Today, theProgressive Policy Institute’s Reinventing America’s Schools (RAS) Project released a new report with a dire message to the Biden Administration and parents across the country: If the Department of Education’s proposed regulations on charter schools are adopted as drafted , it will be difficult — if not impossible — for charter schools to qualify for federal start-up grants under the Department’s Charter School Program (“CSP”). As a result, thousands of children and families will be denied high-quality, innovative education options. The report, “A Bureaucratic Plan to Disempower Parents,” is authored by Will Marshall, President of PPI, and Tressa Pankovits, Co-Director of PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools Project.
“The proposed rules, if adopted, will inevitably stall the growth of charter and other autonomous, innovative public schools desired by communities with urgent academic needs,” write Marshall and Pankovits. “We urge the White House to intervene to stop the Department of Education’s bureaucratic attack on the federal CSP and, by extension, on parents who wish to choose the public schools that best fit their children’s needs. This is not the time for progressives to defend the educational status quo and turn their back on Black and Hispanic and low-income parents who have long been shortchanged by our legacy school system. Instead, President Biden and the Democrats should pick up where Presidents Clinton and Obama left off, by championing public school innovation and modernization,” they continue.
The CSP is a hallmark of the Clinton Administration. It has been supported by every administration since, with the Obama Administration greatly expanding its innovation school improvement goals. Created in 1994, the CSP provides federal funding to state education agencies (SE) and nonprofit education organizations to encourage the development and continuous refinement of new models for public schools. CSP start-up grants have been a critical catalyst of America’s public school choice movement. More than half of today’s charter schools have received a grant. This has made high-quality public schools available to millions of low-income and minority families whose children are too often consigned to low-performing schools. Nationwide, charter schools are in high demand, often with long waiting lists. Public charter school enrollment increased by nearly a quarter of a million students during the pandemic.
The Reinventing America’s Schools Project inspires a 21st century model of public education geared to the knowledge economy. Two models, public charter schools and public innovation schools, are showing the way by providing autonomy for schools, accountability for results, and parental choice among schools tailored to the diverse learning styles of children. The project is co-led by Curtis Valentine and Tressa Pankovits.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org.
The Executive Branch of the United States government has scores of departments and agencies employing about 1.8 million civilians. Given its sprawling size, it’s not surprising that the right hand doesn’t always know what the left hand is doing.
Let’s hope that’s the case with an arcane set of rules newly proposed by U.S. Department of Education (ED). Unless the White House intervenes to block or fix them, the rules would make it harder for parents to choose high-quality public schools for their children. They would also undermine the progressive school reforms championed by the previous two Democratic presidents.
The target of this bureaucratic sabotage is one of President Bill Clinton’s signature policy innovations, the Federal Charter School Program (CSP). Created in 1994, the CSP provides federal funding to state education agencies (SE) and nonprofit education organizations to encourage the development and continuous refinement of new models for public schools. CSP start-up grants have been a critical catalyst of America’s public school choice movement, which has made high-quality public schools available to millions of low-income and minority families whose children are too often consigned to low-performing schools.
The next Democratic president, Barack Obama, continued and built creatively upon Clinton’s modernizing reforms. His $4 billion “Race to the Top” initiative spurred a competition among states to devise plans for adopting higher standards, improving teacher quality, collecting performance data to help schools and parents measure their students’ progress, and turning around failing schools.
During his 2020 campaign, however, President Biden stepped back from his predecessors’ commitment to providing national encouragement to state and local efforts to reinvent K-12 education. He called for eliminating federal funding for charter schools that contract with for-profit external management organizations (EMO). Only 9.1% of the nation’s roughly 7,500 charter schools are run by for-profit companies; the remaining 90% are stand-alone self-operating schools or are run by non-profit groups.
ED’s proposed rules would indeed make it difficult – if not impossible – for schools administered entirely or “substantially” by for-profit companies to get federal start-up grants under CSP. But they go further, imposing onerous and unreasonable requirements on all non-profit charter school models as well. So unprecedented are the proposed changes that if they had been enacted earlier, some public charter schools ED named “blue ribbon schools” – the nation’s best – would have been excluded from its grant competition. Minneapolis’ Friendship Academy of the Arts, which is 98% minority, is an example of a public charter school that would fail to meet the expectation of the new diversity language in ED’s proposed regulation.
The timing of the proposed rule changes is also odd. They will likely delay Fiscal Year 2022 CSP awards, as the annual competition is already behind schedule. What’s more, ED published the proposed rules on March 14, 2022 and has set an April 13, 2022 deadline for public comments – a very brief window considering what’s at stake for millions of U.S. families whose children attend schools of choice.
From a political perspective, the timing of these proposals also couldn’t be worse.[7] Many parents in the U.S. are dissatisfied with the way their children’s public schools have performed during the COVID-19 pandemic. They are frustrated by lengthy shutdowns[9] and learning losses, by political wrangling over vaccines and mask mandates, and by unresponsive central school bureaucracies and teachers’ unions that didn’t seem responsive to their concerns.
During the pandemic, enrollment in traditional public district schools has fallen. But enrollment in public charter schools has risen, a sign that parents want the power to choose among a wider array of quality school options.
Amid mounting public pressure for systemic change in K-12 schools, defending the educational status quo hardly seems like a progressive response. Worse, ED’s proposed rules would roll back previous Administrations’ progress toward modernizing a legacy school system created more than a century ago to serve the needs of a then-rapidly industrializing nation.
Thanks to pioneering efforts by state and local school reformers – mostly Democrats – a new model for 21st Century schools is emerging. It is built upon four pillars: expanding parental choice, shifting decision-making power from central bureaucracies to autonomous school leaders, delivering more personalized learning to students rather than one-size-fits-all instruction, and real consequences for failing to lift all students’ performance.
So far, the main beneficiaries of this new model are parents of color in low-income communities who can’t pick up and move to the suburbs if their local district schools don’t make the grade. In cities such as New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Denver, Indianapolis, New York and Newark, public charter schools, innovation schools, partnership schools and other non-traditional schools have produced dramatic gains in student learning in impoverished communities. As a matter of civil rights and social justice, the Biden Administration should stand with low-income and minority parents who are demanding an end to second-class schools for their children. Instead, ED’s proposed rules seem designed to protect the interests of adults employed in local school districts at the expense of the children and their parents.
ED’S PROPOSED RULES
ED’s new rules– “Proposed Priorities, Requirements, Definitions, and Selection Criteria Expanding Opportunity Through Quality Charter Schools Program (CSP)-Grants” — would make it more difficult for charter school start-ups to get federal support. For nearly three decades those funds have served a critical need. Public charter schools, unlike traditional schools, do not have taxing authority to issue bonds to establish or increase the number of local school seats. Federal grants under CSP average about $500,000. At least half of today’s charter schools have received one.
