The Fighting 44s

To follow-up on the last article on the controversial Canadian black school proposal in Toronto, here are two Economist articles on how America is dealing with school reform and the emergence of “Charter Schools,” which I hadn’t heard of until now. I wonder how much the expectation of going to university alone affects performance? It’s not all bad for model minorities!

The untidy revolution

Nov 8th 2007 | LOS ANGELES AND NEW ORLEANS
From The Economist print edition
Elsewhere in America, school reform is slower and messier, but the pressure for change is coming from parents, which bodes well

OUTSIDE New York, as usual, it is a different story. Most American mayors look longingly at Michael Bloomberg’s accomplishments and wish they were equally mighty. West of the Mississippi, none has succeeded in seizing control of a school system. Nor are they likely to be able to do so: the early 20th century progressive movement, strongest in the West, severely blunted their powers. “We haven’t had reform from the top here,” says Eli Broad, a Los Angeles philanthropist. “So instead we’re seeing change from the bottom up.”

In the vanguard are charter schools like the Academy of Opportunity in south-central Los Angeles. Here 13- and 14-year-olds, almost all of them black or Hispanic, firmly shake your hand and outline their plans to go to Yale and Stanford. They work long hours—from 7.30am to 5pm five days a week, plus four hours every other Saturday. The grind pays off. At the end of their first year in the school just 28% of pupils are proficient or advanced in maths, compared to 48% of pupils elsewhere in California. By the time they leave, three years later, they far outperform their peers.

Los Angeles has 125 charter schools, more than any other school district in America. That is partly a reflection of the dismal state of the mainstream public schools. Perhaps no city would find it easy to educate such a diverse group of children, many of them the offspring of immigrants from rural Mexico. In California, with its miserly education budget and stifling state bureaucracy, the task is almost impossible. For many parents in poor areas, charter schools represent the only hope for a decent education.

That became even clearer this week when another promising reform was stymied. Voters in Utah struck down a scheme, passed last year by the state legislature, which would have helped parents pay for their children to go to private schools. In principle, vouchers are popular: a YouGov poll for The Economist (see chart) finds 53% of people favouring them, with only 32% opposed. Yet voucher schemes have been defeated in every state where they have been on the ballot. Some fear harm to the public-school system, others an influx of poor children. If a universal voucher system cannot be introduced in America’s most conservative state, it probably can’t be anywhere.

As public schools, albeit independent ones, charters cannot deliver nearly such a strong competitive shock to the system. Yet they still introduce a welcome element of choice. Because they are not too controversial, they have been able to grow quickly: some 1.2m American pupils attend them, compared to fewer than 100,000 who receive vouchers. And they are beginning to affect other schools. In May a majority of tenured teachers in Locke High School, one of the worst in Los Angeles, expressed a desire to convert the school into a charter. It was an astonishing gesture, since (as the teachers’ union quickly pointed out) they would lose some of their rights.

Michael Kirst of Stanford University reckons about 15% of pupils in a district need to be going to charter schools before the system as a whole faces real pressure to change. That is not easily achieved, given a lack of appropriate buildings: the Academy of Opportunity has moved three times since it was founded in 2003. Yet the threshold has been reached in a few places, such as Washington, DC, and Dayton, Ohio. And it has been spectacularly exceeded in a city that is among the last one would associate with reform.

New Orleans’s public schools have long been a shambles. Since the 1980s the middle class has fled them for the private sector, with the result that most of the system’s 65,000 pupils came from poor, often single-parent, homes. A potent teachers’ union combined with a meddling school board to frustrate reform. The system was startlingly corrupt: in June a former president of the board pleaded guilty to receiving some $140,000 in kickbacks.

Two years ago Hurricane Katrina swept away this sorry edifice. The state of Louisiana, which had seized control of some of the worst schools before Katrina, took over most of the district, leaving only the best-performing schools to the local board. Charter schools were approved in bunches, with an entire “charter district” created in the Algiers neighbourhood, on the west bank of the Mississippi River. As a result, New Orleans now has a higher proportion of pupils in charter schools than anywhere else in America.

So far, test results suggest that the charters are doing better than the competition. And there are other encouraging signs. Earlier this year the state brought in a new superintendent, Paul Vallas, who had helped turn around schools in Philadelphia and Chicago. The once-mighty teachers’ union and school board have seen their influence wane. Still, fixing New Orleans’s schools will be a daunting task. The system is in flux: more students are trickling back each month, swelling the school population from a low point of about one-third of pre-Katrina levels to about half today. And Karran Harper Royal, a trenchant critic of the public schools, points out that corruption may be even harder to root out when there are more than seven school-board members to keep tabs on.

In New Orleans, as in Los Angeles, a certain amount of chaos is to be expected. Some charter schools are bound to close. Five hundred and sixty others have done so around the country since 1992. Yet, while that will be painful for the children affected, it will be a good thing in the long run if it leads to better schools. Reforms carried out by a mayoral strongman are quicker and tidier. But most revolutions are messy.

