Schoolhouse Rock: FIXING THE EDUCATION SYSTEM.

A Charter-School Setback?

I've long been impressed by the accomplishments of Achievement First, the charter-school network that grew out of Amistad Academy, a middle school founded in 1999 in New Haven, Conn., by Doug McCurry, an educator, and Dacia Toll, then a recent graduate of Yale Law School.

Amistad has always served a low-income, high-minority population—a demographic that tends to do poorly in school and on standardized tests. And yet Amistad's results are consistently excellent. In 2007, the eighth-grade students at Amistad were neck and neck with the students at Worthington Hooker School for the highest state-test results in New Haven. Hooker is a well-respected public school in the city's East Rock neighborhood; some of its students have parents who are Yale professors or who are otherwise connected to Yale. Very few of Hooker's students—just 16 percent—are from low-income families, while at Amistad, that figure hovers around 80 percent. And yet Amistad's eighth-grade students beat out Hooker's eighth grade for the highest math score in New Haven, and they earned the second-highest reading and writing score in the city, right behind Hooker—a fairly stunning result.^*

What impresses me just as much as Amistad's sterling test scores is the commitment of the school's founders to the broader issue of equity in education. Achievement First's leaders see their mission as not just to serve the 3,700 students enrolled in their schools in Connecticut and Brooklyn, but to create a national model for school success in low-income communities.

Two years ago, Amistad middle school expanded upward to include a high school as well. And so I was interested, and a little concerned, to read in the New Haven Register last month that students at the high school have been struggling.

Last year, 19 of the 56 students in Amistad's ninth grade—the same cohort that scored so well on the eighth-grade tests in 2007—failed at least one course. And 11 students, 20 percent of the grade, failed two courses, meaning that they did not move on to the tenth grade.

It's not quite clear just what this means. Last year, the 10th-grade students at Amistad once again did very well on the state achievement tests. So by outside measures, achievement at the school remains high. And yet many students are struggling to meet Amistad High's own standards, even after four or five years of Amistad education.

Amistad, to its credit, has launched an internal review of the middle school's methods to see what steps it can take to better prepare its students for high school. As the Register reported:

Amistad is now examining both the academic and non-academic structure of its middle school, adding more non-fiction reading, for example, and evaluating whether the institutional attitude of "we will not let kids fail" has in turn failed to teach students how to learn independently. "Independence is something you teach and develop and cultivate. We need to be more thoughtful and more intentional about doing that," said [Dacia] Toll.

My guess is that whatever difficulties Amistad's high-school students are now facing can be traced back to their experiences before reaching Amistad. As at most high-performing low-income middle schools, students generally have been arriving in fifth grade at Amistad performing well below grade level. Amistad's intensive methods are usually able to propel those students to grade level and above in just a few years. But it may be that the early academic deficits those students experienced have some lingering aftereffects that will make high levels of achievement a continuing challenge for them at every stage.

Given Amistad's track record, and Toll's willingness to face her school's problems directly and publicly, I imagine that she and her staff will figure out how to get most of those students to graduate from high school well-educated and prepared for college, even if it takes an extra year or two.

I would also hazard a guess that in a few years, things will start to get a lot easier at Amistad High. Achievement First has been assembling its own version of Geoffrey Canada's "conveyor belt"; this year, for the first time, one of the group's charter elementary schools began feeding students into one of their middle schools with four years of Achievement First education under their belts—arriving ahead of grade level instead of well behind it. It seems a safe bet that the experience those students have in ninth grade, a few years from now, will be a lot smoother than the experience of the kids now enrolled at Amistad High.

To me, the struggles at Amistad High point to the same two conclusions as do the attrition issues at the Bay Area KIPP schools: First, that the KIPP/Achievement First middle-school model can achieve truly remarkable levels of success among the kind of students—low-income, behind grade-level, a less-than-ideal home life—who just a few years ago were routinely written off altogether. And second, that if and when these middle schools are linked together with equally well-run elementary schools and high schools  (and then, I hope, with high-quality prekindergartens, parenting programs, and community and family supports), they will be able to achieve much more: better and more consistent results from a broader selection of students. If that happens—and at Amistad, it may begin as soon as this year—what now seems miraculous will, I hope, come to seem downright routine.

^* I'd like to provide a link to the New Haven Register story reporting those figures, but it's not easily available on line. The reference, should anyone want to Nexis it, is: Maria Garriga, "Charter school group ups the ante on scores," New Haven Register, Aug. 7, 2007.