The rules impose a raft of new requirements on applicants for federal grants to state education agencies, charter school management organizations, and grants to groups seeking to organize new charter schools. The rationale for the changes, according to ED, are as follows:
To eliminate federal support for for-profit management contracts, which ED contends is necessary to ensure fiscal transparency and accountability.
To encourage independent public charter schools to enter into new “partnerships” with central school districts.
To ensure charter schools are racially and socioeconomically diverse.
To require charter applicants to submit “community impact” analyses.
ENDING GRANTS FOR-PROFIT MANAGEMENT SERVICES
Charter school opponents invariably cast a nefarious light on schools that seek to increase their capacities by obtaining academic, financial, human, facility and organizational resources from for-profit specialists in those fields. However, creating and sustaining a successful charter school is a complex undertaking, requiring skills, knowledge and capacities in many different areas. As such, private companies can provide small charter schools with economies of scale in managing payroll, back office, and other services.
Because they are public schools, all charters are free, publicly funded and subject to financial oversight from authorizing boards that are answerable to public authorities. The quality of that oversight varies from state-to-state depending on the competence and diligence of the authorizing boards states have empowered by statute. When financial abuses or malfeasance occurs, it is the board’s responsibility to take action.
Such problems are by no means confined to for-profit charters or those that contract with for-profit companies for some, or all, of their administrative functions. It’s not hard to find examples of nonprofit charters that have gone under or have been shut down as a result of financial mismanagement or misuse of public funds. In fact, without proper oversight, even traditional public schools can be felled by corruption.
No surprise, then, that rogue for-profit actors prey on weak authorizers, seeking to take over failing schools and keep them limping along while they collect public funds. But rigorous local oversight is the best answer to financial mismanagement or profiteering. A strong authorizer, such as Washington D.C.’s Public Charter School Board, moves quickly to close schools that mismanage public funds. It also can and has refused to grant charters to private companies with bad financial and academic track records.
And, there are signs that other places are taking concrete steps to reign in wrong doers. In Utah, the State Charter School Board (SCSB), which is responsible for the compliance of 91% of the charter schools in Utah, has issued a record number of “letters of concern” and warnings to administrators this year, letting them know they are being closely watched and that expectations have increased. The state is responding to the high profile scandal that led to the closure of the American International School in June of 2019. The director of the SCSB, Jennifer Lambert says, “It’s not that it isn’t that charter schools are suddenly performing poorly… it’s that the board is being more proactive to help keep these schools in line with rules and regulations.”
Nonetheless, the Biden Administration evidently believes the federal government should deny start-up grants to schools even “substantially” run by private companies. The Administration’s purported main target is charter management organizations with “sweeps” contracts, which are arrangements in which the management company completely runs the school and also receives most of the school revenue. These have the greatest potential for abuse, because the entire school can collapse if the management company runs afoul of rules and regulations.
Even so, we’re skeptical of ED’s argument for usurping the function of local authorizing boards and empowering a remote federal agency to act, in effect, as a “second authorizer” for charter schools. A better solution would be to invest more in raising the quality and rigor of charter authorizing boards.
Our skepticism extends to ED’s failure to define “substantially” for future applicants. Many public charter schools, just like their district counterparts, contract out some administrative and operational responsibilities to private companies, while others purchase a variety of goods and services — transportation, technical supports, cafeteria services, professional development, facility maintenance, and so on — from for-profit businesses. Without a well-defined federal standard, it is difficult for CSP applicants to understand where ED will draw the “substantially” line. Leaving that definition to state education agencies is likely to create an uneven and confusing welter of rules for those seeking to open charter schools.
REGULATORY OVERREACH
Our main concern, however, is for the 90% of public charter schools operated by nonprofit boards and CMOs. ED’s proposed rules would subject them to unprecedented federal micromanagement.
State law and local policy – not federal regulations – have always determined the conditions under which America’s public schools open and operate. At present, ED awards CSP grants to nonprofit developers with a charter approved by a state sanctioned charter authorizer, and to departments of education (SE) that then disburse funds to sub-grantees seeking to open or expand local charter schools in accordance with varying state laws.
ED’s proposed regulations, however, would in effect override the authority of state laws. They would force SE grantees to require charter school applicants to comply with new, non-statutory federal rules in order to qualify for start-up grants. This in effect would make the federal agency a national school board supervening the decisions of charter school authorizers.
A host of new ED mandates will doubtless balloon CSP grant applications to thousands of pages. The department conservatively estimates that the new requirements will add a minimum of 60 additional hours to complete, over the current application requirements. It further estimates the total estimated burden created by the proposed regulations would be 21,900 annual hours at a cost of $2.1 million per year. While large CMOs experienced with CSP applications might absorb the additional burden of time and money, the new regulations would likely mean prohibitively high transaction and compliance costs for the vast majority of charter schools that are organized and run by small groups of educators and parents, many in low-income communities.
MANDATING “PARTNERSHIPS” WITH DISTRICTS
In addition to public charter schools, which are autonomous and free of central district control, some states and cities have created semi-autonomous schools of choice variously called innovation schools, renaissance schools, iZone schools, 1882 schools, and other names. Like charters, they compete for students with traditional district schools.
As the Progressive Policy Institute has documented, the competition gives parents a wider choice of public schools for their kids, while also putting pressure on traditional district schools to improve their performance.
A key to the superior performance of these schools of choice is their ability to make key decisions on-site and operate nimbly, because they aren’t constrained by the central school district’s top-down rules and restrictive union contracts.
Another key to such autonomous or semiautonomous schools’ success is that they are voluntary partnerships, meaning that there is “buy in” from both partners – the district and the school operator. The voluntary nature of the relationship ensures they equally commit to ensuring the arrangement produces good outcomes for students.
However, ED would now mandate that all charter schools partner with local districts if grant applicants want to receive “priority points” for funding in federal CSP competitions. But the “partnership” ED envisions evidently is strictly one-way, since it imposes no such obligation on school boards and district leaders. But the “partnership” ED envisions evidently is strictly one-way, since it imposes no such obligation on school boards and district leaders.
Down on the ground, many school districts resent competition from charters, which they see as luring away “their” students. Compelling charters to partner with often hostile school districts or risking losing access to federal funding would compromise the independence and autonomy that makes them work. This is a longtime goal of the change-averse K-12 establishment and teachers unions, but it has nothing to do with the CSP’s mission: increasing the number of high-quality public schools available to low-income and minority families whose children are too often “zoned” into low-performing neighborhood schools.
AN IMPOSSIBLE “DIVERSITY” MANDATE
Similarly disingenuous is ED’s proposed requirement that charter and independent public schools meet a uniform standard for “diversity” that doesn’t take into account America’s demographic and geographic realities.
PPI wholeheartedly believes that children of different races, creeds, cultures and socio-economic background should learn together. In practice, because schools of choice have made their deepest inroads in America’s major urban centers, they often serve disproportionately low-income and minority students.
All CSP applicants already have to demonstrate to ED how they will maintain racially diverse student and staff populations. The department’s current practice “prioritizes” (awards extra points) to grant competitors who use school models that are diverse-by-design. The proposed rules essentially change ED’s “priority” to a top-down “mandate.”
