Success Academy is a big-time success story, as Charles Sahm makes clear (“What Explains Success at Success Academy?” features, Summer 2015). But what are the general lessons to be learned from the many case studies of successful chartering? Does it take the exceptional leadership of Success Academies’ Eva Moskowitz? Are school uniforms and a “no excuses” ethos the decisive ingredients (KIPP schools)? Are longer school days and an extended school year critical? Is data-based instruction the solution (Achievement First)? How important is a demanding academic curriculum (BASIS schools)? Are class-integrated schools the key (Rhode Island)? Or is personalized instruction the crucial element (Carpe Diem and Summit Schools)? Or is the one essential ingredient the capacity to recruit high-quality teachers and administrators (all of the schools above)?

That last thought came to mind upon reading the latest study on urban charter schools from CREDO (Center for Research on Education Outcomes), which tells us that students in charter schools in 41 metropolitan areas are, on average, outperforming the district-run schools that charter students would otherwise have attended by about “40 days of additional learning per year in math [0.055] and 28 additional days of learning per year in reading [0.039].” (Numbers indicate the average difference in the performance of charter and district students in standard deviations.)

But the overall findings, encouraging as they are, struck me as less telling than the city-by-city comparisons. The cities with the highest-performing charters in math are, in order, Boston (0.324), Newark (0.233), Bay Area [San Francisco] (0.190), New York City (0.145), District of Columbia (0.134), Memphis (0.135), New Orleans (0.119), Milwaukee (0.091), Detroit (0.090),and Southern California [Los Angeles area] (0.080).

Charter students in the top seven of these areas are gaining at least 80 days more of math learning each year, and, in Boston, students are gaining an extra year!

By contrast, the 10 urban areas in which charter students are underperforming by the widest margin relative to their district peers include, in order, Fort Worth (-0.140), Las Vegas (-0.114), El Paso (-0.089), Phoenix (-0.080), Fort Myers (-0.063), Mesa (-0.063), West Palm Beach (-0.033), San Antonio (-0.030), Orlando (-0.014)), and Austin (-0.011).

Results for reading are broadly similar, although New York City, Milwaukee, and Southern California fall out of the top 10, to be replaced by Nashville, Indianapolis, and South Bay (Silicon Valley).

Others may wish to perform statistical tests that estimate the economic and social factors that correlate with urban charter performance, but the “eyeball” test—that is, what hits one straight in the middle of the eye at first glance—points directly toward the availability of young, energetic, capable teachers, administrators, and entrepreneurs within the metropolitan areas.

Certainly, the top five locales—Boston, Newark, San Francisco, New York City, and the District of Columbia—serve as hothouses of young talent for charter operators. Even the second-tier cities are suggestive. Charters in Memphis and New Orleans are known for attracting Teach for America teachers and others no less talented. Milwaukee and Detroit benefit from two of the most prestigious state universities in the country. Given the talent in Los Angeles, one wonders why charters there are not doing even better.

By comparison, the cities in which charters are trailing district schools typically find it difficult to attract well-educated young people. That fashionable, rapidly growing Austin, Texas, made the poor-performing list is perhaps the biggest surprise. A partial explanation for its presence (and that of three other urban Texas areas) is the relatively high quality of Texas public schools, which rank among the country’s best for African Americans and Hispanics on the National Assessment of educational Progress (NAEP). If the public schools are pretty good, then the charter schools need to be that much better if they are to show up as high-performing.

Phoenix is another surprise. In this case, the cause might be Arizona’s early “Wild West” charter law, which allowed for the creation of a plethora of poor-performing charters that nearly destroyed the charter movement nationwide.

The latest CREDO results deserve further analysis. But the initial takeaway, at least for me, is that we cannot create great charter schools without great entrepreneurs, great administrators, and great teachers.

That will not happen at scale until our schools of education, or alternative training institutions, turn out high-quality educators by the bucket full. And until charters have the opportunity to recruit and retain the best teachers, free of artificial licensing constraints.

– Paul E. Peterson

Howard Fuller’s memoir, written with Lisa Frazier Page, chronicles his journey from political activist to school superintendent and back again, revealing along the way the monumental challenge of ensuring that poor black children have access to a high-quality education. The excerpts below begin in the 1980s and detail the origins of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which today enables more than 25,000 low-income students to attend more than 100 Milwaukee private schools. 

Many of us in the community were searching for radical ideas that would give poor and working class parents alternatives to public schools that were failing their children, and a proposal to support publicly-financed vouchers that allow children from low-income families to attend private schools emerged. At the time, I knew nothing about the history of vouchers and had never even heard of economist Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winner who is generally given credit for first suggesting in the mid-1950s that tax dollars for education should follow the child. He argued that such competition for those tax dollars would force public schools to improve.

I’d eventually learn, though, that conservatives, like Friedman, were not the only ones trying to advance the idea of vouchers. By the early 1960s, others on the opposite end of the political spectrum also were making the argument that vouchers were a viable alternative for getting around the bureaucracy and ineffectiveness of many public schools. To me, vouchers just seemed like the next step in a logical progression of the struggle. Our efforts to change the system hadn’t worked, and so we had to have a way for low-income parents to opt out of it. Families with means already had the freedom to choose. If they didn’t like their neighborhood schools, they had the resources to move their children elsewhere. I believed poor and working-class families should have that same opportunity.

There had been a change in the leadership of the Milwaukee Public Schools with the selection of Dr. Robert S. Peterkin as the new Superintendent. He had named as his Deputy Superintendent, Dr. Deborah McGriff, who had come with him from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where there was a version of parent choice within the school system. Bob and Debbie, both African American, were open to some kind of choice program in Milwaukee, and they met with a number of community leaders, both Black and white, who had been pushing for a choice program for quite a while. The meetings were productive, and Bob and Debbie actually had agreed on some broad parameters for a voucher program to allow low-income parents to access private schools that had a proven record of educating poor children.

But somewhere in the process, the teachers’ union got involved and interjected language that was unacceptable to the community.

So, community leaders again turned to State Representative Polly Williams and her assistant, Larry Harwell, who together drafted a bill creating the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. Under the program, children from low-income families would receive state aid to attend non-religious, private schools.

Democrats, who controlled the legislature at the time, did not support vouchers as a party, and Polly had a difficult time even getting the measure heard during the 1989 legislative session. The chairwoman of the State Assembly’s Education Committee refused to put the bill on the agenda for a public hearing, but Larry and Polly organized a campaign that included calling the chairwoman non-stop until she changed her mind. The hearing was held at the Milwaukee Public Schools auditorium, and I was involved in the organizing effort that pulled together hundreds of parents, students, and other community members, who packed the meeting room. We selected powerful speakers to represent them. Polly and others did the necessary politicking behind the scenes, but on the day of the hearing we knew we were still at least one vote short of the majority needed to move the bill out of the committee and onto the Assembly floor. But when it came time for a vote, Kim Plache, a Democrat who had not been supportive of vouchers, astonished her colleagues by voting in favor of the measure.

She said that she could not in good conscience side against so many people in the community. Her critical vote kept the proposal alive.

Polly then worked with State Senator Gary George, a Black legislator who represented the north side of Milwaukee, to get the new program and financing for it included as part of the state budget bill. It would have been impossible to get the program into the proposed budget without the support of Senator George, then co-chairman of the Joint Finance Committee, the legislature’s budget writing body. I have no idea what deal Polly and Gary worked out to get his support for including the measure as part of the budget. But if the program had moved forward as a separate measure, it likely would not have passed.

Another important part of this story was the election of Tommy Thompson, a Republican, who had defeated my old boss, Tony Earl, as Governor. As much as I respected Tony, I realized that if he had won re-election, I am fairly certain he would have vetoed the program.

Tommy was a supporter of parent choice and over the years became a huge ally in keeping the program alive. But Polly should get the lion’s share of credit for pulling together a coalition of Republicans and moderate Democrats—a group she would later call “The Unholy Alliance”—to get the program through the legislature. So, it is important to note that the program, which initially involved just seven schools and 337 children, started out with bi-partisan support.

All of the Black leaders who supported vouchers, most especially Polly, took a lot of abuse from critics, who made all kinds of wild claims, including that conservatives were using us to push their own hidden agenda. But I believe strongly in the concept of “interest convergence,” which my friend, the late Derrick Bell, taught me. Derrick, a scholar and activist who had been the first Black tenured law professor at Harvard University, explained that Black people in this country have made progress only when our interests converged with the interests of people in power. For example, our people made progress during the Civil Rights Movement largely because of our own struggle, of course. But at a certain point, our interests converged with the interests of those in power, who were trying to convince the rest of the world that democracy was a better form of government
than communism.

It was certainly hard to do that with Bull Connor siccing dogs on Black people. So, those in power moved to stop those kinds of actions.

I have ALWAYS been clear that some of the people with whom I’ve been aligned on the parent choice issue are in the battle for very different reasons than mine. We do not share the same world view.

We have a temporary merger of interests that don’t necessarily extend beyond parent choice. Nevertheless, when the legislature approved the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program near the end of the 1989 legislative session for implementation in the 1990-91 school year, it was a monumental victory for the parent choice movement.

The Milwaukee movement would experience another major victory six years later when the voucher program was expanded to include religious schools. By then, Republicans controlled both houses of the legislature, and with Tommy, a Republican, still the governor, most people began to view the program primarily as a Republican-led initiative.

Opponents would claim that the inclusion of religious schools among the choices for parents violated the separation of church and state, required by the federal constitution, and they challenged the program in court. The Wisconsin Supreme Court eventually would uphold the decision, and with religious schools among the options for parents, the program began to flourish. That growth would cause some serious battles down the road. There was no denying that the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program had given steam to a nationwide movement that was taking off.

In time, I would find a permanent home in that movement. But first, my life would take a sudden and unexpected turn after Bob Peterkin made a stunning announcement that he was leaving his job as Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent at the end of his contract in June 1991 to take a position at Harvard University.

* * *

Sometime before Bob’s big announcement, I got a call from Deborah McGriff, his Deputy, who called to invite me to breakfast. She broke the news that her boss was leaving, and asked if I would support her to replace him. I gave her an enthusiastic YES!! She was perfect for the job—a smart, tough sister who had the credentials and the skills, and I knew she cared deeply about our children.

I’d met Debbie in 1988, soon after Bob, who had been Superintendent of Schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts, brought her from his old administration to help him in Milwaukee. To background themselves on the city and its schools, they read old newspaper stories and talked to community leaders, who told them about my involvement in the effort to create a separate school district. As Debbie later put it, she and Bob knew all about “the crazy Black man who was trying to take part of the school district.” She told me that Bob assigned her to meet with me and try to figure out what I wanted. But I clarified my intentions as soon as we met: “I don’t know what you’ve heard about me,” I told her. “But I want you to be successful.” My fight against the school system had been purely about the kids and what was best for them, I explained. If she and Bob could improve the schools for the children of Milwaukee, especially for poor kids, that’s exactly what I wanted. Debbie and I discussed the need for the school district and the Department of Health and Human Services to work together, and we actually became good friends. The two of us were even able to secure a shared $5 million grant between our organizations to create an innovative program that provided intervention to help keep needy families together and their children out of the foster care system. The program also set up protocols for the two systems to work together on identifying and reporting child abuse of MPS students.

By early March 1991, the Mil-waukee Board of School Directors had narrowed its search for a superintendent to two people, and Debbie was one of them. Then, something unexpected happened. I learned from someone I trusted that she didn’t have the votes to win. It was never clear to me exactly why, but I was told that some board members were hesitant to hire a woman for the job. It was ridiculous and sexist. I heard that one member even expressed concern privately that Debbie, who is petite in stature, wouldn’t be able to break up fights, as if that is among the duties of a superintendent. When it was clear to me that Debbie could not get the votes needed to win, I started listening to some of my supporters in the community who were urging me to throw my hat in the ring. I called Debbie and told her what I had learned and that, because of it, I’d decided to seek the position.

By then, she, too, had heard that the board did not plan to select her, and she was already interviewing in other school districts across the country. But it still hurt her to hear that I was going after the job. Our conversation ended abruptly, and for a few months she refused even to speak to me. It was never my intention to hurt or betray Debbie, and to this day, I think she should have gotten the job. I just knew it wasn’t going to happen, and I didn’t want to see someone else from outside our city become the next Superintendent. I also was intrigued by the idea of seeing if, after so many years of being a critic, I could actually make the district better for our kids. At the very least, I knew no one would work harder trying.

The problem with my seeking the job was that I had never worked as an elementary or secondary school teacher or principal. Wisconsin law required school superintendents in the state to have a minimum of three years of elementary or secondary teaching experience and a state license to work as a supervisor in the schools. That stipulation seemed unnecessary for a job that was to me about setting a vision for the district, managing high-level employees, dealing with board politics, handling relationships with the press, the community, and the unions, and most important, using the bully pulpit to fight for kids. I felt that I had been uniquely prepared for the job by my myriad of roles both inside and outside of education, and so I turned to legislators with whom I’d developed good working relationships over the years to change state law. Fourteen state representatives ended up co-signing a bill that would waive the teaching and licensing requirements for a school superintendent in Milwaukee. Six senators introduced an identical bill. Soon after the measures became public, the NAACP and representatives of five Black church groups held a press conference in Milwaukee to denounce the move. The ministers not only expressed their disapproval of the legislation, but they attacked me personally. When reporters called me for comment, though, I refused to respond. I’d learned long ago not to allow this kind of criticism to creep into my soul. What mattered at the end of the day was what those who were making the decision thought. Another group of ministers held an event at a local church to publicly express their support for me and went to Madison to testify in favor of the bill that would allow me to become superintendent. The measure passed easily through the legislature, clearing the way for the school board to interview me for the job.

I knew from the start that some board members had mixed opinions of me. Board President Jeanette Mitchell was one of them. She told me later that she had heard I was very polarizing and jumped from job to job. But she also had heard that I was a dedicated and effective leader, and so she decided to keep an open mind. I’m glad she did because she would become one of my strongest supporters. For my first interview, the board arranged a secret meeting in a private room at the Chicago airport. I was surprised to see reporters waiting with their questions as I arrived. I wore my favorite tie, a bright, colorful one with sketches of kids all over it from an organization called “Save the Children.” The tie captured perfectly my priority, the children. I had spent many hours thinking of what I wanted for the children of Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), and during the interview I laid out five specific goals that would guide me as superintendent:

· That all children become lifelong learners who maximize their intellectual, emotional, physical, and moral capabilities

· That those who attend college immediately upon graduation do so without needing to spend their first year in remedial classes

· That those who immediately enter the world of work have the skills and attitudes they need to secure at least an entry-level job and receive the same rigorous preparation as those who immediately go on to college

· That some of them develop an entrepreneurial spirit that would enable them to create jobs and wealth for themselves and their community

· That all of them engage in what Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Friere calls “the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”

Every child has the capacity to learn and succeed, I told board members, but the school system needed to do more to prepare them. I’d never forgotten my time at Marquette when a young lady from MPS entered the Educational Opportunity Program with a 3.6 grade point average and had never taken a college preparatory course. Even with the program’s support, she was not able to enroll in Marquette. The system was failing so many of our children who wanted to go to college but had no idea how inadequately prepared they were. I also discussed my plans to add technical training to the curriculum so that students who had no intentions of attending college graduated from high school at least with skills that would help them land good-paying jobs. But this would be accomplished without diluting the academic rigor of the curriculum.

