issue: Education

Osborne & Pankovits: In Camden, N.J., Portfolio Schools, an Important School Board Election and a Commitment to Continued Reform

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

With 55 percent of its students in chartered public schools or renaissance schools — neighborhood schools operated by charter organizations — Camden, New Jersey, has implemented one of the most ambitious portfolio strategies in the nation in recent years. It has done so under state control, but New Jersey will probably return power to an elected school board within the next few years. So November’s elections for an advisory school board, the first since state intervention, were an important barometer of local sentiment.

Of the three seats up for grabs, two were won by candidates who support the renaissance and charter schools. The third went to a candidate endorsed by the local teachers union, which ran candidates for all three seats. All three new members were sworn in Jan. 3.

With 75,000 people, Camden is one of the poorest cities in America. At the time of the state intervention in 2013, the Camden City School District was suffering from more than two decades of poor results, financial mismanagement, systemic inequity and grade-fixing scandals. Even though the district spends almost double the national per-pupil average, some 23 of the city’s 26 public schools scored in the bottom 5 percent of schools in New Jersey. Fewer than half of students were graduating from high school, and even fewer were proficient in reading and math in elementary and middle school. With half of the district’s buildings constructed before 1928, students attended crumbling schools, some of which even lacked running water.

Read more here.

Valentine for the Washington Informer: “Talent First: How the Phalen Leadership Academy Closed Achievement Gaps Through Effective Teaching”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

“We will retain 85 percent of our effective teachers and remove 100 percent of my ineffective teachers.”

Those words from Earl Martin Phalen, founder of the George and Veronica Phalen Leadership Academy (PLA) in Indianapolis, represent more than a strategic goal. They are PLA’s foundational priority: the quality of its teachers will be the driver of student success.

Six years ago, Earl Martin Phalen founded what has quickly become the largest African American-run charter school network in the country. In just six years, Phalen Leadership Academies (PLA) has grown from one school to 20, most of them in Indiana but also four in Tampa, one in Detroit, and two schools in Beaumont, Texas. All but two are previously underperforming schools that districts asked PLA to turn around.

Read the full piece here.

Pankovits and Osborne for The Washington Post: “Poor children are still left behind in DCPS schools”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

D.C. Public Schools received well-deserved praise for its recent scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a.k.a. “The Nation’s Report Card.” Of the 27 urban districts that took the test in 2019, DCPS improved the fastest, continuing a trend that stretches back more than a decade.

In 2003, when only a handful of urban districts participated, DCPS fourth-graders trailed the other cities by 28 points in reading and 29 in math. (Because 10 points is considered a year’s learning, this was an enormous gap.) In 2019, the gap was down to 5 points in both subjects. DCPS should be proud.

Sadly, however, one group has been left out of this good news: low-income children. In 2019, DCPS eighth-graders eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (FRL) scored 25th out of 27 urban districts in reading, 21st out of 27 in math.

The gap between these children and others in DCPS was 49 points in reading — almost five grade levels. In math it was even worse, 53 points.

Though low-income fourth-graders did a little better, they still had a 51-point gap in reading and a 41-point gap in math.

The bottom line: DCPS has improved by leaps and bounds, but it has not figured out how to educate its poorest students. In contrast, many of the city’s charter schools have figured that out. The 2019 NAEP score gap between D.C.’s FRL-eligible charter students and other charter students in eighth grade was 12 points; in fourth grade it averaged just 10 points.

Read the full op-ed here.

Osborne for Wall Street Journal: “The Big Lie About Charter Schools”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Democratic presidential candidates claim they take money away from public schools. That’s nonsense.

When Sen. Elizabeth Warren released her education plan, she trotted out a familiar charge against charter schools: that they “strain the resources of school districts.” To fight this supposed scourge, she promised to end federal financial support for new charter schools. And she’s not an outlier among the Democratic presidential hopefuls. Her fellow progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders had already charged, in his education plan, that charter schools’ “growth has drained funding from the public school system.”

Even Joe Biden —who served under President Obama, an enthusiastic charter supporter—has picked up the refrain. “The bottom line” on chartering, he told an American Federation of Teachers town hall, “is, it siphons off money for our public schools, which are already in enough trouble.”

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

Read the full op-ed here.

On the Blog: If it’s Competition for the Goose, Why Not Competition for the Gander?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Many advocates of school choice have slammed Senator Elizabeth Warren for her new education plan, released last week. We have joined them, on Twitter. But few have pointed out the inconsistency between Warren’s embrace of competition in the rest of her plan—and in many of her economic plans—and her embrace of district monopolies in public education. We thought it would be worth adding this note to what has been a full-throated and well-deserved chorus of derision for her abject capitulation to the teachers unions.

A Response to Elizabeth Warren’s Education Plan

On July 16, 2018, progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren reassured the New England Council, “I am capitalist to my bones.” Capitalism.org defines capitalism as “an economic process where men do not compete to forcibly put down others, but to raise themselves up by creating values which are potentially unlimited.” The education plan Warren released last week, “A Great Public School Education for Every Student,” dangles huge federal grants to encourage values-driven competition. Unfortunately, she does not extend this rational to public charter schools, where such leverage could be enormously constructive for low income families—the constituency she repeatedly claims she is running to represent. 

In positioning herself as the most aggressive anti-charter Democrat, Warren has declared outright war with her pledge to eliminate the federal Charter School Program (CSP), created by President Clinton, then greatly expanded by President Obama. Because most public education policy is determined at the state and local level, completely eliminating this federal program is the most drastic anti-charter statement she could make. Warren claims it necessary to stop the expansion of charters because states do not ensure that they “are subject to the same transparency requirements and safeguards as traditional public schools,” amongst other complaints. She could’ve avoided harming poor families of color—the greatest beneficiaries of charter schools—and alienating that key constituency if she had only applied the competitive methods she suggested throughout other parts of her plan. 

