Charter School Teachers and Virtual

NACSA held a pretty good conference here in Utah this week. A lot of talk about holding charter schools accountable including how to replicated great charter schools and close the weak. Virtual charters were a large part of the discussion since charter authorizers have to figure out ways to ensure that they can manage the growth in online learning.

That lead to some revelations on the insanity that in US charter laws. The first that obviously affects ABCTE teachers is that in some states there are requirements that all virtual teachers be state certified – sometimes at a higher percentage than in brick and mortar schools. The second is that seat time takes precedence over subject matter mastery for students.

Both are ridiculous. Online learning is supposed to fully leverage great talent regardless of geographic location. If a great physics teacher in Pennsylvania is available to inspire future scientists in Utah – they shouldn’t have to jump through hoops in all 50 states to become a teacher.

The real beauty of online learning is truly differentiated instruction. But in our system, if the student masters algebra in 3 months, they don’t get credit unless they sit in front an algebra course for 180 days.

Our laws need to help technology work to increase learning – not hold it back so that the adults can feel better.

Eduwonk, Flypaper and NACSA

Both Flypaper and Eduwonk pick up the New York Times story on alternative teaching. Been a great week for ABCTE even while I am down with the flu (not the H1N1 variety).

I am heading to NACSA in Salt Lake City next week to talk charter schools - we will be presenting at the conference on teacher certification. 15% of ABCTE teachers teach in charter schools and we are looking to help out even more. In a few weeks we will launch TeachCharters.com to help out even more with charter school teacher job postings, teacher resume posting, professional development and mentoring for teachers. Pretty exciting stuff!

Have a great weekend!

Only the strong survive

Note: this is not an ABCTE charter school - I just joined the board of an independent DC charter school 18 months ago to try and help them survive and did all we could.

Last night I went before the Washington, DC Public Charter School Board (PCSB) and relinquished the charter to our school. We will not be opening this year because we did not have enough students enroll to make it financially viable. But it goes deeper than that.

Charters schools operate on an incredibly lean budget, always less then district schools, and if there is not outside funding they cannot make it. In our case, we did not succeed in getting enough grants and donations and continued to fall further behind. This drove staffing cuts that then started to hurt the curriculum and student experience.

Even with those cuts we did dramatically improve on AYP this year and we had higher enrollment than we ever have had this summer. But without financial support, we could not make it unless we had another 20 students enroll. We worked hard with the PCSB to thoroughly analyze the school this summer so that we could make the right call. It has been an agonizing few weeks trying to figure out the best possible course of action.

In the end we did what is right for the students and closed the school.

This is the beauty of the charter school system without artificial caps – only the strong will survive giving students the best possible choice for their school.

And the winner is.........the STUDENTS!

In the education world, part of the promise of competition is that it will improve schooling for all kids. But we really have not seen that happen in areas where students have a choice of schools to attend. Most of the blame goes to a system that protects schools from seeing adverse affects from competition.

I chair a board for a DC charter school and I am now seeing first hand the two factors that will ultimately make better schools a reality through competition:

1. There has to be more seats than students so that schools actually have to fight for every student in order to survive
2. Parents have to experience shopping for schools long enough to become savvy consumers

It is basic economics that if a resource is scarce, the price goes up. In DC, there are excess seats and not enough students. Wouldn’t be too much of a problem but our reimbursement per student has stayed flat this year and our reimbursement per student for facilities has gone down. Also of note is that many of these schools were built at the peak of building costs in DC. There is no slop in a charter school budget to absorb any reduction in revenue. Ouch.

So the only way to make up for this budget crunch is to make sure you have more students. Basic business sense as more students means more revenue. The result is more schools are pursuing these students and marketing to a lot more of their parents. These aggressive marketing efforts required in these lean times are creating a much more educated consumer out of DC parents - because we have to reach all of them in order to survive.

In order to meet recruitment numbers, schools are offering free after school programs and more laptops. Parents are demanding more to commit to bringing their student to your school.