The board interviewed me a second time at the school administration building on Friday, May 17, but I had no idea they would meet afterward and decide to begin negotiations to hire me. Jeanette made the surprise announcement during a press conference after the meeting. She said the board would vote on my contract at its May 29th meeting. When I walked into my house on the night after my second interview, my telephone was ringing, and there had been so many other calls that my answering machine was full and could take no more messages. Jeanette and several friends were calling to congratulate me.

On the night of the board’s final vote, I first served as a disc jockey (one of my favorite hobbies) at a fundraiser for Mayor John Norquist, who was among the public officials who had supported my appointment as superintendent. Then, I headed to the school board meeting in time for the board’s vote on whether to extend me a three-year contract. The decision was unanimous, nine to zero. A huge sense of relief and excitement rushed through me, and I jumped onto the stage of the auditorium and shook hands with each board member. I had brought with me two Milwaukee Area Technical College students who lived in the Hillside housing project, where I’d spent part of my youth. My comments to the media afterward were in part aimed at inspiring them: “I think it’s significant,” I said, “that someone from the projects is going to be superintendent of schools.”

I had no time to waste. The new school year was just months away, and the board was already into its new budget cycle. The vote took place on a Wednesday, and I wrapped things up at the county and started as superintendent the following Monday. Even though the public vote was unanimous, it became evident to me right away that behind the scenes was another matter. During my first strategy meeting with the board shortly after the vote, I was not even allowed to speak. I sat there the entire time, ready to present my “Strategy for Change,” and none of the board members asked me  a single question or recognized me to say a word. The tension was thick, and I was fuming. The next day, I wrote an open letter to the board and sent it to the newspaper. In it, I threatened to quit if I were not treated with more dignity. Jeanette then convened a closed meeting for the board members and me to talk. Some of the members were downright angry that I had been selected. Jeanette told me later that I had been able to get enough votes to win primarily because I was local. Bob’s departure after just three years had stunned and upset the board, and my supporters argued that I would be more vested in the system since I had grown up in Milwaukee and was a product of its public schools. That swayed enough undecided members to give me the majority, but there was lingering resentment. My opponents complained that I had tried to destroy the school system with my leadership role in the North Division and independent school district controversies and my support of parental choice. But they were outnumbered and had felt pressured by their colleagues, the community, and the media to vote for me and put forth a united front in public. During our private meeting, some of them questioned me vigorously about how my support for parental choice would play out in my role as superintendent. They would not stand for me to be out advocating for parental choice, while at the same time trying to lead the school system, they said. But I pushed back, telling them point blank that I would never denounce educational options for parents or even say that I was not supportive of choice. As a compromise, though, I agreed that since I was now the superintendent, I would not discuss parental choice publicly or advocate for it. I assured the board that I wanted what they wanted: a better public school system to help all of our children to be more successful. When the nine board members and I finally stepped out of the meeting together three hours later, some of them were wearing T-shirts bearing my photograph and the words “Join Dr. Howard Fuller in the Crusade to Save Our Children.” The shirts had been made during my time with the county when I organized an effort to get the community more involved in ending child abuse.

I moved right into my role as superintendent. The first day was full of the kind of ceremonial stuff that takes place when there’s a change of administrations. But it was important to me to visit a school, and so five hours after being sworn into office at city hall, I made my way to Granville Elementary. I had visited the school in January to speak to the students about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in honor of his birthday. When the students heard that I had become superintendent, they and their teacher wrote and invited me back for another visit. I decided it would be the perfect way to start my new job. From the moment I stepped into the classroom and saw the students’ cheery faces, I couldn’t help smiling. They reminded me of why this job was so important. They were relying on those of us in charge to make sure they were ready for a world they could barely even envision. I wish they knew how much I wanted to do my part and give them the best opportunity for success. I encouraged them to do their part by aiming high: “Each one of you can go on to college,” I told them. “Each one of you can go on to be whatever it is you want to go on to be.”

Dr. Howard Fuller is professor of education and founder of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University. He is board chair and cofounder of the Black Alliance for Educational Options. He married Dr. Deborah McGriff in 1995.

“What’s going on at Success Academy?” Lots of folks are asking that question, thanks to the eye-popping test scores achieved by students at Eva Moskowitz’s network of New York City charter schools.

Last year, 29 percent of New York City kids were considered proficient in English and 35 percent in math on the state’s challenging Common Core–aligned exams. For Success students, the proficiency rates were 64 percent in English and an astonishing 94 percent in math. Success students in the city’s poorest communities outperformed kids in the wealthiest suburbs. If the network were a single school, it would rank in the top 1 percent of the state’s 3,560 schools in math and the top 3 percent in English.

Success’s first school opened in 2006. Today, the network has 32 schools serving 9,000 students: 24 elementary schools (K–4), 7 middle schools (grades 5–8), and a new high school. Over the next two years, 13 additional schools will open. Success could soon be educating 21,000 students—about 2 percent of the 1.1 million children in New York City public schools. No other charter network has grown this fast and achieved such stellar results.

I’ve been endeavoring to figure out what is happening at Success for some time. I’ve visited four schools and interviewed two dozen teachers and principals and the network’s directors of literacy and math, as well as Eva Moskowitz. I’ve spoken with parents, critics, and former Success teachers. I’ve exchanged scores of e-mails with the network’s indefatigable communications director, Ann Powell. I read Moskowitz’s 2012 book (coauthored with Arin Lavinia), Mission Possible: How the Secrets of the Success Academies Can Work in Any School.

So what’s going on? Outwardly, Success is similar to other “no excuses” (Moskowitz dislikes that term) charter schools: students are called “scholars” and wear uniforms; a longer school day and year allow for about one-third more instruction time than district schools provide; rooms are named after the teacher’s alma mater; a culture of discipline and high expectations reigns. What separates Success, in my opinion, is a laser focus on what is being taught, and how.

The What: Content Is King

At Success, content is king. Take blocks: kindergartners everywhere play with wooden blocks, but Success has a blocks curriculum. Children work together in small groups on a crude architectural sketch before constructing a project. One child from each group explains what they’ve built to the other students. Bookcases contain wonderful books—13 Buildings Children Should Know, My New York, Architects Make Zigzags, Block City—that expose children to great buildings, past and present, from around the world. (Teachers are quick to tell me that block play should remain fun and kid-driven, so they don’t overuse the books, which are there for inspiration rather than a “blueprint.”)

The thoughtful way Success approaches a simple thing like blocks reflects the ethos that infuses the entire network: everything has a purpose. Moskowitz calls it “joyful rigor”—an apt description of what I saw in every Success classroom I visited.

Success has developed its own English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum, THINK Literacy. At first, Success used Success for All reading but felt it wasn’t rich enough. (The network still uses Success for All’s “Reading Roots” program to teach decoding skills in kindergarten and 1st grade.) THINK Literacy is based on the controversial “balanced literacy” Teachers College Reading and Writing Workshop model, which emphasizes independent reading (see “The Lucy Calkins Project,” features, Summer 2007). Research conducted in New York City’s traditional schools indicates that balanced literacy doesn’t build the knowledge and vocabulary that children—especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds—need to move beyond basic literacy, but Success adds tons of content to it.

“THINK Literacy is balanced literacy on steroids,” Moskowitz writes in Mission Possible. She believes that the choice between content and skills is false: “The two approaches are not mutually exclusive,” she tells me. “Kids need to be excellent and avid readers…. For that, you also need to have context and background knowledge.” THINK Literacy includes Reading Workshop (independent reading and small-group direct instruction); Guided Reading (students read more-challenging books, with help from teachers); Read Aloud (teachers read books aloud, and students discuss the major ideas); and Shared Text (close reading of short texts, emphasizing central meaning and literary techniques). Each day, students spend two hours on some combination of these four components.

Elementary students complete two “project-based learning” units in each grade, where students read and write about a particular subject for six weeks. In 4th grade, for example, children learn about the American Revolution. This year, Success is piloting two additional two-week “mini Core Knowledge” project-based learning units. “We love [Core Knowledge founder] E. D. Hirsch,” says Michele Caracappa, Success’s director of literacy.

In middle school, Success adds independent reading time and includes a literature class. Students receive iPads loaded with books. Middle-school students must read seven key texts, typically comprising four novels, two nonfiction books, and one of poetry. (I saw middle-school students in Harlem reading The Block, which combines poetry of Langston Hughes with paintings of Harlem Renaissance artist Romare Bearden.)

Writing skills are emphasized in daily workshops from kindergarten through 8th grade. In later grades, students produce longer pieces across several genres, going through the entire writing process. Much focus is on revision; teachers are trained to give targeted feedback.

Success’s children’s literature expert, Sara Yu, fills the schools with rich, engaging books at all levels. Yu worked for many years at the highly regarded bookstore affiliated with the Bank Street College of Education. She notes that the books aren’t selected only to produce competent readers, but also to expose children to “relevant, important, beautiful material … diverse cultures, economic backgrounds, settings, and characters.”

This devotion to content pays off. At the Success Academy in Bedford-Stuyvesant (one block from the Marcy Houses, the public housing complex where Jay Z grew up—still a tough neighborhood), 81 percent of 3rd graders were proficient in ELA last year (98 percent in math!). A 4th-grade English class dissects How My Parents Learned to Eat, the story of an American sailor learning to use chopsticks to impress his Japanese girlfriend. They learn words like “kimono” and distinctive features of Japanese culture. A 3rd-grade class closely reads the poem “Two Lives Are Yours,” and, with skillful guidance from the teacher, a young boy is able to discern the poem’s meaning: “reading lets you escape reality and enter new worlds.”

Success’s math curriculum is equally rigorous. As with ELA, Success found no off-the-shelf curriculum that met the needs of all students, so it developed its own. According to Stacey Gershkovich, director of math and science, the math scores are stellar because teachers “plan the lesson with a clear goal and use precise questioning and a carefully designed set of activities to lead scholars to learn, develop, or master a new concept each day.”

The Success ELA and math curricula are well aligned with Common Core State Standards, although Moskowitz notes that “Success was doing the Common Core before there was a Common Core.” Its math curriculum is constructivist. Besides encouraging student-generated strategies to solve math problems, Success devotes considerable effort in the early grades to honing students’ arithmetic skills. Its ELA curriculum focuses on getting students to read more (especially, challenging nonfiction that builds background knowledge), write more, and cite evidence for their ideas rather than just state opinions. (New York’s second-highest performing charter network, the seven Icahn schools in the Bronx, uses the content-rich Core Knowledge ELA curriculum, which is well aligned with the Common Core—further evidence that curriculum counts.)

Some suggest that the Common Core’s focus on English and math narrows the curriculum. But at Success, every student, beginning in kindergarten, takes a full-period, experiment-based science class daily. (Most public schools in New York don’t teach science daily until middle school.) No wonder 100 percent of Success 4th graders and 8th graders passed the 2014 state science exams, 99 percent scoring an advanced rating.

Success uses experiential learning to bring history to life. Second graders, for example, take part in a multiweek unit on the Brooklyn Bridge. They conduct experiments to learn the engineering principles behind bridge construction, read a biography of the project’s field engineer, Emily Roebling, and visit the bridge to record their observations. Success students participate in many field studies each year and take advantage of New York’s museums and cultural offerings.

Detractors suggest that Success is a test-prep factory where students are constantly drilled in English and math; but that’s not what I saw. I toured a Success middle school in Harlem during a 90-minute “flex” period. In one room, the chess team prepared for the national tournament; in another, students worked on the school newspaper; down the hall, students rehearsed a musical; in other rooms, students worked on art projects or learned computer coding. Success’s debate and chess teams have begun to win national awards.

Undoubtedly, there’s a focus on preparing for the state tests. Students take practice tests, results are posted in school hallways, and teachers are ranked according to how well their students perform. Students scoring poorly attend extra work sessions on Saturdays. Success holds “Slam the Exam” rallies to motivate students. No detail is overlooked: teachers wear quiet soft-soled shoes on test days and keep classrooms at a cool temperature.

Moskowitz views test prep through the lens of equity. “We think it’s our moral obligation to prepare kids for these tests,” she says. “[The tests] do have a bearing, not only on one’s future but on one’s relationship with tests. If kids do very poorly, we worry that they’ll think they can’t do it. We want our kids to go in confident.” She contends that test prep doesn’t crowd out authentic learning. “If you look at the scope and sequence of our curriculum, it is very, very robust. You cannot ace these Common Core tests with test prep. Our kids can interpret the meaning of a poem because they’ve read so much poetry.… When we are prepping for math, it’s open-ended math questions.”

Her response raises an interesting question: If tests are high quality and well aligned with a high-quality curriculum, is “teaching to the test” necessarily bad? I visited a 4th-grade English class where a boy was asked to identify the main idea from a short story. He started to retell the story. The teacher corrected him, and, with gentle prodding, he identified the author’s central point. Some might call that “test prep” because there are main-idea questions on the state exam. But it’s also a skill that’ll make that boy a better reader and communicator.

 The How: Quality Conversations

Moskowitz credits her (nonunion) teachers for the network’s impressive results. “It really is the level of preparation of the teacher and the teacher really understanding the book, the poem, the read-aloud…how much feedback the teacher gets.” Teacher preparation is another area where Success, not satisfied with the status quo, is forging its own path. In 2011, Success launched its own teacher-preparation program: Teacher Success Academy, or T-school.

New teachers participate in a four-week training session. One week is off-site at a college campus where teachers attend seminars and work with school leaders on mock lessons. Three weeks are spent working with Success’s summer-school students, under the watchful gaze of school leaders. Returning teachers participate in a two-week course before classes start, to sharpen their content knowledge and classroom-management techniques. New principals (“school leaders”), who have usually already worked for a year as “leadership residents,” also take a four-week course.

T-school is intense. Instructors place teachers on the hot seat, asking them, for example, to precisely identify the main idea in a college-level text. In Mission Possible, Moskowitz notes that a big part of T-school is “understanding the why”—the purpose behind what’s taught and the way Success handles instruction: “You can’t ask people to do something and take it seriously if they don’t know why they are doing it.” In T-school, teachers learn that “a good lesson flows like a quality conversation.”