For example, Warren proposes awarding $100 billion in competitive “Excellence Grants” to individual schools to restore arts programs and school-based mentoring. This would create competition between schools and reward those making the best efforts. She promises to award states generous additional Title I funding−a windfall few states could resist− if they implement fairer allocation formulas at the local level and more progressive funding policies at the state level. Again, competition designed to “raise up.” She also seeks to address school segregation with a $10 billion competitive grant for states that eliminate restrictive zoning laws that lead to residential segregation—which, of course, drives school segregation.  

So, why not—unless pandering to the anti-charter teachers unions—take the same approach with the federal CSP? Why not use it to strengthen charter schooling, which fills a desperate need for low income and minority families who otherwise do not have access to quality public education? Of the nearly 3.2 million public charter school students, 68 percent are minorities, 26 percent African Americans. More than a million children are on waiting lists nationwide. In many cases, low-income parents say charter schools are their only hope to break their children out of intergenerational poverty and the high crime, high unemployment, blighted neighborhoods in which they would otherwise be trapped. When they enroll in charters, those children learn far more than if they had stayed in district schools.

Of course, not all charter schools are great schools, and those that are not can be and should be closed. On average 3.7 percent of all charter schools have been shut down each year for the past 10 years, compared to just 0.2 percent of all traditional Title I (low-income) district schools during the entire nine years that the No Child Left Behind legislation was in effect. 

The charter school model is now too woven into the fabric of the American public education system, and the demand is for seats in them is too great, for them to be eliminated, regardless of any political promises Elizabeth Warren makes. More important, as the Washington Post editorialized, “There’s nothing progressive about strangling charter schools.” So why not use competition to find solutions to the ills of which Warren complains? Create conditions for awarding federal charter school dollars. Require transparency. Tighten up the charter authorization process, so if authorizes are not closing failing schools, no school they might authorize is eligible for federal grants. Don’t handing the approval process solely to school boards, as Warren suggests; districts are among the worst authorizers, because they are too busy operating schools to oversee charters carefully. (They are also too beholden to teachers unions, who help elect their boards, to make objective decisions about opening or closing charters.) 

According to the American Center for Progress, in a rare show of bipartisan cooperation, Congress has approved increased funds for the CSP as requested by each presidential administration since 1994, topping out at $440 million in fiscal year 2019. Senator Warren, use those capitalist bones to improve the system, not kill it while it is laying golden eggs of opportunity where none existed before. You seem to recognize the value of competition. Well-regulated charter schools create competition by their very existence. 

The Progressive Roots of Charter Schools

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Improving public education has long been a cornerstone of the Democratic platform. Because progressives understand that access to a quality education is the gateway to a better life, our decades-long struggle to promote equal rights and opportunity for all Americans has been deeply tied to our struggle to create an effective public school system.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, progressive thought leaders conceived of a new organizational model for our public schools, a system designed for the Information Age rather than the Industrial Era. In this new system, the state or local school board could grant performance contracts to groups of individuals or organizations that applied to open new public schools. These would be exempt from many of the rules and mandates that constrained district-operated schools. They would be encouraged to innovate, to create new learning models that would appeal to children bored or otherwise dissatisfied traditional public schools. If a school succeeded, its contract would be renewed. If the school failed to educate children effectively, it would be closed. Families could choose between a variety of schools, and because tax dollars would follow children to the public school of their choice, districts would lose their monopoly on taxpayer-funded education. Neighborhood schools could no longer fail students for generations; the competition from new public schools would force them to improve or close.

Today, we know these new public schools as “charter schools,” because their performance contract is called a charter. Over the past two decades, cities that have embraced chartering, such as New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Denver, Newark, and Indianapolis, have experienced profound student growth and school improvement.1 The charter formula–school-level autonomy, accountability for results, diversity of school designs, parental choice, and competition between schools—is far more effective than the centralized, bureaucratic approach that developed more than a century ago.

The charter sector has created opportunity for millions of underserved children. But teachers at charter schools tend not to unionize, so as the charter sector grows, union membership shrinks. As a result, union leaders and their allies have gone to war against charters. They claim that charters are a product of “corporate reformers,” a right-wing effort to “privatize” our public schools. These accusations are nonsense. More accurately, they are lies born of self-interest, designed to protect the jobs of mostly white, middle-class teachers and union officials, at the expense of mostly poor, minority kids.

Democrats should know better than to fall for this anti-charter propaganda. For three decades charter schools have been a progressive initiative, brought to us by reform-minded Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Unfortunately, in the age of President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos—who also support charters—it’s become far too easy for liberal policymakers, facing pressure from the teachers unions, to cut their historic ties with America’s most successful education reform. As we move into the 2020 election season, Democrats should remember the progressive roots of chartering and think twice before turning their backs on millions of children who have benefited—and could benefit in the future—from charter schools.

 

Craig for The Hill: “Can higher ed bill reauthorization close America’s skills gap?”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

House Democrats last week rolled out a sweeping proposal to transform federal higher education policy. Among the proposals included in the bill is a provision that would make community college free nationwide, an expansion of federal Pell grants, and a new set of policies to hold schools more financially accountable for the outcomes of their graduates.

The Democrats’ approach is one that reflects, and seeks to address, a troubling reality: Perhaps more than ever before in our history, too many Americans feel that the American Dream is out of reach. But as it turns out, today’s policymakers may be only perpetuating that challenge.

