In an effort to make public organizations more efficient, governments round the world make use of hard performance targets, such as student test scores for public schools and patient waiting times for health-care systems. Accountability based on objective performance measures has the benefit of being transparent. One potential drawback is that such schemes may lead to gaming behavior in a setting where the available performance measures focus on just one dimension of a multifaceted outcome.

Subjective performance evaluation holds the promise of measuring what matters. When evaluators are allowed to exercise their own judgment, rather than following a formal decision rule, however, the subjective measure may be corrupted by such behaviors as favoritism. One type of subjective evaluation, onsite inspection, is nonetheless used in many school systems around the world. In-class evaluations by external assessors have been proposed recently in the United States for the K–12 sector, as well as for the Head Start preschool program. Yet there is very little evidence to date on the validity of inspection ratings and the effectiveness of inspection-based accountability systems in improving school quality.

This study evaluates a subjective performance-evaluation regime in place in the English public school system since the early 1990s. Under this regime, independent inspectors visit schools, assess schools’ performance, and disclose their findings on the Internet. Inspectors combine hard metrics, such as test scores, with softer ones, such as observations of classroom teaching, in order to arrive at an overall judgment of school quality. Schools that receive a fail rating may be subject to sanctions, such as more frequent and intensive inspections.

I provide evidence on the effectiveness of several aspects of the inspections system. First, I demonstrate that inspection ratings can aid in distinguishing between more- and less-effective schools, even after controlling for test scores and various other school characteristics. Second, exploiting a natural experiment, I show that a fail inspection rating leads to test-score gains for primary school students that remain evident even after the students move into secondary schools. I find no evidence that schools that receive a fail rating are able to inflate test-score performance by gaming the system, suggesting that oversight by inspectors may mitigate such strategic behavior.

The English School Inspection System

The English public schooling system combines centralized testing with school inspections. Over the period relevant to this study, tests took place when students were age 7, 11, 14, and 16; these are known as the Key Stage l to Key Stage 4 tests, respectively. Successive governments have used the results of Key Stage tests, especially Key Stages 2 and 4, as performance measures when holding schools to account.

Since the early 1990s, a government agency called the Office for Standards in Education, or Ofsted, has inspected all English public schools. Ofsted has three primary functions: 1) to offer feedback to the school principal and teachers; 2) to provide information to parents to aid their decisionmaking process; and 3) to identify schools that suffer from “serious weakness.” Although Ofsted employs its own in-house team of inspectors, the agency contracts out the majority of inspections to a handful of private-sector and nonprofit organizations via a competitive bidding process. Ofsted retains responsibility for setting overall strategic goals and objectives, putting in place a framework to guide the inspection process, and monitoring the quality of inspections.

Over the time period covered by this study, schools were generally inspected once during each three- to six-year inspection cycle. An inspection involves an assessment of a school’s performance on academic and other measured outcomes, followed by an onsite visit to the school, typically lasting one or two days for primary schools. Inspectors arrive at the school on very short notice (maximum of two to three days), which should limit schools’ ability to make last-minute preparations for the visit. Inspections take place throughout the academic year, September to July.

During the onsite visit, inspectors collect qualitative evidence on performance and practices at the school. A key element of this is classroom observation. In addition, inspectors hold in-depth interviews with the school leadership, examine students’ work, and engage in discussions with students and parents. The evidence gathered by the inspectors during their visit, as well as test-performance data, form the evidence base for each school’s inspection report. The school receives an explicit headline grade, ranging between l (“Outstanding”) and 4 (“Unsatisfactory,” also known as a fail rating). The full inspection report is made available to students and parents and is posted on the Internet.

There are two categories of fail, a moderate fail (known as “Notice to Improve”) and a more severe fail (“Special Measures”), which carry different sanctions. Schools that receive a moderate fail rating are subject to additional inspections, with an implicit threat of a downgrade to the severe fail category if inspectors judge improvements to be inadequate. Schools that receive the severe fail rating may experience more dramatic consequences: these can include changes in the school leadership team and the school’s governing board, increased resources, as well as increased oversight from the inspectors.

Over the period, September 2006 to July 2009, 13 percent of schools received the best rating, “Outstanding”; 48 percent received a “Good” rating; 33 percent received a “Satisfactory” rating; and 6 percent received a “Fail” rating. The fail group included 4.5 percent of schools receiving the moderate fail rating and 1.5 percent of schools receiving the severe fail rating.

Official policy statements indicate that inspectors place substantial weight on test scores, which is borne out by analysis of the data. A decline of 10 national percentile points on a school’s test performance in the year before inspection is associated with a 3 percentage point rise in the likelihood of being rated fail, taking into account the proportion of students eligible for free lunch, as well as the local authority in which the school is located. Nevertheless, test scores are not the only measure inspectors use to rate schools. Around 25 percent of schools that had scored in the bottom quarter nationally on the test were rated Outstanding or Good during the 2006 to 2009 period.

Validating Inspection Ratings

I first investigate whether inspection ratings convey any information on school quality beyond what is captured by test-score rankings. The critical question is whether inspectors visiting the school are able to gather and summarize information about school quality that is not already publicly available. If inspectors rely mostly or exclusively on test scores to arrive at the overall rating, then these ratings will not provide new information to educators, parents, and policymakers.

I test the validity of the inspection ratings by examining to what extent these ratings can forecast measures of school quality not observed by the inspectors, after taking into account the measures they do observe. I construct two measures of school quality—student perceptions of teacher practices and parent satisfaction—using data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE), a major survey supported by the Department for Education. Students age 14 are asked how likely teachers are to: take action when a student breaks rules, make students work to their full capacity, keep order in class, assign homework, check that any homework that is assigned is done, and grade students’ work. Parents are asked about their satisfaction with the interest teachers show in the child, school discipline, child’s school progress, and feedback from teachers.

I combine the student questions into a single measure of student perceptions of teacher practices and the parent questions into a single measure of parent satisfaction. I then examine whether these survey measures, which are not observed by the inspectors, are higher in schools that received better inspection ratings, controlling for various characteristics of the schools and survey respondents. For this analysis, school characteristics taken into account include national percentile test rank, the proportion of students eligible for a free lunch, whether the school is secular or religious, and the local education authority in which it is located. Student factors include prior test score, gender, ethnic background, parents’ education, income and economic activity, and whether the family receives government benefits.

My results confirm that lower inspection ratings are associated with sharply declining school quality as measured by student perceptions of teacher practices. The strength of this relationship may be gauged by comparing the change in quality associated with changes in the school’s position in the national test-score ranking: the results show that an increase of 50 percentile points is associated with an increase of 0.15 standard deviations in student perceptions of teacher practices (see Figure 1). A two-unit improvement in the inspection rating, such as from Satisfactory to Outstanding, is associated with an even larger increase of 0.21 standard deviations.

Results for the parent satisfaction measure are very similar to those reported for the teacher practices measure. A two-unit increase in the inspection rating is associated with an increase of 0.17 standard deviations in the parent satisfaction measure. The relationship between test scores and parental satisfaction, however, is statistically insignificant after controlling for inspection ratings. In short, this analysis confirms that inspection ratings can help detect differences in teacher practice and parental satisfaction among schools with similar test-score rankings and socioeconomic composition.

The Effect of a Fail Inspection on Test Scores

What is the effect of a fail inspection on students’ subsequent test scores? The challenge to answering this question is that receiving a fail rating is based at least partly on past test performance. Schools that have a bad year on the standardized test are more likely to receive a fail rating when they are next inspected. If the low score is due in part to bad luck, the score is likely to increase the next year, toward the school’s typical performance. Thus, schools that receive fail ratings may appear to improve in the following year for reasons other than the fail rating.

I address this concern by comparing schools inspected early in the year to those inspected late in the year. This analysis exploits a specific feature of the English testing system, namely, that the age-11 tests take place each year over five days in the second week of May. The results are released in mid-July. Schools that are inspected and receive a fail rating early in the academic year can respond to that rating and potentially improve their scores by the time of the May test. But schools that are failed later in the year—in particular, those that are failed after mid-May—cannot. I therefore estimate the effect of receiving a fail rating by comparing the May test results for schools inspected very early in the same academic year, the treatment group, with a comparison group of schools inspected after the test is taken in early May but before the results are released in July. The key idea is that inspectors have the same information on past test scores for both groups of schools.

I conduct this analysis using mathematics and English test scores for schools failed in one of the four academic years, 2005–06 to 2008–09. The key comparison is between students enrolled in schools that received a fail rating in the early part of the academic year, September to November (the treatment group) with those attending schools that received a fail rating late in the academic year, mid-May to mid-July (the control group). It is important to bear in mind that this methodology does not compare the effect of attending a school that received a fail rating with the effect of attending a school that received a higher rating.