Locke High: The Real Charter Challenge

Green Dot was founded by Steve Barr, a garrulous, outspoken Irish American in his late 40s who helped start Rock the Vote in 1990 and nine years later decided his role in life was to run high schools. His organization now manages 10 of them, mostly in L.A., and his new mission is to transform the way public education works in the city (and then in the rest of the country).

Barr is a bit of a bomb-thrower, and Locke is his most recent incendiary device. Two years ago, with the support of a few hundred dissatisfied parents of Locke students, he persuaded more than half of the Locke faculty to sign a petition calling for the L.A. Unified School District to turn the school over to Green Dot's control, and in September 2007, the school district reluctantly handed over the keys. Barr hopes to show the district that he can run a big urban high school better than it can. And he hopes to show the L.A. teachers union that the bare-bones 33-page contract that Green Dot's unionized teachers sign is a lot better than the 300-page contract that the regular union has with the L.A. school district. In the process, Barr hopes to change the way both institutions do business.

Last year was a transitional one for Locke, and it didn't go very well. Green Dot hadn't yet taken over, but the district had already more or less moved out. The result was a disastrous year for the students, culminating in a schoolwide brawl in May that involved as many as 600 students and brought dozens of police officers to the campus, some in riot gear.

Barr showed me around Locke yesterday morning. I never saw the pre-Green Dot Locke, so I didn't have anything to compare it with, but things looked calm and orderly, students wearing their new polo-shirt uniform tucked into their new regulation khakis. There were no fisticuffs.

The Locke project is in many ways a risky undertaking. It's hard to turn around miseducated ninth graders. And Locke is unlike other charters, in that families don't have to fill out a special application to attend. If they live in the neighborhood, Locke is their high school. As the L.A. Times pointed out recently,

it's one thing to make progress with students who voluntarily sign up for a rigorous academic environment and whose parents actively support the endeavor. Green Dot's experience with Locke's many doubt-filled teens will provide a more realistic measure of what charter schools can do for poor and minority students who typically have lower test scores and higher dropout rates. And if it succeeds, Green Dot will have created a blueprint for public schools.

Of course, what makes the project somewhat less risky is that after last year, the school has nowhere to go but up.

To all San Franciscans: I'll be reading and discussing Whatever It Takes tonight (Tuesday) at 7 p.m. at the Books Inc. in Opera Plaza, an event co-sponsored by 826 Valencia, the drop-in tutoring center for kids who want help with their writing. And tomorrow (Wednesday), I'll be giving a talk at lunch at the University of California-Berkeley journalism school, an event hosted by Berkeley professors Michael Pollan and David Kirp. If you're in the neighborhood, please drop by.

The Attrition Problem

In Wednesday's post, I mentioned a new study of the KIPP middle schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. I still haven't read the whole study (it's 140 pages), but I've read a good chunk, along with a report from the San Francisco Chronicle and one from the San Francisco Examiner. The study shows mixed results, and they're mixed in an intriguing way.

First, the five KIPP schools studied do, on the whole, a very good job of raising the achievement level of the students enrolled in them. Eighty percent of the students progressed faster than normal, and at the end of fifth grade, KIPP students outperformed their "matched counterparts"—demographically similar students at other schools who began fifth grade at the same academic level—by anywhere from five to 33 points on a percentile ranking.

Second, the KIPP schools didn't attract higher-scoring students than other schools in their districts. This is important, and it was somewhat surprising to me. In my 2006 article in the Times Magazine about the achievement gap, I wrote about the fact that at the KIPP Academy in the Bronx, one of KIPP's two flagship schools, incoming students were above average for the neighborhood:

Even though almost every student at the KIPP Academy ... is from a low-income family, and all but a few are either black or Hispanic, and most enter below grade level, they are still a step above other kids in the neighborhood; on their math tests in the fourth grade (the year before they arrived at KIPP), KIPP students in the Bronx scored well above the average for the district, and on their fourth-grade reading tests they often scored above the average for the entire city.

The new study shows that even though that phenomenon may be a reality in the Bronx, it's not happening in the Bay Area. The report says that "students with lower prior achievement in [English] or mathematics were more likely to attend each of three KIPP schools, compared with other same-grade students in the same neighborhood." That makes KIPP's accomplishment in raising the scores of their students even more impressive.

But the third big piece of news in the report, on attrition, is less impressive. Sixty percent of the students who enrolled in fifth grade at the three KIPP schools studied had left their school by the end of eighth grade. Some of those students left simply because their family moved out of the district. (KIPP school leaders estimated that family moves accounted for 42 percent of the leavers.) But many of the rest of the students left, it seems, because KIPP was too demanding or difficult for them. One school leader is quoted as saying, "I think for a cohort of students and families, it was harder than they thought it was going to be. Our expectations were more than they had anticipated."

