the mainland, and similar disparities apply to teachers. The average teacher makes $29,000 a year—and opportunities abound for bilingual teachers to double their salaries on the mainland. As a result, the island has seen a mass exodus of teachers. Districts on the mainland actively recruit and hire away some of Puerto Rico’s best talent. Exacerbating the problem, there is a shortage of teachers with English and STEM skills and a huge retirement wave coming. Nearly half (14,000) of Puerto Rico’s teachers are expected to retire in the next five years. Finding school leaders will be a problem, too.

• Stagnant achievement: only 10 percent of 7th, 8th, and 11th graders achieved proficiency in a standardized math test last year. PISA results in math, science, and reading lag behind the average for Latin American countries. There is chronic absenteeism—one out of every four K–3 students is absent 10 percent or more of the time.

These combined statistics of Puerto Rico’s situation are sobering. Finding a path forward must go well beyond any one reform, policy, or strategy, or person. They will require a concerted and sustained effort, new investments, and creative thinking, all locally driven. There is no “proven” path to follow in the states or elsewhere. The solutions must be uniquely Puerto Rican and must be powered by Puerto Ricans. I visited three schools that leave me wholly confident that this can happen.

ColaborativoPR: intensive community-based supports for high school students. Loiza, a deeply impoverished community on the northeastern coast, is the center of Puerto Rico’s Afro-Latino community and home to a promising effort to ensure more young people attend, and successfully complete, post-secondary education. More than 50 percent of Loiza’s youth live below the poverty level, and 48 percent of 18- to 20-year-olds are not in school. According to the 2006 census the median income for families was under $10,000. It is well-known for its cuisine and traditional “bomba” dance.

The Colaborativo was established by six foundations, along with a suite of community partners, to motivate and support Loiza’s high school students to complete high school and pursue post-secondary education.

The organization partners with Centro Esperanza, which has provided educational, music, and psychological services in the community since 1977, including a Montessori kindergarten. The Colaborativo did research on what was holding students age 18-20 back from attending college and then did further work to identify the high schools in the area with students least likely to attend college. They then partnered to provide remedial math and science education, mental health support, and college and career guidance. Counselors take students on college visits and help them fill out financial aid forms, whatever is needed. The goal is to help students manage the difficulties of life so that can focus on education, identify their interests and strengths and apply to college.

Without these supports, students say they would not have been able to manage the process and paperwork given that their parents had not been to college themselves. We met one young woman who has gone into business administration at University of Puerto Rico. Another is studying graphic design and though she has been accepted to Syracuse, she is doing her first year of college in Puerto Rico before she decides whether to move to New York. She says that the Colaborativo “always pushed her to look for the best”. We heard about another student who was deeply depressed after her mother died and didn’t want to go to college. After working with psychologists, she was able to go. The key, the students say, is in providing individualized support and encouragement to students. They wish schools would adjust more to the personalized needs of individuals, provide more exposure to possible careers.

Being in the students’ community has been essential. Counselors know the local dynamics at play and they know the kids. The Colaborativo works to ensure that students meet with counselors in recognized “peace places” where are all treated equally. After the Hurricane, and during the period where students were unaccounted for and not attending schools. More than 80 students showed up at the Colaborativo. Sister Cecilia Sorrano, of Centro Esperanza, says she believes education should be about transformation and about creating healthy communities. She says they try to get students to compete with themselves, not others, and provide individualized supports that respect each student.

Instituto Nueva Escuela: Montessori for all. Nueva Escuela is part of a loose network of 50 K-8 schools that bring a traditional Montessori education to 14,200 Puerto Rican students. Nueva Escuela (not associated with the Centro Esperanza Montessori kindergarten) was started by Ana Maria Garcia Blanco, a revered educator and community leader who radiates warmth and energy. All of the markers of a Montessori class are apparent: the beads, the candles, etc. Students with special needs are fully included in the small classes. The school feels joyful and students seem confident. The network touts impressive (though unconfirmed) statistics: high rates of continuing education, many in selective high schools and colleges, no drop-outs, no serious incidents of violence, and no drug use.

Ana Maria insists that what makes the schools effective is much more than the Montessori curriculum. The model has three tiers: Montessori, collective decisionmaking, and family engagement. She is adamant that the most important element is the “collectivo”—the collective decisionmaking body that adjudicates issues that arise. Parents can be employed as aides and teachers at the schools. Teachers are fully engaged in all decisionmaking. The collectivo says that if a teacher is hired who is not fully on board with Montessori or is struggling, it is not a problem: “We make sure they are not alone,” providing constant coaching and guidance.