The validity of this approach is supported by the fact that the treatment and comparison groups in general have very similar student and school characteristics. The proportion of students receiving a free school lunch, the proportion of students who are white British, student performance on the age-11 test in the prior year, and the school’s inspection rating from the previous inspection round are all similar, on average, in the treatment and control schools.

The results indicate that the effect of receiving a fail rating is to raise standardized test scores in a school by 0.12 standard deviations in math and by 0.07 to 0.09 standard deviations in English. These gains, which roughly equate to between one-third and one-half a year of typical instruction, are especially noteworthy given that they can only reflect the efforts of schools made between an inspection in the period from September to November and the tests administered in May, a maximum of eight months.

Testing for Strategic Behavior

An outstanding question is whether these improvements reflect strategic behavior by schools that face strong incentives to improve their test scores. These strategies could include the removal of low-performing students from the testing pool, teaching to the test, and targeting students close to the mandated proficiency threshold. I conduct three tests for the presence of these types of strategic responses.

First, I examine to what extent gains in test scores following the fail rating are accounted for by selectively removing low-performing students. Specifically, I examine whether the results change when I adjust my results to account for differences in student characteristics, including prior (age 7) test scores; gender; eligibility for free lunch; special education needs; month of birth; whether first language is English; ethnic background; and census information on the home neighborhood deprivation index. I find that controlling for these factors in the analysis has little impact on the estimated effect of receiving a fail rating. In other words, it doesn’t appear that schools try to game the system by systematically discouraging certain groups of students from taking the exam.

Second, I investigate whether there is any evidence that teachers target students on the margin of attaining “Level 4” proficiency; the percentage of students attaining that proficiency level is the key government target for age-11 students. Following a fail rating, the incentives to maximize students passing over the threshold are more intense than prior to the fail rating. Schools may therefore try to target resources toward students on the margin of attaining this threshold, to the detriment of students far below and far above.

I address this issue by examining whether the fail rating effect varies by students’ prior ability and find a strong inverse relationship between prior ability and the effects of attending a school that received a fail rating. The fail rating effect for students with test scores in the bottom quarter prior to the treatment year is 0.20 and 0.14 standard deviations in mathematics and English, respectively (see Figure 2). Students in the middle of the prior test-score distribution also experience substantial gains of roughly 0.10 to 0.12 standard deviations in math and 0.08 to 0.10 standard deviations in English. The gains for students with prior scores in the top quarter are the smallest, at 0.05 and 0.03 standard deviations in mathematics and English, respectively.

Why are the effects of a fail rating largest for students with low prior test scores? One potential explanation relates to differences within the schools in the degree to which parents are able to hold teachers accountable. Parents of children scoring low on the age-7 test are poorer than average and may be less able to assess their child’s progress and the quality of instruction provided by the school. Teachers may exert lower levels of effort for students whose parents are less vocal about quality of instruction. My results suggest that, following a fail rating and the subsequent increased oversight of schools, teachers increase their effort. This rise in effort may be greatest where previously there was the greatest slack.

Finally, I examine whether any gains in test scores in the year of the fail rating are sustained in the years following the inspection. This provides an indirect test of the extent of teaching to the test, as gains due to crude test-prep strategies are less likely to persist over time than gains produced by improved instruction. Specifically, I examine whether the effects on age-11 test scores can be detected when the students are tested again at age 14, three years after the students have left the primary school. This is a fairly stringent test of gaming behavior, because prior research has found evidence of “fade-out” of test-score gains even when there are no strong incentives to boost test scores artificially.

The results show that a fail rating raises average math and English test scores by 0.05 standard deviations three years after leaving the primary school. These medium-term gains are largest for lower-performing students, in line with earlier results showing large gains for these groups in the year of inspection.

Conclusion

How best to design incentives for public organizations such as schools is a fundamental public policy challenge. One solution, performance evaluation on the basis of test scores, is prevalent in many countries. This paper evaluates an alternative approach, school inspections, which may better capture the multifaceted nature of education production. A key concern under such a regime is that it is open to manipulation.

My first set of results demonstrates that inspector ratings are correlated with student- and parent-reported measures of school quality, even after controlling for test-score results and other school characteristics. In other words, inspectors are able to discriminate between more- and less-effective schools, and, significantly, report their findings even when the stakes are high. Simply disseminating inspection ratings and reports may therefore better inform consumers and other decisionmakers in the education sector.

My main finding is that receiving a fail inspection rating leads to test-score improvements of around 0.1 standard deviations. There is little evidence to suggest that schools are able to inflate test performance artificially by gaming the system. If inspectors are able to evaluate actual practices and instructional quality at the school, both before and after an inspection, then inspections may well have a mitigating effect on such unintended responses.

Finally, the data reveal that the fail rating effects are especially large for students with low prior test scores. The gains are large when compared to other possible policy interventions, such as the effects of attending a school with higher average achievement levels or enrolling in a charter school. These results are consistent with the view that children of low-income parents, arguably the least vocal in holding teachers accountable, benefit the most from inspections. Consequently, the findings of this study may be especially relevant in the current policy environment where, first, there is heightened concern about raising standards for this group of children and, second, these students are hard to reach using other policy levers.

Iftikhar Hussain is a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Sussex.

Championed by California-based Parent Revolution, and adopted first by California in early 2010, more than a half-dozen states now have parent trigger laws. The parent trigger, which allows a majority of parents at a low-performing school to vote to seize control from the local district, has been wielded at four California schools. Is the parent trigger a good idea? Can empowered families transform the system one school at a time? Making the case for the parent trigger is Ben Austin, executive director of Parent Revolution and former deputy mayor of Los Angeles. Questioning the merits of the trigger is Michael Petrilli, vice president for policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and an executive editor of Education Next.

• Empowered Families Can Transform the System, by Ben Austin

• There’s a Better Way to Unlock Parent Power, by Michael J. Petrilli

If 2012 was the year of MOOCs (massive open online courses) in higher education, then the flipped classroom was the innovation of the year for K–12 schools (see “The Flipped Classroom,” what next, Winter 2012).

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post spilled ink over the phenomenon. Several authors resorted to old-fashioned books to discuss flipping, including the two teachers who allegedly originated the technique (see Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day by Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams). None of that tells us anything about the number of teachers who actually flipped their classrooms. No one has offered any firm measure of the practice or, more importantly, assessed its impact on student learning.

In case you missed all the hype, the flipped classroom is a form of blended learning in which students learn online at least part of the time while attending a brick-and-mortar school. Either at home or during a homework period at school, students view lessons and lectures online. Time in the classroom, previously reserved for teacher instruction, is spent on what we used to call homework, with teacher assistance as needed.

How can this improve student learning? Homework and lecture time have merely been switched. Students still learn through a lecture. And many online lectures are primitive videos.

There is some truth in this characterization, but it misses the key insight behind the flipped classroom. If some students don’t understand what is presented in a real-time classroom lecture, it’s too bad for them. The teacher must barrel on to pace the lesson for the class as a whole, which often means going too slow for some and too fast for others.

Moving the delivery of basic content instruction online gives students the opportunity to hit rewind and view again a section they don’t understand or fast-forward through material they have already mastered. Students decide what to watch and when, which, theoretically at least, gives them greater ownership over their learning.

Viewing lectures online may not seem to differ much from the traditional homework reading assignment, but there is at least one critical difference: Classroom time is no longer spent taking in raw content, a largely passive process. Instead, while at school, students do practice problems, discuss issues, or work on specific projects. The classroom becomes an interactive environment that engages students more directly in their education.

In the flipped classroom, the teacher is available to guide students as they apply what they have learned online. One of the drawbacks of traditional homework is that students don’t receive meaningful feedback on their work while they are doing it; they may have no opportunity to relearn concepts they struggled to master. With a teacher present to answer questions and watch over how students are doing, the feedback cycle has greater potential to bolster student learning.

The flipped classroom does not address all the limitations of the brick-and-mortar school. Although in the best flipped-classroom implementations, each student can move at her own pace and view lessons at home that meet her individual needs rather than those of the entire class, most flipped classrooms do not operate this way. As Salman Khan, the media’s personification of the flipped-classroom, observes in The One World Schoolhouse, “Although it makes class time more interactive and lectures more independent, the ‘flipped classroom’ still has students moving together in age-based cohorts at roughly the same pace, with snapshot exams that are used more to label students than address their weaknesses” (see “To YouTube and Beyond,” book reviews, Summer 2013).

This arrangement also doesn’t tackle the root causes of the lack of motivation that persists among many low-achieving students.