This has enormous potential to harm urban students and indigenous populations. Notwithstanding vigorous enforcement of federal civil rights laws over the past 60 years, too many urban school districts have continuously failed low-income, African American, and Hispanic families. Charter schools are helping to change that baleful tradition, and it isn’t fair to put the burden of reversing centuries of residential segregation entirely on them. Should their students be punished because charters operate in communities that don’t have enough white students or because their schools don’t have enough white teachers? Our answer is a resounding “No.”
A TENDENTIOUS “COMMUNITY IMPACT” STANDARD
Perhaps the most egregious of the ED proposals is one that would give federal grant reviewers the power to override state and local decisions to authorize schools in the name of “community impact.” This vague standard is transparently intended to protect school districts from losing students and public dollars when parents choose to enroll their children in charter schools. It apparently rests on the spurious assumption that charters create too much school capacity in communities where district schools have enough seats for all children that live there. Omitted from this zero-sum logic is any consideration of the quality of district schools.
Under the new rule, charter applicants would have to demonstrate “sufficient demand” for new school seats, rather than simply letting parents choose between charter and district schools. Specifically, an applicant must “show evidence that the number of charter schools proposed to be opened, replicated or expanded. . . must not exceed the number of public schools needed to accommodate the demand in the community.”
Charter schools were never conceived to be temporary classroom trailers waiting to catch traditional schools’ overflow population.
Nor do parents typically choose public charters for their children because of overcrowding. Parents choose them because they believe they are a better fit for their children, offer higher quality instruction and outcomes, are safer, or are more culturally affirming.
ED’s criteria for this proposed regulation center make it clear that its chief concern is not a quality education for all students, but the fiscal health of traditional school districts, and preserving their monopoly on public schools to protect their staffing models. At a time when enrollment in traditional district schools is falling, this regulation aims at stopping the growth of charter school enrollment. With long charter school waiting lists — around 50,000 children in New York City alone, for example — this is no time for the U.S. government to be turning its back on America’s neediest families.
CONCLUSION
What is most striking about ED’s proposed rules is their evident unconcern for making our public schools better, and for making sure all students have equal access to good schools. Parents frustrated by their interactions with their schools during the pandemic also are demanding a more transparent, accountable and responsive public education system. ED’s push to load scores of new regulations and mandates onto CSP applicants points is fundamentally out of touch with the public’s growing interest in systemic change.
The proposed rules, if adopted, inevitably will stall the growth of charter and other kinds of innovative public schools springing up in communities where they are urgently needed. We urge the White House to intervene to stop ED’s bureaucratic attack on the federal CSP and, by extension, on parents who want to be able to choose the public schools that best fit their children’s needs.
This is not the time for progressives to defend the educational status quo and turn their back on Black and Hispanic and low-income parents who have long been shortchanged by our legacy school system.
Instead, President Biden and the Democrats should pick up where Presidents Clinton and Obama left off, by championing public school innovation and modernization.
A new report by the Progressive Policy Institute’s Reinventing America’s Schools (RAS) Project provides a deep dive look into a promising, innovative education initiative in Texas. The Leadership Academy Network (LAN) is a novel partnership between the Fort Worth Independent School District (FWISD) and Texas Wesleyan University (TXWES). Through a performance contract, TXWES is responsible for the governance and day-to-day operations of six of the district’s most challenged schools. Supported with additional funding from the state, pursuant to Texas’ 2019 statute commonly referred to as “Senate Bill 1882,” the LAN operates autonomously from the district’s central office, with the deliverable of earning an Texas Education Agency “A” rating for each of the six campuses by 2024.
During this high-tension time for educators, school administrators, and parents, report author and Co-Director of the Reinventing America’s Schools Project Tressa Pankovits covers how and why the school district leaned in on this partnership, the state policy that authorized and sustains the partnership, how it works, and how it’s currently working.
“It appears we have reached a moment in time when there seems to be a broad public consensus that yesterday’s bureaucratic and highly centralized K-12 school model is not ‘the one true way’ to deliver public education for all times,” writes Tressa Pankovits in the report. “Instead of letting our public school districts continue to shrink, why not reinvent them using autonomous partnerships like the Leadership Academy Network to increase choice, transparency, and a diversity of models? In Fort Worth and other places, it appears to be a sound way to feed the public’s post-pandemic hunger for sweeping changes in their K-12 schools.”
“All children deserve quality schools and a chance to rebound from the disruption the last two years caused in their attainment of the knowledge and skills they need to live productive lives. Not just in the time of a pandemic, but especially in the wake of one, it’s time to acknowledge that new school models like the LAN aren’t a threat to the public education ideal. Rather, they could be the way to save it,” Pankovits concludes.
In addition to explaining the inner workings of this innovation education partnership, Pankovits also offers exclusive interviews with teachers and administrators, who provide candid assessments of the challenges and successes of strengthening the Leadership Academy Network. Her ‘on the ground’ reporting connects those in the halls of the LAN to the readers, and lifts up the voices of these innovative leaders in education.
Read the report:
The Reinventing America’s Schools Project inspires a 21st century model of public education geared to the knowledge economy. Two models, public charter schools and public innovation schools, are showing the way by providing autonomy for schools, accountability for results, and parental choice among schools tailored to the diverse learning styles of children. The project is co-led by Curtis Valentine and Tressa Pankovits.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org.
The pandemic put both a microscope and a wide-angle lens on America’s education systems. Under the microscope, parents had a window into individual classrooms as never before, as their children struggled to learn through laptops. Many didn’t like what they observed. Through the wide angled lens, the country was jolted by evidence that school districts everywhere were failing to adapt. Failing to meet the moment. Failing to stem learning loss. Many recognized that perhaps 150 years were more than enough of centralized, bureaucratic school systems. What we at Progressive Policy Institute have been saying for many years — that it is time for something different — began resonating with parents across the country. What that “something” is will likely be different in different places to meet differing needs. But for large school districts, it is painfully obvious that top-heavy central administrations that push a standardized, one-size fits all school experience are as antiquated as paper road maps. We believe that everyone — except perhaps overstaffed central bureaucracies and the teachers unions — would benefit from more decentralized and more accountable school systems.
One auspicious approach is the partnership model. The model in a nutshell: a school district partners with a qualified nonprofit to operate a school or a subset of its schools, usually using a performance contract to define the terms of the relationship. Even before the pandemic disrupted the education of a generation of students, an increasing number of urban districts around the country were experimenting with the partnership model. As with anything new, some early adopters are doing better at it than others. This report tells the story of one promising effort: the Leadership Academy Network (LAN) in Fort Worth, Texas. LAN is a partnership between the Fort Worth Independent School District (FWISD) and Texas Wesleyan University (TXWES). LAN is unique because it is effectively a “homegrown” initiative, meaning the district did not simply bring in a proven charter school operator to manage its failing schools; it launched the turnaround on its own prior to its partnership with Texas Wesleyan University. It is a modern partnership adopted by a district willing to venture out of its bureaucratic comfort zone in order to sustain improvements in what had been some of its lowest performing elementary and middle schools.