Moskowitz hopes to open T-school to other charters, and even district teachers, and wants it someday to become a state-certified graduate school of education. Currently, Success teachers must attend an education school to obtain a master’s degree. But Success pays for promising college graduates to get a master’s in education from Touro College while teaching at Success.

Teachers at Success work hard and are paid fairly well: compensation is generally above what district teachers make, but Success teachers work many more hours. Unlike at many district schools, teachers are given preparation periods and collaborate frequently and practice lessons together. Rather than having a rigid evaluation system, school leaders regularly visit classrooms and quickly offer targeted feedback and recommendations on improving practice.

Principals act as their school’s instructional leader, in stark contrast to district schools, where principals, though accountable for school outcomes, have limited control over what’s being taught and how. (Recently, the New York City teachers union won an arbitration decision mandating that “lesson plans are for the personal use of the teacher” and that supervisors may not “mandate specific elements of lesson plans.”)

Teachers at Success access loads of technology. SMART Boards are in every classroom. Teachers are given MacBook Pros, and Success has an impressive IT system: everyone in the network can communicate with one another. Teachers and network leaders share videos of effective (and ineffective) lessons. Shortly before a lesson is taught across the network, an experienced teacher delivers (and video-records) the lesson early to her students, and shares the recording with other teachers.

Class sizes vary. Each kindergarten class has a lead teacher and an assistant. In all other grades, floating assistant teachers are shared across the grade. Generally, recent college grads and novice teachers cannot be lead teachers at Success; they must first serve as associate teachers, supporting lead teachers by helping with classroom management and working with students individually.

All the teachers I spoke with agree that Success prepares its teachers well. “You know the material at such a high level that it gives you a real confidence in the classroom,” one teacher stated. Even critical former teachers credited the network with having improved their craft.

Teachers spend much time on parental engagement, via e-mail, phone calls, and meetings. One mother of two Success students told me that her child never had homework at the district school she attended and that she “had to chase the teachers around to get a meeting.” At Success, she meets with her daughters’ teachers regularly, reviewing their “action plan.”

Teachers do complain about 10- to 12-hour days. The staff is young, and burnout is a factor. Critics have claimed that the teacher attrition rate at some schools is as high as 70 percent. But these absurdly high figures misread how charters differ from traditional public schools. When a teacher transfers from one Success school to another or takes a position at the network level, the state counts that teacher as “leaving.” Success insists that, across the entire network, the retention rate was 83 percent last year.

Some complain that Success has “teacher-proofed” its instruction. Lessons and materials are the same in each grade across all schools on any given day. With Success’s inquiry-based approach, however, teachers actually spend more time working individually with students than at other schools. Teachers often spend only ten minutes delivering direct instruction; the rest of the class period is devoted to hands-on learning, as students participate in guided reading and writing or grapple with a math problem.

Education news web site ChalkbeatNY featured a piece by a (non-Success) teacher who argued: “What each school needs is what Success has: a team of people whose primary job is to create a high-quality curriculum for their own school.” At Success’s headquarters, that support is evident. Folks scurry about the stark, modern offices on two floors of an office building in Lower Manhattan. (Success was formerly headquartered in Harlem, the location of its first schools. Its new offices are more centrally located for the growing citywide network.)

Miracle or Mirage?

So is Success a miracle? Or, as critics suggest, are the test scores a mirage? It’s too early to tell. Most schools are just a few years old and still adding grades. Although the network has 32 schools and 9,000 students this year, only 9 schools had 2,250 students in tested grades last year (only 340 in grade 6 or higher). And Success detractors do raise issues that warrant attention.

Critics assert that Success “creams” the best students. In 2013–14, 77 percent of Success students received free or reduced-price lunch, compared with 79 percent for city schools overall; 12 percent of Success students received special education services, compared with 18 percent for the city; 4 percent of Success students were English-language learners (ELL), compared with 13 percent for the city. Success officials note that 4 percent of their students are former special ed and 5 percent former ELL, and that Success students are declassified at a higher rate than kids in district schools. However, Success has relatively few students in the most acute categories of learning disability and English proficiency.

New York law instructs charters to place “special emphasis on expanded learning experiences for students who are at risk of academic failure.” But what exactly does that mean? Is it enough that Success serves low-income minority children exceedingly well? (In the quintile of highest-poverty schools in the state, four of the top five schools in English language arts and math are Success schools.) Or does it have to serve exactly the same percentages of special-needs students as district schools? Can different charters serve different types of students? When a network reaches a certain size, should it be held to a different standard?

Student attrition is another big issue. Success opened in 2006 with a 1st-grade class of 73 students; only 32 remained to graduate 8th grade in June 2014—a 56 percent loss of students over eight years. However, the student population in New York City—mostly low-income, heavily immigrant—is highly mobile. Traditional public schools annually lose about 14 percent of their students, while Success loses about 10 percent. The difference: Success doesn’t accept new students after the start of 3rd grade, claiming that its restrictive backfill policy is necessary to build its unique academic culture. (Success recently loosened its backfill policy; for 2015 admissions, it’ll accept applications for kindergarten through 4th grade.)

The backfill issue is dividing the charter community. One prominent figure told me: “Eva runs around the city…telling parents ‘don’t steal possible.’ But she doesn’t backfill after 3rd grade, so she gives up on kids when they are eight.” Success, however, is following state law, which mandates that charters accept students when seats become available through the beginning of 3rd grade. Charters aren’t required to disclose backfill policies or attrition rates (a policy that should change), but most say that they accept new students when a spot opens in any grade.

Seth Andrew, founder of the Democracy Prep charter network, has been calling for charters to backfill in all grades whenever a spot becomes available. He recently offered an analysis that shows the average number of proficient students increasing at Democracy Prep and declining at Success in later grades. But the comparison is imperfect because Democracy Prep started as a middle school, while Success is just now starting to see significant numbers of students in those grades.

Percentages of proficient students remain consistently high from grades 3 through 8 at Success. It’s not attrition that’s driving achievement. (In fact, local district schools probably benefit by gaining high-scoring students who leave Success.) Success’s model—starting with kids at an early age, getting them on grade level by 3rd grade, and keeping them there—works. Some claim that Success weeds out low performers before they begin to be tested in 3rd grade, alleging that low performers are subject to multiple suspensions to force them out. But there’s no empirical evidence for these claims. In fact, attrition rates at Success are lower in early grades than in later grades.

Success suspended 11 percent of its students last year, triple the district school rate but similar to those of other charter networks. (Data report only whether a student has been suspended at least once during the year—not how many times.) Moskowitz, noting that Success charters are much safer than district schools, states that creating a safe learning environment, instilling discipline and values, and building social and emotional skills are part of the Success model.

Critics point out that none of the few dozen Success Academy 8th graders who took the entrance exam over the past two years did well enough to get into one of the city’s eight selective public high schools. Although the test is difficult, and less than one-fifth of applicants are admitted each year, it is perplexing that no Success students, many of whom scored at the advanced level on the state exams, made the cut. Only 10 percent of students admitted this year were black or Latino (52 percent identified as Asian), and the wisdom of basing admittance entirely on this one exam is being debated in New York City.

It will be interesting to see what happens with test scores as Success’s enrollment grows; how its high school performs (some suggest that Success’s elementary schools are outstanding but that instruction weakens in later grades); and how Success graduates fare in the college admissions process and in college. As Success expands into more affluent neighborhoods, will upper-income parents support its program? Or will they bristle at the amount of test prep and the strict codes of behavior? Hopefully, Success can help lessen the segregation in New York’s schools.

Many say that Success is overly secretive, but that criticism seems unwarranted. The network hosted tours for 275 educators from 70 organizations last year. Moskowitz wrote a book (embedded with 23 videos) about the Success model. Recently, Success organized a daylong forum, open to all district and charter principals, to share information. Disappointingly, two-thirds of the 60 principals who attended were from other charters. “I have no interest in what [Moskowitz] does,” one district principal who stayed away told me.

As the above comment suggests, Moskowitz has become a polarizing figure. Her battles with the teachers unions and New York mayor Bill de Blasio are well chronicled. Although de Blasio has backed off his anti-charter rhetoric and actions lately, relations between the network and city hall remain strained. The animosity shown toward Moskowitz by de Blasio and other self-described “progressives” is ironic because her education vision is essentially progressive. The curriculum (although infused with content) is Montessori-like, stressing experiential learning, problem solving, and critical thinking. Instead of formulaic evaluations, teachers receive continual feedback and support. Parents are involved. A longer school day and year allow for extracurriculars, helping build the “whole child.”

“Eva Moskowitz is a force of nature.” I heard variations of that phrase from nearly everyone I spoke with about Success. Some criticized her salary (now more than $500,000), but it seems a bargain from a return-on-investment standpoint. Moskowitz is deeply involved in every aspect of the schools; her passion and energy are extraordinary. So is her knowledge of education theory and practice. (Don’t get her started on Piaget’s theories that it’s not “developmentally appropriate” for young children to read, do math, or learn history.) But her hands-on style, along with the fundraising juggernaut she has built (last year, Success raised $22 million in private support), does raise questions about replication and equity.

More time and data are needed before Success can be declared an unqualified success, but clearly, there are lessons to be learned. According to Andrew Malone, principal of Success’s Harlem Central middle school, “There are things that everyone can do, even within the [teachers union] contract and the shorter school day … the quality of the literature, the way that we work with teachers, the curricula themselves.” He adds, “It seems so pessimistic and cynical that the first reaction by many is to say, ‘Oh, they must be cheating, they must be counseling out special ed kids.’”

Here’s hoping that Success skeptics will open themselves to the possibility that the network is actually getting some things right, and that Success supporters will consider how the rapidly expanding network can do everything possible to attract and retain the kids who most need its help and share best practices with other schools, charter and district. If Success can help chart a course back to the original vision of charters as laboratories of innovation and reform, that would be an even more amazing success story than the one already being written.

Charles Sahm is education policy director at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. 

A Democratic Constitution for Public Education
By Paul T. Hill and Ashley E. Jochim
University of Chicago Press, 2014, $28.96; 152 pages.

As reviewed by Michael Kirst

Who should control our schools is a long-standing debate, but there has never been a proposal like the one in this book. It provides the rationale and operational details for a radical decentralization of school governance and preserves the legitimacy of a much-diminished, locally elected governing entity. It distinguishes this radical governance overhaul from school vouchers for parents. Governance is brought to the center of policy discussion, while the limitations of governance regimes for improving classroom instruction are acknowledged.

Currently, local school districts and boards have no intrinsic powers except those provided by state government. Under the Hill and Jochim plan, the key governance unit becomes each school site, which is empowered with a “constitutional” bill of rights. School control cannot be undermined by a local authority, state, or federal government. There is a specific and limited role for a central authority (called a Civic Education Council or CEC) that provides economies of scale, such as a central data system. But the CEC cannot hire or set terms of employment for teachers and school administrators. Only each school can make these decisions.

The authors envision a significant reduction in the historic federal and state education roles. For example, students would carry “backpacks” of federal, state, and local funding as they choose to move from school to school. Consequently, schools will want to recruit students rather than seek grants specified for federal and state purposes.

The authors envision a phase-in of the plan, most likely starting in cities with many struggling students and spreading last to wealthy suburbs and rural areas. Past attempts to provide school-site control basically failed because, the authors contend, there was a lack of school-site power to make decisions. The CEC can close failing schools and set weights for pupil-based funding. But it cannot mandate such things as a particular salary schedule, curriculum, or instructional method. The CEC cannot require schools to purchase central services or to enter collective bargaining agreements. Bargaining could be implemented if school sites want it, but teachers unions strongly prefer centralized contracts with districts or larger agencies.

School sites would be protected from CEC late or partial payments, changes in attendance boundaries, admission rules, reporting requirements, and other actions without review by an independent body or through financial compensation. The state role is primarily to hold the CEC accountable, including by way of state takeover of poorly performing CECs. The federal government would deregulate in numerous areas and consolidate funding so that it is tied to individual students (rather than to districts or schools).

Would It Work?

What is the research base for how this bold plan would work? The most surprising aspect of this concise volume is how little data or analysis are provided about school-level politics or school-site capacity to improve instruction. Much literature suggests that governance is only one factor in successful schools and effective site management.

Principals were never prepared at colleges or induction programs to implement the enhanced role envisioned in this book. Most school principals do not know how to devise an effective site budget because budgeting has always been done at the central office. Principals rarely have sufficient support staff and are often overwhelmed by day-to-day operational crises and details. Principals struggle with all their existing responsibilities, much less are they able to take on the new roles envisioned in this book.

Someone must rethink the principal’s role and figure out whether more site administrators will be needed. For example, one characteristic of successful principal leadership is the ability to delegate power throughout the school and create networks of decisionmaking teams. Principals take on the role of manager and facilitator of change, while teacher leaders take on responsibilities around issues of teaching and learning.

There is a significant political-science research base concerning “micropolitics” at school sites that could inform the potential impact and desirability of the book’s proposals. When school sites gain much more control, who should control policy and practice at the school level? Researchers have advanced several competing viewpoints:

1) As site manager, the principal allocates financial resources and is held accountable for the success of the school. The school effectiveness literature’s focus on strong site leadership reinforces this concept.

2) Parents control site policy because they are the consumers and care most deeply about policies at the schools their children attend. An elected parent and citizen council operates at each site.

3) Teachers form a school-site senate and allocate funds and personnel, as well as decide instructional issues. The principle at work here is that teachers cannot be held accountable for pupil performance if they do not control resource allocations and must instead follow standardized instructional procedures. School-based control by teachers would also enhance the professional status and self-image of teachers.

4) None of these rationales is sufficiently compelling, so there should be “parity” of control among teachers, administration, and parents/citizens and decisionmaking through bargaining and coalitions.

None of these has the weight of evidence behind it. Moreover, research suggests that changes in school culture and classroom instructional practice are necessary requirements for improving pupil achievement, and that just redistributing decisionmaking power and resources is not enough. What is the school-based governance theory of action that would help drive instructional improvement? Governance transformations may be akin to changing the shell of a turtle, while effective instruction lies underneath.

In sum, Hill and Jochim propose breaking the mold of the current governance superstructure. The resistance will be strong from school boards, unions, and citizens concerned about leaving curriculum decisions to tens of thousands of schools. Civil rights groups that rely on federal and state governments will fear the loss of federal and state protections for students through laws, regulations, and earmarked funds. The current system, however, with everybody and nobody in charge is hard to defend. No major constitutional overhaul of governance has been accomplished since the early 20th century, so the ideas in this book deserve serious consideration.

Michael Kirst is president of the California State Board of Education and professor emeritus of education at Stanford University.

Since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was enacted into federal law in 2002, states have been required to test students in grades 3 through 8 and again in high school to assess math and reading achievement. The federal law also asks states to establish the performance level students must reach on the exams in order to be identified as “proficient.” According to NCLB, each school was expected to increase the percentage of proficient students at a rate that would ensure that all students were proficient by the year 2014. Student proficiency rates have been publicly reported every year for schools in every state as well as for the state as a whole. Importantly, each state chooses its own tests and sets its own proficiency bar.