Some in the media have suggested that the flipped-classroom approach may only work in upper-income, suburban schools. If low-income students lack access to computers at home or to reliable Internet access, flipping may be a nonstarter in some schools. If students can’t benefit from online instruction at home, then they need to receive instruction in the classroom or risk falling behind. Some fear that in relying on parents to provide technology and support, the flipped-classroom model may exacerbate existing resource inequalities. Schools can make computer labs available during afterschool hours, however, and parental assistance is less critical when watching an online video than when solving homework problems.

What is perhaps most telling is that the “no-excuses” charter schools that serve large numbers of low-income students well—KIPP, Rocketship, Alliance, and Summit among them—are not flipping their classrooms. Even as these schools adopt blended-learning models, the flipped classroom isn’t among them. The models these schools are employing give students more support as they need it and actively guide students to more ownership over their learning. These models also do not rely on students having access to high-speed Internet-connected computers at home; online learning occurs during the school day.

Even if the flipped classroom does prove of some benefit to some low-income students, this change in structure alone is unlikely to produce the vast improvement in student learning our country needs. But that doesn’t mean the innovation is insignificant. The flipped classroom might still have an important indirect impact on the American education system, as one brand of digital learning. The optimal use of digital learning will vary in different contexts and communities. Some people will attend full-time virtual schools, with even the “classroom” experience occurring online; most will attend brick-and-mortar schools that employ some version of digital learning.

Unlike school vouchers for low-income students, charter schools in disadvantaged communities, or bonus pay for teachers in inner-city schools, digital learning is not designed for just one slice of the population. It’s not a policy that parents might support in theory but, because it has no practical impact on them, won’t spend political energy promoting or defending. Rather, if it works as well as its proponents hope, digital learning will gather political support from a wide swath of the American public.

And it may well turn out that the flipped classroom is most effective in private schools or upper-income suburban schools. If that’s how those students make the best use of digital learning, that’s OK. As Khan says, “Blue jeans didn’t become cool until Hollywood started wearing them.” In the world of digital learning, the flipped classroom may just be one good brand.

The summer of 2011 might have been a chance for Diane Tavenner to rest on laurels, but the CEO of Summit Public Schools is not a restful sort of person.

The California Charter Schools Association had named Tavenner Charter Leader of the Year in 2010. Summit’s first charter high school, Summit Prep, launched in 2003, was featured in the film Waiting for Superman (2010). The 400-student school in Redwood City, California—midway between San Francisco and San Jose—was named one of the Top 10 Most Transformative Schools in the country by Newsweek in 2011.

Summit’s second Redwood City high school, Everest, which opened in 2009, had strong test scores and a wait list. Summit was expanding to San Jose in response to parent demand so strong she was opening two new high schools there, Rainier and Tahoma, with 100 9th graders in each.

Dissatisfied, Tavenner decided it was time to radically rethink Summit’s teaching model. Summit partnered with Khan Academy, known for its online lessons and progress-tracking dashboard, to pilot “hybrid” math instruction at the new high schools. Students fill in knowledge gaps and develop math skills online, working at their own level and at their own pace, while also applying math to projects and learning from teachers. The goal is to create “self-directed learners.”

Fast-forward to 2013: Tavenner’s plans include a “Silicon Valley College Ready Corridor” with 14 high-performing, heterogeneous schools in the 50 miles from South San Francisco to San Jose. Two “next generation” schools will open in the fall: a high school in Daly City and a middle/high school in Sunnyvale.

The Summit Prep Model

With Summit Prep and Everest, “we took the factory model high school and did it significantly better,” Tavenner explains. “We made it smaller, more personal, with no tracking, longer hours, more support for kids. We recruited very talented teachers and fully developed them. But it’s still a factory model and kids are moving through that system.”

Summit hires graduates of elite universities to teach a college-prep curriculum that includes six Advanced Placement (AP) courses. About half the Redwood City students are Latino and black. Many come from Spanish-speaking families and start 9th grade with significant gaps in their academic skills and knowledge. Some take a basic skills class in addition to college-prep classes. They can take more time to pass if they need it, says Tavenner. “Algebra I ends when you show competency. It doesn’t necessarily end in June.”

The Redwood City schools also enroll students from white and Asian American families that range from middle class to wealthy. Some are top students who choose Summit for the rigor and the Ivy-educated faculty. Some have learning disabilities.

Students from all backgrounds like the small size—a maximum of 400 students—and the sense of community.

Nearly all graduates are accepted at four-year colleges and universities. The six-year college-graduation rate is expected to be 55 percent for Summit Prep’s first graduating class, nearly the same as the national average for all students. That isn’t good enough for Tavenner. Students who’ve relied on supportive high-school teachers may not be prepared to “drive their own learning” in college, she says. “We need to let kids set goals, make plans, maybe fail in lots of short cycles. Try, fail, learn.”

Summit 2.0

On a sunny Valentine’s Day in 2013, Tavenner, 41, sits in a room in the old elementary school that’s now the temporary site of Rainier and Tahoma. She has no office. She works in shared space at one of Summit’s two Redwood City schools or at the San Jose campus, which is nestled behind National Hispanic University’s newer buildings in a part of town with many immigrant families.

Valentine’s Day is her least favorite day to spend with hormonally excited 14- and 15-year-olds. Still, the drab campus is enlivened by teenagers carrying red and pink balloons and pink-frosted cupcakes. Half the students are on their way to classrooms, while the other half head for a large room where a more personalized learning environment has been created.

In the second year of the experiment, Summit has gone “beyond blended learning” to create what Tavenner calls an “optimized learning environment.”

Two hundred 9th and 10th graders at a time spend two hours a day studying math and brushing up on basic skills. They start at a work station by opening their personal guide, reading e-mail from the math teachers, and setting goals. Students can choose from a “playlist” of online learning resources, seek help at the “tutoring bar,” participate in teacher-led discussions in breakout rooms, or work on group projects, such as designing a water fountain.

When they’re ready, students take an online test to see if they’ve reached their goals. The math team, five teachers and two coaches, keeps students on track.

It’s an experiment in progress, but results are promising, says Tavenner. Next year, San Jose students will spend the whole day in self-directed learning.

A Tough Climb

Summit was started by affluent Silicon Valley parents in the Sequoia Union High School District, which includes some of the wealthiest towns in the U.S. (Atherton, Woodside, and Portola Valley), affluent Menlo Park, middle-class Belmont and San Carlos, blue-collar Redwood City, and low-income East Palo Alto. The high schools compete with excellent private schools.

Sequoia’s leaders and teachers bitterly opposed Summit, but a district in far-off Tuolumne County agreed to charter the new school for a small share of state funding.

From the start, Summit was accused of being an “elitist” school for wealthy whites who didn’t want their kids to mix with Latinos and blacks. The founding parents vowed to recruit students of all colors and income levels. They hired Tavenner, then vice principal of nearby Mountain View High School, to fulfill that promise.

A native of South Lake Tahoe, she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology at the University of Southern California and a teaching credential at Loyola Marymount University. After five years of teaching English and journalism at “a classic inner-city dropout factory” near Los Angeles, she was so frustrated that she considered leaving teaching.

By then, she’d married Scott Tavenner, whom she first met when they were 15-year-olds at a summer leadership camp at Stanford. He persuaded her to try teaching at a different sort of school. The couple moved to Mountain View in the heart of Silicon Valley. While he ran an online advertising business, she taught English at Mountain View High, which was trying to close a large achievement gap between its affluent white and Asian American students and its working-class Mexican American minority. Tavenner was intrigued by the school’s decision to open AP classes to all students.

Starting from Scratch

After earning a master’s degree in educational administration and policy analysis at Stanford, Tavenner moved into administration.

Opening up AP wasn’t enough to close the gaps, she realized. “How do we get students to make good choices? How do we inform parents? How do we teach? How do we organize courses?”

She liked the work, but didn’t think the high school would go as far as she wanted. Then she heard about the Summit job, “a chance to start from scratch” with a school that would educate all kids together.

“When you live in Silicon Valley, there’s so much entrepreneurship, it’s hard to resist,” she says.

A new mother at the time—her son is now 10—Tavenner set out to create a new charter school. She went to elementary and middle schools, libraries, and lots of churches in Redwood City to spread the word. She asked new recruits to reach out to their friends. “Every one of those first families I had a relationship with,” she recalls.

Forging a unified school community was a challenge. The school almost started with two parent groups, one for English speakers and one for Spanish speakers. To Tavenner’s relief, parents decided on one group with co-presidents from each community. Meetings are conducted in both languages.

Teaching in a “truly heterogeneous environment is really hard to do and generally not done well,” Tavenner says. It’s always been her goal.

“I want to have as many doors open as possible, including being legitimately ready for success in a four-year college when they graduate. I don’t think our education system does that.”