This report will cover how and why the FWISD went the partnership route, how the LAN got up and running, how it works, and how it is working. It will also take the reader inside LAN’s schools, which will hopefully inspire pragmatic thinkers to encourage more places to consider its data-driven instructional model. At the center of LAN’s model is the practice of providing students support to master the skill or topic being taught before they move on to the next lesson. Now is the moment to embrace innovation in America’s public K-12 school systems. Millions of students who were already academically behind prior to the pandemic are suffering from significant learning loss. Therefore, it is imperative that we accelerate and scale efforts like Fort Worth’s LAN partnership to improve and modernize our education systems.
INTRODUCTION
In 2017, bitter and protracted fights over sanctuary cities and transgender bathrooms dominated both the Texas legislative session and media headlines. There was at least one shoving match on the House floor and, after a particularly contentious debate, a couple of legislators threatened to shoot each other dead in the Capitol’s parking lot.
Amidst that chaos, Texas’ lawmakers did manage to pass Senate Bill 1882, which provides financial incentives for school districts to partner with carefully vetted nonprofits to operate district schools. SB 1882 is similar — but not identical — to partnership statutes in a growing number of other states, including Colorado, Indiana, New Jersey, Tennessee, and others. Los Angeles, Memphis, Indianapolis, Charleston, S.C., Springfield, Mass., Chicago, and several other cities are also trying partnership schools. Partnering has become a new model of how large urban districts can reinvent themselves, shifting from centralized, rule-driven, and bureaucratic to decentralized, mission-driven, and innovative.
In each state, the bills’ architects wanted to prompt traditional districts to proactively improve the delivery of education services. In the case of perennially failing schools, the goal is for the district to bring in a qualified organizations to improve schools the district itself had been unable to turnaround. In cases where a school was limping along but not necessarily failing, the bills’ sponsors hoped offering the partnership model would inspire district leaders to give a partner the autonomy to turn mediocre schools into great schools. In some places — Indianapolis and Denver, for example — if a school’s leader and enough teachers want to, they can vote to become an autonomous school.
While some districts grant more autonomy than others, in almost all cases, the nonprofit’s contract with the district is a performance contract that articulates specific success metrics for improved student outcomes. If the school meets the deliverable, the contract is renewed. Sometimes, the successful school is allowed to expand or replicate on another campus. If the school fails to meet its performance goals, the district replaces the operator or returns the school to district governance. By replacing the low performers, replicating the best, and developing new models to meet new needs, the district almost guarantees continuous improvement. This new formula — autonomy, accountability, diversity of school designs, and parental choice — is simply more effective than the centralized, bureaucratic approach we inherited from the 20th century.
Because governance is decentralized to the local school level, these schools are also nimbler when challenges like those wrought by the pandemic arise. Decisions can be made with increased parental input and without central office bureaucratic red tape.
In some places, the partner-operated school remains in the same school building, with the same neighborhood students. If there are empty seats after all zoned students enroll, the schools may enroll students from outside the zone using random lotteries. In other places, they are purely schools of choice. For example, three rural Texas counties have banded together to create a regional Rural Schools Innovation Zone of specialized high school academies. Students from all three counties can choose to attend any academy in the zone.
No matter how they enroll their student body, all nonprofit school partners must follow all state and federal laws while operating the school — anti-discrimination protections, the Americans with Disabilities Act, procurement procedures, workplace safety regulations, and so on — but they are exempted from most school district policies and in some places, collective bargaining agreements. Each partner has its own board of directors or trustees that oversees the school or schools, with various degrees of independence from the school district board. Our research finds that the more independence the partner’s board has, the better the model works.
In Texas, the 1882 statute spells out certain autonomies districts are required to give their partner-operator in order for the state’s department of education, the Texas Education Agency (TEA), to grant the extra funding. The required autonomies include freedom to make staffing, budget, and curriculum decisions. As Fort Worth Independent School District’s Chief Officer of Innovation David Saenz put it, “The state must be able to see (in the proposed partnership contract) that there has been no negotiation of terms on those issues between the district and the partner.” Other autonomies can be — and should be — negotiated before the performance contract is signed.
Texas’ exchange of extra funding for the mandatory autonomies is a pragmatic bargain for several reasons. School turnaround is difficult and sustaining improved outcomes is expensive. Providing an incentive for high quality school operators to take on a floundering school while giving districts an incentive to relinquish a low-performing school is a win for the students in that school building.
It also increases transparency and accountability. Because the district and partner sign a performance contract, all parties understand the metrics for success or failure from the outset of the partnership. If the partner doesn’t meet the terms of the agreement, at the end of the contract, it loses the right to continue operating the school.
Finally, when a school improves, the district gets to include its higher test scores in its submission to the TEA, thereby raising the entire district’s rating. And, the district is freed from managing a challenged campus, allowing it to redirect its resources to other campuses.
The district-nonprofit partnership model is one that large urban districts everywhere can employ to reinvent themselves. We have seen for ourselves that it can transform schools hamstrung by central-administration bureaucratic whim into mission-driven organizations liberated to innovate.
Progressive Policy Institute’s Reinventing America’s Schools project in 2020 published a comprehensive guide to this school model, complete with model legislation that incorporates the strongest elements of the various state statutes mentioned above. The schools we wrote about are known by different names in different places. In Camden, N.J., they are “renaissance schools.” In Indianapolis they are “innovation network schools,” while in Denver, innovations schools can organize themselves into “zones,” which are then commonly called “iZone schools.” Across Texas, they are nicknamed after the law that created them: “1882 schools.”
In Fort Worth, the nickname is especially appropriate, as the legislature passed SB 1882 in the nick of time for the district. FWISD had started a turnaround initiative in some of its low-performing schools that was making rapid progress, but it was running out of resources to sustain the momentum. SB 1882 created the mechanism that allowed LAN to continue what FWISD started.
By Tressa Pankovits, Co-Director of PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools Project
This is the 12th year in which the final week of January has been designated National School Choice Week (SCW). The nonprofit that sponsors the celebration — 26,000 events this year — chose this particular week because, more than any other week of the year, this is when parents begin the process of searching for schools. The event is a campaign to draw attention to the fact that children have unique learning needs; therefore, children need unique educational opportunities.
National School Choice Week is celebrated locally with school fairs, parent information sessions, open houses and rallies. There are webinars and meetups. Governors sign proclamations. Students sport bright yellow and red scarves and teach each other a new school choice dance each year. There is an upbeat “kickoff video,” and 31 public buildings and monuments — including the Aloha Tower in Hawaii and Niagara Falls on the New York-Canadian border — will dazzle in yellow and red lights after dark.