NCLB also requires the periodic administration of tests in selected subjects to a representative sample of students in 4th and 8th grade as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the nation’s report card, which is administered under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Education. The performance levels considered proficient on NAEP tests are roughly equivalent to those set by international organizations that estimate student proficiency worldwide.

The availability of data from both NAEP and from tests administered by each state allows for periodic estimates of the rigor of each state’s proficiency standards. If the percentage of students identified as proficient in any given year is essentially the same for both the NAEP exam and for a state’s tests, it may be inferred that the state has established as rigorous a proficiency standard as that set by NAEP. But if percentages of students identified as proficient are higher on a state’s own tests than on NAEP tests, then it may be concluded that the state has set its proficiency bar lower than the NAEP standard.

Since NCLB was enacted into law, Education Next has used this information to identify the rigor of state proficiency standards each time the results from state and NAEP tests have become available. This is the sixth in a series of reports that grade state proficiency standards on the traditional A-to-F scale used to evaluate students. Each state is graded according to the size of the differential between the percentages of students identified as proficient by the state and the percentages identified by NAEP on the 4th- and 8th-grade math and reading exams. In the five previous reports (most recently, “Despite Common Core, States Still Lack Common Standards,” features, Fall 2013), it has been shown that proficiency standards in the average state have been set at a much lower level than those set by NAEP. Also, the reports reveal wide variation among the states in the standards they have established. Further, prior reports have shown that up until 2011 the proficiency standards set by states initially did not, on average, rise significantly.

In 2009, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers formed a consortium that established the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), curricular standards that outline what students should know and be able to do at each grade level. Many states have committed themselves to implementing “college and career ready” standards, such as those outlined in CCSS, in exchange for receiving a waiver from many NCLB regulations granted by the U.S. Department of Education. So far, 44 states and the District of Columbia have adopted CCSS for at least one subject. One of the consortium’s goals is to encourage states to set proficiency levels that are on par with those set by NAEP.

In this paper we extend the five prior analyses by identifying the changes in state proficiency standards between 2011 and 2013, the last year for which the relevant information is available. We show that many states have raised their proficiency bars since 2011. Indeed, the 2013 data reveal that for the first time, substantially more states have raised their proficiency standards than have let those standards slip to lower levels. Overall, 20 states strengthened their standards, while just 8 loosened them. In other words, a key objective of the CCSS consortium—the raising of state proficiency standards—has begun to happen.

Still, these advances have been marginal. There is more than enough room for growth, especially among the states that have yet to adopt CCSS.

Measuring State Proficiency Standards

To identify changes in state proficiency standards, we use the same procedures as in our five prior analyses. We estimate each state’s proficiency standards in reading and math in grades 4 and 8 by identifying the difference between the percentages of students the state identifies as proficient and the corresponding percentages of students identified as proficient by NAEP. If for any given state the differences in the percentage proficient on the state tests and the NAEP tests are small, we interpret those results as showing that the state has set high, internationally competitive standards. But if for any given state the percentages proficient on the state tests are much higher than those reported for the state by NAEP, then we conclude that the state has set its proficiency standards much lower than the international bar that CCSS is encouraging.

We report in Table 1 a grade for each state for each of four tests (4th-grade math, 4th-grade reading, 8th-grade math, and 8th-grade reading). The average of these grades provides an overall grade for the state, also shown in Table 1. (The specific numeric differentials between state and NAEP proficiency rates for each grade and test are available at www.educationnext.org/edfacts.)

It is important to understand that high grades do not indicate high student performance. Rather, high grades indicate that states are setting a high bar. Grades assess “truth in advertising,” indicating the degree to which states are accurately informing parents how well students are doing on an internationally accepted scale (see sidebar, “Grading the States,” below).

Stricter Standards

Although state proficiency standards are not yet at international levels, they moved in that direction between 2011 and 2013. Over that two-year period, the average difference between NAEP and state proficiency levels decreased from 35 percent to 30 percent, the largest tightening of state standards in any two-year period since NCLB was first established (see Figure 2). No fewer than 20 states raised their proficiency standards, while just 8 let them slide. By comparison, between 2009 and 2011, proficiency standards improved by only 2 percentage points. Even that gain was due only to the fact that a few states raised their standards sharply. Overall, 27 states actually lowered their proficiency standards in the two-year period prior to 2011, while only 11 states raised them (see Table 2).

Which states changed the most? For the first time since this survey of state standards has been undertaken, no fewer than nine states receive a grade of “A,” indicating they have set a proficiency bar that is roughly comparable to that set by NAEP. Joining Massachusetts and Tennessee, the only two states given that top grade in 2011, are Kentucky, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Wisconsin. Five of these states (Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) have even set some standards that exceed those of NAEP. Six states (Kentucky, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Utah, Wisconsin, and Michigan) should be commended for improving by more than two letter grades between 2011 and 2013. All of these states have adopted CCSS. Meanwhile, only New Hampshire’s standards have dropped by a full letter grade.

CCSS may be driving these changes. One indication that this may be the case is that the six states that are not implementing CCSS for reading or math all continue to set low proficiency standards. Their grades: Virginia, C+; Nebraska, C; Indiana, C-; Texas, C-; Alaska, D+; and Oklahoma, D.

Not There Yet

Although many states have established more rigorous proficiency standards, there remains, on average, a 30-point differential between the percentage of students defined as “proficient” by the average state and the percentage of students considered proficient by NAEP. That constitutes a large gap for CCSS to close, raising the possibility that the introduction of higher proficiency standards nationwide could be fraught with political controversy that could endanger full CCSS implementation. Already, CCSS is coming under pressure from critics (see “No Common Opinion on the Common Core” features, Winter 2015), and the criticism could intensify when the public is informed that a higher percentage of a state’s students are not proficient. The criticisms could intensify even further later in 2015 when the initial results from the Common Core–aligned PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) and Smarter Balanced tests will be released. With a rising bar, student performance could appear to be lower even when it is the bar itself—not student performance—that has changed. If the press does not interpret the test results properly, needless new political controversies  could easily arise, a development that has already happened in the state of New York, one of the first states to raise its proficiency bar in both subjects to the level expected by CCSS.

The controversy could be dampened, however, by the fact that most states no longer need to comply with NCLB requirements that they penalize schools for not making state-defined proficiency targets. Since the U.S. Department of Education has waived many NCLB regulations in exchange for states’ engaging in alternative reform strategies, states are under less pressure to keep their proficiency standards at a low level. Indeed, the waivers—as well as CCSS expectations—may help to account for the increasing rigor of state standards since 2011. As long as NCLB regulations were being enforced, school districts had strong incentives to resist the establishment of high proficiency standards within their state. Had states raised proficiency standards, fewer students would be considered proficient and local schools would have been subject to increasingly severe penalties. Now that many of those rules have been waived by the U. S. Department of Education for the vast majority of the states, they no longer need to be worried about penalties if lower percentages of students are identified as proficient. If CCSS works as its proponents expect, higher proficiency standards could drive schools and students to reach international levels of performance.

That proficiency standards have for the first time begun to move in the right direction is a hopeful sign. Later this year we shall have new information from NAEP and state tests that will allow us to see whether the progress made up through 2013 has persisted into 2015 and beyond. If that should happen, and if student performance shifts upward at the same time, it will signal a long-awaited enhancement in the quality of the American school. One reason for expecting still further shifts upward in the proficiency bars states are setting is that the Smarter Balanced standards accepted by a number of states seem to be very similar to those set by NAEP. And even those states rejecting the Common Core are claiming that they, too, believe in high standards, although calls for cutbacks in state testing can also be heard. Still, higher expectations for students may become more than just a rhetorical phrase. As soon as the next round of NAEP and state testing data become available, we should have some indication whether the recent changes are a precursor of what is to come or merely a temporary spike in official state policies.

Paul E. Peterson, editor-in-chief of Education Next, is professor of government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School, where Matthew Ackerman is a research fellow.

There didn’t appear to be anything extraordinary about this December morning gathering of about 40 middle-school parents in the multipurpose room at BASIS San Antonio North charter school. The topic: a “charters 101” presentation about Texas charter-school politics.

Then came the pitch: Are you willing to write a letter to state officials asking permission for BASIS to open up K–5 schools to feed into their existing middle schools? Sure, many of the parents answered.

Parents lobbying on behalf of charter schools is nothing new. Who doesn’t remember the massive march in New York City—thousands of children and parents trudging across the Brooklyn Bridge wearing T-shirts with slogans such as “My Child, My Choice,” all to protest the crackdown on charters by New York’s new mayor?

But there’s more to this story. The two BASIS charter schools in San Antonio, along with a Great Hearts Academies charter, are part of an effort to lure top charter schools into the city, and not just into the low-income neighborhoods where charters are traditionally found. San Antonio and the surrounding Bexar County are served by 17 independent school districts, ranging from high-poverty San Antonio Independent School District to the wealthy districts on the north side of the city. Some parents in the higher-income districts are disenchanted with the local schools, and they are looking for options. These “soccer moms and dads,” who typically opt for more academically rigorous schools, lend political heft to the broader charter movement in that city. In a political battle, who doesn’t want them on their side?

What’s happening here raises a compelling question: could an influx of middle-class parents into charter schools emerge as a political game changer? It’s too early to answer that question, but it’s the right time to ask it.

The San Antonio charter story is only one among many across the country that involve middle-class parents. In Arizona, parents see charters as akin to high-end grocers Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s—options that doctors and lawyers and mayors might choose. In California, especially in rural areas, charters offer parents their only options for specialty schools such as Montessori and Waldorf. For these parents, unlike their counterparts in San Antonio, the attraction is an education philosophy rather than accelerated academics.

Yet another reason middle-class parents are becoming more familiar with charters is the “intentionally diverse” school movement. Charters ranging from the Denver School of Science and Technology network to the E. L. Haynes Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., intentionally draw a mix of families, by race and income.

The rise in middle-class students attending charter schools is largely masked by the overall growth of charter schools: over the last five years, the number of charter schools has grown nationally from 4,690 to just over 6,000. There are now 43 communities where at least 20 percent of the students attend charters, reports the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Most of that growth is found in low-income, high-minority neighborhoods such as those in Los Angeles. Between 2005 and 2010, the percentage of suburban charters actually fell from 25 to 21 percent of the total. Thus, what’s happening in San Antonio, Washington, D.C., Denver, and cities across the country remains hidden.

There are some compelling reasons why growth in charters that appeal to middle-class parents is likely to continue. As researchers have documented (see “U.S. Students from Educated Families Lag in International Tests,” features, Fall 2014), even middle-class and suburban parents have reason to find fault with their schools. And while most still trust their local schools, those who don’t are enough to fill schools such as BASIS and Great Hearts.

And there are obvious political advantages for the charters of having these parents onboard. San Antonio parent Kerri Smith sent a two-page letter to every Texas official overseeing charters, explaining, “Had my children not been given the opportunity to attend a BASIS school, I truly fear that they would have continued to go through traditional public school in the middle of the pack, not reaching their full potential and not being fully prepared to go off to college one day.”

Changing the Game in San Antonio

If you had to name the “mastermind” behind the push to bring more charter schools to San Antonio, it would be Victoria Rico, who is something of an accidental school-reform champion. A San Antonio native and lawyer, and the granddaughter and daughter of well-known lawyers there, Rico was asked to take over the George W. Brackenridge Foundation, a little-known foundation with modest assets that mostly funded small education projects, such as field trips and summer camps. Considering the problems in the city school districts, the foundation grants seemed insignificant to her. But what to do? After she visited a local KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) school and viewed the movie Waiting for “Superman,” the answer suddenly became clear: pull multiple San Antonio foundations together to attract more high-performing charter schools to the city.

Rico, who one Brackenridge board member dubbed “Hurricane Victoria” for her intense focus and determination, did exactly that. KIPP and IDEA Public Schools were showered with new help. But the interesting part of the plan was her insistence on pulling in charters that appeal to middle-class parents, a strategy rooted in a broader perspective. “To be internationally competitive, we need to close the international achievement gap for all of our students, including our relatively advanced students,” said Rico. “A happy side effect of this is that when you build schools that are rigorous enough to close the international achievement gap, they are attractive to middle-class families as well as low-income families.”

BASIS Schools and Great Hearts Academies were the obvious choices, and they quickly set up San Antonio operations (BASIS in 2013 and Great Hearts in 2014) that they plan to expand. Their schools couldn’t be more different. BASIS, which offers students a chance to pursue world-class academics at their own pace, also grants its students (and teachers) world-class freedoms. Wear what your mood that morning dictates and express yourself loudly in the hallways and cafeteria seem to be the rules. Considering the heavy homework load at these schools, the trade-off seems fair.

By contrast, Great Hearts students wear uniforms, file quietly through the halls, and study the Great Books. Found on each classroom wall are the Great Hearts nine “core virtues”: humility, integrity, friendship, perseverance, wisdom, courage, responsibility, honesty, and citizenship.

At Great Hearts, prospective teachers are first reviewed for their character. At BASIS, teachers are first reviewed for their content knowledge; PhDs are not uncommon (see “High Scores at BASIS Charter Schools,” features, Winter 2014). But while the schools have radically different feels, what I found interesting was the number of parents with one child in BASIS and another in Great Hearts. To them, what mattered most were the highly rigorous academics. After that, choosing a school was more about the personal style of the child.

As I discovered in my interviewing, there’s an unexpected sweet spot for charters: middle-class parents who are desperate for a curriculum that will challenge their bored sons and daughters but who are unable or unwilling to pay private school tuitions (see “The Right Choice” sidebar below). For those parents, schools such as BASIS may lack lush soccer fields, but the academics equal or surpass those of many private schools, all at the right price: free.

Anyone expecting these schools to be white enclaves will be surprised. At the two BASIS schools, 36 percent of the students are white, 33 percent Hispanic, and 24 percent Asian/Pacific Islander. The schools appear to be especially appealing to South Asian families. At Great Hearts, about half the students are white; few are Asian. This school attracts a great many middle-class Hispanics, including families who want their children to be part of the next-generation San Antonio leadership. The metropolitan area is about 55 percent Hispanic.

Intentionally Diverse Schools

Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy may have one of the most compelling launch stories of any charter school network in the nation. In 2007, when Dan McKee was mayor of Cumberland, Rhode Island (in 2014 he was elected lieutenant governor of the state), he famously asked, “What kind of public school system would we have if we could just build it from scratch?” McKee’s answer: he wanted schools as diverse as his son’s basketball team. “His son benefited from the diversity, and other kids on the team benefited from being around his son and peers,” said Jeremy Chiappetta, executive director of Blackstone Valley Prep (BVP), the school McKee helped launch (see “The Mayors’ Charter Schools,” features, Winter 2014).