Although Summit’s enrollment reflected the district’s demographics, the school was accused of creaming the best students. “I took it very personally,” Tavenner says. Dealing with Sequoia was “the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

Battling for Everest

Sequoia took over Summit Prep’s charter in 2006, but the school board denied a charter to Everest.

“Everest is clearly not designed for low-performing students, and in fact Everest focuses selectively on high-achieving, privileged students,” charged Sequoia superintendent Pat Gemma, in a 2008 newspaper commentary. “Everest proposes offering a solely college preparatory curriculum to prepare all its students for enrollment in a four-year college.”

“The superintendent said kids of color won’t want this because it’s college prep,” Tavenner recalls, still fuming. “Teachers said we were an elitist school. It made me become a mama bear. It was a fight, a war zone.”

Summit was “demonstrably unlikely to successfully implement” Everest’s financial plan, concluded district staff. Summit Prep had demonstrably succeeded with the same plan, Tavenner pointed out, in vain. The charter network raises donations to fund start-up costs. When fully enrolled, schools operate on the same state funding as other high schools.

Sequoia trustees also claimed a new charter would draw white students away from two small charter high schools serving East Palo Alto that enrolled blacks, Latinos, and Pacific Islanders, but no whites.

After the state board of education chartered Everest, Sequoia offered a vacant lot in East Palo Alto. Summit filed a lawsuit to force the district to provide facilities, as required by state law. When Sequoia named a new superintendent in 2010, the fighting ended. The charter school now has a “very good” relationship with the district, Tavenner says.

Taming the Wild West

In Summit’s early years, “some people thought charter schools could be ‘stamped out,’” Tavenner says. “It was the Wild, Wild West.”

Now 8 percent of California’s public school students attend the more than 1,000 charter schools statewide. As president of the member council of the California Charter Schools Association, Tavenner believes strongly that ineffective schools should be closed. “It can’t be like traditional schools that perpetually fail,” she says.

But it’s clear that charters are here to stay. And so is Summit.

Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, who serves on the board of Summit Public Schools, donated $2.5 million to fund new schools and pledged to match up to $2.5 million in contributions from other high-tech leaders, potentially giving Summit $7.5 million for the Silicon Valley corridor. Attracting high-profile supporters is undoubtedly aided by a strong track record: all four Summit charters exceed state goals on the Academic Performance Index. Summit also has raised an innovation fund to pay for its experiments with “optimized” learning.

While it’s easier to start a charter school than it was 10 years ago, it takes a “solid plan” and “a leadership team with experience in running schools and running a business,” advises Tavenner. “It’s a political process. Do your homework, meet with everyone, be open to feedback.” And perform.

Joanne Jacobs, a former San Jose Mercury News editorial writer and columnist, writes about K–12 education and community colleges at joannejacobs.com and ccspotlight.org. She’s the author of Our School on the early years of a San Jose charter school that prepares Mexican American students for college.

Since the first charter school opened 20 years ago in Minnesota, charters have been a focus of school reform advocates and the subject of substantial research. Yet the regulators of the charter industry (called “authorizers” or “sponsors”) remain a mystery to many. In fact, many authorizers work in isolation, developing their own best practices, and are often just trying to keep their heads above water. Why is this? Is it that reformers have appropriately been focused on the charter schools themselves? Or is the notion of regulation within a movement that has autonomy as its lifeblood simply not a popular topic? Regardless, the quality of authorizing matters. Authorizers evaluate charter school applications, oversee charter schools once they are up and running, and decide, based on various performance measures, whether to renew or revoke the schools’ charters. Strong authorizing can create and support high-quality charter schools, and weak authorizing can enable lousy charter schools to open or stay open.

Public charter schools enroll about 5 percent of the nation’s public-school students. More than 2.3 million students attend 6,000 charter schools, and more than 600,000 students are on waitlists for seats in charter schools that are oversubscribed. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) anticipates that 400 to 500 new charter schools will open in 2013. The authorizing environment can directly determine whether the charter seats that are created and maintained are of high quality. While authorizers are not the operators, they set the standards and measure operators against those standards.

The work of authorizers is central to the charter compact: granting autonomy in exchange for accountability. What entity decides if the compact has been honored? The authorizer decides. As Lou Erste, charter schools division director at the Georgia State Department of Education, points out, “we are the guardians of the flexibility” held sacred by charter schools. While many reformers believe that market forces determine whether charter schools live or die, charter authorizers actually sign the charter renewal and school closure orders.

One would think that, given the authorizer’s central role in the charter sector, authorizing would be a permanent item in local and state budgets, but support for authorizers often reflects the political whims of lawmakers and education officials. While some authorizers charge a fee to the schools in their portfolio, these fees rarely cover costs. Most authorizers must rely for basic funding on the year-to-year spending decisions of governments, universities, or philanthropies.

The Authorizing Landscape

With charter schools numbering in the thousands and the sector’s continual growth, one might expect that the authorizer world had developed a solid infrastructure. This is hardly the case. Instead, one finds a scattered and largely underfunded set of regulators, most of them within the traditional public-education system. As of 2011–12, 957 agencies serve as authorizers, and fewer than 80 are entities other than school districts or state education departments (see Table 1). This means that 92 percent of all authorizers are “within the educational establishment,” and that 72 percent of all charter schools are authorized by these two types of organizations.

What does the typical authorizer look like? Most authorizers are tiny shops, typically consisting of about one-half of a staffer’s time up to the equivalent of two full-time staffers. Many school districts and state education departments do authorizing work via committee, whereby authorizing responsibilities are divided among various departments (authorizing is added to the normal workload of staffers hired to do something else). Only a few large authorizers have as many as 20 or 30 staff members. Due to this disparity between large and small authorizers, the average authorizer employs about 4 staff members; authorizers with few schools average about 2; and for authorizers with more than 10 schools, 7.5 staff members is the average.

Some 86 percent of all authorizing is done by authorizers that have fewer than five charters in their portfolios. Out of the non-school-district authorizers, a significant portion (38 percent) has more than 10 charter schools. Only 7 percent of school district authorizers have more than 10 charter schools.

There is, then, no typical authorizer. But there are good odds that a charter school has been authorized by a school district that has only a few charter schools, and that the district has about two staff members dedicated to chartering responsibilities.

What Determines Authorizer Quality?

Does the type of authorizer influence the quality of the schools? Maybe. Greg Richmond, president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), suggests that most of the school districts that authorize a small number of charter schools understand the charter concept differently than does the charter community at large. Instead of viewing charters as independently operated public schools, school districts open these schools to add innovative programs to the district. In these cases, the charters likely meet a particular need of the district, which employs the charter staff. Many of these schools have been converted from traditional schools to charters. Conversions are often referred to as “charter in name only,” since they do not usually have the full set of charter autonomies, such as freedom from the teachers union contract.

For the rest of the charter world, is there an ideal type of authorizer? Richmond explains that K–12 education is not the core business of several types of authorizers (such as universities and nonprofits). K–12 education is the core business of school districts, but they have a multitude of priorities besides charter schools, and authorizing is a sideline activity. For example, they may have a conflict of interest if they are competing for the same students. State education departments may have the most difficulty as authorizers because their purpose is to enforce regulations, not to offer autonomy in exchange for performance. The structure of independent chartering boards likely affords the least resistance to high-quality authorizing, but structure alone does not ensure quality. Factors such as targeted training, consistent resources (especially human resources), and the scale of the enterprise seem to matter more.

Does the size of the portfolio matter? We know that authorizers with fewer than 10 charter schools are less likely to implement national best practices, as enumerated by NACSA. It may be that authorizers that have less authorizing to do fail to receive appropriate training and support. They may also lack the resources required to adopt best practices like external reviewers, performance management systems, or a rigorous application process.

Susan Miller Barker, executive director of SUNY’s Charter Schools Institute, contends that in order for authorizing quality to be maximized, education stakeholders, including schools, policymakers, and the public, all need a better understanding of what authorizers do: “We are not evil regulators…. We are ‘venture bureaucrats,’ safely utilizing public funds for the best offerings of education, but also managing risk in a way that most people overseeing government funds don’t usually have to. Many people in public education don’t talk about loss of funds or funds not being spent in a way that leads to the highest level of quality education for those funds.”

Are policymakers ready for “venture bureaucrats” to conduct regular assessments of school quality and then to act on their findings? And are the same policymakers ready to provide consistent funding to those who “ruffle feathers” for the sake of accountability? Let’s hope so, because the accountability compact relies on it.

The Money Question

Is it too simple to suggest that authorizers may be underresourced and that this is an obstacle to authorizing quality? Richmond notes that “good authorizing does not cost a lot of money, but it is not free.” This sentiment is echoed by authorizers. One points out that a charter management organization in its state has five lawyers while the authorizer has two.