The schools operate as public schools under a special division of the Puerto Rico department of education. They receive a line item in the budget of around $6,400 per student. The nonprofit organization run by Ana Maria supplements that funding through private donations and provides teacher training and support for running effective collectives in schools that voluntarily join the network.

Proyecto Vimenti (Lifelong learning in English): The first and only charter school on the island. Proyecto Vimenti is run by the Boys and Girls Club of Puerto Rico. The organization provides after-school programs to local students but found that they were spending more time working with students on academic remediation than on play and enrichment. And they realized these students’ families were locked into cycles of poverty that led to hopelessness and domestic problems, making it difficult for students to achieve upward mobility. Concerned, they started developing plans to open a school that would tackle education and poverty as interlocking pieces, drawing from all of the Boys and Girls Club’s programming and resources.

Vimenti was preparing to open as a private school for Kindergarten and first grade when Puerto Rico passed its education reform law in March 2018, which allows for charter schools. As a charter, Vimenti will eventually serve 190 students and will grow to include to 5th grade. Students receive intensive academic and social-emotional support and from an early age learn competencies, like coding and design-thinking, that can help qualify them for well-paying jobs later in life—primarily in technology, tourism, and health care. Health and welfare screenings and supports have identified many students with vision impairment who were previously considered as needing special education.

The large and modern building is meant to be a central gathering place and a hub for community resources to serve a holistic set of family needs. There is an adult employment training and entrepreneurship center that provides workshops and support for basic job skills, like how to conduct oneself at work, how to dress professionally, and how to apply for jobs. Those seeking work, typically single mothers, get help finding jobs and even have access to work-appropriate clothing. Entrepreneurship classes support families to take marginal business activities, like food carts, to a more sustainable level. Vimenti’s belief is that a two-generation approach to addressing intergenerational poverty is critical. Students need skills, Vimenti believes, that will position them for new opportunities, but they also need to see the adults in their life modeling how to seize those opportunities.

Vimenti chose to operate as a charter school to have access to government funding. They could not have operated on private dollars alone. But being the island’s first charter has come with plenty of challenges. There is community suspicion that charter schools are a mainland reform and the funding levels are very low. Under the education reform law, charter schools receive base funding of $1,800 per student, plus add-ons for special needs, poverty, etc., bringing Vimenti up to an average of around $3,500 per student. This is just a fraction of the total $7,639 spent per student in Puerto Rico’s public education system. Without the financial backing and trusted brand of the Boys and Girls Club, it’s hard to imagine this school could have launched successfully. The school pays teachers 50 percent higher than other schools and heavily subsidizes the cost of the program through private donations.

Beyond the schools, I learned of efforts by Puerto Rico’s College Board to create a Spanish version of Khan Academy, which will provide online assessments and opportunities for students to practice in weak content areas, and is providing career and college data to school counselors. The Flamboyan Foundation (run by my friend Kristin Ehrgood) is focused on K–3 literacy and recently partnered with Lin-Manuel Miranda for a special island showing of Hamilton that raised money for Puerto Rican arts and arts education. The Puerto Ricans I met were amazing people, focused on finding locally crafted solutions, and not waiting for answers from anyone.

Secretary of Education Julia Keleher, whom someone described as “a fast-talking Philly girl who speaks fluent Spanish,” was appointed by the governor and approved by the legislature in December 2016. Julia has brought a new intensity and urgency to address the deep dysfunctions and corruption in the educational bureaucracy and wants to move more decisionmaking to the local level. Though charter schools have gotten much of the attention about the reforms, they are very small but important part of the story. More broadly, people speak of the reform focus as an effort to bring Puerto Rico’s education system into the 21st century, including training and supports for educators, a less centralized system (previously all principals in the state reported directly to the secretary of education), and efforts to update the technology infrastructure.

I left with a strong feeling of possibility for Puerto Rican education. The needs are enormous and multidirectional. Nascent efforts to build solutions could go awry in many ways. And the overall underfunding and underinvestment in our fellow Americans’ education system is shameful. But many determined and creative people are at work and great things are happening as a result. They are working in partnership—crossing organizational lines and eschewing the traditional boundaries of school in recognition of the fact that schooling must be integrally related to other community assets and needs, and to opportunities for upward mobility.

