Education Archives - Page 35 of 43 - Progressive Policy Institute

Schools of the Future: California’s Summit Public Schools

Posted on January 7, 2016 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The first time I visited a Summit Public School, in February 2014, I pulled up in front of a long, low, one-story building in an office park setting. I was sure I had the wrong address—but no, there was a sign. This was Summit Denali, in Sunnyvale, California.

Inside, my surprise deepened. All the students, then sixth graders, were in one big, open area. Most were working on their own, at laptops. A few were working with another student, or in hushed conversations with teachers. One was on a sofa, reading. All their chairs, desks, tables, and whiteboards were on wheels, so the space could be instantly reconfigured.

Diane Tavenner, Summit’s co-founder and CEO, explained that she and her colleagues had spent the last two years piloting profound changes in their education process, and this year they had rolled out the new, personalized model in all seven of their Bay Area charter schools. “The industrial model is really driven by adults,” she said. “Kids come in, they’re told where to go, where to sit, what they’re going to learn, when they’re going to learn it. You’re on the assembly line. We believe the next generation models are about the students being empowered to drive their own learning.”

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Student Rights, Judicial Precedent and Why 2016 Could See a Profound Shift in Education Law

Posted on January 7, 2016September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

A feature for the Center for Civil Justice.

Can America’s courts deliver better schools for disadvantaged students?

Some students and teachers seem to think so. In Massachusetts, five student plaintiffs who were unable to secure seats in charter school lotteries intend to file a lawsuit challenging the state’s cap on charter schools. In California, veteran teacher Rebecca Friedrichs objected to her annual union dues being used to protect ineffective colleagues; the Supreme Court is hearing arguments in Ms. Friedrichs’ case this week. If Ms. Friedrichs prevails, teachers’ unions will be compelled to better represent the many teachers who want significant changes to the profession.

Do these disparate cases amount to a trend? Some judicial scholars scoff at the idea. After all, judges preserve their authority by deferring to precedent, not by transforming bureaucracies. Education decisions tend to side with school systems, not individual students or teachers. Bureaucratic lawsuits against reform continue to be filed in numerous states.

The optimists, however, may finally be right that the judicial tide is turning. Judges have dealt setbacks to union-backed lawsuits against school reform in Florida, Louisiana, and New York City. Pro-student lawsuits have won surprising victories; for example, nine California students recently won a trial court ruling that public schools unconstitutionally denied them a decent education by assigning them ineffective teachers. After nearly 150 years of anti-student rulings, students have a real shot at legal relief that will not merely defend a few individuals, but improve equity, access and choice to the entire public education system.
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U.S. News & World Report: Engaging Families to Help Students Succeed

Posted on November 30, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Everyone in public education knows that what happens at home is more important than what happens at school. Hence, many successful schools work to engage parents (or their substitutes) in their children’s education. Indeed, many of the nation’s best charter schools have long sent teachers to visit their students’ homes and asked parents to sign contracts that commit them to supporting the education of their children.

Lately some of the nation’s more innovative school districts have begun to emulate this practice. In Denver, Colorado and Washington, D.C., family engagement has become an important element of district strategy.

In Washington, the effort is led by a nonprofit organization, the Flamboyan Foundation. Kristin Ehrgood, its founder and president, is an alumnus of Teach for America who went on to run the organization in New Jersey, then served on the Teach for America board in D.C. In 2006 she and her husband created the Flamboyan Foundation, and in 2008 they brought it to D.C. to invest in public education.

Before deciding where to focus, Ehrgood talked with a variety of people to figure out the most pressing needs in the city. Over and over, she heard the words “family engagement.”

So she and her staff read all the research, which says that family engagement is critical to student achievement. They also did focus groups and built “learning partnerships” with 11 D.C. schools, charter and traditional.

Continue reading at U.S. News & World Report.

A Tale of Two School Systems

Posted on October 5, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

In public education, the District of Columbia may be the nation’s most interesting laboratory. It is the only city with two public school systems of roughly equal size, each with a different governance model. The results of this competition have profound implications for the future of public education nationwide.

The older of the two, the District of Columbia Public Schools, uses the “unified” governance model that emerged more than a century ago, in which the district operates all but one of its 113 schools and employs all the staff, with central control and most policies applied equally to most schools. Since 2007, when Michelle Rhee became chancellor, the district has gone to extraordinary lengths to wring performance out of its schools, pursuing the most aggressive reforms of any unified urban district in America.

The other system, overseen by the Public Charter School Board, is largely a 21st century creation. Under this governance model, the board does not own or operate schools. Instead, it contracts with 62 independent organizations – all of them nonprofits – to operate 115 schools. It negotiates performance contracts (charters) with operators, lets parents choose their schools, shuts down schools that fail to perform and replicates those that succeed.