Authorizing is a labor-intensive business. According to NACSA, a good authorizer needs at least five to six staff members for a portfolio of 50 to 70 schools. But the accuracy of this formula depends on the type of authorizer organization. If the authorizer can rely on a special education department, for example, or an IT department, or other infrastructure assets of a larger organization, this level of staffing is appropriate. If not, the authorizer will need additional expert staffing and may need to invest in large systems such as data management on its own. The budgetary requirements of authorizers also vary depending on the particulars of the charter state law (e.g., special monitoring requirements, the quality of the student performance measurements, and other criteria). But even by this staffing formula, it is clear that most authorizers have too few staff members.

Providing an extreme example of need, with approximately 515 schools under its purview (with 18 that opened in 2012), the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools has a staff of eight. Executive director DeAnna Rowe must rely on Arizona’s state attorney general for legal support. Another authorizer notes that as the office has added more schools, the staffing level, already inadequate, has stayed the same. Many authorizers rely on staff funded by grants. Authorizers even have voluntary boards that oversee their work. This chronically inadequate and unstable funding makes it hard to become a great authorizer.

Barker of SUNY believes that the real challenge of authorizing is establishing long-term stability. SUNY’s Charter Schools Institute’s budget (like that of many other authorizers) is a stand-alone line item in each year’s state budget. Barker explains that if budgets could be stabilized, then authorizers could assess how much capacity it takes to be an innovative authorizer, one that conducts research internally, not just a “check the boxes” kind of authorizer. Erste agrees. “The technical aspects [of authorizing] are straightforward. It is the strategic aspects that make the difference between a good and great authorizer.”

Why not fund authorizers for the long term as we do local districts (based on a per-pupil rate)? Why not have a minimal funding threshold based on a number of schools and simply add this into state laws? Why not provide start-up funding for authorizers to support the creation of their major systems?

The Right People

Lou Erste of Georgia points out that a strong authorizer must assemble a staff that has the right combination of skills and knowledge: people who understand how to operate a successful charter school, who understand how to measure school performance, who can think strategically, who understand legal and fiscal issues, who have experience in the public sector, who have worked with large foundations and the federal government, and most importantly, who are skilled in relationship management. Relationship management may be the essential authorizing skill because of the complex working relationships an agency has with the state education department, state charter-school association, districts, schools, funders, and the legislature.

The need for long-term stability of expert staff is echoed by Rowe of Arizona. She notes that while she has a small team, several members have been there since the early 1990s, and this has enabled her team to handle the oversight load. She also explains that technology and transparency have contributed greatly to their efforts (e.g., online applications and a metric-driven accountability framework), but people are still the key. Rowe does hope for more staffing in the future, as it will allow for greater speed in authorizing good charter schools to open in her state.

Who provides support for authorizer development? NACSA, state charter-school associations, and a few consultants do. The National Charter School Resource Center offers professional development and networking for a group of state education department authorizers. Is this enough support for authorizers? Not by a long shot. Maine recently passed what is considered to be one of the best charter-school laws in the country, and its newly formed statewide commission was given no start-up funds to facilitate learning about authorizing from others around the country before it had to begin its work. Despite some philanthropic support, there is not enough investment in the training organizations that could consistently assist authorizers that lack funds for development. The lack of training and ongoing support for authorizers is especially acute for authorizers with only a few schools.

Remarkably, most authorizers do not complain much about the high caseload of schools and the small numbers of people to do the work. Members of the Los Angeles Unified School District explained that as can happen with students in a classroom, a few “troubled schools” require 80 percent of authorizer time. Authorizers do worry that being understaffed may become a larger problem as larger charter networks continue to expand. In this case, risks become more serious, and a small authorizing mistake may have enormous rippling implications due to network scale.

Changing Charter Laws

Each state’s charter law can create an environment that either supports professional charter-school operations and high-quality authorizing or does not. And every year, states pass comprehensive school-reform laws and make simple tweaks to charter laws that have an impact on authorizing. Since 2011, several states have lifted caps on charter school growth, and 14 states have moved to strengthen charter school authorizing and accountability (see Table 2). Four states created independent statewide charter authorizers. Three states—Hawaii, New Mexico, and Rhode Island—passed charter school quality-control measures. In Georgia, where in 2011 the state supreme court abolished the statewide charter authorizer, the state’s legislature proposed a constitutional amendment that would allow the authorizer’s reinstatement. Voters approved the amendment in November 2012.

State-level charter school–law developments are closely monitored by Todd Ziebarth, senior vice president at NAPCS. Ziebarth believes that the ideal scenario is for charter laws to require at least two authorizers in the state (preferably one statewide authorizer and one large district that is interested in authorizing). In the past several years, there has been a significant advocacy push to create “multiple” authorizers in each state. But the policy of having dozens of low-quality authorizers has turned out to be a mistake for several states. In theory, having more than one authorizer should raise charter quality, but the magic number of authorizers depends on the state’s particulars (size, political dynamics, strength of charter law, among other factors).

Ziebarth contends that the real public-policy issue is how to hold authorizers accountable: Should there be several regional charter commissions created in each state instead of one statewide commission? Should state laws and regulations require that each authorizer apply to do this work and be reviewed for its own performance? Should there be provisions in state laws that allow authorizers to be closed for shoddy performance? (Minnesota recently shut down 40 of its 70 authorizers, and Ohio has closed one.) Should there be requirements regarding an authorizer-staff-to-school ratio or other authorizing practices? Should state laws put an end to schools “shopping for a new authorizer” as is allowed in certain states? And who has authority over authorizers (state departments of education, state legislatures, the courts, state ballot initiatives)? Do the regulators need to be regulated to improve their practice?

Moving Forward

Experimentation with different authorizing structures and resources will be needed, as no silver bullet approach has emerged thus far. But there are clear signs of progress. Minnesota’s education department has created an authorizer application and continues to improve the state’s authorizing capabilities. Another attempt at improving authorizer quality via state law that deserves attention is an effort in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, to create authorizer standards. As a result of a school reform law (the Cleveland Plan), experts recently created a set of regulatory authorizing standards that will be rolled out in 2013.

Carolyn Bridges, senior director of the Office of Magnet, Choice, and Charter Schools in Polk County, Florida, is a founder of the Florida Association of Charter School Authorizers (FACSA), whose members include 36 of the state’s 42 authorizers. The association has created a shared renewal process, application process, and model contract, and has built a best practices website, all with a series of federal grants. The federal resources permitted the authorizers to have product retreats and to create uniformity in practices, despite many different authorizing structures and levels of expertise. The funds also permitted Bridges to hire staff to create these best practices and products for Florida authorizers. Michigan and Ohio also have created state-level associations of authorizers in order to pool resources and talent and to focus on authorizer quality.

Peer-to-peer networks of authorizers seem to be filling some of the gap between support and need. In each of these examples, success has come from individuals working in small teams determined to improve authorizing. The teams had a vision and spent time and found resources to deliver it. The problem with these stories of authorizer accomplishments is that they are not the norm.

Richmond explains that good authorizing has relevance for public education as a whole: “Authorizing is a small R&D activity within public education that is helping us explore how we can organize public schools better. On a macro-level, authorizing is helping us to understand how to give schools autonomy, what is the [best] way to hold schools accountable in meaningful ways, and how do we promote innovation and offer families more variety for differentiation for kids.”

For choice and deregulation advocates, some of the findings about charter authorizing have been difficult to absorb. The assumption that local and state policymakers will naturally understand what quality authorizing looks like or costs has proved incorrect. If we want poorly performing charter schools to be closed, we have to ensure more than subsistence funding for authorizers; taking strong action requires adequate staffing and legal support, to name some of the costs.

If charter school accountability is to exist as intended, we have to fund authorizers on a secure and permanent basis. If local and state policymakers decide how much to fund authorizing bodies on an ad hoc basis instead, then we will continue to get accountability that is hit or miss. Only high-quality authorizing will ensure that only high-quality charter schools open and grow.

Joey Gustafson is CEO of Manchester, Massachusetts-based JM Consulting, Inc., which specializes in charter diagnostics, growth planning, and evaluation.

The 2013 Edu-Scholar Rankings were released in a series of Education Next blog posts beginning January 7, 2013, along with a full explanation of the scoring rubric. Please visit www.educationnext.org for the complete list and related discussion.

The extraordinary policy scholar excels in five areas: disciplinary scholarship, policy analysis and popular writing, convening and shepherding collaborations, providing incisive media commentary, and speaking in the public square. Scholars who are skilled in these areas cross boundaries, foster crucial collaborations, and bring research into the world of policy in smart and useful ways. The academy today does a reasonably good job of recognizing good disciplinary scholarship, but a mediocre job of recognizing scholars who move ideas into the national policy conversation. If we did more to encourage and recognize policy-relevant contributions, more scholars might be willing to do more than publish articles in niche journals, sit on committees, and serve in professional associations.