If that's true of KIPP schools across the country, it means that they're accomplishing an important but somewhat limited mission: providing an excellent education to that group of low-performing, low-income students who are able to keep up with the schools' intense demands.

Green Dot

The divide between the teachers unions and the charter-school crowd often seems unbridgeable. At an education-reform forum in Denver last month, on the eve of the Democratic Convention, Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark and a member of the pro-charter Education Equality Project, spoke out against the unions, noting how "vicious" they can be:

Ten years ago, when I started talking about school choice, I was tarred and feathered. ... I literally was brought into a room by a [teachers] union [representative] ... and threatened that I would never win in office if I kept talking about school choice, if I kept talking about charter schools."

When collaborations—or even kind words—between the two sides do come along these days, they can seem all the more startling. Take the new Green Dot school in the Bronx.

Green Dot Public Schools is a charter-management organization that runs 12 charter high schools in Los Angeles. It's different from other successful charter groups, like KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools, in three important (and challenging) ways: Green Dot runs high schools instead of middle schools. The group specializes in "transformations" of existing failing public schools instead of starting their own from scratch. And their schools work with unionized teachers, unlike most charter schools.

Two weeks ago, Green Dot opened its first school outside of L.A., a charter in the South Bronx. What's unusual about the school is that it is run in a partnership with the United Federation of Teachers, the New York City teachers union. The ceremony marking the school's debut was a lion-lying-down-with-the-lamb moment: Joel Klein, New York's school superintendent, stood next to his frequent adversary, Randi Weingarten, the president of the UFT, as they cut the ribbon.

It's hard to know if the new school will be the beginning of a trend toward unionized charters—for now, there doesn't seem to be much enthusiasm for this kind of arrangement on the part of any charter provider but Green Dot. But at the very least it's a model for a new type of relationship between old enemies. And if the reform folks really want to scale up their no-excuses model to a point where it's big enough to change things for a significant number of kids across the country, it couldn't hurt to have the unions on board.

The Divide

The debate I wrote about yesterday, between the teachers-union wing of the Democratic Party and the pro-charter-school education-reform wing, is in some ways a symptom of a even deeper divide between two competing approaches to public education today.

On one side, you have people who think that the most important determiner of educational success is demographic. I've heard from a lot of teachers these past two weeks who have voiced this feeling: Low-income students come to them from broken homes and dangerous neighborhoods with poor reading skills and a slack work ethic, and it's just not fair to expect teachers to achieve high-quality results with those students.

On the other side, you have people who say that talk like that is nothing more than a convenient excuse for continued educational failure, a way to perpetuate an unaccountable school system. They say there's lots of evidence, especially coming out of some new and innovative charter schools, that we can make a huge dent in the problems of poor kids using extended class hours and intensive teaching methods.

There are two new advocacy groups that more or less represent the two sides of this debate. On one side you have a group of scholars and social scientists who call themselves the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. They call for increased spending on early-childhood education, health care, and other social supports instead of an emphasis on school reform alone.

On the other side, you have the Education Equality Project, led by Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, and the Rev. Al Sharpton. They call for legislative changes that would enable the people who are creating those successful experiments: more charter schools, the kind of teacher-pay reforms I wrote about last week, increased school choice.

These two groups announced their formation on consecutive days in June, and ever since, they've kind of been at one another's throats.

There are many people I admire on both sides of this divide. Geoffrey Canada, the subject of my new book, signed on to the Education Equality Project; James Heckman, the economist whose work I hold up in the book as the most persuasive evidence that the Harlem Children's Zone could have a transformative effect in the lives of poor children, signed on with the Broader, Bolder Approach. Wise scholars like Glenn Loury and Christopher Jencks and William Julius Wilson are on the Broader team; innovative superintendents like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee and Michael Bennet are on the Equality side.

There doesn't seem to be much common ground.

So, I'm going to suggest a compromise.

To those in the Broader camp: Let's admit that our public schools could be serving poor kids much, much better than they are today, and that in order to do that, they need a radical overhaul right away. Let's agree that the best charter schools, like KIPP and Achievement First and Green Dot, have found a whole new way of educating disadvantaged children, and that it works. So, why not embrace looser contracts like the one proposed in D.C. and the one adopted in Denver. Help persuade teachers to give up some job security in exchange for more pay. Help the school systems get rid of poor-performing teachers—not just a few of them, but a big swath, the whole bottom tier. And to replace them, let's create alternative certification programs and encourage unconventional career paths that will attract the kind of committed young overachievers who actually want to teach in the most challenging classrooms but can't stand the thought of slogging their way through a couple of years of education school.