That diversity was achieved by building a regional coalition that includes two suburban communities, Lincoln and Cumberland, and two urban, Central Falls and Pawtucket. A lottery pulls equal numbers from all four, but the lottery is also weighted toward low-income students.

Blackstone is an ideal school for answering a key question: do charters that serve a socioeconomic mix of students look and feel different from charters that target only low-income students? In short, yes. Leslie Royal, a BVP parent who works as dean of operations at a Blackstone elementary school, previously worked at an urban “no excuses” charter school. That strict culture was appropriate for the students there, she said, but not necessarily for her son. “Many middle-class parents who are relatively successful in their fields know how to prep their kids to start kindergarten and what experiences they need to expose them to for their kids to be well-rounded, and eventually get to college (for example, trips to museums and zoos). In my experience at an urban no-excuses school, the rigid discipline and structures we put in place allowed us to focus on the urgent academic intervention that our students there desperately needed. Our focus was closing the achievement gap, which meant that academics were the most important thing.” Royal had no hesitations about enrolling her son at Blackstone.

Unlike Blackstone, E. L. Haynes Public Charter School is subject to the same lottery used by all charters in Washington, D.C., which forbids weighting that would allow them to favor some students over others. That said, from its beginnings in 2004, Haynes founder Jennifer Niles was determined to both educate underserved students and preserve racial and socioeconomic diversity. “She didn’t think we should be working toward having a community that was racially and socioeconomically segregated,” said Rich Pohlman, acting head of school. (In December 2014, Niles was appointed D.C.’s deputy mayor for education.)

Washington, however, is a city starkly divided by race and income, which prevents Haynes from achieving significant diversity. In 2014, its elementary school was 15 percent white, 36 percent Hispanic, and 47 percent African American. As the grades advance, the student population becomes less diverse. In middle school, the percentage of white students drops to less than 6 percent. The high school is 35 percent Hispanic and 63 percent black—there are no whites. In Washington, that actually amounts to diversity: Haynes gets many applications from the all-black neighborhoods in Wards 7 and 8 where families say they want their kids going to school with Hispanics. “That shows just how segregated we are,” said chief academic officer Phyllis Hedlund.

Leaders at Haynes, however, are not giving up on boosting diversity in the upper grades. “This is the first year for our senior class,” said Pohlman. “It’s the first year where we’ll have proof points about where kids go to college. After a few years of that, I anticipate having the demographics become more stable.”

California Culture

There has long been a culture gulf between California and the East Coast states, and that definitely holds for charter schools. In Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, charters are understood to be about giving low-income parents a shot at sending their kids to decent schools. Nearly all charters target low-income urban neighborhoods. The idea of middle-class parents tapping into urban charters is unsettling. In New York, the already controversial Success Academy network of charter schools (see “What Explains Success at Success Academy?” features, Summer 2015) draws the most resistance when it moves into an affluent neighborhood. In Washington, D.C., middle-class white kids showing up in sizable numbers at several charter schools has prompted conspiracy theories from charter critics.

In some states where charters have opened new schools in suburbs, such as New Jersey, the move has backfired politically as well, as parents rallied to defend traditional schools. In California, meanwhile, charters are about choice, regardless of race or income. In fact, the state’s first charter school, San Carlos Charter Learning Center, opened in a suburb.

“That creates a public mind-set,” said Jed Wallace, president of the California Charter Schools Association, “that charters are something that can and should help in middle-class areas.”

The difference is easy to see in the state’s web of Montessori and Waldorf charter schools. Those schools, often started by parents who couldn’t find those school philosophy options in their own communities (or couldn’t afford the private Montessori and Waldorf schools) are incredibly popular.

Kim Zawilski, principal of a Montessori charter in Shingle Springs, a tiny bedroom community well outside Sacramento, runs a K–8 school that serves 370 students and has a waitlist of nearly as many. Nearly all the students are white, with a small population of Native Americans. There are almost no students living in poverty. Most of the parents have college degrees and are working either in the state government or at technology firms. Zawilski seems puzzled when I ask about race/ethnicity and income. The school, she points out, reflects the community. It’s the kind of question only asked by someone from the East Coast.

Zawilski’s school is one of seven campuses in the Sacramento area run by the California Montessori Project. Other schools in the network have far higher numbers of low-income and minority students, points out executive director Gary Bowman. “The big thing is we want to provide a methodology that up until the charter movement only the affluent could afford. We strongly believe in the methodology and believe it will have a tremendous impact on the world. We know the world can’t be changed if you only serve the affluent.” In short, the project aims to bring Montessori to the broader population.

But it’s not just the specialty charter schools in California that draw middle-class parents. In Rocklin, an affluent suburb outside Sacramento, the Rocklin Academy Schools serve the same students—nearly all white or Asian, nearly all the children of college-educated parents—that are served in the well-regarded public schools. So why have a charter school?

Big school districts become academically complacent, explains Rocklin charter founder David Patterson. “They become one-size-fits-all schools where sports are more important than academics. The football team got more attention than other things. There was even an anti-intellectual bias.”

Patterson and other parents wanted something different, so they designed their own school, one based on a Core Knowledge curriculum. And they found plenty of interest. The first school, offering grades 3–6, opened in 2001, and the academies kept expanding in grades and students. Today, four Rocklin charters serve 1,400 students from preschool through high school. The relationship with the local Rocklin district has been rocky, but the demand remains steady, with several hundred students on waitlists.

Patterson now works with an urban charter school in Sacramento. Asked about the difference between urban and suburban charter parents, Patterson replied, “In the inner city, parents first want a school that’s safe, where their children won’t get hurt or shot and hopefully will be around adults who care about them. Suburban parents already bought that and now have to think about what they want their children to experience, the academic engagement, and whether they want to be part of that as true partners.”

Said Wallace, “Suburban charter schools are a vital part of the success of California’s charter-school movement. Not only have some of our most successful charter-school organizations gotten started in suburban settings…parents and communities embracing charter schools in middle-class areas generate critically needed additional advocacy strength.”

Whether in urban or suburban charters, the rise in middle-class enrollment bears watching to see whether resistance grows or the California mind-set and the attendant political muscle spreads east.

But Are the Charter Schools Better?

There remains the question of quality. Are the charter schools pulling in middle-class parents any better than the schools those children left? At Blackstone Valley Prep, analysis of the suburban and urban students’ scores on the 2013 state exams measuring proficiency in reading and math offers 80 different snapshots, by grade, subject and family income, with Blackstone students faring better than their peers on nearly all. Said Chiappetta, “When children attend schools that are socioeconomically diverse, everyone benefits. As an educator and a parent, I think BVP’s results make an incredibly compelling case for truly diverse schools.”

In suburban San Antonio, the schools are too new to evaluate by academic achievement, and self-selection bias will make it hard to do so: schools that are designed to appeal to students and parents looking for faster-paced academics would be expected to appear at the top of state school rankings. In Arizona, a state that has always had charter schools that draw middle-class students, there is evidence that, on average at least, charters are not doing any better at raising student achievement than district schools; outside of urban areas, they appear to do a bit worse. Similar findings hold, on average, for suburban students in Massachusetts, although the charter schools they attend are nonetheless consistently oversubscribed. “The National Charter School Study 2013,” by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University, examined results in 26 states and concluded that charter schools offer the greatest academic promise for inner-city students. If one looks at the data for elementary and middle schools separately, however, it appears that in the higher grades, charters have a positive impact in reading on higher-income students relative to the district schools.

In California, there is evidence from CREDO that charters serving low-income students in Los Angeles are doing far better than the district schools, but available data do not allow true comparisons of middle-class charters to district schools. California is probably the best example of the difficulties of searching for reliable data on the question of academic gains for suburban charter students. Of course, parents don’t send their children to Montessori or Waldorf schools so they can outscore other students on state tests.

If the question of quality can’t be answered yet, then what’s the significance behind the growth in middle-class students attending charters? Probably the political clout those parents bring, whether it comes from those choosing free Montessori schools or those seeking more academic rigor. Letter-writing campaigns like the one in San Antonio are just the beginning.

“At least in San Antonio, the big difference between low-income and middle-class parents,” said Victoria Rico. “is that middle-class parents are louder and have better access to decision makers…When educated parents experience a BASIS or Great Hearts school, they realize what is possible in public education, and their voices are driving a whole new conversation about rigor, teacher quality, and advanced course options…They write op-eds. They visit with their elected representatives. They question the status quo in a way that is great for all kids.”

In short, might there be a benefit to underserved communities of having middle-class parents drive demand for charter schools?

Richard Whitmire is an Emerson Collective fellow and author of On the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools Are Pushing the Envelope.

From San Francisco to Austin, Texas, to New York, new forms of schooling termed micro-schools are popping up.

As of yet, there is no common definition that covers all these schools, which vary not only by size and cost but also in their education philosophies and operating models. Think one-room schoolhouse meets blended learning and home schooling meets private schooling.

As Matt Candler, founder of 4.0 Schools, writes, “What makes a modern micro-school different from a 19th century, one-room schoolhouse is that old school schools only had a few ways to teach — certainly no software, no tutors, and probably less structure around student to student learning. In a modern micro-school, there are ways to get good data from each of these venues. And the great micro-school of the future will lean on well-designed software to help adults evaluate where each kid is learning.”

Several factors are driving their emergence. Micro-schools are gaining traction among families who are dissatisfied with the quality of public schooling options and cannot afford or do not want to pay for a traditional private-school education. These families want an option other than home schooling that will personalize instruction for their child’s needs. A school in which students attend a couple days a week or a small school with like-minded parents can fit the bill.

Some trace the micro-school’s origins to the United Kingdom, where over the past decade people began applying the term micro-schools to small independent and privately funded schools that met at most two days a week. As in the United States, the impetus for their formation was dissatisfaction with local schooling options. Although home-schooling families have for some time created cooperatives to gain some flexibility for the adults and socialization for the children, the micro-schooling phenomenon is more formal.

QuantumCamp

One of the early U.S. micro-schools, QuantumCamp was founded in the winter of 2009 in Berkeley, California, out of a dare that one couldn’t teach quantum physics in a simple way. The result was the development of a course that would be accessible to children as young as 12. The school now offers a complete hands-on math and science curriculum for students in 1st through 8th grade, and serves about 150 home schoolers during the school year; double that number attend the summer program. Tuition ranges from $600 to $2,400 depending on the program and enrollment period. In 2013 QuantumCamp introduced language arts courses. Each academic class meets once a week for an activity-based exploration of big ideas and then offers out-of-class content that includes videos, readings, problem sets, podcasts, and other activities to enable students to continue exploring concepts at their own pace.

Acton Academy

At roughly the same time as QuantumCamp’s founding, in Austin, Texas, Jeff Sandefer, founder of the nationally acclaimed Acton School of Business, and his wife Laura, who has a master’s degree in education, launched Acton Academy. In creating the five-day-a-week, all-day school, the couple sought to ensure that their own children wouldn’t be “talked at all day long” in a traditional classroom. The Acton Academy’s mission is “to inspire each child and parent who enters [its] doors to find a calling that will change the world.” The school promises that students will embark on a “hero’s journey” to discover the unique contributions that they can make toward living a life of meaning and purpose.

With tuition of $9,515 per year, Acton Academy initially enrolled 12 students and has since 2009 grown to serve 75 students in grades 1 to 9. The school has learning guides—they aren’t called teachers—whose role is to push students to own their learning. The model enables the academy to have far fewer on-site adults per student than a traditional independent school and to operate at a cost of roughly $4,000 per student per year.

Acton compresses students’ core learning into a two-and-a-half-hour personalized-learning period each day during which students learn mostly online. This affords time for three two-hour project-based learning blocks each week, a Socratic seminar each day, game play on Fridays, ample art and physical education offerings, and many social experiences. The Socratic discussions teach students to talk, listen, and challenge ideas in a face-to-face circle of peers and guides. The projects require the students to work in teams to apply the knowledge they have learned. They also foster a ‘‘need to know’’ mind-set to motivate the online learning and provide a public, portfolio-based means for students to demonstrate achievement.

Early results appear impressive, as the first group of students gained 2.5 grade levels of learning in their first 10 months. Now the school is spreading. There are currently eight Acton Academies operating—seven of them in the United States. Twenty-five are slated to be open by 2015. The Sandefers are not operating them, however; they provide communities that want to open an Acton clone a do-it-yourself kit plus limited consulting and access to wiki discussion groups. They are developing a game-based learning tool to help prepare Acton Academy owners and the learning guides in the schools. Tuition at the academies ranges from $4,000 per year to $9,900.

AltSchool

Another micro-school network in the Bay Area turned heads this past March, and placed the micro-school trend firmly on the map, when it raised a whopping $33 million in venture capital financing from prominent venture capital firms Andreesen Horowitz and Founders Fund. AltSchool, a five-day-a-week, all-day school founded by serial entrepreneur Max Ventilla, promises to prepare children for the world of 2030 by offering personalized learning, access to teachers at a very low ratio—currently 8-to-1—and a micro-school network “that offers the warmth of a tight community while benefiting from the extensive, continuous research and analysis of in-house education architects.”

Key to the development of the AltSchool model is a proprietary, integrated software backbone that will handle everything from student learning in its schools to the operations of a network of private micro-schools. As at Acton Academy, students are grouped only loosely by age. Students spend about half their time on core subjects and work through personalized playlists built around third-party curricular materials. The rest of the day is spent on longer-term projects that can span as many as six weeks, according to a profile of the school in Fast Company.

Four AltSchools are open in San Francisco, with a combined 150 students enrolled, and more locations are coming, including schools in Palo Alto and Brooklyn Heights, New York, in the fall of 2015. Tuition ranges from $20,875 for elementary school in San Francisco to $28,250 for the Brooklyn middle school. For additional fees, each individual AltSchool will bring in specialists outside of the core school day to teach extracurricular classes based on the interests of the school’s families. AltSchool plans to drop its price tag significantly in the years ahead as the software improves, the school network scales, and it can bring down the internal cost each year.

Will it work? We’ll see, but notably, Ventilla told Fast Company that the traditional randomized-control trial approach to research is meaningless in a “personalization first” context. “You’re not thinking about the global population as one unit that gets this experience or that experience,” he told the magazine. “Something that’s better for 70% of the kids and worse for 30% of the kids—that’s an unacceptable outcome for us. AltSchool isn’t a particular approach.”

Echoing the sentiment, Azra Mehdi, a parent at AltSchool, said, “One of the reasons we looked to AltSchool was because of the personalized aspect of the learning.… [We] didn’t want him to be one of 35 kids with one teacher, to get lost in the cracks. Parochial schools were too rigid, and would dampen his spirit and personality.”