Read Ryan Craig’s full op-ed in The Hill by clicking here.

Osborne, Langhorne for Medium: “The Progressive Roots of Charter Schools”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Listening to the rhetoric of Democratic presidential candidates, one would think charter schools were a Republican initiative opposed by all progressives. Read the full piece here on Medium.

By David Osborne and Emily Langhorne

Listening to the rhetoric of Democratic presidential candidates, one would think charter schools were a Republican initiative opposed by all progressives. Bernie Sanders calls for a halt to all federal funding for charter schools. Elizabeth Warren joins him in condemning for-profit charters.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who served under a president enthusiastic about charters, told the American Federation of Teachers at a forum, “The bottom line is it [chartering] siphons off money for our public schools, which are already in enough trouble.”

Even candidates who have been charter supporters in the past, such as Michael Bennet, Beto O’Rourke, and Julian Castro, have had nothing positive to say about charters. All seem afraid to draw the ire of the teachers’ unions, which contributed $64 million to candidates, party organizations, and outside spending groups during the 2016 election, according to the campaign finance tracking organization, OpenSecrets.

So it may come as a surprise to readers that chartering originated as a Democratic initiative. Democrats spearheaded charter legislation in most of the early charter states, and Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enthusiastically supported charters, pushing through federal legislation to provide funding.

The innovative Democrats who pioneered chartering were looking for a better organizational model for public education — a system designed for the Information Age rather than the Industrial Era. In their new approach, an “authorizer” — usually the state or local school board — grants performance contracts to groups of individuals or nonprofit organizations that apply to open new public schools. Exempt from many of the rules that constrain district-operated schools, they are encouraged to innovate, to create new learning models that will appeal to children bored or otherwise dissatisfied with traditional schools. If a school succeeds, its contract is renewed; if it fails, it is closed. Families can choose between a variety of schools. Districts lose their monopolies on taxpayer-funded education, and their schools can no longer fail students for generations; the competition either takes away their students or forces them to improve.

The new schools are called “charter schools” because their performance contract is a charter. Over the past two decades, cities that have embraced chartering, such as New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Denver, Newark, and Indianapolis, have experienced profound student growth and school improvement. The charter formula — school-level autonomy, accountability for results, diversity of school designs, parental choice, and competition between schools — is far more effective than the centralized, bureaucratic approach that developed more than a century ago.

Teachers at charter schools tend not to unionize, however, so as the charter sector grows, union membership shrinks. By 2000, union leaders and their allies had gone to war against charters. They claim that charters are a product of “corporate reformers,” a right-wing effort to “privatize” our public schools. These accusations are nonsense. More accurately, they are lies born of self-interest, designed to protect the jobs of mostly white, middle-class teachers and union officials at the expense of mostly poor, minority kids.

The Origins of the Charter Concept

In 1988, University of Massachusetts Education Professor Ray Budde, a former principal, published Education by Charter: Restructuring School Districts. He proposed that districts allow teams of teachers to “charter” a program within a school for three to five years.

The following July, Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers, expanded on the concept in his New York Timescolumn, suggesting that teams of teachers charter whole schools, not just programs. Shanker believed that the U.S. needed school systems that provided educators with autonomy and “genuine accountability” for results. He urged school systems to charter schools with a variety of teaching approaches, so that “parents could choose which charter school to send their children to, thus fostering competition.”

In 1995, just two years before his death, Shanker told Republican Congressman Steve Gunderson, who was writing an education reform bill for Washington, D.C., that “every school should be a charter school.”

Democrats Lead the Way in Early Charter States

In 1988, after reading Shanker’s column, members of a nonpartisan civic organization in Minnesota called the Citizens League began working on a report that outlined the framework for charter legislation, led by former League Executive Director Ted Kolderie. In October, when Shanker spoke at the Minnesota Foundation’s annual Itasca Seminar, Democratic State Senator Ember Reichgott Junge and Democratic State Representative Ken Nelson were in the audience. Afterward, Reichgott Junge began drafting charter legislation, with Kolderie’s help, and in 1989 she and Nelson introduced the bill. It passed the Senate but failed in the House, two years running. Finally, in 1991, with help in the House from Democratic Rep. Becky Kelso, a compromise version finally passed. And in 1992, a group of veteran public school teachers opened City Academy in St. Paul, the nation’s first charter school.

In California, conservatives were preparing a voucher ballot initiative that would allow Californians to use tax dollars to send their children to any school they chose, public or private. Democratic State Senator Gary K. Hart, who understood that the electorate was deeply frustrated with public schools, decided the Democrats needed legislation to counter the voucher movement. Hart felt that vouchers relied too much on a free-market approach, threatening the equal opportunity that should be built into public education. A former teacher, he’d already sponsored a bill that gave 200 public schools more autonomy in exchange for more accountability. Chartering was the next logical step: a third way between vouchers and traditional systems.

Democratic Assemblywoman Delaine Eastin introduced a charter bill at the same time, but it required sign-off by the district’s collective bargaining unit for charter approval. Teachers unions pressured Hart to amend his bill to do the same, but he refused. He also stood his ground against demands related to parent involvement and teaching credentials. Hart believed such decisions should be left up to school founders and leaders. He wanted a simple bill that would create a system with limited bureaucracy, in which schools were judged on the basis of student outcomes, not compliance with rules.

Both bills passed the legislature, but Republican Governor Pete Wilson vetoed Eastin’s and signed Hart’s into law. The legislation took effect on January 1, 1993, and that fall, 44 charters opened.