This year, however, underneath the fun and fanfare, there is a serious message for Democrats. For years, public school systems have either disregarded parents or failed to encourage their engagement. Once the progressive champions of school reform, charter schools and other education innovations, many Democrats are now failing to listen to parents as well, at their own peril.
For almost two years, parents have had an unprecedented front-row-seat into their kids’ classrooms. Many haven’t liked what they saw. Many decided one-size-doesn’t fit all, after all. Many voted with their feet. Public charter school enrollment grew from school year 2019-2020 to the end 2020-2021 by nearly a quarter of a million students, while traditional public school enrollment declined by 1.7 million students. Home schooling, virtual schools, micro-pods, and other non-traditional models also contributed to traditional schools’ decline.
Democrats for Education Reform found 81% of likely 2020 voters and 89% of Black voters supported school choice. A June poll from RealClear Opinion Research found a majority support school choice (74%). The National School Choice Week organization’s own early January study found that more than half of parents either already had or were considering switching schools. Additionally, in 2021, 22 states enacted or expanded — dramatically in some cases — school choice legislation.
But not all school choice is created equal. In each of the 22 states, 2021’s school choice legislation included some kind of voucher (sometimes called education tax credit or education savings account). This has long been a top priority for Republicans, so it’s not surprising that in 18 of the 22 states, the governor signing the bill into law was a Republican.
Vouchers come with two other major flaws, as Reinventing America’s Schools’ founder, David Osborne has long argued. First, vouchers offer no guarantee that kids will get a good education, because private schools are not accountable to any public body, the way public schools are (at least theoretically). Second, if vouchers are limited to those who live in poverty, they can enhance equal opportunity, but if their use is widespread, they will actually increase inequities. Parents who can afford it will add their own money to buy more expensive education for their kids and the education market will stratify by income, Osborne argues, like the housing market and every other market has. The outcome? Children will lose the chance to grow up learning next to children of different races, ethnic groups, and social classes. If that happens, imagine even how much more fragmented and polarized our country will become.
Public charter schools, or their cousin, autonomous partnership schools, are the better, more pragmatic form of choice. If charter or partnership schools do not live up to their charter or the performance metrics of their partnership contracts, the operator loses the school. That just happened in Indianapolis. Schools can be returned to the district, given to a different partner, or closed. This offers far superior accountability to vouchers — and, for that matter, traditional district schools, which are rarely voluntarily closed even after multiple years of abysmal performance — while offering parents choices and enhanced decision-making authority over their children’s education.
But Democratic leadership and political will is lacking to decentralize massive school bureaucracies into nimble, quick-to-adapt systems. In this vacuum, Republicans pushed through or inflated voucher in nearly half of the states in 2021 alone. Democrats – especially the progressive wing of the party — largely retreated into the arms of the teachers unions while letting parents’ cries for increased school choice fall on deaf ears.
As a result, parents didn’t just vote with their feet. In 2021, they voted at the polls as well. Just a year after Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in Virginia 54% to 44%, Virginians elected Republican Glenn Youngkin, largely on education issues. Those issues included Youngkin’s promise to create 20 new charter schools in Virginia. And Youngkin may just do it. He needs just two Democratic defectors in the Senate to fulfill his charter school promise. This would be good news for Virginia students but bad news for Democrats in the 2022 midterms. Republican candidates around the country are seeking to emulate Youngkin’s playbook.
Some Democrats are starting to see the light. New Mexico House Representatives Meredith Dixon (D-Bernalillo) and Joy Garratt (D-Albuquerque) recently co-sponsored a bill that would make it easier for charter schools to obtain facilities funding. Two Florida House Education Committees set politics aside to unanimously advance a bill that would make the charter renewal process fairer for charter schools. In Washington state, Representative Debra Entenman (D-Kent), formerly hostile to charter schools, introduced a bill to extend this year’s deadline for new charter schools to be authorized to 2027. And in Virginia, Senator Chap Peterson, who represents Fairfax, where remote learning was an exceptional mess and parents were extraordinarily angry, is on record as the likely first defector to help Governor Youngkin fulfill his charter school campaign promise.
None of this is enough for thousands of students on charter school waiting lists, of course. But it’s a start and pragmatic lawmakers like these should be celebrated. More should consider following their lead — if not for the kids, for their own political careers. National Charter School Week would be a great time to start.
Conversations on school choices have had a critical impact on communities of color, but traditionally have been led by individuals outside the Black community. That’s beginning to change this National School Choice Week, as community leaders and families gather for the premiere of From Our Perspective, a documentary elevating conversations and testimonies on education from African American community leaders.
WHAT:
Documentary premiere highlighting African-American leaders’ perspectives on education
Celebration of National School Choice Week
WHO:
Leading voices in education, including Naomi Shelton, Curtis Valentine, Chris Stewart, Michael Phillips, Alisha Thomas Morgan (Searcy), Dr. Kathaleena Edward Monds, Dr. Charles Cole, Sekou Biddle, India Johnson, Deirdra Reed, and Walter Blanks, Jr.
WHEN:
6-9 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 26
WHERE:
Conrad Indianapolis at 50 W. Washington St.
This event is hosted by EdChoice. The EdChoice mission is to advance educational freedom and choice for all as a pathway to successful lives and a stronger society.
National School Choice Week shines a spotlight on effective K-12 education options for children, focusing equally on traditional public, charter, magnet, online, private, and home education options. Every January, participants plan tens of thousands of celebrations –– such as school fairs and open houses–– to raise awareness about school choice across all 50 states. School Choice Week also develops resources and guides to K-12 education for families. As a not-for-profit effort, the Week is nonpolitical and nonpartisan and does not advocate for legislation. For more information visit schoolchoiceweek.com.
Join PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools as we celebrate National School Choice Week on Thursday, January 27, 2022 at 3:00 p.m. RAS will present a webinar and debut the first video in a series that features voices rarely heard in school choice debates: teachers! You will meet active-duty teachers and teacher leaders who have chosen to practice their craft in non-traditional schools. Hear, in their own words, how their choice is impacting their passion for the work, their students and their job satisfaction.
At a time when America is suffering from widespread “teacher burnout” and teacher shortages, come be inspired by educators who refuse to give up, and learn how their decision to work in autonomous schools is part of what fuels their love for their profession.
Panelists include:
Lidia Mercedes Vidal Sandante, 2021 Teach Indy Latinx Teacher of the Year
Greg Sparks, World Language Teacher and Faculty Student Council Advisor
Nathan Tuttle, Executive Director & CEO, Edison School of the Arts (IPS Innovation School)
Patrick Jones, Senior Vice President Leadership and Equity, The Mind Trust
With special guest: Andrew R. Campanella, President National School Choice Week
Join us for an engaging conversation about what teachers want and need to remain in the classroom, and how working in a mission-aligned school makes a big difference.
Join us on Wednesday, January 19th at 1:00 PM EST for an hour-long virtual webinar on the growing movement for a constitutional right to quality public education in America.
Tune in to learn from experts about the impact the right to a quality public education would have on closing racial and economic achievement gaps in America.