The Edu-Scholar Rankings seek to recognize those university-based academics who are contributing most substantially to public debates about K–12 and higher education. The metrics used here are designed to gauge the influence of a scholar’s academic scholarship in terms of bodies of work, citation counts, book readership, and impact on public debate as reflected in old and new media.

Eight individual scoring categories comprise a composite score, on which the rankings are based:

• Google Scholar Score gauges the number of widely cited articles, books, or papers a scholar has authored

• Book Points tallies the number of books a scholar has authored, co-authored, or edited

• Highest Amazon Ranking reflects the author’s highest-ranked book on Amazon, as of December 18–19, 2012

• Education Press Mentions reflects the number of times the scholar was quoted or mentioned in Education Week or the Chronicle of Higher Education between January 1 and December 13–14, 2012

• Blog Mentions reflects the number of times a scholar was quoted, mentioned,  or otherwise discussed in blogs between January 1 and December 27, 2012, as determined by Google Blogs

• Newspaper Mentions reflects the number of times a scholar was quoted or mentioned in English-language newspapers between January 1 and December 26–27, 2012, as determined by a LexisNexis Academic search

• Congressional Record Mentions accounts for whether a scholar testified or had work referenced by a member of Congress between January 1 and December 14, 2012

• Klout Score reflects how often a given scholar with a Twitter profile is retweeted, mentioned, followed, listed, and answered.

The 60 highest-ranking edu-scholars are presented below. The full list, which includes 168 university-based scholars who are widely regarded as having some public presence, is not intended to be exhaustive. Many other faculty are tackling education or education policy. For those interested in scoring additional scholars, it should be straightforward to do so using the scoring rubric.

Within days of taking on their new roles as co-chief executives of Teach For America (TFA), Elisa Villanueva Beard and Matt Kramer planned to take off on a 100-day tour of the 46 cities and rural areas where TFA works, “leaving our agenda behind,” Kramer said. “I expect it will lead to changes in things,” he told me.

The project that Wendy Kopp launched with a 1989 college thesis placed 10,400 teachers in 2012, with plans to expand to 15,000 teachers and 60 sites by 2015. To hit that target, Beard told me, TFA will need revenues of a half billion dollars a year, up from $320 million in 2012. Overseas, entrepreneurs in 26 countries have launched TFA projects under a sister organization called Teach For All; projects in another 18 countries are in the pipeline.

And more changes are ahead?

Kramer, previously TFA’s president, portrays the leadership shift as little more than a change in business cards, formalizing Kopp’s evolution out of TFA’s day-to-day activities and reassigning some of her public duties to himself and Beard, who previously was chief operating officer. The new arrangement puts Kramer in charge of recruiting, training, fundraising, marketing, and administration, while Beard will run the regional operations and become TFA’s public face.

Kopp becomes TFA’s board chair and remains chief executive of Teach For All.

Kramer sees TFA as, yes, a pipeline of teachers into poor and neglected neighborhoods. Its teachers were in 3,200 public schools in 2013 (nationwide, two-thirds of those were district schools), and 57,000 college students applied to become corps members. But Kramer also paints a vision of TFA as an instigator of change, producing alumni that TFA expects—just expects—will become the sort of shake-up-the-beast leaders who will “do something radically different” for the schools.

The beast shaking seems well under way. TFA says 550 alumni are school principals, 100 are system leaders, and 70 hold elective office. Charter operators, education entrepreneurs, and philanthropists increasingly follow TFA into its new neighborhoods, “magnetizing talent,” Kopp calls it. (Indeed, several education entrepreneurs told me they wouldn’t expand their projects into cities where there isn’t a TFA presence because they couldn’t be sure of attracting the talent they need.)

A study by Harvard professor Monica Higgins and co-authors Wendy Robison, Jennie Weiner, and Frederick Hess (“Creating a Corps of Change Agents,” features, Summer 2011) found that of the 49 leading entrepreneurial organizations in education, 14 had at least one top manager who was a TFA alumnus. And Weiner contends that TFA alumni are driving the curriculum at education schools. “They come here wanting to know more about solutions” like charters, school choice, and teacher evaluation, she said. “The [TFA] commitment may end after two years, but there’s a forward momentum” that goes on and on.

I wondered how TFA has managed to keep that forward momentum after almost 24 years. After all, there are plenty of start-ups—in education and everywhere else—that have been slowed by middle-aged paunch. There probably are a lot of reasons, researchers, funders, and TFA’s fellow entrepreneurs told me, but here are four:

Common Vision, Regional Innovation

Josh Anderson is the executive director of the Chicago Teach For America project, which has 500 corps members dispersed in 187 schools and a staff of 64 to support them. Like all TFA executive directors, Anderson must raise his entire operating budget (the schools pay the corps members’ salaries), which is $12.8 million this year. The state and city put up $2.2 million of that, but the biggest share, almost $7 million, comes from individual donors and family foundations.

The Chicago project’s growth is on pace to meet its 2015 goals, he told me, so he has begun setting 2017 targets: 1,000 corps members and a budget “north of $20 million.” Like other executive directors, Anderson also sets his region’s education agenda, and among his plans is an “inspire zone” in seven contiguous neighborhoods. The idea is to concentrate corps teachers in the zone, install corps alumni as principals, and invite in high-performing charter networks to help leverage the impact.

Anderson, who is 31 and a former New York corps member, said it’s “the expectation” that executive directors develop and fund their own plans. “The ideas and vision for what needs to happen in Chicago emanates from Chicago,” he added.

Kopp has written about TFA’s earliest days, when everyone had a vote in every decision, and strategy sessions lasted much of the night. It began abandoning that folly about five years in, she says. Now, half of TFA’s 1,900 staffers are in the regions where TFA is teaching and 80 percent of its revenue comes from fundraising by the regional projects. Executive directors were told to start asking “what it’s going to take for every kid to get an excellent education” in their region, and then go out and do it, Kramer said.

That keeps TFA regions innovative and learning from one another, Jane Hannaway, director of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, told me. But what keeps it from spinning off into 46 disconnected projects? I asked.

One explanation is a communications network that seems to hum with activity. There are thrice-yearly conferences where executive directors “problem solve” and “transfer knowledge,” Anderson said. There are phone briefings, a newsletter, conference calls, seminars, and an ongoing review of the “negotiables” and the “flexibles” in the TFA model, Elisa Beard said. “We don’t want it to feel like they’re entirely different organizations when we go from one region to another.”

Perhaps the bigger reason, though, is what Alex Hernandez, a partner in the Charter School Growth Fund, called “a superclear mission.” TFA has a concise manifesto that commits it to eliminating educational inequity. That vision is so central to TFA’s culture that it’s “imprinted” on corps members as a set of shared understandings, said Harvard’s Higgins.

“We’re working toward the same thing,” James Curran, the executive director in South Dakota, told me. “We’re just doing it in different ways.”

Data-Driven Improvement

Katie Jaron is TFA’s vice president for leadership development, a job in which she thinks about what would make corps members more effective teachers. In 2011, she asked a large consulting firm to study some school districts and charter management organizations that were known for giving robust support to their teachers.

TFA already provides a coach, called a manager of teacher leadership and development, to every corps member (TFA says 89 percent of its first-year corps members return for a second year, and 63 percent go into education as a career). But the consultants, and internal surveys, told Jaron that there were gaps in TFA’s coaching. So this year Jaron, who is 33 and a Houston corps alumna, launched a pilot project that adds content and classroom-management coaches in Houston and several other cities.

The content coaches offer technical advice on how to teach elementary grades, math and science, and the humanities. The management coaches are each equipped with a walkie-talkie and coach a corps member—who is equipped with an earpiece—through classroom behavior problems as they’re happening.

There’s more: in Jacksonville, executive director Crystal Rountree is piloting a summer training institute for 100 new corps members who will teach in Duval County schools next fall. Typically, TFA assigns its new teachers to one of nine summer training institutes that are spread around the country. Rountree, who is 31 and a former corps member in Atlanta, said that under that system, her new teachers would arrive in Jacksonville with limited understanding of the city and its schools.

So last year, she brought together Duval’s superintendent and board of education, the president of a local university, and others, and said, “Let’s do some thinking about what it would look like” to train TFA teachers locally. The teachers will arrive in their schools weeks earlier; they’ll supplement the district’s summer-school program and they’ll know their students even before school starts. Rountree already is planning weekly dinners for the new teachers with parents, veteran teachers, and city officials.