The third bill passed in Colorado, where Democratic Governor Roy Romer was instrumental in pushing it through the legislature. In 1992, Republican Senator Bill Owens and Republican State Representative John James Irwin introduced a bill to create a new, independent school district to authorize and oversee “self-governing” schools. That bill died in the Senate Education Committee, whose chairman, Republican Senator Al Meiklejohn, stood firmly against choice and charters.

Irwin died before the 1993 session, so Owens and his allies reached out to Democratic State Representative Peggy Kerns, to sponsor a new charter bill in the House. The unions and other establishment groups opposed the bill, and Meiklejohn neutered it with amendments in the Senate.

In the House, Kerns and fellow Democrat Peggy Reeves re-amended the Senate bill so that it more closely resembled the original. Gov. Romer met with the Democratic caucus and rallied support on the House floor. The bill narrowly passed, the two bills were reconciled in conference committee, and both houses passed the new version. On June 3, 1993, Romer signed the Charter Schools Act into law.

In Massachusetts, Democratic State Senator Thomas Birmingham and Democratic State Representative Mark Roosevelt, then co-chairs of the Joint Committee on Education, spent several years developing the 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act, which sought to reform the state’s education financing system while increasing academic expectations and school accountability.

In the fall of 1991, a mutual friend introduced Roosevelt to David Osborne, who had recently finished a new book, Reinventing Government. Roosevelt described for Osborne the higher academic standards he planned to include in the legislation. Osborne said, “That’s great; standards are important. But what are you doing to do when districts don’t meet them?”

Roosevelt explained that the state would take over underperforming districts. Osborne pointed out that takeovers would stir up intense resistance, severely limiting their use. You need another strategy, Osborne told him. You need choice and competition.

Shortly afterwards, he introduced Roosevelt and his staff to the concept of charter schools. A few weeks later, when Ted Kolderie told Osborne he was planning a trip to Boston, Osborne put him in touch with Roosevelt, and Kolderie helped Roosevelt and his staff write charter language for the bill. When the teachers unions came out against the charter proposal, Roosevelt and Birmingham introduced a cap on the number of charter schools, as a compromise.

In 2016, Roosevelt and Birmingham urged Massachusetts to raise its cap: “We included charter public schools in the 1993 law to provide poor parents with the type of educational choice that wealthy parents have always enjoyed…. We now have enough data to conclude that charter schools have exceeded expectations. In our cities, public charter schools consistently close achievement gaps. No wonder more than 32,000 children are on charter school waiting lists. Imagine being one of the parents crushed with disappointment when your child is not selected.”

By the end of 1994, seven more states had enacted charter laws. Democrats spearheaded the legislation in Georgia, Hawaii, and New Mexico, Republicans in Arizona and Wisconsin, and there was overwhelming bipartisan support in Michigan and Kansas. Of the next 23 states, which passed bills in the rest of the ’90s, all but three had strong bipartisan support.

Even today, most education reformers are Democrats. A study by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) showed that 87 percent or more of the political contributions made by staff at education reform organizations over the past decade went to Democratic candidates. “The leading participants in the school-reform ‘wars’ are mostly engaged in an intramural brawl,” the authors concluded, “one between union-allied Democrats and a strand of progressive Democrats more intent on changing school systems.”

As reform-minded Democrats attempt to put children first, union-backed Democrats block them. They betray America’s children — particularly those whose parents lack the money to move into a district with strong public schools or send their children to private schools.

Voters should ask this year’s presidential candidates: Which type of Democrat are you?

David Osborne, author of Reinventing America’s Schools: Creating a 21st Century Education System, leads the education work of the Progressive Policy Institute. Emily Langhorne, a former associate director of that project, is now at DAI, which works on economic and social development in low-income countries around the world.

Cribb for The 74: “The English Embrace Charter-School-Like Academies – and Learn the Free Market Is No Substitute for a Quality Authorizer”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The English Embrace Charter-School-Like Academies — and Learn the Free Market Is No Substitute for a Quality Authorizer

by Phoebe Cribb, Summer Intern

New Orleans is the first major U.S. city to convert all its traditional public schools to public charter schools. Now imagine an entire country moving in this direction. That is exactly what England has done.

Academy and free schools, England’s equivalent of charter schools, currently educate more than half of all public school students, far more than the 6 percent of U.S. public school students who attend charters. In just nine years, England’s conservative government has pushed academy and free school numbers from 200 to more than 8,600, representing a third of all primary schools (grades 0-5) and 76 percent of all high schools (grades 6-10). (After grade 10, English students choose to remain in full-time education for two more years or enter into employment or vocational training.)

Since 2016, the government has required public schools rated “inadequate” to become academies. Unfortunately, it created only eight authorizers to hold the explosion of autonomous schools accountable for performance, and they have been overwhelmed by the numbers, leaving England’s academy sector with uneven performance. The English have learned the same lesson we have on this side of the pond: The key to quality charter schools is quality authorizing.

Read the full piece.

Curtis Valentine on NNPA: “Educator Spotlight: Lakisha Young, Oakland Reach”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Lakisha Young is no stranger to education reform. A former Teach For America corps member and founding member of a KIPP Charter School, Young knows the power parents can wield when they demand educational options for their children. The daughter of a single mother who enrolled her in a traditional public school, a Catholic school, and later a private high school, Young expected to have the same power to make choices for her children when she became a mother.

A single mother of three, Young is satisfied with the choices she’s made: Her sons attend a charter school, and her daughter attends a selective high school. However, successfully securing places in these schools was no easy feat. Young knows firsthand the aggravation of dealing with the Oakland school lottery. She also understands the anxiety parents feel not knowing whether their children will have to enroll in a low-performing neighborhood school should there not be enough seats available at quality schools. Her personal experience led her to organize other parents and teach them how to advocate for their children.

