Over the past 15 years, cities across the country have experienced rapid growth in the number of public charter schools serving their students. Charter schools are public schools operated by independent organizations, usually nonprofits. They are freed from many of the rules that constrain district-operated schools. In exchange for increased autonomy, they are normally held accountable for their performance by their authorizers, who close or replace them if they fail to educate children. Most are schools of choice, and unlike magnet schools in traditional districts, they are not allowed to select their students. If too many students apply, they hold lotteries to see who gets in.

The charter formula – autonomy, accountability, diversity of learning models, choice and operation by nonprofits – is transforming urban education. In states with strong charter laws and equally strong authorizers, charter schools have produced impressive students gains, especially in schools with high-minority, high-poverty populations.

Recently, districts from Boston to Los Angeles have tried to increase student achievement by replicating parts of this formula, in particular giving their school leaders more autonomy.

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Over the past 15 years, cities across the country have experienced rapid growth in the number of public charter schools serving their students. In states with strong charter laws and equally strong authorizers, charter schools have produced impressive students gains, especially in schools with high-minority, high-poverty populations.

According to the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) 2015 study on 41 urban regions, the academic gains made by students in charter schools increase with each year students spend at the school. Those who have spent four or more years at a charter gain the equivalent of 108 more days of learning in math and 72 more days in reading each year than their traditional public school peers. In other words, they learn about 50 percent more every year than those with similar demographics and past test scores who stayed in a district school.

Urban districts have spent a lot of time and money trying to compete with the charter sector’s formula for success — autonomy, choice, diversity of school designs, and real accountability. Recently, however, many districts have attempted to replicate parts of it instead. Districts from Boston to Denver to Los Angeles have tried to spur charter-like innovation and increase student achievement by granting school leaders more autonomy.

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Julie Cook was ready to leave teaching. She’d worked in both urban and suburban districts and in three different states. No matter where she taught, she ended up frustrated with the lack of autonomy given to, and professionalism expected from, teachers.

Top-down policies dictated what she taught, on what timeline, and how her students were assessed. Supervisors didn’t understand why she wanted to create curriculum. And her colleagues treated teaching like a by-the-hour job, rather than a profession.

“They clocked in and out, presented information, and left the rest up to the powers that be,” she says.

In 2002, just as she’d finally decided to leave the field, Cook was offered a position at Souderton Charter School Collaborative, a teacher-powered school in Souderton, Pennsylvania.

“Teachers at our school have full or partial autonomy over our professional development, budget, curriculum, assessments, teacher evaluations, school policies, scheduling, and hiring,” she explains. “I was invited to create, decide, collaborate, and lead. I no longer felt crushed.”

She’s been teaching there ever since.

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The big moments of historical importance don’t go unremarked, but quieter milestones often pass with little notice unless we stop to commemorate them and note their significance. On July 1, one of those modest but meaningful events will occur when New Orleans marks a change that might sound like a dry bureaucratic reshuffling, but is in fact a remarkable event in the history of American education.

Recall that nearly 13 years ago, one of the effects of the Hurricane Katrinacataclysm was to largely wipe out the city’s abysmal public schools. New Orleans’s educational system was essentially rebuilt from the ground up as a laboratory for charter schools — not a school district with a few charters sprinkled among traditional institutions, but an almost wholly charter-filled system largely run by the state of Louisiana.

The Recovery School District experiment proved successful; New Orleans public schools have improved faster than those of any other city in the nation over the past decade. But 80 percent of the schools were run by the state’s Recovery School District. An indication of the RSD’s success — and of New Orleans’s resurgence as a thriving metropolitan center — is the state’s decision to hand over responsibility for the school district to a locally elected school board on July 1.

Continue reading at The Washington Post.

Big things are quietly happening in San Antonio Independent School District (SAISD).

Ever since Pedro Martinez became superintendent in 2015, creating innovative schools and putting kids first have been at the heart of the district’s values.

Under Martinez’s leadership, the district has begun to create real change and build a system of great schools that provides educational opportunities for all families.

One of the district’s crucial steps in this educational journey was hiring Mohammed Choudhury as Chief Innovation Officer. Before coming to San Antonio, Choudhury served as the founding director of Dallas Independent School District’s Office of Transformation and Innovation.