Under both models, student performance is improving. Comparisons are tricky, because their demographics are slightly different. Charter students are poorer: 82 percent qualify for a free or reduced price lunch, compared to 75 percent in the public school district. The latter also has more white students: 12 percent compared to charters’ 5 percent. And its schools get $7,000 to $9,000 more per student each year than charters, mostly for buildings and pensions.

On the other hand, all charter families make an active choice of schools, while only about half of District of Columbia Public Schools families do, so some believe charter students are more motivated. Most experts agree that the district has more students “in crisis” – homeless, coming out of jail, former dropouts and so on – because families in crisis don’t usually make the effort to apply for charters. And many charters don’t accept students midway through the school year or “backfill” seats after students leave, while most district schools do. Far more students leave charters for district schools during the school year than the reverse, and sometimes the new entrants set back schools’ test scores, graduation rates and attendance rates.

It is hard to say just how these realities balance out. Fortunately, there is one study that tries to compensate for student demographics (but not for other factors). Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes is a respected academic organization that has published extensive studies comparing charter and traditional public school performance on standardized tests. Its methodology compares charter students to demographically similar students in traditional public schools who have had similar test scores in the past.

The center found that between 2007-08 and 2010-11, charter students gained an average of 72 more days of learning per year in reading than traditional school students and 101 days in math – more than half an academic year.

Continue reading at U.S. News & World Report.

Washington Post: Lowest performing D.C. Public Schools should become charters

Posted on September 15, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

David Osborne’s newest report, “A Tale of Two Systems: Education Reform in Washington D.C.“, was featured as an exclusive in the Washington Post:

The D.C. Public Schools is not equipped to improve its lowest-performing schools and should have the ability to convert them to charter schools, according to a report being released this week by the Progressive Policy Institute.

What the traditional school system is missing is greater autonomy to create specialty programs, extend school days, and shut down failing schools, or replicate high performing ones, the report said.

“For struggling schools in poor neighborhoods, no strategy has been more effective,” said the report which was authored by David Osbourne, director of the the Institute’s project on Reinventing America’s Schools.

D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson has long said that she would like to use charters as a tool to turn around low-performing schools.

Continue reading at the Washington Post.

A Tale of Two Systems: Education Reform in Washington D.C.

Posted on September 15, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

An important contest is taking place in Washington, D.C.—a race between two vehicles designed to carry children into the future with the habits and skills they need to live productive, meaningful lives.

The older of the two, the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), uses a “unified governance model” that emerged more than a century ago, in which the district operates all but one of its 113 schools and employs all their staff, with central control and most policies applied equally to most schools. Since 2007, when Michelle Rhee became chancellor, DCPS leaders have pursued the most aggressive reform effort of any unified urban district in America.

Racing against them—and carrying 44 percent of D.C. public school students—is a very different vehicle, designed and built largely in this century. This model does not own or operate any schools. Instead, it contracts with 62 independent organizations—all of them nonprofits—to operate 115 schools. It negotiates contracts with operators, lets parents choose their schools, shuts down those that repeatedly fail to achieve their performance goals, and replicates those that are most effective. We know these as charter schools, authorized by the Public Charter School Board (PCSB), which Congress legislated into existence in 1996. Like DCPS, the Charter Board is a leader in its field, considered by experts one of the best authorizers in the nation.

Under both models, student performance is improving. Comparisons are tricky, because their demographics are different. DCPS students are not as poor: 75 percent qualify for a free or reduced price lunch, compared to 82 percent in charter schools. DCPS has more white students: 12 percent compared to charters’ 5 percent. And DCPS schools get $7,000 to $9,000 more per student each year than charter —particularly for their buildings and pensions.

On the other hand, all charter families make an active choice of schools, while only about half of DCPS families do, so some believe charter students are more motivated. Most experts agree that DCPS has more students “in crisis”—homeless, coming out of jail, former dropouts, and so on—because families in crisis don’t usually make the effort to apply for charters. And many charters don’t accept students midway through the school year or “backfill” seats after students leave, while most DCPS schools do. Far more students leave charters for DCPS during the school year than the reverse, and sometimes the new entrants set back schools’ test scores, graduation rates, and attendance rates.

It is hard to say just how these realities balance out. Fortunately, there are two independent studies that try to compensate for student demographics (but not for other factors). Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) is a respected academic organization that has published extensive studies comparing charter and traditional public school performance on standardized tests. Its methodology compares charter students to demographically similar students in traditional public schools who have had similar test scores in the past.