Read the full piece here.

Osborne for The Washington Post, “‘Privatization’ doesn’t make charter schools bad. It makes them like Obamacare and Medicare.”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) recently unveiled his education reform plan, it predictably castigated charter schools, claiming that they were “privatizing public schools.” Sanders joined a long line of leaders who tar charters with the privatization brush. Before, during and after the Los Angeles teachers strike last winter, union President Alex Caputo-Pearl did so repeatedly. “The charter school movement,” he declared, is “a vehicle for billionaires to privatize the system and undermine the public district.”

His teachers constantly repeated the charge. Even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who represents the Bronx and part of Queens, threw in her two cents, tweeting in support of “these LA teachers striking against privatization.”

National union leaders Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers and Lily Eskelsen García of the National Education Association regularly add to the chorus. From the picket line in Los Angeles, Eskelsen García went so far as to announce that “the billionaires who are behind this [chartering], the venture capitalists, the Wall Street guys, are out to make money on public schools.” (For the record, California outlawed for-profit charters last year.) And in the District of Columbia, Washington Teachers’ Union leaders raised the issue against Chancellor Lewis D. Ferebee during his nomination hearings. “My real concern here is privatization of public education,” Washington Teachers’ Union executive board member Signe Nelson told the D.C. Council.

Continue reading at The Washington Post.

Valentine for Washington Informer: “Recognizing Donald Hense”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The African American community’s fight for quality education is a 12-months-a-year struggle, and every month — not just Black History Month — is a great time to reflect on what’s working and who is successful in fighting for quality public education in our community. Donald Hense and the Friendship Charter Network are worthy of recognition.

Hense is founder and board chairman of the Friendship Charter Network, the largest African American-led charter school network in America. Hense’s accomplishment is significant, because, while over 80 percent of charter school students are Black or Latino, fewer than 10 percent of charter schools are founded and led by Blacks or Latinos, according to a study by the Brookings Institute.

Read Curtis’ full piece here.

Marshall, Langhorne for NY Daily News: “Bernie Sanders’ reactionary education plan”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Central to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ cantankerous mystique is his anti-establishment stance and uncompromising vision for radical economic change. When it comes to public schools, however, Sanders is no revolutionary. On the contrary, he sides with the education establishment in defending a status quo that is failing poor and minority students.

The democratic socialist from Vermont recently unveiled an education “reform” plan that can only be described as reactionary. It calls for rolling back federal support for public charter schools, which are providing millions of black and brown children access to educational opportunity in a growing number of large U.S. cities.

Read the full opinion piece on the NY Daily News website.

New Ideas for a Do-Something Congress No. 11: Encourage Employers to Help with Student Debt

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

More than anything else, a higher education remains the ticket to the proverbial American Dream. It offers the skills prized by employers in an increasingly global marketplace, and puts graduates on a path to higher wages over a lifetime of work. But for too many Americans, it comes at the price of student loans that can saddle them with debt just as they’re launching their careers and stunt their financial wellbeing for years to come.

New thinking can address the challenge. One promising solution is gaining traction in the private sector. A small but growing number of U.S. employers have begun offering student loan repayment benefits to their employees—helping them erase student debt faster and, not incidentally, earning the loyalty of employees in a competition for the best workforce talent. Though these programs are still uncommon, they are in high demand, leading some to dub student loan assistance “the hottest employee benefit” today (1).

Congress can help spur widespread adoption of this solution by encouraging more employers to offer this benefit to their workers, such as through the tax code. While current law gives employers a tax break for offering tuition assistance benefits to their employees, student loan assistance doesn’t get the same favorable treatment. Lawmakers should take up bipartisan legislation in this session to equalize the tax treatment of student loan assistance benefits.

THE CHALLENGE: Student Loan Debt is Skyrocketing For Generations of American Workers

American college graduates collectively face a student loan debt crisis of eye-popping proportions. As of December 2018, more than 44.7 million borrowers owed $1.5 trillion in student loans(2)—a sum that exceeds the gross domestic product of all but a dozen countries around the globe.

While this student debt burden impacts Americans of all ages and socioeconomic groups, it hits younger workers the hardest. An estimated 65 percent of the total is owed by people under 40—no surprise, considering that more than two-thirds of college seniors graduating in recent years have left campus with student loan debt, averaging $28,650 as of 2017.(3)

Now, there’s evidence that this mounting IOU has consequences for financial wellbeing more broadly. Indebted graduates enter the workforce with less money available to save, and this constraint soon catches up with them. By age 30, those with student debt have accrued only about half as much in retirement assets as those without debt, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.(4) Other studies suggest that student loan debt also makes it harder for young people to pursue graduate studies, buy their first home (5) and achieve other important life milestones—including, anecdotally, even starting a family.

In recent weeks, the issue has drawn the attention of candidates on the Presidential campaign trail. With an eye toward the coveted youth vote, several Democratic contenders have made college affordability a rallying cry and unveiled proposals to address the crushing debt burden. The most ambitious plan to date would “cancel” up to $50,000 in student debt for every borrower with a household income under $100,000—helping an estimated 42 million Americans.(6) This plan, however, would be immensely expensive for U.S. taxpayers and potentially create perverse incentives for borrowers. Workers need better and more cost-effective help.

THE GOAL: Encourage Employers to Help Ease Workers’ Student Debt Burdens

In the search for solutions to the student debt crisis, America’s employers are an important part of the answer. Today’s historically tight labor market and demand for young workers with the right skills presents big challenges—and a big opportunity. In particular, more employers are finding that offering student loan assistance benefits is an effective way to attract and retain workers.