These efforts largely emerged in the absence of policies designed to nurture them. People don’t talk about “scaling” solutions in Puerto Rico. They create solutions and hope that others will do the same. They focus on recognizing the interconnectedness between school, family, and community, not on academics alone. For us on the mainland, it raises the question of how policies can support, rather than stifle, bottom-up problem-solving that connects educators more closely with the communities they serve. On the island, it raises questions about how policy can help sustain promising initiatives, enable existing efforts to reach more students, and allow new ones to develop. Puerto Ricans want to be a productive part of economic revival and opportunity for youth. The work ahead is to help them catalyze those possibilities.

Robin J. Lake is the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington.

This post originally appeared on The Lens.

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The national charter movement grew because people from diverse perspectives agreed on the need for a new form of public school free of bureaucratic and union constraints. As political scientist Stephen Page observed, the movement consisted of left-leaning educators supported by right-wing money.

In the absence of a guiding political mastermind, the members of the movement settled on a loose strategy:

• Show that public charter schools could benefit the students most in need of new opportunities (poor and minority children in big cities).

• Join with enthusiastic parents to make the case for continued expansion.

• Attract the support of liberal middle-class voters based on benefits to the disadvantaged.

• Let competition force school districts to seek the advantages of chartering for their own schools.

In the long run, this strategy was meant to “tip” a certain number of urban school systems to all-charter. These localities would get strikingly better student outcomes so that other cities would want the same, and states would facilitate charter growth via favorable policies.

This strategy has been, on balance, successful. Charter schools have mixed results overall, but they strongly benefit students of color and low-income students in big cities. Parents have mobilized on behalf of charter schools when political opponents threatened their existence. And, compared to the earliest days of the movement, greater numbers of community leaders, elected officials, and philanthropies support public charter schools in their communities.

But the strategy is losing steam. Opposition among antipoverty groups is building on two grounds — that charter schools are done to, not by, families in big cities; and that transfers of funds to charter schools hurt students in district-run schools. Middle-class liberals have turned negative as opponents have successfully branded charter schools as part of a broader privatization agenda. Rather than competing with charters, some districts have sought to cripple them with legislation.

The charter movement has focused on a few localities, hoping to build exemplars of completely transformed public education systems where districts have either gone out of business or completely embraced chartering. As we have argued elsewhere, this tipping strategy has proved much more difficult than expected, as charters end up competing with one another for talent and facilities so that charter growth in key cities is slowing, not accelerating. Further complicating the politics of reform, charter-receptive local civic and business groups often also support efforts to improve district-run schools — particularly neighborhood schools. The attempt to tip a few cities also has opportunity costs, because it bypasses localities that need and might welcome new charter options.

Our new study of the slowdown in charter growth in California’s Bay Area demonstrates this dynamic. It reveals a maturing sector facing what is, essentially, the price of its success — scarce facilities, increased competition for resources, and heightened political opposition. This powerful trifecta of factors exacerbates an already challenging reality: After a period of rapid expansion for numerous charter networks, many are pausing growth to attend to improved instruction, talent development, and other internal challenges. Essentially, an already fatigued movement is being priced out of the area, politically and financially. Other research we have conducted at the Center on Reinventing Public Education in “high choice” cities suggests this same general dynamic might explain the recent national slowdown in charter growth.

The near-exclusive focus on the most disadvantaged students (in New Orleans, for example) has also led to large numbers of custodial “no excuses” schools using traditional pedagogies, albeit with great rigor. These are excellent for children who have been deprived of learning opportunities, but they don’t take advantage of charter schools’ opportunities to innovate, and are not attractive to families whose children don’t need basic remediation. Even as “no excuses” schools like KIPP work to make their programs more intellectually challenging, only a few charter providers (for example, Summit) are experimenting with technology-based, personalized schools and with models that reduce the need for large facilities.

The charter movement now has a limited constituency and some real enemies who are not likely to be deflected by facts or argument. Which is why the movement needs a new political strategy — one that builds a broader constituency, whose success doesn’t turn key supporters against it, and one that continues to encourage innovation in an increasing number of high-quality charter schools.

This new strategy can be built on three principles:

1. Continue working in cities and states where charter provider capacities, parent demand, and local politics are favorable, by:

• Maintaining philanthropic support for high-performing urban charter schools and for enrichment of curriculum and pedagogy in “no excuses” schools.

• Working closely with civic and political leaders promoting portfolio strategies.