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Weinstein on To the Point Discussing Affordable College Education

Posted on September 4, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

A three year college degree is just one proposal to rethink the cost of college education. With the average graduate carrying $30 thousand in debt and middle class parents depleting their retirement funds to pay for higher education, has the time come for radical reform? PPI Senior Fellow Paul Weinsten tells Guest host Barbara Bogaev on KCRW’s To the Point why a three-year degree programs would help rein in the soaring cost of a college education and the staggering levels of student loan debt.

Listen to Weinstein on To the Point.

Washington Monthly: How New Orleans Made Charter Schools Work

Posted on August 31, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Last year 2.9 million children attended 6,700 charter schools in America—public schools independent of districts and free of many bureaucratic constraints. Since charters were invented in Minnesota twenty-four years ago, they have become the subject of intense battles between supporters and detractors.

Supporters point out that charters receive 28 percent less money per child, on average, but still have higher graduation rates and send a higher percentage of graduates to college than traditional public schools with similar demographics. Detractors counter that charters often push out the hardest-to-teach students, and, citing a national study published in 2013 by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), they report charters barely, on average, outperform those traditional schools on standardized tests.

But that average masks the reality more than reveals it. In truth, we have forty-four different charter school laws and systems in this country. A close look at the CREDO study shows that in states where charters are rarely forced to close when their students are falling behind—in Arizona, Texas, Ohio, and others—charter students do underperform their socioeconomic peers in traditional public schools on standardized tests. In states where charter authorizers close failing charters, however—in Massachusetts, New York, Indiana, the District of Columbia, and others—charters outperform traditional public schools.

The truth is that charters have lived up to their billing in some places and been a disappointment in others.Â In one city, however, they have fulfilled the vision of even their most ardent supporters: that chartering would not only raise student achievement, but gradually replace the old system.

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, 92.5 percent of public school students in New Orleans attend charters. The Tulane University economist Douglas Harris, who leads a research team focused on education reform, calls it “the most radical overhaul of any type in any school district in at least a century.”

In Katrina’s wake, a governor and legislature frustrated with New Orleans’s chronic corruption and abysmal public schools placed all but seventeen of them into its new Recovery School District (RSD), created just two years before to take over failing schools. Gradually, the RSD converted them all into charters. Today it oversees fifty-seven charters in the city, while the old Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) oversees fourteen charters and operates five traditional schools. (The city also has four charters authorized directly by the state board of education and one independent state school.)

The city’s two districts, unlike traditional districts, do more overseeing than operating; they steer more than they row. They authorize schools, negotiate performance contracts (charters), measure results, and close schools whose students are lagging behind. Not all the schools succeed; educating poor, minority students in the inner city is extremely challenging. But on a variety of measures, New Orleans is improving faster than any other district in the state, if not the nation. Indeed, it may soon surpass its state on many metrics, a rare feat for a major American city.

Before Katrina, most public schools were terrible. In 2005 the city ranked sixty-seventh out of sixty-eight districts in Louisiana, itself a low performer compared to other states. Last year, New Orleans was forty-first out of sixty-nine school districts in Louisiana.

Before Katrina, some 62 percent of students attended schools rated “failing” by the state. Though the standard for failure has been raised, only 7 percent of students attend “failing” schools today.

Before Katrina, only 35 percent of students scored at grade level or above on state standardized tests. Last year 62 percent did.

Before Katrina, almost half of New Orleans students dropped out, and less than one in five went on to college. Last year, 73 percent graduated from high school in four years, two points below the state average, and 59 percent of graduates entered college, equaling the state average.

And according to a 2015 CREDO study, between 2006 and 2012 New Orleans’s charter students gained nearly half a year of additional learning in math and a third of a year in reading, every year, compared to similar students in the city’s non-chartered public schools.

Because the OPSB was only allowed to keep schools that scored above the state average, the failing schools were all in the RSD. In the spring of 2007, the first full school year after Katrina, only 23 percent of RSD students tested at or above grade level. Seven years later, fully 57 percent did. As Figure 1 shows (page 68), RSD students in New Orleans have improved almost four times faster than the state average.

Little of this appears to be the result of demographic changes. In the 2012-13 school year, 84 percent of public school students qualified for a free or reduced-price lunch, compared to 77 percent before Katrina. And census data tells us that poverty among residents younger than eighteen rose from 32 percent in 2007 to 39 percent in 2013, approaching pre-storm levels. Some of the improvement could reflect a small increase in white students, who rose from 3 to 7 percent of the total over the past decade. But African Americans still make up 85 percent of the city’s students (down from 93 percent). And they have made the greatest gains relative to their counterparts statewide, no doubt because the RSD schools, which have improved the most, are 91 percent black. If one counts only African Americans, New Orleans had the lowest test scores in the state before Katrina, 8 percentage points below the state average. Last year the city’s African American scores exceeded the state average by five points.