Under this approach, employers can choose to make monthly contributions against an employee’s student loan balance—either directly to the employee, or to the employee’s lender—and speed up pay-off of the loan. This benefit is actually something that Congress and most federal agencies have offered to eligible staff members for more than a decade. In both cases, the repayment programs were implemented as a way to recruit highly skilled young employees to government service. The specifics vary, but broadly speaking, Senate staffers can qualify for up to $500 per month to pay down their student loans, and House staffers can receive as much as $10,000 yearly in assistance, up to a total $60,000. Similarly, all federal agencies are permitted to make payments of up to $10,000 annually against federal student loans for qualifying employees who agree to remain on the job for at least three years. Most recently through this program, 34 agencies assisted nearly 10,000 federal employees with more than $72 million in student loan repayment benefits.(7)

From the perspective of today’s workforce, there’s unmistakable demand for this “perk” in the private sector, too. Recent surveys have found that student debt is a primary source of stress, distraction, and impaired productivity for young workers. More than half worry “all the time” or “often” about repaying their loans, and many say this anxiety has impacted their health.(8) Moreover, big majorities would welcome proactive solutions from their employers.

• Fully 92 percent say they’d take advantage of an employer match for their student loan payments if one were offered.(9)

• 58 percent would even prefer that their company make payments against their student debt over contributions to a retirement fund.(10)

• And—most importantly for companies—offering help with student loans would earn major points for participating employers. In one survey, 90 percent of employees said that having a loan repayment benefit would positively influence their decision to accept a job offer,(11) while in another, 86 percent said they’d commit to a company for five years if it helped pay off their student debt.(12)

Some forward-thinking employers have responded to this growing market demand and launched student loan repayment plans. Among the early adopters:

• Fidelity. Through its Step Ahead student loan assistance program, the investment company has helped more than 9,000 employees by offering a monthly subsidy—totaling up to $10,000 per borrower—toward student loans.(13)

• Abbott. The pharmaceutical company encourages employees to repay student debt and save for retirement simultaneously through a 5 percent employer “match” in its Freedom 2 Save Plan.(14)

• Others ranging from PricewaterhouseCoopers to Peloton, the fitness cycling company, have partnered with Gradifi, an employee benefits platform, to offer monthly contributions to eligible associates, helping them whittle their student debt.

Notwithstanding these models, employer-provided student loan assistance remains rare. According to an annual Employee Benefits Survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), just 4 percent of U.S. companies offered this benefit last year.(15) Far more commonplace, found SHRM, are traditional tuition assistance programs: 51 percent of employers provided tuition support for their associates attending undergraduate studies, and 49 percent offered assistance for graduate school.

THE PLAN: Equalize Tax Treatment of Employer Student Loan Assistance Benefits

There’s a simple reason why so few employers currently offer student loan repayment assistance—current tax law discourages them for doing so. Currently under Section 127 of the Internal Revenue Code, businesses receive a tax break for subsidizing their qualified employees’ postsecondary tuition. (Indeed, that’s been the case for 40 years, when the tuition deduction was first enacted by Congress as a pilot.) But there’s no tax incentive to support employees who have already incurred student loan debt in college or grad school. If student loan repayments were treated the same way tuition assistance is today under federal law, many more employers would be eager to adopt such programs.

Congress could jumpstart private-sector engagement on this pressing issue by passing the Employer Participation in Repayment Act. Introduced by Reps. Scott Peters (D-CA) and Rodney Davis (R-IL) in the House and Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and John Thune (R-SD) in the Senate, the legislation would build on the current educational assistance program by allowing employers to contribute up to $5,250 a year, tax-free, toward any employee’s student loan repayments. The contribution would be tax-exempt for the employee, and could be made against qualified education loans to the employee directly, or through a payroll deduction to the employee’s lender.

At this writing, the measure has broad, bipartisan support, with 128 cosponsors in the House and 21 in the Senate—reflecting much wider interest than in the previous session of Congress. The legislation also enjoys the support of leading education organizations, such as the National Education Association and the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, as well as the Democratic House leadership and key figures from the Trump Administration, according to the bill’s sponsors. There’s no official score, but the Joint Committee on Taxation has estimated the measure would cost $3.6 billion over 10 years—far less than the price tag for having the federal government “cancel” all outstanding student debt. The bill’s lead Democrats are pushing to get it attached to an appropriate vehicle—perhaps a tax extenders package—in the current session.

Student debt has saddled millions of Americans and can remain a lifelong drag on their families’ financial health. Employers can help provide much-needed relief, and many seem eager to do so. With a straightforward change in the tax code, Congress could provide a powerful incentive for more companies to help—delivering benefits for workers, their families, and the 21st-century workforce.

Sources:

  1. Zack Friedman, Forbes Magazine, October 18, 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2018/10/18/student-loan-repayment-employee-benefits/#3481b84a566f

  2. Federal Reserve Bank and Federal Reserve Bank of New York, February 2019. https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/interactives/householdcredit/data/pdf/hhdc_2018q4.pdf

  3. Institute for College Access & Success, Project on Student Debt, https://ticas.org/posd/home

  4. Center for Retirement Research, June 2018. https://crr.bc.edu/briefs/do-young-adults-with-student-debt-save-less-for-retirement/

  5. Center for Retirement Research, 2018.

  6. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Medium.com: Election 2020 Coverage, April 22, 2019.