The great experiment

Nov 8th 2007 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition
Bringing accountability and competition to New York City’s struggling schools

THE 220 children are called scholars, not students, at the Excellence charter school in Brooklyn’s impoverished Bedford-Stuyvesant district. To promote the highest expectations, the scholars—who are all boys, mostly black and more than half of whom get free or subsidised school lunches—are encouraged to think beyond school, to university. Outside each classroom is a plaque, with the name of a teacher’s alma mater, and then the year (2024 in the case of the kindergarten), in which the boys will graduate from college.

Like the other charter schools that are fast multiplying across America, Excellence is an independently run public school that has been allowed greater flexibility in its operations in return for greater accountability, though it cannot select its pupils, instead choosing them by lottery. If it fails, the principal (head teacher) will be held accountable, and the school could be closed. Three years old, Excellence is living up to its name: 92% of its third-grade scholars (eight-year-olds, the oldest boys it has, so far) scored “advanced” or “proficient” in New York state English language exams this year, compared to an average (for fourth-graders) across the state of 68% and only 62% in the Big Apple. They did even better in mathematics.

This is the sort of performance that the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, now wants to extend from New York’s 60 charter schools to all of the city’s schools. On November 5th, the mayor and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, announced what is in effect the final piece in their grand plan to charterise the entire city school system. As charter schools remain politically contentious, though, they have been careful not to use that phrase in public.

When Mr Klein took the job in 2002, having led the Clinton administration’s efforts to break up Microsoft, The Economist joked that he should try to do the same thing to New York’s schools monopoly. He more or less has. Under the new scheme, every school run by the city will receive a public report card, with a grade that reflects both academic performance and surveys of students, parents and teachers. The first grades were given out this week.

Schools that do well will get a boost to their budget; the principal may get a bonus of up to $25,000 on top of a base salary of $115,000-$145,000. Schools graded D or F (about 12% of them this year) will have to submit improvement plans that will be implemented with support from Mr Klein’s department. Principals whose schools are still faltering after two years will be fired. Schools still failing after four years will be closed. Though each element of what is happening in New York has been tried elsewhere, this seems to be the most far-reaching urban school accountability initiative in America. Mr Klein claims that no school system on earth has innovated on the scale of New York.

Even New York’s previous reforming mayor, Rudy Giuliani, failed to improve the city’s disastrous schools, despite several attempts. When he ran for election in 2001, Mr Bloomberg said the school system was “in a state of emergency”. The graduation rate in 2002 was alarmingly low, 51% of students compared to a national average of 70%. Most New Yorkers thought the system impossible to fix.

To do something about this, Mr Bloomberg demanded, and got, the thing that Mr Giuliani had with the police but not with the schools: mayoral control. As soon as he had it, the new mayor promptly moved the schools headquarters from its sprawling building in Brooklyn to be next to the heart of his government in City Hall. He hired Mr Klein, and they set about changing things—initially by taking decision-making away from the patronage-heavy local school boards, and then by decentralising it to accountable principals, and by actively piloting experimental charter schools that could be models for others. A new “leadership academy” was created to train principals. Big schools with poor graduation rates were closed, and replaced with smaller ones, often several sharing the same building once occupied by a single big school.

Many of these innovations were paid for by wealthy philanthropists, including Bill Gates of Microsoft, Eli Broad from Los Angeles and sundry hedge-fund managers who have been cajoled into handing over millions of dollars at the annual Robin Hood Foundation auctions. Mr Klein says that this private source of funds was crucial in paying for experiments that might have involved huge political battles had they been paid for out of public funds. The hope is that in future, such reforms might be more widely supported.

Even before this week’s reforms, progress has been sufficiently impressive that the Broad Foundation declared New York the most improved urban school district in the nation. Some $500,000 in Broad scholarships will be distributed to graduates. In 2002 less than 40% of students in grades three to eight (aged eight to 14) were reading and doing maths at their grade level. Today, 65% are at their grade levels in maths and over 50% in reading. Graduation rates are at their highest in decades. Last year the city outperformed other New York state school districts with similar income levels in reading and maths at all grades. The gap between white and minority students has been narrowed.

The New York reforms rely on collecting a lot of data. An $80m computer system designed by IBM will give teachers access to information about student performance and progress as well as contact information for parents.

Equally crucial has been Mr Bloomberg’s success in winning round hitherto reluctant principals, who have agreed to sign a new accountability contract, and the teachers’ unions, which despite quibbles broadly support the new system. The fact that teachers’ starting pay is up on average by 43% since Mr Bloomberg took office may have helped. But whatever the reason, there seems a good chance that the reforms are here to stay.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 11:33 pm and is filed under News, Opinion, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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