The webinar is part of a series co-sponsored by the Progressive Policy Institute, The 74, and Education Civil Rights Now.
Panelists will include:
Linda Jacobson, The 74
Ben Austin, Education Civil Rights Now
Dr. Pedro Noguera, University of Southern California (USC)
Antonio Villaraigosa, Former Mayor of Los Angeles, CA
Alan Page, Former Minnesota Supreme Court Justice
Moderator: Curtis Valentine, Co-Director of Reinventing America’s Schools Project at the Progressive Policy Institute.
Join us for an engaging talk on civil rights and the fight to ensure every student in America is assured a quality public education.
Join PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools Project (RAS) on Wednesday, December 15, 2021 at 2:00 p.m. ET for a one hour webinar on enrollment trends during the pandemic.
Many parents expressed dissatisfaction with traditional public schools during the first year of the pandemic. Studies show that thousands of them expressed that dissatisfaction by disenrolling their children, or “voting with their feet.” At the same time, public charter schools–known for adopting innovative approaches to educating students–dramatically increased enrollment from the end of the 2020 school year to the end of the 2021 school year. So, now what? How can parents and policymakers keep the momentum going to increase options for parents who want them?
This webinar is part of a series co-sponsored by RAS and The 74 Million.
Panelists will include:
Dave Sokola, Delaware State Senate Pro Tempore (D-8th) Jessica Sutter, District of Columbia State Board of Education A.J. Crabil, Director of Governance for Council of the Great City Schools Debbie Veney, Senior VP, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
Along with two parents who’ve switched to public charter schools:
Matt Mohler, Tallahassee, FL Katrina Merkerson, Birmingham, AL
Buoyed by recent gains in Virginia and New Jersey, Republicans see an opportunity to win back suburban voters by stoking public anger at what’s happening in their public schools. A Fox News headline says it all: “Parents across US revolt against school boards on masks, critical race theory and gender issues.
While Fox’s claim is typically hyperbolic, the issue of parental control over kids’ education did loom large in Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory over Terry McAuliffe in Virginia’s gubernatorial contest. Since GOP strategists view it as the template for next year’s midterm elections, K-12 schools seemed destined to become the new central front in the nation’s culture wars.
Around the country, riled-up parents are storming normally soporific school board meetings and targeting members for online abuse and threats. In Washington, Republicans have cobbled together a “parental bill of rights” to campaign on next year. Teacher unions and their political allies call for a counter-mobilization to win school board races around the country.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) released a new report today outlining several root causes of the lack of affordable and accessible higher education in America. Report authors Paul Weinstein Jr. and Veronica Goodman propose increasing price transparency and ensuring prospective students get the credit they’ve earned before beginning their degree.
“Far too often, proposals to address the skyrocketing financial costs facing college bound students involve subsidizing an already broken system with more taxpayer dollars,” said Paul Weinstein, Jr., Senior Fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. “PPI’s recommendations for policymakers constitute an actionable, pragmatic roadmap for substantive change that will give more students opportunities to succeed without bankrupting their financial future”.
The skyrocketing cost of higher education affects young people across the country, with more than one in five U.S. households holding a student loan and the increased costs of college outpacing inflation nearly fivefold since 1983. Policymakers’ increased focus on proposals to expand financial aid and loans – or cancel them entirely – neglects the reality that these remedies would not prevent the problem from repeating itself year after year.
The report proposes the following reforms to expand access to higher education and increase affordability:
The White House should push for legislation that gives the Department of Education greater authority to establish policies for Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB), and dual enrollment course credit and ensure that these credits transfer automatically.
Colleges should be required to disclose before a student matriculates the number of credits, including through AP, IB, or from community college coursework, that will be accepted.
The Department of Education should require that colleges provide easy access to information on transfer credits.
States should set clear standards for minimum test scores on AP tests and GPA-level coursework required to earn college credits.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org.
Over the last 30 years, college tuition has skyrocketed. From 1988 to 2018, tuition at public four-year institutions (in real terms) rose 213%. The numbers for private tuition are also stark, with a jump from 1988 to 2018. Students at public four-year institutions paid an average of $3,190 in tuition for the 1987-1988 school year, with prices adjusted to reflect 2017 dollars. Thirty years later, that average has risen to $9,970 for the 2017-2018 school year.
The price jump at private schools has also been significant. In 1988, the average tuition for a private nonprofit four-year institution was $15,160, in 2017 dollars. For the 2017-2018 school year, it’s $34,740, a 129% upsurge.
In response to the exponential surge in the cost of higher education, policymakers have focused increasingly on proposals to expand financial aid and loans, and canceling the vast sums of debt that college students have accumulated. Calls for canceling student debt are understandably popular with those burdened with those loans. But student loan forgiveness is a one-off gift to one generation of borrowers, that does nothing to prevent the problem from repeating itself year after year.
The first step to make college more affordable and expand access to more Americans is to increase price transparency about the true cost of college, and ensure prospective students get credit for college-level work they have completed before starting their degree.
Presently, students lack the information they need to make smart choices about if and where they should go to college. Colleges and universities are not transparent about the true cost of tuition and fees and are opaque about how much credit (if any) students can earn before enrolling (which in turn can reduce the cost). As a result, too many students aren’t getting the college credit they have earned and are being forced to pay and borrow more than they should.
As the pandemic abates, higher education institutions must commit to holding down the cost of tuition and helping students reduce the amount they have to borrow. For example, colleges should guarantee up to two semesters worth of credit for successful completion of Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB), and college courses taken in high school. They should also make the transfer of credits from community colleges more seamless.
This paper offers a series of pragmatic steps policymakers could take immediately to curb college costs and borrowing. The federal government should use the leverage of billions in financial support for higher education to increase transparency around tuition price, credit transfers, and acceptances so that students can make more informed decisions around college costs:
1.) The White House should push for legislation that gives the Department of Education greater authority to establish policies for AP, IB, and dual enrollment course credit and ensure that these credits transfer automatically.
2.) Colleges should be required to disclose before a student matriculates the number of credits, including through AP, IB, or from community college coursework, that will be accepted.
3.) The Department of Education should require that colleges provide easy access to information on transfer credits.
4.) States should set clear standards for minimum tests scores on AP tests and GPA-level coursework required to earn college credits.
BACKGROUND
The skyrocketing cost of higher education has become a millstone around the necks of young Americans. More than one in five U.S. households hold a student loan, up from one in 10 in 1989.1 According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the cost of college has increased by nearly five times the rate of inflation since 1983.2
These increases depend on the type of institution a student attends, and tuition hikes have been most pronounced among four-year private universities.3 Overall, researchers point to state disinvestment in colleges and rising administrative costs as key drivers of higher education costs.