That sums up much of the ethos of the micro-schools: a fidelity to personalization and success for all in small communities. And the trend looks likely to grow.

Inspired in part by the micro-schools like Acton Academy that use his software, the prince of online and personalized learning himself, Sal Khan, launched his own micro-school in the fall of 2014 in Mountain View, California. The Khan Lab School, which charges $22,000, opened with roughly 35 students and intends “to research blended learning and education innovation by creating a working model of Khan Academy’s philosophy of learning in a physical school environment and sharing the learnings garnered with schools and networks around the world.” As Isabella, an 11-year-old student who previously attended a nearby public school, said, “Here it’s different from my old school because you’re doing your own playlist and you have more projects.”

Mandeep Dhillon, a parent with two children enrolled at Khan Lab School, amplified the differences. “After a while we realized, public, private school didn’t matter. Kids were being programmed in chunks,” he said. “I hate the term home schooling because it’s based on location. It’s not really about having them at home. What we’re trying to do is build an independent path. It’s not about the schooling, it’s about experiences.”

As these small schools proliferate, their impact on the wider world of schooling—public and private—is potentially large, but still anything but certain.

Michael B. Horn is co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute and serves as executive director of its education program.

The 7:40 p.m. agenda item at a meeting of Washington, D.C.’s charter-school authorizer, the D.C. Public Charter School Board, was a “discussion” about a school for 700 low-income, African American girls.

As authorizing-board members listened in stony silence, the school board’s new chair explained that a recent “self-assessment” revealed that staffers had been misusing school credit cards, teacher retention was miserable, the front office was staffed “like a Fortune 500 company,” and two-thirds of the previous year’s students hadn’t verified that they were D.C. residents and eligible to attend at D.C. taxpayer expense. Among the non-D.C. students: the enrollment manager’s daughter.

Whose responsibility is it when a charter school gets into trouble—when its students aren’t learning or it misses its enrollment targets or money runs short or it closes?

Everyone I asked gave the same answer. “I’d point right to the board,” said Mark Lerner, who sits on the board of Washington Latin charter school. “The failure of a charter is the failure of the board,” said Tom Keane, who directs strategic initiatives at AppleTree, an early-learning charter with six D.C. campuses. “Every closure ultimately can get traced back to the board not doing the job,” added Marci Cornell-Feist, a Massachusetts-based education consultant and entrepreneur.

Which is why, on a warm fall day, an organization called Charter Board Partners (CBP) gathered a World Bank strategist, a couple of advertising executives, a behavioral psychologist, a retired English teacher, a former Exxon executive, and perhaps two dozen other professionals for what it called a governance boot camp.

Since its 2010 launch, Charter Board Partners has recruited, trained, and placed 100 people like these onto D.C. charter-school boards. At the end of this boot camp, another 67 candidates were ready to join boards that ask for them. About two dozen boards—not quite half of the charter-school boards in D.C.—already contract with CBP, paying up to $15,000 a year for CBP’s matchmaking services, governance workshops, personal coach, and help with such problems as how to “pre-plan” a school leader’s succession or how to move board paperwork online.

With Gates Foundation funding, the group has opened a Seattle office in anticipation of the opening of the first charter schools there. And with Walton Family Foundation money, it expects to open a third office in 2015.

CBP’s boot camp began simply enough with a lecture on what, exactly, a charter school is. But the discussion quickly moved to governance nuts and bolts: committee organization, budget oversight, school-leader evaluations, and, by afternoon, a mock charter-school board meeting.

“You don’t have to get into the weeds on academics,” said Simmons Lettre, who along with Carrie Irvin founded CBP. Reading scores and math achievement are the job of the school leader, she told the board candidates. But just as a sigh of relief seemed to spread around the room, she reminded them that the school leader works for the board. “At the end of the day, you own student achievement,” she said. “The stakes are crazy high.”

Charter Board Pitfalls

In the 2013–14 school year, 651 new charter schools opened around the country, and 202 charters closed, a 3-to-1 ratio that has held steady for the past five years, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, an advocacy and research group.

The closure rate is even higher in Washington, D.C., where almost half of public school children—more than 38,000 kids—attend charters. Of the 102 charters that have been granted in D.C., 39 have either been revoked by the city’s authorizer or relinquished by the charter holder. Another 10 charter holders have closed one or more school campuses, or dropped troubled middle- or high-school programs.

AppleTree’s Tom Keane says that’s part of the bargain that charters make with the taxpayers in return for freedom from most school-district rules. “Part of the idea behind charters is that they could fail.”

D.C.’s charter authorizer cites low enrollment or inadequate academic achievement for many of the closures, but “financial and management deficiencies” contributed to at least 16 closures and “governance” problems to another 4 since 1998.

Charter laws vary from state to state, but typically, authorizers award school charters to a governing board, not to a school’s founders or managers. Those boards own the school buildings and hire a lead manager—their only employee—
to implement their strategic plan. Charter-school boards generally follow a governance model used by most U.S. corporations and nonprofits: they write their own bylaws, elect officers, organize committees as they choose, and perpetuate themselves by inviting new members to replace those who retire.

Thomas Nida, a banker and former head of D.C.’s charter-authorizing board, says problems typically begin when a school buys or builds a new facility and then, perhaps, expands enrollment to fill it. In the scenario he paints, construction costs nibble into the academic budget (oops, there goes the reading specialist), the school leader’s attention is diverted, and those additional kids change the school’s carefully crafted culture.

Board members would have approved the new building and the expanded enrollment, Nida adds, but many lack experience running a start-up with a multimillion-dollar budget (Friendship Charter, the city’s largest, had 2012–13 revenues of $73.3 million). They underestimate the time involved: AppleTree’s Tom Keane, who sits on his charter’s finance committee, says those meetings alone run three hours and are held eight times a year.

Especially at a start-up, the group that applied for the charter may be too invested in it, or just too busy getting the lights turned on to give proper oversight. And a charismatic founder who’s used to running the show may have trouble sharing responsibility with a board. Cynthia Brown, the new board chair of D.C.’s Perry Street Prep, told me that the board was so “dominated” by the school’s founder that members weren’t aware of the school’s academic shortcomings. The founder eventually was fired, but the school lost the charter for its new high-school program. “It was traumatic,” Brown said.

The school-closure rate will fall as the charter sector matures, I was repeatedly assured. In part, that’s because authorizers, bankers, and donors are paying increasing attention to how well the schools are governed. D.C.’s charter-authorizing board, for example, reviews the meeting minutes of all 61 local charter-school boards and calls in those whose schools seem troubled.

Meanwhile, CBP and a tiny handful of other organizations have begun focusing attention and training on the people who govern charter schools.

Looking For, and Training, Doers

BoardOnTrack, an online site launched by Cornell-Feist, leads board members through a catalog of lessons, like what the finance committee does and who should be on it. “We provide a slow, steady drip of professional development,” says Cornell-Feist, who also helped found Achievement Network (see “Teaching the Teachers,” features, Summer 2012) and, by her count, six other education start-ups.

Her site asks board members to evaluate themselves—asking, for example, if they know the key promises that they made to their authorizer—and encourages them to compare their board to others in the BoardOnTrack network by using the self-evaluation data. Cornell-Feist expects the comparisons will be motivating for board members and will give her the data to track improvements in each board. Some 150 schools in 22 states already use the site, she adds.

Likewise, Thomas Nida, the Washington banker, says he is in talks with two universities to offer board-member training through their education schools. Included in the curriculum that Nida already has piloted on four boards are lessons on aligning the budget with school goals and “working with the school leader.”

The application form that would-be board members fill out for CBP makes clear that it’s looking for doers, not simply do-gooders. Do you have a background in risk management or budget development? it asks. Are you a philanthropist or hang out with “high-net-worth individuals,” have contacts in local government, understand facilities financing. Are you conversant about education data use, know your way around technology, are a lawyer—and what kind? How many boards have you served on, why do you want to serve on another board? Oh, and send a résumé.

Irvin and Lettre launched CBP, Irvin says, after a fellow guest she’d met at a Washington dinner party asked her how a public-school advocate like himself could find out about charter-school boards that could use his help. The two women, who were working as education-policy consultants, set up shop on Irvin’s screened porch to mull the question. Eventually, they approached NewSchools Venture Fund with their idea to match charters with the kind of business professionals who might otherwise be outside their orbit, and then train them for charter-school boards’ special needs.

NewSchools was deeply invested in D.C. charters already, but was disappointed with their quality, and particularly with the weakness of their boards, Maura Marino, director of the fund’s D.C. program, told me. School governance “is what’s going to drive improvement over time,” she had concluded.

When I asked how, she rattled off a long list of “levers” that boards control: hiring the right school leader, providing him or her with professional development, aligning school resources to strategy—finding money for an enhanced reading program if teachers believe it will raise reading scores, for example. “Looking at academic data, asking questions, trying to be a good thought partner” with the school leader, she continued.

NewSchools eventually invested $1.1 million in CBP, and the two groups now share office space near D.C.’s Dupont Circle. Among other funders, the Walton Family Foundation has since invested $1.8 million, and D.C.’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which oversees the city’s education programs, put in $500,000.

CBP started with three schools, offering recruiting and training services for free, then added another two schools, which it charged $500 a year. It added individualized board coaching and raised the fee to $10,000 a couple of years ago, and offered a $15,000 “premium” service in 2014. That service includes access to CBP fellows, who are given time off by their employers from their corporate jobs to serve as part-time staffers to charter-school boards.

CBP has “walked away” from several troubled or uncooperative schools, including the D.C. girls’ school, Irvin says. But charter-board chairs who have hired CBP have told me they appreciate its outsider’s fresh eye. Washington Latin’s Lerner says that he’s gone to CBP with concerns about board members who were “disengaged” or “didn’t understand their role.” CBP supplied training, but also “provided legitimacy to what I’m saying,” he adds.

The Capacity Challenge

Laws about who can sit on charter boards vary around the country, but D.C.’s law limits charter boards to 15 unpaid members, with two seats reserved for school parents; 51 percent of members must be D.C. residents. Charter management companies (CMOs) are required to have a local board in addition to their national board.

Don Soifer, a longtime member of D.C.’s charter-authorizing board, says parent members “help with the flow of critical information,” getting word to the board about issues at the school before they begin to fester, and getting word to parents about board actions and concerns before they reach the rumor mill.

But Lerner frets that parent members can “stir up” other parents by sharing board discussions—real estate negotiations are particularly fraught, he says—and can be stirred up themselves by parent gripes and grumbles. “Some parents can’t differentiate between governing a school and being on the PTA,” he says.

The CMO board is a thornier issue. CMOs generally appoint school leaders themselves, which can leave their local boards with little leverage over the school head. “That’s your one employee,” says Lerner. “What’s left?”

Likewise, large CMOs have their own real estate and finance operations that, for one reason or another, may bypass the local board. Rocketship Education discovered belatedly that the site it chose for a much-anticipated D.C. school is across the street from a halfway house. (Soifer says the local board was “not engaged.”) Community opponents raised so many objections that Rocketship delayed opening the school until 2016.

At least initially, a CMO can also stack a local board with its choice of members—engaged or otherwise—so that local input is even further diminished. D.C.’s authorizer now asks, in a roundabout way, if a charter applicant can “fire” its CMO.

About 20 percent of a charter board’s seats turn over every year, Lerner estimates, which means that D.C.’s charter schools need about 180 new board members each year. Even with its standing-room-only supply of policy wonks, foundation staff, think tankers, and corporate chiefs, that’s a lot. Those foundations and think tanks also have boards to fill and, let’s face it, probably offer more glamour than an inner-city school.

“There’s a danger of hitting a saturation point with the number of qualified and civic-minded people who can do that kind of work,” says Soifer, who runs a think tank and is on charter school boards in four states in addition to sitting on the D.C. authorizing board.

Capacity can be an even bigger problem in cities where charters are still largely unknown and the talent pool is shallow or already tapped. “You have to think more creatively” to find board members, says Cornell-Feist. Working with hospitals, oil companies, and the Urban League, she says, she identified 240 potential board members in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina largely wiped out the traditional school system there.

Rael Nelson James, who directs CBP’s recruiting, told me she looks for board candidates within professional and education associations, on networking web sites, at meetings of grantmakers and development professionals, and among people she met in her years of community work. Charters come to her with specific needs: someone with budget-oversight experience, someone with a fundraising background. A STEM school recently asked for a candidate from the health-sciences industry.

James invites applicants to an interview where, she says, she’ll “suss out” their education philosophy: “I don’t want a board that doesn’t believe every kid can achieve.” She turns down candidates she thinks are too young, too new to their careers, or too opinionated.

Then she’ll send a “match memo” describing the candidate to the school’s board, and a PowerPoint describing the school and its board to the candidate. After that, it’s up to the board chair and the candidate to meet. “We’re matchmakers; we don’t go on the date with you,” James says.

Debra Drumheller, a retired Exxon Mobil Corporation treasurer, told me she turned down the first school CBP proposed because it wanted help with budgeting and financial planning rather than oversight, and “it was more than I was willing to take on.”

She accepted CBP’s second match, with a four-campus middle- and high-school charter, where she’ll sit on the finance committee. When I asked Drumheller why she applied to CBP—was she a charter advocate, frustrated with traditional schools or what?—she seemed philosophically neutral. “I believe in competition,” she said, and charters wouldn’t be flourishing in D.C. if there weren’t a need for them.

Robert Cullen, a retired journalist-turned-public-school-English-teacher who was awaiting board placement, also sounded conflicted when I asked. “I always had reservations about charters and still do,” he said. But “my basic concern is helping kids get a good education, and if charters are doing that, then I’m going to support charter schools.”

Linking Governance and Achievement

On one of my visits to CBP’s offices, Lettre and a group of staffers were reviewing a 22-page lesson—they called it a “tool”—designed to help schools develop a constantly updated report that charts students’ academic progress. Board members could turn to the report—a “dashboard” in education parlance—to see if the school is on track to meet its academic goals.

The staffers agreed that a dashboard showing how many students, by grade, have mastered four or five separate math skills is too much information for the full board. On what might be enough, they agreed: a red hexagon to indicate that the school isn’t on track to meet its math goals, a green diamond to show that it is. The board’s academic committee might get a more detailed report.

In addition to recruiting and coaching boards, CBP provides its subscribers with professional development through a library of online training tools. There’s another 22-page tool on how to evaluate a school leader. It includes a month-by-month evaluation time line (June: establish the leader’s goals and professional-development plans for the year), sample evaluation forms, and practical tips, like how much time to devote to the chore (four hours a year per board member).

The fundraising tool urges board members to develop a “stakeholder story” that describes the school through the
experiences of one student, and outlines the disparate fund-raising roles of the development staff, the school leader, and the board. There also are tools for setting annual goals, planning
for the school leader’s succession, and helping new board members settle in.