• Advocating changes in state law that allow rapid transformation of districts and schools and partnerships between willing districts and charter providers.

2. Broaden the movement’s scope and appeal with additional groups and places outside of big-city enclaves, by:

• Serving groups that the original strategy assigned low priority, particularly middle-class families whose children have distinctive learning needs.

• Emphasizing new approaches to preparing students for careers in the changing American economy.

• Working in smaller cities and towns that also need better or more diverse schooling options.

3. Take greater advantage of charters’ inherent flexibility to experiment with and thoroughly implement instructional innovations, such as:

• Personalized instruction.

• Innovative high schools, especially for complex learners and students falling below their potential.

• Micro-schools that require modest facilities.

• New sources of teacher talent and new school staffing models.

This strategy builds on what has been accomplished to date. Looking to new localities and constituencies doesn’t imply cutting back on charter growth in cities where growth is possible, or reducing support for existing quality school providers and organizations that develop talent or support school quality. However, the new strategy will require new investments by philanthropy and new capacity developments by charter providers and supportive nonprofits, including:

• Focused startup funding for charter schools that hope to operate in suburban or rural contexts.

• Support for coalition building and implementation in localities newly committed to chartering.

• Design support to help groups with rudimentary ideas about technology-supported instruction flesh these out so whole schools can be built around them.

• Design competitions and prototyping for new elementary and high schools, including some in partnership with organizations serving complex learners.

• Outreach by state charter organizations to new cities, suburbs, and towns.

• New capacities to inventory talent in key localities and decide which teachers can be found locally and what talent must be developed or brought in through national organizations.

The need and demand for excellent new public charter schools are clear. But charter proponents will not deliver on that need and demand by doubling down on the same strategies that grew the charter movement over the past 25 years.

A vibrant next generation of charter schooling requires a new politics, one that adapts to today’s constraints and opportunities.

— Robin J. Lake and Paul Hill

Robin J. Lake is the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. Paul T. Hill is Founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education and Research Professor at the University of Washington Bothell.

The post The Future of the Charter School Movement Requires a New Political Strategy appeared first on Education Next.

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For those in the charter movement who have viewed chartering as a systemic reform strategy (not just an escape hatch for some kids), the prevalent theory of action for the last ten to fifteen years has been a “tipping point” strategy. The idea was to concentrate growth in targeted cities until districts either responded to competition or were entirely replaced by charters.

Looked good on paper. Sadly, though, things are not going as expected. Here’s why:

First, as charters hit significant market share, political opposition grows exponentially. School boards and superintendents are faced with a situation where they lose enrollment so quickly that the only thing they can do is close schools, lay off teachers according to seniority not quality (thanks to “last in, first out” requirements), increase class sizes, and slash their central office staffing and support levels. In some cities, districts also face an increasing concentration of the students hardest and most costly to educate, those with severe special needs, those who speak little to no English, those with the most severe behavior and mental health challenges and the least parental support. This combination of factors often triggers a slow death spiral that paralyzes politically bound superintendents and boards and ultimately harms students.

The Center on Reinventing Public Education has a new report out this week that makes clear that the financial challenges facing such districts arise from irresponsible labor contracts, failure to reduce semi-fixed costs in response to enrollment loss, and rigid and unsustainable pension and health care commitments. Still, as we say in the report, while this situation is not charters’ fault, it is in part their problem. In the eyes of the public, charter schools are causing harm to district kids. And any attempt to close under-performing or under-enrolled district schools means quick ousters for reform-oriented superintendents and board members.

Second, we’re seeing that in most cities, demand for charters slows significantly at around 40–50 percent market share. About half of all families prefer district-run neighborhood schools for a variety of reasons.

Third, the supply of high-quality charters has not kept pace with the need, especially in tough labor markets and in Midwestern and rural states. In these areas, districts are sometimes better positioned—knowledge-wise, resource-wise, staff-wise—to provide high-quality and innovative public schools.

For all these reasons, and despite my own affection for the idea of all-charter systems, the charter community in most cities is failing to achieve the goals assumed by the tipping point strategy. If the typical urban district were a soda machine, it has been wobbling back and forth for several years and threatens to fall back on the reformers who are trying to push it over.

Consider the lessons from Oakland, a once reform “hot spot” but where charter growth has slowed to a trickle. When we talk to school providers there, they say they can still get charters authorized but the politics of district finance, combined with the saturation effect of having so many charter operators fighting over the same buildings, kids, and talent, are forcing them to look to other communities. Meanwhile, kids are paying the price for the district’s inaction.