And the winner is……….the students!!!

It is pretty amazing to see that charter schools are actually building this competition in DC. And because Michelle Rhee is building a better public school system to compete, the students in DC are really going to win over the next few years.

Bringing Ed Reform to Scale

Yet another data point on the selectivity model for improving education. By selecting teachers from top universities, charter schools in Boston are getting better results for their students. This is pointed out in an editorial over at Gadfly today by Steven Wilson from Ascend Charter schools.

There are 7 charter schools that are realizing significantly higher student learning gains on the state’s MCAS tests. Over 50% of the teachers in those schools are from elite universities compared to 19% at public schools.

But then Steven does something that most education reformers refuse to think about. Can you bring that model to scale. Can we slowly replace all 2.6 million teachers with teacher from elite schools (note I used a little thing called math to pull out the 19% already from elite schools). He thinks not.

From his editorial:“Each year, about 142,000 students graduate from highly selective postsecondary institutions (Barron's top two ranks). Even if one in every ten of their graduates entered teaching for two years (the average tenure at many no-excuses schools) before moving onto other careers, they would provide for only six percent of the 438,914 teachers currently working in the 66 member districts of the Council of Great City Schools (CGCS). Simply put, we might have enough of these teachers to staff a few hundred more No Excuses schools, but not a few thousand more, and certainly not enough to reach every disadvantaged child in America.”

This is the same problem with KIPP and TFA which are highly touted as the solution for education woes. While they are great programs we need to simultaneously invest in programs like ABCTE that can be brought to scale efficiently and effectively.

Time on Task

Apologies to the 10’s of loyal readers – summer hiatus to take care of family issues, get daughter 1 ready to transfer to James Madison University and relax.

But, there is no rest for education reformers – so a little recap of the ABCTE summer. We have been extremely busy looking at the data from Mathematica on our program and pretty pleased with the results so far – student achievement data will come in December. We have been taking a ton of enrollments from Missouri (325)– a lot of pent up demand for an affordable program to get into teaching in that state and we have been meeting with decision makers to look at the next set of states for ABCTE.

As for me, I have taken on the role of Board Chair for a small charter school here in DC. The Academia Bilingüe de la Comunidad Public Charter School (ABC), which opened in the Fall of 2005, is a Bilingual English and Spanish total-immersion Public Charter School in Washington DC, serving grades 6-8. We have not made AYP yet and our test scores are pretty dismal.
When asking for advice from other education leaders, I hear one thing pretty clearly – it is time on task. There is no silver bullet special program or teaching technique that will get AYP – it is how much time you spend on math and reading that will get scores up. And when you look at the KIPP model, there is a ton of time on task and they get results. Now they also have great facilities, dedicated parents, energetic teachers willing to put in the time. But if they tried to get the same results in the normal school day/year, I doubt they would.

So I embark on a journey for AYP. It started with getting a great principal who was hired in June. Then the simple task of really cleaning the school to show the great facility and I can assure you that a man never walked so tall as when he stooped to clean a middle school bathroom. We are heavily recruiting students and working on teacher training. I will keep you posted on the results as we try to work on greater time on task.

Charter Schools: help is on the way

The Issue:
• Teachers have the greatest influence on student achievement
• There are not enough great teachers
• School districts have TFA and TNTP to help them
• Charter schools need to start demonstrating that they are really increasing student achievement
• Charter schools are not getting the staffing they need

The Solution:
• Hold ABCTE recruitment events just for Charter and Private Schools

So that is what we are doing next week. In Arizona we will hold two teacher recruitmentevents just for public charter schools. Those career-changers that are ready to get into teaching will complete our preparation program to ensure they are ready to go and be ready to teach by the fall.

“Human Capital” is the new buzz word in education. It is just a fancy way of saying we have a severe shortage of great teachers. If we don’t all start working together to get more great people into the classroom, we can never truly impact student achievement and improve our schools.