In the year and a half since he’s been in San Antonio, Choudhury has been overseeing a new innovation zone through which the district is using a growing network of in-district charters as a vehicle to build socioeconomically diverse learning environments and to ensure that all students have access to best-fit schools. In order to prevent the creation of “islands of affluence” and ensure that high-needs families have equitable access, the district has implemented controlled choice for its open enrollment choice schools and programs.

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For the past six months, scandal after scandal has come to light in the nation’s capital as the media’s interrogation lamps have shone on D.C. Public Schools.

In November, WAMU exposed a graduation scandal at Ballou High School, leading the Office of the State Superintendent to launch an investigation into DCPS.  The investigation revealed district-wide complicity in a systemic culture that pressured teachers to pass students regardless of their attendance or academic performance. The report concluded that one in three 2017 DCPS graduates were awarded diplomas in violation of district policies.

Best-case scenario, 67 percent of the class of 2018 graduated. That’s a significant drop from the 73 percent rate the district claimed in 2017.

What’s happened in DCPS is tragic — not only that the number of students graduating declined but also that DCPS has been graduating students who aren’t prepared for life beyond school.

Yet there is a story of real academic progress in the nation’s capital. It’s the story of the other public schools, the ones educating nearly 50 percent of public school students. It’s the story of D.C.’s charter schools.

Continue reading at The Washington Post.

In many cities across the nation, home values and rents have risen so high they are pricing teachers out of the market. Young teachers either spend the majority of their paychecks on rent, deal with long daily commutes, or leave the profession. In a survey of public school teachers who left the profession in 2012, two thirds of those who said they would consider returning rated increased salaries as an important factor in that decision.

Raising salaries is difficult for districts, given the twin burdens of state funding cuts since the Great Recession and skyrocketing costs for health care and pensions. But innovators in Newark, New Jersey, have found a solution: a new “Teachers Village” that gives teachers subsidized rents in the center of the city.

Teachers receive discounts of seven to 15% off units’ market rate, and currently seventy percent of the residents are educators. Twenty percent of the apartments are discounted for individuals earning up to 80% of Newark’s Area Median Income, while the remaining 10 percent are rented at market rates.

Continue reading at Forbes.

When asked about my education in a traditional public high school, I always talk about Mr. Gebler’s pre-calculus class. I remember it well for two reasons. One, I struggled to earn a C. Two, his standards — like his eccentric behavior and dedication to students — were so exceptional that I actually retained the content after the school year ended.

A draft research report by workplace survey company Pairin confirms what I’d always known: Mr. Gebler was a top-tier teacher.

Pairin recently analyzed survey results from 9,359 teachers in traditional public schools and 390 in public charter schools. It found that certain behavioral attributes — motivation, independence, and the ability to correct others — correlate with high performance. Mr. Gebler had all of these.

Today, however, many educators who share these behavioral qualities aren’t working in our nation’s traditional public schools. They’re working in charter schools.

“When we look at the aggregated survey results, more charter school teachers share the qualities that we’ve found in all top-performing teachers,” says Pairin CEO Michael Simpson. “What we’re trying to figure out is why trends in behavior differ between these two sectors and how we can help teachers overall be more successful.”

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The latest edition of the Nation’s Report Card — the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress — got a lot of ink last week. While results nationally were a yawn, the scores from Washington, D.C., hold powerful lessons for other cities. Together, D.C. charter and district public schools have improved faster than those of any state over the past decade, by far, while district schools have improved faster than those of any other urban district that takes the exam.

NAEP is widely considered a more reliable measure than state tests because there are no stakes attached, so schools have no incentive to cheat or spend time preparing their students. But because the random sample of students who take the test changes every two years, short-term results tend to bounce around. Looking at a decade or more smooths things out and provides a more trustworthy gauge.

In D.C., that takes us back to the pivotal year of 2007, when the city council did away with the elected school board and gave power over D.C. Public Schools to the mayor, who appointed Michelle Rhee as chancellor. Since then, DCPS has embraced some of the most profound reforms of any traditional district.

Meanwhile, D.C.’s charter sector, which has grown to educate 47 percent of public school students in the city, has won plaudits as the “healthiest charter sector” in the country from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

So D.C. provides a fascinating laboratory. We can compare a rapidly improving traditional district to a vibrant charter sector.

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“I think Texas has used district-level incentives and implementation support for districts who want to move more towards 21st century school systems in a far more thoughtful way than any other state,” says Chris Barbic, who ran Tennessee‘s Achievement School District for its first four years and now invests in state efforts to turn around struggling districts and schools through his position at the Houston-based Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

Continue reading at US News.