To those in the Education Equality camp: Let's admit that alone, even the best charter schools can't fix the crisis in the nation's worst urban neighborhoods. Let's agree that if we truly want to be data-driven, we should accept the data that say that the most effective time to intervene in a poor child's life is in infancy, before that child ever gets into the school system. So, why not apply some of your intelligence, passion, organizational talent, and financial resources to building out-of-school supports like prekindergartens, parenting programs, and family counseling? Let's figure out how to take the accountability methods and organizational structures you've brought to middle schools and apply them to preschools. Let's figure out how best to provide poorly educated and overstressed parents with new strategies for preparing their kids for school. Let's build a new kind of no-excuses school, one that is integrated with an early-childhood program and a strategy to improve the surrounding community.

It may be wishful thinking, but that's where I believe Obama is trying to push his party. And I do think it's a path toward a real solution to some of the problems that seem most unsolvable—not only in our schools, but in our inner-city neighborhoods as well.

Obama Speaks

Speaking of the country's education debate: In Dayton, Ohio, yesterday, Barack Obama delivered a major speech on education reform.

Last weekend, I wrote in the Times Magazine that Obama was facing a schism in the Democratic Party over education, with the teachers unions on one side and a new, accountability-focused group of education reformers on the other. Each camp, I wrote, was trying to claim Obama for their own, parsing his speeches and policy pronouncements, looking for clues that he favored their approach.

To me, yesterday's speech sounded more like the words of a pro-charter reformer than a union loyalist. Obama pledged to double federal funding on charter schools and to make teachers more accountable for the success of their students, saying, "Teachers who are doing a poor job will get extra support, but if they still don't improve, they'll be replaced."

But union folks, it seems, liked what they heard as well. Just after Obama's speech, I spoke with Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, and she told me she thought the speech was "very important." She pointed to Obama's support for a measure that would make it easier to close failing charter schools and said she admired his plan to increase the number of high-school students taking college-level or AP courses. The speech, she said, "had a balance of a great tone—even though there were things we disagreed with—along with some serious, concrete proposals."

For someone (like me) who finds the politics of education generally depressing and dysfunctional, what really stood out in the speech was its scope, the recognition that the system needs big, big change: not just charter schools or vouchers or better teacher pay but a complete overhaul. As Obama put it:

We need a new vision for a 21st century education—one where we aren't just supporting existing schools, but spurring innovation; where we're not just investing more money, but demanding more reform; where parents take responsibility for their children's success; where our schools and government are accountable for results; where we're recruiting, retaining, and rewarding an army of new teachers, and students are excited to learn because they're attending schools of the future; and where we expect all our children not only to graduate high school, but to graduate college and get a good paying job.

It's time to ask ourselves why other countries are outperforming us in education. Because it's not that their kids are smarter than ours—it's that they're being smarter about how to educate their kids. They're spending less time teaching things that don't matter and more time teaching things that do. Their students are spending more time in school, and they're setting higher expectations.

I think there are people on each side of the standoff within the Democratic Party who know that the eventual solution is going to require both sides to give something up. But neither wants to be the one to go first. And so for now, the debate feels stuck. It's exactly why I think a broad vision of reform like the one Obama laid out is potentially important—it might serve as something of a peace treaty, a chance for both sides to lay down their arms and figure out the real solutions to the country's education crisis.

Welcome to the Blog

For the month of September, Slate has invited me to blog about schools, education reform, parenting, and poverty. I’m an editor at the New York Times Magazine, where I’ve written cover stories, in recent years, on school reform in New Orleans, on the achievement gap and charter schools, and on the Harlem Children’s Zone. I’m also the author of a new book, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America, that will be published next week.

I fell into these subjects more or less by accident—I started reporting on Geoff and his project simply because I found his ideas on poverty so intriguing. But as I worked on this book over the last five years, I came to appreciate that I had stumbled into a particularly fertile moment in education, with heated political debates, surprising scholarship, and promising initiatives underway around the country.

I’m hoping to use this blog over the month as a place to explore some of those ideas and developments, as well as news from the presidential campaign and elsewhere. If you’ve got comments or suggestions for me along the way, please send them to me at slateschoolhouserock@gmail.com. Thanks for reading.