The education debt crisis has disproportionately affected millennials4, who are already saddled with lower wages and lingering economic pains from the Great Recession. Of young adults aged 25 to 34, or the bulk of millennials, approximately one-third hold a student loan.5 Collectively, as of 2019, 15.1 million millennial borrowers hold $497.6 billion in outstanding loans.6 Economists have pointed to this massive debt burden as a key reason why millennials are not buying houses, starting small businesses, or saving for retirement in the same way as past generations, and it is to the overall detriment of the economy.7
Those who have borrowed for degrees are more likely to be lower-income, Black, and less likely to have family wealth to fall back on. Thus, they are more likely to default, exacerbating poverty and the racial wealth gap. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 20% of borrowers are in default, and a million more go into default each year. Two-thirds of borrowers who default never completed their college degrees or earned only a certificate and owe a comparatively low average amount of $9,625.8 Those who default include veterans, parents, and first-generation college students.9 This “debt with no degree” syndrome leaves borrowers in the hole without access to the earning power associated with a postsecondary degree.
Pell Grant recipients from lower-income households represent an exceptionally high percentage of defaulted borrowers. For example, close to 90% of defaulters received a Pell Grant at one point.10 Of this group, even those who earned a bachelor’s degree are three times more likely to default than students from families that don’t qualify for a Pell Grant.11
For young people who borrow heavily and get in over their heads, default often has catastrophic implications for future access to credit. Many have their wages garnished and tax records seized, starting adulthood and careers on the wrong foot.12
DIMINISHING CREDIT FOR COLLEGE LEVEL COURSEWORK COMPLETED IN HIGH SCHOOL
More high school students are graduating with college-level coursework that could help alleviate some of these costs. High schools with AP and IB programs, as well as Early College high schools,13 give students a head start on advance credits. But many colleges are not transparent about which of these credits will transfer once students matriculate.
According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 71% of community college students intend to, at some point, pursue a baccalaureate degree.14
Adding to their data, studies from the Center reveal that approximately 20-50% of new university students are actually transfer students from community college. As students move between institutions, they find it very difficult to navigate the system of credit transfers and agreements.
In fact, colleges have made it increasingly difficult to receive course credit for AP, IB, and work completed at community colleges.15 Some schools (Dartmouth, Brown, and Williams, to name a few) have stopped granting course credit entirely for AP. Furthermore, only 20 states have statewide policies for AP course credit, and more often than not, those that do have statewide policies do not have a minimum score guaranteeing credit transfer.
Why are schools restricting the use of AP? Many claim AP courses are not an actual substitute for college courses. Yet most of these schools that restrict credit are willing to grant those same students’ waivers out of many college courses, which underscores that AP courses are perfectly acceptable substitutes for college courses. A more likely reason is revenue, as more and more schools have become dependent on tuition in order to keep operating.
HIGHER EDUCATION’S TRANSPARENCY PROBLEM
To say that higher education has a transparency problem is an understatement. No industry, with the possible exception of health care, makes it more difficult to compare costs and lock-in an actual price.
Many have long recognized this problem, but efforts to get schools to provide basic pricing information has lagged. For example, work conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania noted that some colleges do not comply with federal rules requiring net-price calculators, while others offer “misleading,” “incomplete,” or dated information about price.16
Another problem is inconsistent financial aid offers — sometimes loaded with obscure and overly complex language, or sometimes omitting the cost of attendance altogether, according to New America and uAspire’s report, Decoding the Cost of College.17
Students looking for information on credits for Advanced Placement work or courses completed at community colleges often have to wait until they arrive on campus. Most schools have made it increasingly difficult to figure out how much AP credit will be awarded, with many leaving that decision to university and college departments. And more and more schools are offering only waivers or exemptions, instead of actual course credit that can reduce the cost of tuition.
What information schools do provide is often vague and confusing. As the reprint below of an agreement between Johns Hopkins and Prince George’s Community College on course transfers highlights, many school websites provide no more than a low-quality copy of legal language that raises more questions than it answers.
The federal government has attempted to address some of these issues, but most of these reforms have proven ineffective because neither party is willing to use the billions in federal support for higher education as leverage.19
MAKING FEDERAL AID CONTINGENT ON PRICING AND ADVANCED CREDIT TRANSPARENCY
During his campaign, President-elect Joe Biden proposed creating a more seamless process for earning credit for college-level work completed prior to enrolling as an undergraduate (dual enrollment). The Biden administration should fast track this effort in two steps.
First, President Biden should direct the Department of Education to create a federal website where prospective undergraduates could access simple and clear information on the AP, IB, and dual enrollment policies of undergraduate institutions. Trying to find whether your AP test score or that community college class you took will earn you credit at a particular college is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Schools often bury this information on their website, or even worse, don’t provide it all. This lack of transparency can often deter prospective students from even trying to get credit for work that should qualify.
Second, the Biden administration should require schools that receive federal aid to provide admitted students with a detailed spreadsheet of how much credit they will or won’t receive from AP, IB, and dual enrollments prior to their matriculation. No student should have to wait until they arrive on campus to learn how many courses they need to take (and how much money they will have to spend) to graduate.
Accessing early college coursework opportunities can make high school more relevant, increase college-going, make higher education more affordable, and provide a financial lifeline to eligible colleges struggling with depressed enrollments. College-level coursework through AP, IB, and dual enrollment can be motivating to disadvantaged students. It facilitates completing a degree faster and at lower total cost to students and their families.
Of course, neither of these policies would reverse the impact of those colleges and universities that have made it increasingly difficult to get actual course credit for AP, IB, and work completed at community colleges. To truly bring down the cost of tuition and the debt burden on future students without relying completely on federal subsidies, a Biden-Harris administration will need to push for legislation that gives the Department of Education greater authority to establish policies for AP, IB, and dual enrollment course credit.
For example, colleges and universities should be prohibited from capping the amount of credits one can earn towards their degree outside from AP or community college coursework. As long as the students meet the minimum requirements, credit should be granted automatically.
In addition, schools would be required to agree to a universal minimum test score for all AP subject matter tests and a GPA level for coursework at a community college.
These two reforms would help millions of future college students reduce their tuition bill and get them into the job market or graduate school sooner.
CONCLUSION
Promises of massive debt cancellation and increased federal aid are popular with students, but they won’t fix the higher education system’s broken financial model. Instead, they’ll pour more taxpayer money into an opaque, high-inflation college sector and generate new waves of debtladen students and families. We need to break this pernicious cycle by rethinking transparency in higher education with a focus on bringing down costs through a more seamless and transparent process for credit transfers.
Policymakers should require increased transparency on AP and IB credits as part of acceptance packages, as well as ensure that credits transfer more easily between institutions. These will help students and families better plan for the cost of a postsecondary education, and reduce the bills for those who matriculate or transfer with college-level coursework.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Paul Weinstein Jr. is a Senior Fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and Director of the Graduate Program in Public Management at Johns Hopkins University.
Veronica Goodman is the former Director of Social Policy at the Progressive Policy Institute.
REFERENCES
1 Venoo Kakar, Gerald Eric Daniels, and Olga Petrovska, “Does Student Loan Debt Contribute to Racial Wealth Gaps? A Decomposition
Analysis,” Journal of Consumer Affairs 53, no. 4 (2019): pp. 1920-1947, https://doi.org/10.1111/joca.12271.