Still more: in South Dakota, Curran, who is 29 and a former Phoenix corps member, is part of a seven-region pilot project to build an incubator to prepare teachers in rural districts to become principals. It’s being funded with a competitive TFA “innovation grant” that the executive directors collectively applied for out of frustration that there was no infrastructure to develop principals for their schools.

The pilots—there are loads more—and other programmatic decisions “aren’t just hunches,” said Jane Hannaway, whose daughter is a TFA alumna. TFA is “constantly trying to figure out better ways to do things,” she added. (In addition to its internal research, TFA has a five-person team that cooperates with researchers on “dozens” of studies of TFA’s effectiveness and is looking for more, said Raegen Miller, TFA’s vice president for research partnerships.)

Even more compellingly, when the data show that something isn’t working—“and they’re always monitoring—they have the money and wherewithal to scrap it and redesign it,” said Susan Moore Johnson of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. (Her daughter also is a TFA alumna.)

Based on all that scrutiny, TFA cut the number of corps members that each teaching coach supervises to 30 or fewer, down from 50 a few years ago (in Chicago, Anderson cut it further, to 20 teachers per coach). Corps members now teach “life skills,” like persistence and problem solving, and “access skills,” like note taking and skim reading, that will help students get into college.

“We are one of the most data-driven, matrix-driven organizations I know,” Annis Stubbs, the executive director of the Detroit TFA project told me.

Global Reach

Amy Black is vice president of development for Teach For All, which Kopp co-founded in 2007 after pleas from entrepreneurs in Britain—and then Germany, India, Lithuania, China, Lebanon, the Philippines—to help set up projects in their countries. Black said TFA concluded that the challenges were the same in every country—poor kids don’t have the same access to education as richer kids—and that TFA could “help shorten the learning curve” for those entrepreneurs.

TFA requires the international projects to place teachers in full-time jobs for two years, measure student performance, and be independent of their governments, among other things. But how, what, and whom they teach “are questions every program is answering,” Black said.

That experimentation will accelerate innovation (talk about crowd sourcing!), Harvard’s Monica Higgins and other researchers told me. The overseas projects will force TFA to examine its assumptions about how kids learn, teachers are trained, school systems are set up and funded, and more. “Nothing else is going to push them as much,” Higgins said.

Beyond that, exposure to different cultures will keep TFA “open to new ways of doing things,” which can be a challenge for young companies, Jon Schnur, a co-founder of two education nonprofits, America Achieves and New Leaders for New Schools, told me. “It will keep them learning from educators around the world.”

TFA already is taking lessons in “values leadership” from Teach For India, Black and Kopp both told me—that is, how to instill teachers with a sense of mission and urgency. It’s also watching how the projects in India and Israel recruit teachers, should it decide to expand its own recruiting outside college campuses. Both countries recruit older corps members—Israel because college graduates first must serve in the military, and India because it’s looking for corps members who are mature enough to move into jobs as principals as soon as their teaching commitment is up.

“There’s a ton of leadership literature out there, but the newest, freshest information we’re getting” is from Teach For India, Black said.

Stoking the Leadership Fire

Two years ago, in its annual alumni survey, TFA asked its 28,000 former corps members if they were interested in becoming superintendents or in taking other district-level posts. There was “overwhelming interest,” Andrea Stouder Pursley, vice president of alumni affairs and a former corps teacher in Phoenix, told me. But that interest didn’t correlate with the number of alumni who actually went into district leadership.

So Pursley enlisted another management consultant to figure out why and, beyond that, what kind of skills and preparation a successful superintendent needs. From there, TFA built a part-academic, part-on-the-job fellowship program that will place alumni in district offices for a year beginning this fall. Some 160 alumni applied for 20 spots; 25 districts asked for fellows.

Among the other molds TFA has broken, it has “reframed the way to think about alumni relations,” said Jennie Weiner, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Most organizations look to their alumni for what they can give back; TFA looks to its alumni to carry its mission forward.

Kopp says it was TFA’s vision from the start to get its alumni into jobs where they could influence—no, direct—education policy. “We’re not going to solve this problem in the classroom. We want [alumni] out there, pioneering new things we never thought of,” she told me.

That squares with a complaint I heard from Harvard’s Susan Moore Johnson, that TFA’s two-year commitment “isn’t designed to increase the capacity of a school over time.” Corps members come and go, but the school remains woefully the same (indeed, part of the reason for those life-skills and persistence lessons corps members now teach is to help students cope with a weak teacher they may be assigned the next year, or the year after that).

Getting TFA alumni into leadership roles, though, has meant first creating an enormous talent-building infrastructure of graduate-school partnerships, employer internships, an in-house career-counseling center, and an organization to help alumni win elected office. Almost one in 10 TFA staffers now works on alumni development, including a three-person “entrepreneurship team” that helps alumni with their education start-ups and hosts an annual “design camp” for innovators. Last year, 150 showed up to compete for $150,000 in start-up capital. (The big winner: GirlTrek, which encourages African American girls and women to lose weight through walking.)

TFA sets annual goals for the number of alumni it expects to become principals, school-board members, state school chiefs, even congressmen. Kopp wouldn’t share the goals, but told me they “seem like the right intersection between stretch and realism.” An early alumni survey showed that 5 percent of former corps members who were still in education were principals, so Kopp said she figured that 10 percent could make the jump if TFA provided some counseling and support. Within a few years, she said, 12 percent had.

Pushing the Limits

When I asked Elisa Beard, the new co-CEO, what was the greatest constraint on TFA’s growth plans, “leadership capacity” was at the top of her list, a surprise because of TFA’s focus on leadership development. But in early 2013, four TFA regions lacked executive directors, and Beard scrapped plans to open in two new cities in the fall because she hasn’t found qualified executive directors. Her solution is to launch—what else?—a pilot project to develop executive directors.

Kopp also named talent recruitment as “a big potential limitation,” but she meant teacher talent. For all the campus excitement TFA seems to generate, recruiting is a challenge, she said. TFA says that of the 48,000 people who applied in 2012, it accepted only 17 percent, about 8,200, and of those, just 5,800 took up its offer.

TFA’s costs average $40,000 per corps member over three years, including recruiting, pre-service training, in-service coaching, and overheads, and those costs haven’t come down even as TFA has grown. In part, that’s because “there are new ideas every day for things we need to do,” Kopp said (think of those design camps, the summer institute, the coaches). And in part, it’s because some expenses—Kramer named labor law, finance, accounting—don’t lend themselves to scale-up savings, he said. “What it takes to do things right at a bigger scale is more than it costs to do them right at a tiny scale,” he said. “It’s not at the top of my thinking that we have to slash,” he added.

TFA also claims favorable comparisons with other service organizations: it says the Peace Corps spends $78,000 to recruit, train, and support a volunteer for a two-year commitment (the National Peace Corps Association puts the cost at $50,000 a year). VISTA asks localities to pony up $11,000 a year for a community-service volunteer, to which it adds $12,000 in benefits.

Almost three-quarters of TFA’s revenues came from philanthropy in 2011—$194 million, up $40 million from the year before, according to the latest annual report—and Kopp said “it’s actually been powerful” to have to appeal to donors. “It’s forced us to get out in the world and sell this cause.” Funders encourage innovation by asking for results: they’d take their money somewhere else if they lost confidence. Just as important, they become what Kopp called “champions” of education reform.

Those champions no doubt will be watching Kramer and Beard—and those half-billion-dollar plans. I asked Kramer what he worried about as the co-CEO. “Whether or not we fulfill our potential,” he told me without a moment’s pause.

June Kronholz is an Education Next contributing editor and a former Wall Street Journal education reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor.

California passed a “parent trigger” law in January 2010. A few months ago, parents in Adelanto, California, became the first parents in American history to win a parent trigger campaign.

After years of systemic failure at Desert Trails Elementary, in 2011 parents with children at the school formed an autonomous organization, the Desert Trails Parent Union, and went door-to-door, working alongside other parents, to develop an agenda for change and get the word out about this new legal right they had. Desert Trails parents met with teachers, the principal, and the deputy superintendent of the school system to create a list of objectives for improving the school. At the heart of the list was one simple idea: that all decisions, from staffing to budget to curriculum, should be driven by the best interests of their children.

In response, the defenders of the status quo launched a campaign of lies and intimidation against parents who signed the petition. Parents even uncovered direct evidence of fraud and forgeries.

This past October, a superior court judge concluded a yearlong legal battle, confirming that parents have the right under the parent trigger law to transform their school, while ordering the school district to abide by the parents’ petition. This followed a July court decision that was also in favor of the parents.

Two court decisions, two judges, and two victories for parent power.

In early January, the Adelanto School Board approved the parents’ recommendation for a highly qualified, nonprofit charter-school operator to begin transforming Desert Trails Elementary School in August 2013.