So I’m not okay with the argument or attitude that reformers should either replace all of the traditional public schools with charter schools or just “let districts be districts,” as Mike Petrilli recently argued.

I do not contend that districts need to turn all of their schools into charters in order to improve and compete. Some small, largely homogeneous districts can be very effective at centralizing and acting like big, successful CMOs, with a coherent, thoughtful approach to instruction, curriculum, and all the rest. But for large, dysfunctional urban districts with political boards and dismal performance, especially those now actively losing enrollment and facing the downward spiral described above, there is rarely a viable path for improvement and competition with charters that does not involve a partial or complete restructuring of what really is a failed delivery model.

In order to innovate, districts need to attract and retain entrepreneurial teachers and leaders. There is no amount of top-down directive that can inspire the zeal and commitment that it takes to serve the most challenging students. You can’t have high-performing, mission-driven schools without placing the locus of control and accountability at the school level. For these reasons, many districts should consider decentralizing all or part of their system, although this needs to be done strategically and only when schools can demonstrate that they have effective models.

That is the lesson we can learn from D.C. and New York City district reforms under the early years of Joel Klein’s reign. It’s possible to make centralization work under the right conditions, but not for the toughest schools and not in a sustainable way.

CRPE’s many years of work on the Portfolio Strategy make these arguments and more. We have also been developing tools and research-based resources to help the growing number of districts that want to move decision-making to the school level, a challenge that has serious implications for what tomorrow’s central office will look like and do. This month, David Osborne, whose seminal 1992 book, Reinventing Government, inspired our center’s founding, has released a new book that makes our case with stories and examples.

Some charter advocates cannot abide the idea of working with districts. Pessimistic that districts can be trusted to respect school-level autonomy, they prefer to keep charters outside the district sphere altogether. That’s a fine strategy if the goal is to help a limited number of students escape a failed system, but it doesn’t hold as an overall reform strategy. When districts create charter-like schools such as those underway in Indianapolis and Springfield, MA, the strategy can help a district right itself financially while still expanding the number of high quality schools.

We can argue all day about the right path forward for districts, but we ignore the problem at our peril. Figuring out how to help districts thrive in a high-choice environment is one of the toughest challenges out there. And figuring out what to do if they don’t thrive but still persist is even harder.

— Robin J. Lake

Robin J. Lake is the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington.

This post originally appeared on Flypaper.

The post The Charter Movement’s ‘Tipping Point’ Strategy Isn’t Working. What Now? appeared first on Education Next.

Many respected national groups have recently set their sights on school choice as the new battlefront for disability rights. They are anywhere from open to highly skeptical to adamantly opposed to charter schools and private school choice, often aligning with teachers unions to try to block new proposals or to re-regulate existing policies.

This opposition makes sense in many ways. Schools of choice, to varying degrees, are free of the hard-won regulations that these groups fought for over the last two decades: the right for access to, and inclusion in, general education classrooms, rather than isolated institutional settings; and the right to a defined set of supports and services to help students with special needs succeed in school.

Indeed, there are good reasons to be alert to issues like counseling out, disproportionate or inappropriate school discipline, and denial of services in public charter schools, which are required to comply with the same federal and state protections as district-run public schools. And when it comes to vouchers, education savings accounts (ESAs), and other forms of private school choice, the issues get more complex around student rights and school responsibilities.

But while their hearts are in the right place, the advocates have the wrong target in their sights. They are too often inadvertently working against the very policies that can open up new possibilities for innovation and quality, and empower parents to make decisions about their children’s unique needs.

Families of students with special needs have certainly benefited from the fights of the past. But they also know that processes and protections like Individual Education Programs (IEPs), school-provided therapies, and the right to sue for more appropriate placements are not enough. Too many families find themselves expending huge sums on lawyers and moving to different neighborhoods or school districts to find a good fit and proper services.

I (Robin) was lucky: I had the financial means to move and a deep knowledge of the system that helped me fight to get my son into a school where he thrived. Those without the financial means to sue or move or leave their current system are simply faced with fighting against a massive bureaucracy that responds only to the loudest and most powerful voices. What disability groups must acknowledge is that the fight for rights is meaningless when parents have no real choices or power.