2 “Not What It Used to Be,” The Economist, December 1, 2012, https://www.economist.com/united-states/2012/12/01/not-what-it-used-to-be
3 “The Rising Cost of College,” The Hamilton Project, December 3, 2010, https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/the_rising_cost_of_college.
4 “The Biden Plan for Education beyond High School,” Joe Biden for President: Official Campaign Website, August 2020,
https://joebiden.com/beyondhs/.
5 Ben Miller et al., “Addressing the $1.5 Trillion in Federal Student Loan Debt,” New America (The Emerging Millennial Wealth Gap, October
2019), https://www.newamerica.org/millennials/reports/emerging-millennial-wealth-gap/addressing-the-15-trillion-in-federal-studentloan-debt/.
6 Wesley Whistle, “The Emerging Millennial Wealth Gap,” New America (The Emerging Millennial Wealth Gap, October 2019),
https://www.newamerica.org/millennials/reports/emerging-millennial-wealth-gap/millennials-and-student-loans-rising-debts-and-disparities/.
7 Christopher Ingraham, “Millennials’ Share of the U.S. Housing Market: Small and Shrinking,” The Washington Post, January 20, 2020,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/20/millennials-share-us-housing-market-small-shrinking/.
8 Ben Miller et al., “Addressing the $1.5 Trillion.”
9 Colleen Campbell, “The Forgotten Faces of Student Loan Default,” Center for American Progress, October 16, 2018,
https://americanprogress.org/article/forgotten-faces-student-loan-default/.
10 Ben Miller, “Who Are Student Loan Defaulters?”, Center for American Progress, December 14, 2017,
https://americanprogress.org/article/student-loan-defaulters/.
11 Ben Miller et al., “Addressing the $1.5 Trillion.”
12 Ben Miller et al., “Addressing the $1.5 Trillion.”
13 Joel Vargas, Caesar Mickens, and Sarah Hooker, “Early College,” Jobs for the Future, https://www.jff.org/what-we-do/impact-stories/
early-college/.
14 Ellen M. Bradburn, David G. Hurst, and Samuel Peng, “Community College Transfer Rates to 4-Year Institutions Using Alternative
Definitions of Transfer,” U.S. Department of Education (Research and Development Report, June 2001), https://nces.ed.gov/
pubs2001/2001197.pdf.
15 Paul Weinstein, “How Biden Can Cut the Cost of College,” Forbes, December 14, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/
paulweinstein/2020/12/14/how-biden-can-cut-the-cost-of-college/?sh=43214ce936a8.
16 Laura W. Perna, “It’s Time to Tell Students How Much College Costs,” The Hill, May 18, 2021, https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/
education/553650-its-time-to-tell-students-how-much-college-costs.
17 Stephen Burd et al., “Decoding the Cost of College,” New America, June 5, 2018, https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/policypapers/decoding-cost-college/.
18 Paul Weinstein, “Diminishing Credit: How Colleges and Universities Restrict the Use of Advanced Placement,” Progressive Policy Institute,
September 2016, https://www.progressivepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/MEMO-Weinstein-AP.pdf.
19 “Two Decades of Change in Federal and State Higher Education Funding,” The Pew Charitable Trusts, October 15, 2019, https://www.
pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2019/10/two-decades-of-change-in-federal-and-state-higher-education-funding.
Join us Wednesday, November 10th at 1:00 PM EST for a one-hour Zoom webinar on STEM education and math recovery in America’s public schools post-covid.
Tune in to learn strategies for programmatic and policy success to close achievement gaps in math and STEM education exacerbated during the COVID pandemic.
The webinar is part of a series co-sponsored by Reinventing America’s Schools (RAS) Project and The 74.
Panelists will include:
Lagra Newman, Purpose Prep Charter School (Nashville, TN)
Shenell McCloud, Project Ready NJ
Michelle Stie, National Math & Science Initiative
Patrick Jones, The Mind Trust (Indianapolis, IN)
Jo Napolitano, Senior Reporter, The 74
Moderator: Curtis Valentine, Co-Director of Reinventing America’s Schools Project at the Progressive Policy Institute.
Join us for an engaging talk on what experts have learned, and get their advice for other traditional public schools and public charter school districts.
Buried deep in the massive $600 billion “minibus” appropriations package the House passed last month are two discriminatory provisions against 3.3 million school children who attend charter schools. As both Chambers consider this spending bill and other related spending measures this fall, Senators should do away with these provisions.
Democrats on the House Appropriation Committee’s subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies cut $40 million from the federal Charter School Program (CSP), which exists to increase high quality public education options for students whose needs are not being met in traditional public schools. Most public charter school students are minorities and more live in low income households than traditional public school students.
“In this post-COVID world, those students who were treading water before are in jeopardy of drowning without the right interventions. ” said Curtis Valentine, RAS Co-Director and moderator for the event. “Empowering teachers means equipping them with what they need — to meet students where they are and address critical gaps in learning and academic achievement. With the right guidance, policymakers can craft literacy programs that are available, accessible, and equitable for all learners.”
The webinar’s panelists included Dr. Kymyona Burk of ExcelinEd, Mary Clayman of the DC Reading Clinic, Cassandra Gentry of DC Pave, Dr. Michael Durant of the Academy of Hope Adult Charter School, Representative Allister Chang of the DC State Board of Education, and Washington DC State Superintendent Christina Grant.
The Reinventing America’s Schools Project inspires a 21st century model of public education geared to the knowledge economy. Two models, public charter schools and public innovation schools, are showing the way by providing autonomy for schools, accountability for results, and parental choice among schools tailored to the diverse learning styles of children. The project is co-led by Curtis Valentine and Tressa Pankovits.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org.
When teachers unions forced public schools to close indefinitely in spring 2020, the void they created showed how ill-suited traditional public schools are to the 21st century. Though the pandemic stressed most public institutions, public charter schools proved remarkably resilient.
According to a new report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), during the pandemic, public charter school enrollment increased in 39 of the 42 states with charter schools, adding 237,311 students from the 2019–20 school year to 2020–21. During the same period, traditional public schools lost 1.4 million students. While some of the traditional public schools’ losses can be attributed to homeschooling, learning pods, and other alternatives, the Center for Reinventing Public Education learned that flight to virtual schools only accounted for roughly 40 percent of traditional districts’ enrollment declines.
That tracks with the NAPCS findings. Though enrollment in virtual public charters spiked in a few states—Oklahoma, Utah, and Pennsylvania—in other states like Texas, which had an enrollment surge of almost 30,000 students, those new charter school students are not attending virtual schools. Over the last decade, brick-and-mortar charter schools did very well, and would have likely done even better were enrollment not arbitrarily capped by law in many blue states like New York and Washington. Even in places where public charters are not legislatively capped, union contracts have scotched their growth.