If anything, today’s students may be more disadvantaged than they were before Katrina, because they lived through the hurricane and the subsequent spike in violent crime. A survey of more than 1,000 youths aged ten to sixteen, taken from 2012 to 2014, found that nearly 20 percent showed signs of post-traumatic stress, four times the national rate.

In short, a radically new governance model—a recovery district that converted all of its schools to charters—has produced what some experts believe to be the most rapid improvement in American history.

Continue reading at the Washington Monthly.

CNN: Why we need the 3-year college degree

Posted on August 27, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

In rolling out an ambitious higher education plan this month, Hillary Clinton put a genuine national dilemma — America’s ballooning student debt crisis — at the center of the 2016 debate. What a refreshing contrast to her Republican opponents.

Clinton’s “New College Compact” is a big, multifaceted plan to take the debt monkey off the backs of millennials who attend public universities. But one thing it is not is cheap — the price tag is $350 billion. And it does not do enough to rein in college tuition costs, much less roll them back.

So let us offer a friendly amendment that would do just that and thereby complement Clinton’s otherwise creative proposal. Our suggestion? The three-year college degree.

Three-year colleges are the norm in many European countries, and a few enterprising universities here have begun to follow suit. We propose requiring any U.S. college or university with students who receive any type of federal student aid to offer the option of earning a bachelor’s degree in three years.

While some schools might be tempted to squeeze a four-year degree into three years, that approach would be unwise, given that the majority of today’s college students need six years to complete a bachelors.

Continue reading at CNN.

What New Data Says about Debt-Free College

Posted on July 28, 2015September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

New data shows that young people who don’t fit within the current college system are facing great hardship in today’s workforce. This sheds valuable insight into the debt-free college debate, the charge for injecting more money into the federal student aid system at the top of Democrat’s 2016 election talking points.

With outstanding student loans topping $1.2 trillion, it’s little wonder that Democrats from Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, Elizabeth Warren, and even Hillary Clinton are choosing to make tackling student debt a priority.

But student debt is the biggest problem for non-completers, who are increasingly unable to find decent work. Good job options have become so limited for non-graduates that the millions of young Americans who do not perfectly fit into the standard college mold now find themselves at an inherent disadvantage.

Indeed, my analysis of the latest labor force data highlights the plight of young people with some college but no degree. Since 2000, young people aged 16-24 neither enrolled in school nor in the labor force in June with some college or an Associate’s degree has increased by 700,000, or about 120%. (Overall, young people aged 16-24 neither enrolled in school nor in the labor force in June increased by 1.4 million, or 27%, since 2000.) This chart considers June to get best sense of underlying trends in young people not in school.*

The implication is that we need better workforce preparedness options for those without a college degree, not simply debt-free college. The policies that comprise “debt-free college” merely throw more resources at propping up the current higher education system. For Bernie Sanders, that means free tuition. For Martin O’Malley, it means regulating tuition and expanding federal grants to schools and students. For Hillary Clinton, it’s just a conceptual endorsement that everyone should graduate college, and without debt.

Such policies are short-sighted. Rising student debt is a symptom not of inadequate federal funding, but of a broken federal financial aid system and of a higher education system in need of a shake-up. Greater transfers of money from taxpayers to students and schools will only exacerbate the challenges young people face in today’s labor market, by discouraging needed innovation in higher education. It quickly turns into an expensive and inefficient way to match workers with jobs.

Indeed, with the falling costs of information-sharing, thanks to the proliferation of high-speed broadband, and promising rise of innovation in education technology, there should be a downward pressure in college tuition. And with more people than ever graduating college, we should see an overall rise in real earnings. Yet college costs continue to rise at a faster pace than inflation, and the real earnings of young graduates have fallen 12% in the last decade.

By perpetuating the status-quo, policies that comprise debt-free college will not enhance opportunity and social mobility for those who need it – it will only widen the gap between young Americans with and without a degree. The barriers to innovation in higher education will remain, along with a lack of incentive to provide higher education more efficiently and effectively. Instead of introducing productivity-enhancing reforms to deal with rising enrollments and falling state funding, such as customized education or hybrid learning, higher education institutions can continue to use federal student aid to fill budget holes. In fact, groundbreaking new research from the NY Federal Reserve directly ties increases in federal student aid eligibility to increases in tuition.