In many cities, students with unique needs have no substantive educational choices. They attend their neighborhood school, or the district places them in a school with a program for their specific disability. Families have some say through the IEP team, but the power dynamics at meetings, particularly for disadvantaged families, results in most decisions being made by school personnel.

School choice can change this power dynamic. In the charter context, rather than constantly fighting to make the school fit their child, parents can choose a school already designed to be a good fit. Parents can choose a school that they believe is the right academic match and culture rather than fighting the district to layer services and supports to make the neighborhood school work. In the case of an ESA, parents can craft a curriculum and a set of services individualized to their child’s unique needs rather than trying to find one school that offers that package.

The challenge still lies in how we make all forms of schools offer the necessary protections for students with special needs, but the traditional answers are insufficient. The IEP, which documents the goals the student will achieve and the supports and services he or she will receive in order to do so, is the essence of the compliance culture and inefficiency in special education. Private schools show no desire to embrace the IEP and all the bureaucracy it entails. And charter schools are often at war with the rigidness it forces upon them.

Rather than expending effort to fight school choice, we need to focus on fighting for policies that will make choice work well for students with special needs. We need to counter overt discrimination, pushing out, or counseling out. We need to develop policies, such as unified enrollment systems, and mobilize advocacy groups, like DC School Reform Now, to ensure that families get the information and support they need to choose the right school for their child.

Schools of choice, with their autonomy and incentives to demonstrate outcomes, could lead the way forward on innovation and quality in special education. Advocates should shift their sights and start fighting for policies that open up new possibilities and empower parents to make decisions about their children’s unique needs.

— Robin Lake and Sivan Tuchman

Robin Lake is director and Sivan Tuchman is a research analyst at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE).

This blog entry was earlier published on The 74 and CRPE’s The Lens.

The post Disability Rights Advocates Are Fighting the Wrong Fight on School Choice appeared first on Education Next.

District budgets are badly strained when many of their schools are under-enrolled. This is one of the biggest reasons that districts with growing charter enrollment hit financial hurdles. Meanwhile, charter schools can’t expand without access to facilities, and in a growing number of cities, suitable facilities are in very short supply. Understandably, charter leaders bristle when they are blamed for budget woes that may be easily solved by consolidating under-enrolled schools. And understandably, district leaders think they wouldn’t have the under-enrollment problem if charter schools weren’t pulling away students.

At a recent CRPE gathering to discuss ways the two sectors can better cooperate, district leaders made a strong case that they need charters’ help in this area. One discussion focused on whether charter schools should coordinate with the district to ensure that high-performing schools can locate in the neighborhoods that need them most. A district leader said they need their charter partners to better understand the political reality of co-locations, turnarounds, and closures, and to find ways to help take some of the political heat or provide cover for those kinds of decisions—which are extremely unpopular with community leaders and board members. As she described, “We need to figure out how to share the burden of opening up a legacy comprehensive high school to co-location. People react to this. So the question is how to share the burden with charters. How do charters stand with the district on this?”

In another discussion on the politics of collaboration, some charter leaders had a difficult time understanding why closing schools is so challenging for districts. This led to a patient explanation from other charter leaders as well as district leaders about how hard it is for communities to see a building shuttered or handed over to a charter school when generations of neighborhood kids, some of whom went on to be accomplished leaders, attended the school. There is little that causes more strife and political pain in education than school closures.

At the very least, it would be politically wise for charter leaders to better understand and empathize with that pain and what helps ameliorate it. One charter leader put in stark terms how closing a district school and replacing it with a charter school can feel like a personal affront to a community if there hasn’t been enough transparency about school performance:

“’I’m shutting down your school because you deserve better’ doesn’t go over well. Imagine you come home and a stranger has rearranged your whole house. ‘Who are you and why are you here and touching my stuff?’ You haven’t been invited to do so. The politics within the community and lack of information creates a problematic transition.”

More sophisticated partnerships are needed, not just empathy. To create smoother transitions in school closures or takeovers, communities need, as one district leader put it, “Not just transparency, but truth.” Transparency about the quality of their current school, and truth about school capacity and how under-enrollment affects school resources—and about how they plan to strike the balance between capacity and quality by closing, restructuring, and opening new schools, charter or otherwise. And as another district leader said, district and charter leaders need to be able to “paint a picture of what tomorrow is going to look like,” to provide answers about what these sometimes painful transitions mean for the future.

Another charter leader noted that what has worked in their context is to show parents and students concrete examples of what this “tomorrow” could look like: give families the opportunity to see good schools in action. As she described, “Once kids see that they can have more, the district has to deliver. But it’s hard to imagine it until you actually see it.”