  7. U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Federal Student Loan Repayment Program (2016), February 2018. https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/student-loan-repayment/

  8. American Student Assistance, February 2017. https://www.asa.org/innovation/

  9. American Student Assistance, 2017.

  10. Oliver Wyman, 2017. https://files.acrobat.com/a/preview/c52b032b-4e17-458f-8c66-bc25d7daf01f

  11. Oliver Wyman, 2017.

  12. American Student Assistance, 2017.

  13. https://www.fidelity.com/about-fidelity/who-we-serve/easing-the-pressures-of-student-debt

  14. https://www.abbott.com/corpnewsroom/leadership/tackling-student-debt-for-our-employees.html

2018 Employee Benefits Survey, Society for Human Resource Management, June 2018. https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/trends-and-forecasting/research-and-surveys/pages/2018-employee-benefits.aspx

Langhorne for Forbes, “Ed Reformers Rejoice: New CREDO Report Shows Student Progress In New Orleans Has Continued”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Nearly 14 years ago, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana’s elected leaders decided to rebuild New Orleans’s failing public education system from the ground up, as a system of public charter schools.  Prior to the storm, the district was considered one of the nation’s worst. Half the students dropped out, and four in 10 adults in the city could not read beyond an elementary school level. The district was almost bankrupt, searching for a $50 million line of credit just to meet payroll. Katrina only exacerbated an already dire situation, displacing 64,000 students and creating over $800 million in damage to school buildings alone.

For New Orleans, this catastrophe brought with it an opportunity. In 2003, the governor and state legislature had created a Recovery School District (RSD) to take over the state’s worst public schools, including five in New Orleans, which the RSD had turned into charters. After the storm, the legislature placed all but 17 of New Orleans’s 127 public schools in the RSD. Over the next nine years, the RSD turned them all over to charter operators, and academic progress surged.

In 2015 Louisiana switched to standardized tests aligned with the Common Core standards, which was far more rigorous than the old tests. It began the process in 2014, when it first moved its tests in that direction, and it continued to alter the test after 2015. Not surprisingly, starting in 2014, what had been a steady rise in proficiency leveled off. Education reformers began to fear that this plateau revealed waning effects of the move to charters, rather than just the impact of tougher tests.

But a new report by the Stanford Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) focused on student growth scores reveals that New Orleans’s progress has continued.

Continue reading at Forbes.

Do-Something Congress No. 10: Fighting Inequality by Reinventing America’s Schools

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Progressives are rightly concerned about inequality, but some overlook the crucial role that underperforming public schools play in perpetuating poverty and inequality in America. The poor quality of many school systems is a serious impediment to social mobility for children from low-income and minority families, who can’t easily pick up and move to communities with good schools. The number of students taking college remediation classes has soared, and too many students graduate high school underprepared to enter either college or the workforce.

First-rate schools are key to delivering on America’s core promise of equal opportunity. That’s true for U.S. students everywhere – not just for kids trapped in poor schools in poor communities. In international comparisons, even students from America’s best suburban school districts consistently score below students from other advanced countries in Asia and Europe.

America’s public education system was designed for the Industrial Era. The centralized, bureaucratic approach that we inherited from the 20th century no longer works for the majority of America’s students. We need a new model, and fortunately one is emerging from cities that have embraced profound systems change, including New Orleans, Denver, Washington, D.C., and Camden, N.J. All have experienced rapidly improving student outcomes as a result.

These four cities are building 21st century school systems, founded upon the four pillars of school autonomy, accountability for performance, diversity of school designs, and parental choice. Essentially, 21st century school systems treat many of their public schools like charter schools, even if they call them “innovation schools,” “partnership schools,” or “Renaissance schools.”

Although transforming our K-12 education system to meet the needs of the modern era is primarily the responsibility of state and local governments, Washington can play an important catalytic role by creating incentives for change. In particular, Congress can create financial incentives for states that strengthen charter authorizing and for districts that create autonomous schools, hold schools accountable for performance, and replace failing schools.

 

THE CHALLENGE: AMERICA’S K12 PUBLIC EDUCATION SYSTEM IS DESIGNED FOR THE INDUSTRIAL ERA

For a century, our public education system was the backbone of our success as a nation. By creating one of the world’s first mass education systems, free to all children, we forged the most educated workforce in the world – a key pillar of our economic strength. But all institutions must change with the times, and since the 1960s, the times have changed. The Information Age economy has radically raised the bar students must meet to secure jobs that support a middle-class lifestyle. Meanwhile, America’s public school population has grown more diverse, necessitating differentiated approaches to education. Yet our 20th century school districts too often produce cookie-cutter schools that fail to motivate or meet the needs of different students.

Traditional Public Schools are Failing Too Many Students

Overall, our traditional public schools “work” for less than half of our students. Of those who attend public schools, 17 percent fail to graduate on time. Even more graduate but lack the skills necessary to succeed in today’s job market. Almost a quarter of those who apply to the U.S. Army fail its admissions tests, more than a third of those who go on to college are not prepared for first-year courses, and half of college students never graduate. A large portion of middle- and high-schoolers are bored by their public schools; only one in three rate their school culture positively. And among developed nations, the United States ranks 18th or worse in high school graduation rates and in the bottom half in math, science, and reading proficiency (1).

Traditional School Structures are Bureaucratic, Inflexible, and Discourage Innovation

Our traditional public schools struggle to respond to the challenges of today’s world, held back by their traditional district structures, rules, and union contracts. After all, 20th century bureaucracies were built to foster stability, not innovation.

By continuing to assign students to schools based on their neighborhoods, we not only reinforce racial and economic segregation – creating a system with schools of concentrated poverty and concentrated wealth – but we also limit our ability to create innovative schools with diverse and specialized learning models.