But the academic-dashboard tool takes on what surely must be the most important aspect of board membership: student achievement. After all, a charter board’s purpose is to build a school that provides kids with a good education. So I wondered if there’s a relationship between good governance and student achievement.

So far, there’s no evidence—but also no research—to prove that there is. Soifer sees plenty of correlation: “The strongest schools generally have the strongest governance,” he says. But any “cause and effect is unclear,” he
adds. Marino likewise told me that any connection “is distant, if there is one.”

Lettre says she and Irvin initially thought they’d begin seeing their work have an impact on children’s learning within three years. By then, CBP’s recruiting and coaching would have boosted board effectiveness. Following that, tools like the academic dashboard would prompt boards to start “asking questions of the school leader in a way that impacts outcomes for students.”

That time line may be too ambitious, she now says. And CBP hasn’t yet figured out how to measure its impact—how to calculate the board’s role, separate from the teachers’ or school leader’s, when reading scores rise. It’s looking for outside help.

Even so, defining standards for effective governance and trying to measure them is “the first effort of its kind, even if it’s not perfect,” Marino told me. “It’s hard to distinguish the best board from just a strong board,” she added, “but you can tell a weak board.” And that’s usually by the school it leads.

June Kronholz is a former Wall Street Journal reporter, editor, foreign correspondent, and bureau chief. She served on the board of the Harare International School in Harare, Zimbabwe.

It would be impossible to consider strategies for improving rural education without examining the pressing challenges of rural life. These vary widely by community, yet important trends emerge. Texas, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Louisiana, and Alabama include 66 of the nation’s 100 poorest counties. The historically poor regions of Appalachia and the Deep South remain so, with few catalysts to stimulate meaningful economic growth. Meanwhile, areas in the Mountain West have proven adept at leveraging high-speed Internet access and lifestyle perks to lure well-educated families and late-career professionals into permanent settlement. Yet even within the comparatively wealthy state of Colorado, the condition of rural life varies. Colorado’s Hinsdale County, population 843, and Costilla County, population 3,524, have per capita incomes of $43,293 and $16,525, respectively, despite their proximity to one another. Most of America’s landmass is to some degree rural (see Figure 1), and about one-fifth of American students live in rural regions.

Overall, one in four rural children live in poverty, and of the 50 U.S. counties with the highest child-poverty rates, 48 are rural. Drug usage abounds. In the mid-2000s, rural 8th graders were 59 percent more likely than peers in large cities to use methamphetamines and 104 percent more likely to use any amphetamine, according to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. Tragically, mental health issues complicate the process of educating rural students. Individuals between 10 and 24 years of age living in rural areas are twice as likely to kill themselves as their urban peers. This may be symptomatic of the persistence of serious depression in rural America, which occurs nearly 20 percent more frequently than in urban areas. Figure 2 shows that the achievement of rural students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) gets worse the farther from a population center they live.

Such complex and socially entrenched ills require a proportionate educational response. Owing to a number of factors, such a response rarely occurs. Onerous policies and inadequate access to resources, among other constraints, hamper improvement of rural education. Most federal and state education policies ignore rural America’s many natural advantages and force rural school districts to operate in ways similar to those in urban centers. Various types of policies, including compliance and reporting requirements, teacher certification and evaluation schemes, funding formulas and grants, and the broader category of “innovation killers,” disadvantage rural schools in particular.

In the post–No Child Left Behind world, reporting and compliance are significant components of a district’s work product and require substantial allocation of resources. Large urban districts may have an array of staffers and consultants to focus on compliance reporting and complete lengthy grant applications. Rural administrators often shoulder these burdens themselves, in addition to tackling numerous pressing tasks. A survey of “every report and indicator that districts are required” to produce in Colorado, for example, generated a “list [that] goes on for 59 pages. Very often, the same information is requested multiple times.”

Teacher recruitment and certification in rural communities is a struggle for school and district leaders, as well. Certification requirements, while burdensome, do little to suppress supply in urban and suburban regions: in 2013, the tony Philadelphia suburb of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, for example, fielded well over 400 applications per teaching spot. Rural districts often struggle to find even one qualified teacher per subject. Often, the most qualified community members are barred from educating students by certification rules. A seasoned musician or painter in the community may be kept from teaching art or music by licensure requirements, even if no “highly qualified” teacher can be found and classrooms lie fallow. A study in Colorado found that when new teachers are found, they can be tied up in the licensure process for up to a year, the result of outdated rules and processes. This is to say nothing of the challenge of assessing and nurturing teachers, a task greatly complicated by the Rube Goldberg evaluation requirements put into place in many states following Race to the Top. Absent access to additional supports for teachers or an enhanced talent pool, these well-meaning policies create yet another time-consuming reporting requirement that fails to support developing teachers or increase the availability of new ones.

Federal grants targeted solely at rural schools offer paltry compensation: the two main federal rural-education grants provide about $92 and $29 per pupil per year. Much of this funding is too categorical to allow for creativity in its use, locking rural administrators into spending that doesn’t necessarily yield positive results. Competitive grants can be entirely out of reach. A federal i3 (Investing in Innovation Fund) grant application, for example, is estimated to take 120 hours at a minimum (the equivalent of 15 full workdays) and is often developed in consultation with paid advisors, which few rural districts can afford. Put simply, funding formulas and education grants are not structured to support innovation and improvement in rural areas, and thereby create incentives for talent and new ideas to flow into more-populated areas.

The list of regulations that burden rural education improvement goes on and on. Seat time rules for blended learning. Prohibitions on charter schools. Inept vocational learning requirements. These and many other state and federal policies suppress the capacity of inventive rural educators to meet the needs of their students or to leverage their community’s advantages.

Local Innovation Is Imperative 

If the policy environment can be improved, ambitious educators will develop appropriate solutions. Already, teachers and education entrepreneurs have demonstrated a few proof points for rural education reform: online adaptive learning delivered directly to schools and students; the development of fresh, locally relevant, and autonomous school models; and efforts to improve the quality of instruction, school management, and regulations.

The spread of online and blended learning holds particular promise in rural schools. While far from a panacea, online learning provides access to courses and resources otherwise far out of reach for students. Instructional expertise in short supply locally can be wired in from communities near and far. Students grouped with peers of varying ages and levels can advance according to their own mastery of the material. Teachers can be alerted by software when students struggle and can intervene accordingly. All of these advantages are especially helpful in regions without the requisite populations for varied course offerings or specialized instruction.

Rural communities are seeing the promise in distance learning. Iowa, for example, is working to expand its 1:1 laptop program, with more than one-third of districts now putting laptops into the hands of students to ensure online learning is constantly available. In Ohio, however, rural superintendents have embraced the potential of blended learning (a mix of adaptive online and traditional in-person learning) without actually moving to utilize the practice. While it’s evident that the proliferation of technology alone will not improve education, rural communities are particularly well suited for an online learning push.

A promising example of a replicable, blended learning effort executed at large scale can be found in Idaho, where Khan Academy’s largest U.S. pilot is under way (the largest non-American pilot is in Mongolia, a heavily rural country). Khan Academy in Idaho launched in May 2012, spreading out across nearly 600 miles of the state and serving 12,800 students in 570 classrooms. Examining the conditions that enabled this effort to occur, it becomes apparent that rural states can provide fertile ground for education innovation. This pilot crossed numerous district lines and required significant instructional change, yet the mostly rural teachers and administrators who participated readily adjusted. The swiftness with which this pilot was adopted and launched is also impressive. Organizations often find rural areas too sparsely populated to warrant much investment. Khan’s pilot proved that eager schools can be clustered to achieve scale. The foundation that principally funded this work, the J. A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation, decided to make this $1.5 million pilot a classroom-specific grant rather than a schoolwide one, thus ensuring that only fully committed teachers participated. This constraint renders the scale of the pilot all the more striking. Official results are not available, but preliminary data are quite positive. Notably, Idaho ranked number one in the world for use of Khan Academy.

Other, less technology-heavy programs have proven their value in rural communities. Teach for America and KIPP, for example, both achieve impressive results in rural regions and continuously work toward new solutions, as with Teach for America’s recent Rural School Leadership Principal Fellowship. Yet national organizations often hemorrhage money propping up projects in rural areas that are devoid of major philanthropy. Most of the top education organizations have evolved to thrive in urban environments with higher levels of funding, significant philanthropy, and ready access to major talent pools. Some may be able to modify practices to serve the needs of rural America (New Teacher Center’s virtual teacher mentoring program is a noteworthy example), but it is likely that sustainable and appropriate solutions will more often be developed within, not appropriated from outside.

In this vein, a number of excellent school models have developed organically in rural communities. The highest-performing charters have sprung from the needs and desires of the local community. These include the Walton Rural Life Center in Kansas, which weaves agriculture and project-based instruction into almost every subject. The center, a former district school reorganized as a charter in 2007, now scores in the top 5 percent of Kansas schools. Similarly, California’s rural-adjacent Grimmway Academy achieves significantly better academic outcomes for the children of farm workers than local alternatives, with a model centered on an edible schoolyard and blended learning.

It’s worth noting that only a small portion of the rural population is employed in farming, so a much wider variety of models is necessary to provide relevant career preparation. The best of these models push communities to consider how a well-educated, thoroughly prepared workforce can improve and grow the local economy.

Is Meaningful Rural School Choice Impossible?

While expanding charters like Grimmway and Walton holds promise, districts remain the central providers of education in rural America. The two sectors have formed intriguing partnerships in a handful of rural states. The Arkansas Public School Resource Center brings rural school districts and charter schools together as partners in policy and school management. The center provides support, technical assistance, and training to both constituencies in four areas: legal services, financial analysis and management, technology, and teaching and learning. Full-time staff members travel the state to support charters and rural districts, all the while advocating for policies that benefit both. Rural superintendents often form a potent political block, so aligning these distinct groups provides political heft for reform. Among the 10 most rural states, only Arkansas has charter schools, thanks in part to this powerful alliance with rural districts (although Reimagine Prep will open the first Mississippi charter school, in Jackson, in the fall of 2015). Donors in Oklahoma and Idaho are seeding charter school efforts in their states.

The rarity of charter schools in the most-rural states raises the broader question about the viability of school choice in rural America. It makes little sense to create additional schools of choice, and thereby add to the supply of school seats, when the population of an area can barely sustain one academic program. While school choice does have a history in rural states—since 1869, Vermont has allowed parents to select a nearby school for their student to attend at the expense of their own town through a “tuitioning” program—few states have encouraged the direct creation of rural, publicly funded schools of choice. For financial reasons, private schools aren’t a particularly viable option at scale, either.

Rural communities have not embraced charter schools with the same gusto as their urban counterparts in part because they fear consolidation. The fragmentation of districts and declining populations has led to a wave of school consolidations in rural America. Nationally, over the past seven decades, the number of school districts has fallen from 117,000 to just over 14,000, with much of this impact felt in rural communities. There is concern, perhaps warranted, that the growth of a charter sector could force further consolidation and, ultimately, the dissolution of distinct communities. Despite the pedagogical and managerial freedoms charters can offer rural communities and educators, they are often viewed with suspicion. Balancing the growth of these autonomous educational institutions with the survival of existing, locally celebrated schools has proven challenging.

It may be wise to reconsider the purpose of charter schools in rural areas. Chartering could be a tactic to liberate schools from meaningless or detrimental state regulation. Certainly the autonomy that charter laws afford could be put to good use in rural schools, which labor under rules often designed for their urban cousins. If so, charter laws should be written or rewritten to emphasize independence. Convincing traditional rural schools to embrace and act upon this definition of chartering, however, seems unlikely in the near future. Various political and economic pressures, constraints, and incentives may combine to induce some communities to convert their traditional school to a charter, but it is likely that the political power rural legislators and politicians enjoy will cement the status quo in most rural districts and hamper actions that promote chartering.

The Impact of “College for All” 

Do any of the proposals above address the most pressing problems facing rural communities: economic stagnation and “brain drain”—the outflow of the most intellectually talented residents to more-populated areas? One might assume, given the need to build stronger rural economies and retain local talent, that high-quality career education options would abound. This is hardly the case. Nationally, the average number of high school credits earned in career and technical education dropped notably between 1990 and 2009, while those earned in almost every other major subject area increased. Anecdotal evidence indicates that this decline is felt no less in rural regions.

The prevailing winds of education reform do not blow in the direction of career and technical education, once called vocational education. There exists an orthodoxy among education leaders, especially those involved in the no-excuses movement, that a four-year college degree is the ultimate goal for all children, regardless of background, circumstance, or geography. As such, the lion’s share of public and private resources goes into programs that advance that mission. This commitment rightly serves to equalize expectations between more- and less-privileged students and has reaped untold good by encouraging underserved students to achieve academic excellence. It also ensures that students are not “tracked” out of more rigorous courses. One might argue, though, that a college-for-all goal is suited to places like Chicago or Tampa or Phoenix, where scores of students can earn a bachelor’s degree, obtain high-paying jobs, and continue to live in and better their communities. But what of rural students, most of whom must look outside of their communities to find the sorts of jobs that college graduates are drawn to? Can a college-for-all approach enable rural communities to retain their best and brightest? Or do the interests of rural communities and those of their most talented, ambitious students inevitably conflict?

Until rural communities can create sufficient economic opportunity for college-educated citizens, or for those who for lack of viable local career opportunities leave to seek a college education, the brain drain will continue. The number of rural inhabitants with college degrees has grown significantly over time. Some 21 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds in rural communities hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 13 percent of those 65 and older. Still, college graduates make up a huge portion of individuals who leave their rural communities, by some estimates more than 40 percent. Depopulation of counties thus correlates very strongly with brain drain. Of the U.S. counties that lost population between 1970 and 2000, 95 percent were nonmetropolitan and 96 percent experienced brain drain.

An education system custom-made for rural communities would ensure that those who wish to stay in their community, and those who might return after venturing out, have access to relevant career education while they are in high school. Students should also be exposed to the best of rural entrepreneurialism and encouraged to create new ventures in their communities. The current education system, grafted haphazardly onto rural communities, is anything but fitted to local economic need.

Until schools and the federal and state policies that govern them support robust career and technical options, educational solutions to economic sclerosis will have to be cobbled together by educators, employers, and donors. Toyota, for example, has partnered with the STEM curriculum and teacher training program Project Lead the Way (PLTW) to develop a pipeline into their Advanced Manufacturing Technician program, which promises high-paying, technical jobs at Toyota’s plants in Kentucky, West Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama, as well as at Bodine Aluminum facilities in Tennessee and Missouri. Students who complete PLTW and graduate high school in good standing spend two years earning an associate’s degree and receiving paid training from the carmaker, after which they are hired into full-time manufacturing positions at Toyota or elsewhere. While promising economic growth in rural states, this model doesn’t directly address the needs of rural high school students who aren’t within driving distance of, or willing to relocate for, good jobs in their state. This arrangement does demonstrate, however, that industry can be a valuable job-training partner for rural communities.