Charter advocates could help rally their community allies to promote sensible building-use policies that make it as painless as possible for each neighborhood to have access to a growing number of high-performing schools, whether district or charter. These policies should do everything possible to preserve the honor and legacies of existing school names, heroes, and sports teams. They could also be great neighbors, giving communities access to the space after school hours for practices, adult education, and family health services. They should engage the community in the process as much as possible and take time to listen to real concerns.

At the same time, it should be made clear by both the district and the charter community that students pay the price of NOT closing schools. Larger class sizes and staff layoffs should not be pinned on charter schools when district buildings are not being used efficiently.

Failure to find politically viable pathways to replacing low-performing schools can bring both district improvement strategies and charter growth to a halt. The solution will require district and charter leaders to come together in thoughtful and strategic ways.

—Robin J. Lake and Alice Opalka

Robin J. Lake is the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. Alice Opalka is a project manager at the Center on Reinventing Public Education.

This post originally appeared on The Lens.

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A serious shift toward PL severely disrupts the status quo. It uproots what is taught and how, what the expectations are for students and how they are assessed, and how teachers plan and execute lessons. And because true PL hands over some control to students, it injects an element of unpredictability into everyone’s work. Of course, teachers can always close their classroom doors and teach the way they always have. Students can revolt against an approach that might make it harder for them to get good grades. And parents can vocally resist out of fear and distrust of the new school order. But the uneven implementation that inevitably results has real-world consequences. It’s hard on students, who experience radically different approaches and expectations from classroom to classroom. And it’s hard on teachers, calling into question the point of sinking so much time and effort to make the new approach effective and sustainable, and dampening enthusiasm of those working hard to do so.

Schools with all sorts of redesign experience are clear on this point: effectively managing change depends entirely on a clear vision and rationale. Those leading the change process must be able to make a compelling case for upending the traditional mode of teaching and learning. The “why” is far more important than the “what.”

In our field visits, we heard stories of teachers who were once harsh critics of PL becoming its most vocal advocates. One district leader described a tough football coach (a real skeptic of PL) breaking down in tears when he realized the positive impact that personalizing the school was having on students. But the more common story we hear is from principals and teachers frustrated that only a small slice of teachers in their schools are on board with PL. Schools can struggle to pull off a shift to personalized learning, especially among more veteran teachers wedded to old ways. This issue is all the more daunting in unionized schools.

At a recent gathering of school leaders who have successfully implemented schoolwide PL designs, we heard that when considering a school redesign it’s important to:

• Start with, and stay focused on, a vision of the graduate you want—their skills and attributes—not the school or classroom you want.

• Use data to analyze which groups of students aren’t doing well and how all students could do better.

• Survey alumni to identify their skill gaps in college.

• Survey current students on what they want from their education. Teachers want to do the right thing for kids; student ideas and priorities may have more sway than those of administrators.

• Survey both teachers and students on what most dissatisfies them and redesign the school around addressing those concerns.

• Run a SWOT analysis (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat) to demonstrate the need for urgent action (e.g., students won’t succeed in college without the ability to self-direct).

• Appoint your most resistant teachers and parents to design groups and take them on model school visits.

So what’s the takeaway for districts or charter networks that want to move to PL at scale? They need to heavily invest in training their leaders on not just instructional coaching, but on managing change. This isn’t about creating a super hero principal but a strategic one. Unfortunately, both schools of education and districts typically ignore change management in leader development.

One district we visited last winter as part of our PL research stood out as an exception. The school system realized that their principals often excelled in instructional leadership, but struggled when it came to developing a vision for their schools and managing the changes needed to fulfill that vision. The district has started asking principals to read John Kotter, the change management guru, and revamped its leadership training programs and coaching supports to include change management elements. They now teach principals how to create and carry out a vision, build school and community support for change, develop an organizational culture, etc.

To be sure, PL can be an effective classroom approach. But its transformative potential lies in schoolwide and districtwide redesign that moves away from generic offerings and outdated and ineffective instructional practices. That’s why true personalized learning will live or die on the ability of visionary education leaders to get their entire organizations to adapt to—and fully own—a plan for 21st century learning.

— Robin J. Lake

Robin J. Lake is the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington.

This post originally appeared on The Lens. This is the ninth in their series of “Notes From the Field” on personalized learning.

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