Moreover, by clinging to the hierarchal organizational model of a centralized system, we remove decision-making authority from those educating the students. Principals and teachers best understand the needs of their students, but they lack control over school-level decisions that affect student learning. Principals often do not control their staffs, budgets, curricula, or learning models: those decisions are made at district headquarters. They cannot adapt their schools to meet the specific needs of their students, because the centralized system has been designed to treat all students the same.

Since 1983, the U.S. has seen wave after wave of school reforms. Unfortunately, most have been of the “more-longer-harder” variety: more required courses and tests, longer school days, higher standards, and harder exams. Few have reimagined how school districts and schools might function.

 

THE GOAL: CREATE 21ST CENTURY SCHOOL SYSTEMS IN DISTRICTS ACROSS URBAN AMERICA

By embracing a 21st century school model based on accountability for performance, school autonomy, choice, and a diversity of learning models, we can create public school systems that meet the needs of all students. This model has created the fastest improvement in urban America, in cities like New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Denver.

In such systems, the central office no longer runs all schools directly; instead, it is responsible for overall policy, oversight, enforcement of compliance, evaluation of schools, and matching school supply to demand. Most 21st century school systems are made up, at least in part, of public schools operated by independent organizations, usually nonprofits. They are freed from many of the top-down mandates that constrain district-operated schools, so school leaders can craft unique programs and make school-level decisions. In exchange for increased autonomy, these schools are held accountable for their performance by a district or authorizer, who closes or replaces them if their students are falling too far behind.

Many of the public schools in these systems are schools of choice, but they are not allowed to select their students. If too many students apply, a school holds a lottery to see who gets in—ensuring that all families have an equal shot at quality schools. Districts that have embraced this approach have created computerized enrollment systems that give all families a chance to select their top choices—a kind of lottery for all students.

 

THE PLAN: INCENTIVIZE STATES TO CREATE 21ST CENTURY SCHOOL SYSTEMS

Although most education legislation occurs at the state level, Congress can incentivize states to create 21st century school systems.

Congress should offer financial incentives for those states that improve their charter laws. One approach would be to expand or revise the U.S. Department of Education’s existing Grants to State Entities, awarded for the preparation, opening, replication, or expansion of high quality charters and for the improvement of state agencies that oversee charters.

The State Entities Program, one of six distinct grant programs included under the Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program, replaced the State Education Agencies program in FY 2017. The State Entities Program expanded grant eligibility from state education agencies to governors, statewide charter authorizing boards, and nonprofit charter support organizations (2). In FY 2017, the program distributed $144.7 million in grants of varying amounts to nine states (3).

Two proposed changes could improve this program. First, no state should qualify for a grant if it caps the number of charter schools it authorizes. Adding this requirement would direct more aid to states that are expanding their use of charters.

Second, in addition to the principal eligibility criteria, the application has six weighted priority preferences, through which a candidate can earn extra points in the selection process. The sixth preference, “best practices for charter school authorizing,” should be worth double its current weight, and, to receive these points, a state entity should have to demonstrate that its authorizers close failing charter schools, rather than merely implement authorizer training. Currently, the state entity must only demonstrate the extent to which it has taken steps to ensure all authorized public chartering agencies implement best practices for charter school authorizing.

In order to be eligible for these preference points, states with multiple authorizers should also have to develop a clear guideline for authorizer accountability. In particular, it should require that authorizers close any charter school with student scores for academic growth that fall in the bottom 10 percent of public schools in the state for three years in a row. Applicants should also be required to have a strong process in place for preventing authorizers with a large portfolio of failing charter schools under their oversight from authorizing new schools. Similarly, applicants should have a procedure in place for revoking authorizing status from authorizers who fail to shutter consistently failing schools.

In addition to modifying the existing State Entities Program, Congress should create a separate program that awards grants to school districts that partner with nonprofit organizations to take over and redesign district schools, with new staffs. The Texas Education Agency has implemented incentives for districts to create such “partnership schools,” and it is working well. In Texas, the nonprofits selected as partners must have acceptable academic performance and financial ratings for the last three years. When they enter the partnership, they get access to district facilities and better financial deals (4).

Many urban districts have some form of the partnership model, including Denver, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Antonio, Tulsa, New Orleans, Camden, N.J., and Springfield, Massachusetts. The schools in the partnerships are given autonomy to control their budgets, staffing, schedules, and learning models. In return, they are held accountable through multiyear performance agreements and replaced if they fail.

A federal grant program could encourage districts to enter partnerships with nonprofits, awarding $2 million per school for each of the first three years. The first year would be a planning year for the takeover and redesign, followed by two years of operation. Deciding which schools would become partnership schools would be left to the districts.

These grant programs alone would not be as effective as districts redesigning their systems to operate on the pillars of autonomy, accountability, family choice, and diversity of school designs. But they would encourage states and districts to implement strategies that have proven to improve student outcomes more rapidly than any other methods used at scale.

 

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  1. David Osborne, Reinventing America’s Schools: Creating a 21st Century Education System (New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2017), 1-2.
  2. “Federal Charter Schools Program (CPS) and Authorizers,” National Association of Charter School Authorizers, at https://www.qualitycharters.org/research-policies/archive/federal-charter-schools-program/
  3. “Awards,” Office of Innovation & Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, at https://innovation.ed.gov/what-we-do/charter-schools/state-entities/awards/.
  4. David Osborne and Emily Langhorne, “Texas has Ambitious Plans to Transform Urban Schools,” U.S. News & World Report, Apr. 13, 2018, at https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2018-04-13/commentary-texas-has-ambitious-plans-to-transform-urban- schools.