Schools have sprung up in rural and rural-adjacent areas with the goal of ensuring students graduate ready for college or career. In some cases, industry is leading the charge, similar to such urban efforts as IBM’s presidentially lauded P-Tech schools in New York City. In Delano, located in California’s fertile Central Valley, the agriculture giant Paramount built Agriculture Career Academy within a larger charter school. Though set on ensuring all students graduate academically prepared for college (like P-Tech, Paramount’s project is an early college high school and provides numerous no-cost college courses to enrolled students), each student also completes an apprenticeship at one of Paramount’s divisions. Within a company as large and diverse as Paramount, apprenticeship opportunities can range from legal matters to product distribution. Students can enroll in a four-year college or obtain gainful employment without a college degree if they choose to enter the workplace or a technical academy after high school.

When rural students head to far-off colleges, private and public incentives can help to bring them back and ensure their newfound skills are put to work in communities. The Greenville, Tennessee–based Niswonger Foundation, for example, offers the most talented college-bound students full scholarships to postsecondary schools of their choosing in exchange for commitment to return to and work in their often-rural eastern Tennessee communities for the same number of years they receive the scholarship. Financial aid is coupled with extensive leadership training. The Niswonger Foundation calls this effort “Learn, Earn, and Return.” Farther north, Maine Medical Center created the Maine Track MD Program to provide up to 20 Mainers each year, as well as those with strong ties to the state or an interest in rural medicine, an annual scholarship of $25,000 to pursue a medical degree at Tufts University’s School of Medicine. In exchange, students spend their third and fourth years working in one of more than three dozen medical centers scattered around the largely rural state of Maine. While students are not required to return to the state after graduation, the program was in large part created to stanch the state’s brain drain.

A Vast Expanse of Opportunity 

Large swatches of rural America are struggling to educate children effectively, develop strong economic engines, and preserve communities. An education system that is lackluster in urban America is perhaps even more so in rural areas. It fails both to educate students for college and to prepare them for post–high school careers that allow for individual flourishing without draining out a community’s highest achievers. Under the current education system, it is not surprising that so many ambitious, talented individuals leave their hometowns in order to seek more engaging and remunerative job opportunities. This need not continue to be the case. Political, philanthropic, and education leaders should focus on creating the policy conditions, supporting the entrepreneurs, and more fully integrating the industry opportunities that can best address rural education improvement.

Changes to public funding schemes, policies, and economic incentives could encourage more initiatives that match educational opportunity to rural economic vitality. In order to improve rural educational quality and outcomes, the rules that hamstring educators must be lifted or amended. In areas that can support charter schools, or where districts would benefit from charter conversion, many more are needed.

Emphasis should be placed on finding, nurturing, and supporting rural entrepreneurs who wish to bring new non- and for-profit ventures to their communities. Similarly, systematic efforts to cultivate and develop quality ideas and organizations focused on elementary, secondary, and possibly even postsecondary education, perhaps modeled on the Charter School Growth Fund or NewSchools Venture Fund, must be created. An influx of capital from a prestigious venture fund, coupled with the buzz, magnetic draw, and talented mentorship this offers, could usher in a new wave of leaders from outside and within who focus on rural education issues. Given the huge variation in need between rural locations, countless strategies and campaigns are necessary.

Dan Fishman worked as a high school teacher in rural New Mexico. He is the former director of K–12 programs at The Philanthropy Roundtable and a current MBA candidate at the Berkeley Haas School of Business.

In snowy climes, school superintendents must frequently decide whether an impending storm warrants closing schools for the day. Concerns about student and teacher safety must be weighed against the loss of student learning time, along with state requirements for days of instruction and the cost and inconvenience of extending the school year into the summer. This calculus assumes, based on evidence of various kinds, that school hours lost to snow days equal lost student learning. Studies show that highly effective charter schools, for instance, tend to have longer school days and years than traditional public schools, and that increased instructional time is correlated with higher school effectiveness even within the charter sector. Other studies have shown that schools fare worse on state tests in years in which they experience more weather-related school closings, seemingly providing direct evidence that closings reduce student learning (see “Time for School,” research, Winter 2010).

Discussion of instructional time loss, however, has rarely focused on individual student attendance, a surprising omission given that the average American student misses more than two weeks of school every year. While most absences are the result of illness or disengagement from school, some reflect the decision to stay home when the weather is bad, even though schools remain open. In addition to reducing instructional time, student absences may impede the learning process by forcing teachers to split their time between students who have and have not missed the previous day’s lessons.

This study provides a fresh look at the impact of instructional time lost due to weather-related student absences, as well as to school closings. Using student-level data from Massachusetts, I find that each one-day increase in the student absence rate driven by bad weather reduces math achievement by up to 5 percent of a standard deviation, suggesting that differences in average student attendance may account for as much as one-quarter of the income-based achievement gap in the state. Conversely, instructional time lost to weather-related school closings has no impact on student test scores.

What could explain these apparently conflicting results? It appears that teachers and schools are well prepared to deal with coordinated disruptions of instructional time like snow days but not with absences of different students at different times. In short, individual absences and not school closings are responsible for the achievement impacts of bad weather.

Studying Instructional Disruptions

The major challenge of studying the effect of disruptions to instructional time on student achievement is that students and schools with high absence and closing rates are likely to differ in unobserved ways from those with low absence and closing rates. Simply comparing the test scores of students who are absent more and less often, for example, would ignore factors such as students’ health or family background that affect both academic performance and attendance rates. In the same way, school districts that close school more often may have other policies in place that would lead to performance differences.

One way to overcome this challenge is to take advantage of weather patterns that affect instructional time. Although students have been known to pray for snow days, the amount of snow that falls in a given time and place is outside of their control. It is of course possible that regions that consistently receive more snow than others may differ in unobserved ways that are related to their achievement. Yet the amount of snow a given school experiences often varies a great deal from one year to the next. This makes it possible to compare the performance of individual schools in years they experience an unusually large amount of snow to their performance in years they experience very little.

This is the strategy I implement, using data from Massachusetts spanning the years 2003 to 2010. In particular, I compare how students in a particular grade in a particular school fared on the state tests in years when winter weather resulted in numerous student absences and school cancellations to the test results for students in that same grade and school in years when the winter was milder and resulted in fewer absences and cancellations.

Massachusetts is an ideal state to conduct a study of weather-related absences and school closings as the amount of snowfall varies widely from year to year and across the state. Indeed, the average number of days with more than four inches of snowfall experienced by schools in the state during the study period ranged from just a single day in 2007 to nearly five days in 2005. In some years, the Boston area was hardest hit, while in others more snow fell in the Berkshire Mountains to the west.

As in most states, school closings in Massachusetts are at the discretion of the superintendent, who generally consults the weather forecast, neighboring superintendents, and other local officials before making a decision. Superintendents are typically reluctant to call a snow day for a number of reasons. Parents of school-age children may struggle to make child-care arrangements when schools close unexpectedly. Massachusetts law requires all schools to provide 180 days of instruction. When schools close too often during the winter, instructional days must be added to the calendar in June. Because the state’s standardized tests are administered in the spring, snow days also reduce the amount of instructional time that schools have to prepare students for the tests.

Data

Because the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education does not collect information on school closings, I solicited it from the state’s roughly 350 school districts individually, by e-mail and phone, with priority given to collecting data from the largest districts. I was ultimately able to obtain annual data on the number of school closings between 2003 and 2010 from districts serving more than half the students in the state.

Snowfall data come from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Data Online. NOAA records daily weather data, including snowfall, rainfall, and minimum and maximum temperatures, all of which are captured by dozens of sensors scattered across the state. By mapping schools’ latitude and longitude, I assigned each to its closest weather sensor. This allowed the construction of annual measures of snowfall that are specific to each school.

My main analysis sample includes all students in Massachusetts public schools from 2003 to 2010 with valid state test scores in math or English language arts (ELA) from districts that reported a complete annual history of school closings. Student-level data on demographics, attendance, and achievement come from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Specifically, the data include student gender, race/ethnicity, family income as indicated by free or reduced-price lunch eligibility, special education status, and current grade. A little more than one-third of the students are from low-income families. More than two-thirds are white, while 11 percent are black, 14 percent are Hispanic, and 6 percent are Asian.

I calculate student absences as the difference between the number of days a student was enrolled in school and the number of days a student actually attended school. The data do not include specific dates of student absences, so daily weather patterns cannot be linked to daily attendance. All analysis is therefore done at the annual level.

The data include students’ scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), which is given annually in grades 3 through 8 and in grade 10 in mathematics and ELA. The ELA tests are typically administered during a two-week window in late March to early April and the math tests in mid- to late May. Although my annual measure of absences may therefore overstate the number of absences that could affect test performance, the weather-related absences that are the focus of the analysis almost always occur prior to these test-administration windows.

A Blizzard of Absences

The average Massachusetts student is absent 8 school days per year, but student absences vary by poverty status, grade, and race. In the sample of students used in my analysis, poor students are absent 10 days per year on average, 3 days more than nonpoor students. There are also striking differences by race in the average number of absences. Black and Hispanic students are absent 9 and 10 school days a year, respectively, compared to 5 days for Asian and about 8 days for white students.

In contrast, the average student misses just two days a year due to weather-related closings, a figure which does not differ notably across student groups. For most students, then, the amount of instruction time lost to absences dwarfs that lost to closings (see Figure 1).

The first step in my analysis is to determine how both student absences and school closings are affected by snowfall. In doing so, I distinguish between moderately snowy days, in which a school received at least 4 but fewer than 10 inches of snow, and days when more than 10 inches fell. To discern the effects of both kinds of days, I compare students attending the same school and grade in different years and adjust for the average amount of snow experienced in a given year statewide.

I find that each extra day with at least 4 but fewer than 10 inches of snow leads to just .04 additional school closings but .08 additional student absences (see Figure 2). The size of the latter effect implies that, for a classroom of 25 students, each additional moderately snowy day would result in about two students more being absent. Each day with snowfall of 10 inches or more, in contrast, leads to .51 additional closings. Controlling for the number of moderately snowy days, however, heavy snow leaves student absences unaffected, since all students are generally out of school.

Snowy days thus affect instructional time through two channels. Some result in school closings, in which all students miss school. On other, less snowy days, schools typically remain open but a subset of students remains home. With information on the number of moderate and heavy snow days that schools experience each year, it is possible to disentangle the effects of absences and closings on student achievement.

Absences, Closings, and Student Achievement

I find that absences cause sharp reductions in math achievement. When the average student in a given grade and school is absent one additional day over the course of a year, average math achievement in that grade falls by 5 percent of a standard deviation, a large effect, roughly equivalent to 6 percent of the gap in math performance between low-income and nonpoor students in Massachusetts. Given that the typical low-income student is absent three more days each year than a nonpoor student, this result suggests that student absences could account for as much as one-quarter of the income-based achievement gap in the state. The estimated impact on ELA performance, while negative, is smaller and statistically insignificant (see Figure 3).

The larger impact of absences on math performance may be because in math, much more so than in ELA, understanding the current topic depends on having understood prior topics. Teachers may feel more obligated during math instructional time to try to catch up students who have been absent, thus depriving the rest of the class of instructional time. If teachers don’t review for those students, their days missed may have long-run effects, as they lose mastery of both the material presented in their absence and the material presented subsequently. Missing an ELA lesson may not have as deep an impact on a student’s ability to learn from subsequent lessons.

Because my analysis relates average achievement levels in a given school and grade to overall absence rates, the effects of absences on math achievement could be driven by students’ own absences or those of their peers. I suspect that both factors are important. In a separate analysis of the same achievement data, I compare the test scores of specific students to their own test scores in years in which they and their peers were absent more often. I find that student learning in math is equally affected by one’s own lost instructional time and the time lost by one’s peers. This pattern provides a first suggestion that the harm caused by student absences may stem as much from the challenges frequent absences pose for teachers as from the instructional time lost by the specific students missing class.

School closings, in contrast, have no effect at all on student achievement for the sample as a whole, in either math or ELA. I find that school closings do appear to reduce performance in both subjects in schools serving predominantly low-income students, but the effect is smaller than .02 standard deviations for each day lost. In the main, then, it appears that individual student absences and not school closings are responsible for the achievement impacts of bad weather and that the magnitude of the estimated impact of absences on math achievement is substantial.

These findings, that weather-related school closings have little impact on student achievement, appear to conflict with those of a number of previous studies, which may have painted an incomplete picture of the relationship between bad weather, lost instructional time, and achievement. Finding a correlation between bad weather and declines in student achievement, prior researchers assumed that the effect runs through school closings. This analysis distinguishes between the effects of school closings and of individual student absences and finds the latter to be the culprit in lowering student test scores.

Conclusion

In short, the impact of lost instructional time depends on the particular form of the time lost. Student absences sharply reduce student achievement, particularly in math, but school closings appear to have little impact. These findings should not be taken to mean that instructional time does not matter for student learning; the bulk of the evidence suggests it does. A more likely explanation is that schools and teachers are well prepared to deal with the coordinated disruptions caused by snow days—much more so than they are to handle the less dramatic but more frequent disruptions caused by poor student attendance.

This result may seem intuitive to teachers, who are familiar with the management challenges of instructing students at different levels of preparation. When a few students miss a day or more of instruction, the teacher can review the recently presented material for those students who missed it, in which case the absent students’ peers lose out on valuable instructional time, or she may move forward with new material and risk having the absent students fall behind.

School closings, conversely, present no such coordination challenge. All students miss the exact same lesson, allowing the teacher to easily plan for ways to compensate. The lost time will have no effect on students’ standardized test scores so long as the teacher redirects time from nontested subjects or material to compensate for the missed lesson on tested material. If lessons on nontested material can be postponed, compressed, or eliminated altogether, school closings will not affect student test scores.

The fact that changes in student absence rates are strongly associated with changes in student achievement demonstrates that instructional time lost to these student-level disruptions matters for student learning. Increasing instructional time does not necessarily require lengthening the school day or year. Substantial gains may be made by simply improving student attendance.

The negative achievement impacts associated with student absences imply that schools and teachers are not well prepared to deal with the more frequent disruptions caused by poor student attendance. Schools and teachers may benefit from investing in strategies to compensate for these disruptions, including the use of self-paced learning technologies that shift the classroom model to one in which all students need not learn the same lesson at the same time.

In the meantime, superintendents watching the weather forecast should consider erring on the side of cancellation when an impending storm is likely to be severe enough to substantially disrupt student attendance. Their decisions may not please working parents scrambling to arrange child care. (As a Boston-area parent, I speak from experience.) But closing school for everyone appears to be better for student learning than adding to the challenges posed by American students’ already low attendance rates.

Joshua Goodman is assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.