Without serious reform, we cannot possibly hope to realize the enormous potential coming from the tech sector to transform the design and delivery of higher education and workforce training. Happily there is promise for real progress: a Senate HELP hearing last week focused on need for breaking down barriers to innovation in higher education. Still, until Democrats move past the “debt-free college” approach, and the notion that college degrees are the only answer, 2016-themed rhetoric on college affordability will be little more than that.

*Note: Enrollment and labor force figures in June have been comparable with those in July over time, for those who are interested in complete mid-summer analysis.

U.S. News & World Report: The Wrong School Choice

Posted on July 6, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Nevada’s new school voucher law will make inequality worse.

I’m struggling to understand an intellectual disconnect of the first order.

Nearly everyone involved in education reform wrings their hands about the achievement gaps between poor and nonpoor, between white and minority students. And most Americans are increasingly disturbed about widening inequality of income and wealth.

Yet when Nevada enacted the nation’s first law last month creating almost universal access to vouchers (technically, education savings accounts, or ESAs), few reformers pointed out that it would undermine equal opportunity. Dozens of bloggers weighed in; the Fordham Institute even invited 14 of them to comment. And not one of the 14 mentioned that the new bill would make access to quality education less equal than it is today.

Why do I say it will do that? Because it allows families to add to their education savings account to buy a more expensive education. Most parents want what’s best for their children, so those who can afford it will do just that. Those who can’t will not. And the education market will stratify by income, far more than it already does. In a decade, it will look like the markets for houses, cars and other private goods, with huge disparities based on wealth.

I just don’t get it. We need bold reform of education, yes. But do we want to widen the achievement gap? Do we want to increase inequality in America? More than half of public students in America are poor (i.e., they qualify for a free or reduced price lunch). Do we want to leave them all behind in inferior schools?

Continue reading at U.S. News & World Report.

Weinstein on WBUR: Will Three-Year Colleges Make The Grade?

Posted on June 16, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

With college costs rising and many students struggling with loan debt, some colleges are offering three-year bachelor’s degree programs to reduce costs and send graduates out into the world a year sooner. PPI Senior Fellow Paul Weinstein, who also directs the M.A. in Public Management program at Johns Hopkins University, tells Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson why he’s a big proponent of three-year degree programs.

Listen to Weinstein’s interview at Here & Now.

The Hill: Student loan borrowers need financial literacy, not more regulation

Posted on May 15, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Yesterday’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) field hearing in Wisconsin was designed to address how student loan servicers could better serve millions of struggling borrowers. But instead of mandating that servicers provide more after-the-fact counseling, the CFPB could better help borrowers through reforms aimed at enhancing their financial literacy on the front end.

The CFPB is right to be concerned about growing burden of student debt both on the borrowers and the broader economy. Total outstanding debt, and the share of loans in default, are at historic highs. And although countless studies show that a college degree is still worth the investment, the majority of loan defaults are wracked up by students who don’t complete college. They therefore don’t enjoy the wage premium that comes with a four-year degree.

But in its quest to hold loan servicers accountable for the student debt problem, the CFPB is overlooking the behavior of borrowers. It should also be thinking about ways to enable the students to make better borrowing choices.

Continue reading at The Hill.

Creating New Pathways into Middle Class Jobs

Posted on May 12, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Many policy ideas on how to reduce income inequality and improve the upward mobility of low-income Americans are gaining popularity, on both sides of the political aisle. As usual, Republicans suggest that tax cuts heavily tilted towards the rich can address these problems, though many of their proposals would actually worsen inequality and mobility. Populist Democrats’ proposals include minimum wage increases, gender pay equity and the like—which deserve support but would have very modest effects on overall inequality and mobility into the middle class. If we want to have large impacts on these problems, and create systemic rather than mostly symbolic effects, there is only one place to go: postsecondary education or other skills by low-income workers, and whether they get the kinds of jobs that reward these skills in the job market.

Most job training in the United States now occurs in community and for-profit colleges, as well as the lower-tier of four-year colleges. We send many young people to college, even among the disadvantaged, but completion rates are very low and earnings are uneven for graduates. The public colleges that the poor attend lack not only resources but also incentives to respond to the job market. Approaches like sectoral training and career pathways, which combine classroom and work experience, show promise but need to be scaled, while employers need greater incentives to create middle-paying jobs.

This report proposes a three-part strategy for equipping more Americans with new tools for economic mobility and success: 1) A “Race to the Top” program in higher education, where the federal government would help states provide more resources to their community (and perhaps four-year) colleges but also require them to provide incentives and accountability for the colleges based on their student completion rates and earnings of graduates; 2) Expanding high-quality career and technical education along with work-based learning models like apprenticeship; and, 3) Giving employers incentives to create more good jobs.

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