Public Support

Even in this era of partisan gridlock and paralysis, politicians across the political spectrum find common ground around the simple notion of giving parents power over the education of their own children. Last November, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, a Republican, and former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, a Democrat, shared a Washington, D.C., stage to laud the parent trigger movement for moving the issue of education reform past partisan bickering to focus squarely on the needs of kids trapped in failing schools.

Meanwhile, a 2012 Gallup Poll showed 70 percent of respondents favor parent trigger laws as a long-term education reform solution.

A vocal minority of detractors also spans the political spectrum. Detractors on the right contend that the parent trigger gives parents too little power. They argue that the parent trigger is too difficult, laden with bureaucratic hurdles, limited in its options, and ultimately unscalable.

What these detractors overlook is ongoing work with the California State Board of Education to create a regulatory framework around the parent trigger process that removes unwarranted barriers and codifies the legal steps leading to the successful transformation of a failing school.

When the parent trigger was signed into law in 2010, the president of the California Federation of Teachers famously called it a “lynch mob” law. Major elements of the education establishment still believe parents do not have the formal training or knowledge required to have direct, legitimate power within the public education system, and that parents should step out of the way and let the experts do their jobs.

Yet we need outside pressure from parents. No movement in the history of our country has been able to achieve the scale and transformative change needed in public education without a powerful, informed grassroots movement pushing for it. In the absence of an organized parent effort applying pressure to the system, bureaucratic inertia and skewed political-incentive structures determine how decisions are made. Having passionate, committed people working on the inside on behalf of kids is necessary but not sufficient if the goal is change that puts kids first.

The question, then, centers not on whether we must build a parent movement for change, but rather on the most effective and empowering way to go about it. Empowering parents to levy a direct and immediate impact on the lives of the children in their community is the answer. Therein lies the importance of laws such as the parent trigger, which give parents a government-sanctioned mandate to organize and take control of the educational destiny of their children.

The parent trigger provides parents with options other strategies may not. One of its greatest advantages is enabling parents in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities to generate change at their neighborhood school. With the school-choice alternative, for example, parents wanting the best education for their child often need financial means and knowledge of the educational options to make an informed choice of another school, resources not always available in low-income communities.

Additionally, the parent trigger is focused solely on public education. It is our belief that the work of real and lasting change must take place in our public school system.

Parents enduring a parent trigger campaign are transformed. Some, like the parents at Desert Trails, are forced to endure lengthy legal battles, a process most of them have never experienced. Others, including the parents of 24th Street Elementary School and also Haddon Avenue Elementary in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), find a responsive school district that wants to collaborate with them in changing their school. No matter the intensity of the campaign, it is transformative.

Many of these parents, for the first time in their lives, feel real power, not only over their child’s destiny but over their own as well. These parents, and parents like them, are the key to the future of public education in America. Each parent trigger campaign focuses on changing the conditions of a particular school. In that sense, each campaign is unique. The common thread is empowering parents to make decisions about their child’s education, knowing they have the legal capability to do so.

Parents Want Good Schools

Parents don’t care if a public school is a traditional district school or a charter school; they just want it to be a good school. In California, the parent trigger law gives parents a seat at the decisionmaking table. It empowers parents to transform a failing school through community organizing. According to the law, if 51 percent of parents with children in a school agree to change the direction of the school, the school board must listen.

Parent Revolution created the parent trigger based on our conclusion that the public education system is failing because it’s not designed to succeed. It doesn’t serve the interests of children, because it’s not designed to; it’s designed to serve the interests of powerful adults. The fundamental idea behind the parent trigger is to effect an unapologetic transfer of raw political power from the defenders of the status quo to parents, which is necessary because parents have wholly different incentive structures and a far greater sense of urgency than those who hold the power in the education system.

None of the bold reforms and technocratic fixes of any ideological stripe, no matter how well intentioned, can substitute for empowered parents. When parents organize into independent, autonomous organizations like parent union chapters, they have the power to hold all those within a school district, as well as the school, accountable to serve the interests of their children rather than the interests of adults.

The parent trigger movement is not a substitute for other reforms. It is a necessary precondition for their ultimate and sustained success. Parents can have direct input into teacher evaluation and efforts to improve teacher quality. Parents can participate in decisions regarding the academic programs and recreational opportunities being offered to their children. Importantly, parents become a highly visible and integral part of the daily life of the school, interacting with teachers, students, and administrators in a new way.

As the parent trigger movement grows, it will be important to understand what success looks like. Successful parent empowerment means sustained, organized, and ongoing engagement by parents, whether through parent union chapters or otherwise. Successful outcomes may range from negotiated improvements to ensure safer school conditions or improved special-education policies, to charter conversion or school leadership changes.

Over the coming 12 to 18 months, as successful conversions take place at schools using the parent trigger, we are confident the new school leadership will bring significant improvement in student learning and achievement. In Desert Trails, the parents selected and the school board approved a high-quality nonprofit charter operator with significant, measurable academic success in the other school it operates.

Power to the Parents

In January 2013, more than 150 parents and children from the 24th Street Elementary School in Los Angeles presented their parent trigger petition to the superintendent of the LAUSD. In February, the LAUSD board unanimously approved their petition, allowing the parents to move forward in selecting a new operator for the school. Eight organizations, including the district, are now putting together proposals to transform this chronically failing inner-city school.

Six states have followed California’s lead, enacting parent trigger laws of their own, and more than a dozen states are considering doing the same in 2013.

In the coming weeks and months, parents throughout California and across America will follow in the historic footsteps of the Desert Trails Parent Union. As they organize on behalf of their children, 2013 will become the year of parent power.

This article is part of a forum on parent trigger laws. For another take, please see “There’s a Better Way to Unlock Parent Power,” by Michael Petrilli.

It’s hard not to sympathize with the impulse behind the parent trigger. Here’s a mechanism that empowers disadvantaged parents to force speedy and transformative change at schools long considered dysfunctional. It upends the stasis that pervades so many urban districts: the veto power that teachers unions and other adult interests hold over all decisions; the culture of low expectations that blames social factors (and the parents themselves) for poor student achievement; the slow pace of reform that subjects yet another generation of students to failure while the system struggles to get its act together.

For these reasons and more, it’s worth experimenting with the parent trigger. But I strongly suspect that the experiment will fall flat, at least most of the time, at least when it comes to turning around failing schools and/or forcing significant reform on the part of failing school districts. Three factors come into play here. First, the parent trigger mechanism itself will continue to get bogged down in lawsuits and other blocking tactics, as has been the case to date. Second, if and when the trigger gets pulled, the resulting school turnarounds won’t generally amount to much. And third, empowering parents via the parent trigger (creating a “bargaining chip”) won’t be enough to force larger changes in dysfunctional districts—because nothing will force such change.

The Lawyer Trigger

Parent Revolution has launched parent trigger campaigns in two California schools: McKinley Elementary in Compton and Desert Trails Elementary in Adelanto. (As this article goes to press, Parent Revolution has helped parents pull the trigger in a third school, 24th Street Elementary in the Los Angeles Unified School District, and a fourth campaign is underway.)

The campaigns in McKinley and Desert Trails were characterized predominantly by lawsuits that revolved, first, around the parent signatures on the trigger petitions. In Compton, district officials demanded that signatures be verified in person and with photo identification (reminiscent of the wave of Voter ID laws passed by Republicans in 2011–12). A judge issued a restraining order, ruling that such requirements were illegal. Compton was allowed to cross-check signatures with student records, however, and to reject those that did not match. Compton also wanted to allow parents to rescind their support for the petition, arguing that they weren’t truly aware of what they were signing. These strategies eventually succeeded: the effort fizzled, and Parent Revolution lobbied the state board of education to tighten its regulations in an attempt to prevent such tactics from prevailing the next time around.

The story started out much the same in Adelanto. Parent Revolution organized a trigger petition and obtained signatures from a majority of Desert Trails’ parents. But the school board then allowed parents to rescind their support for the petition (97 did so), causing it to fail. Parent Revolution sued, and a county judge ruled that the board’s action was illegal; it could only verify signatures, not give parents a chance to remove them.

Soon afterward, the Adelanto school board voted to accept the parents’ petition but not their preferred course of action (turning the school into a charter school). So the parents went back to court, and a judge ruled again in their favor.

Finally, the school board (which had experienced significant turnover in the November 2012 elections) agreed to hear a proposal from the parents’ chosen charter operator, which hopes to take over the school in the fall.

While the Adelanto outcome is better than what happened in Compton, the story indicates that successfully pulling the parent trigger is going to be a slow, expensive slog anywhere that school boards choose to resist. Nor should that be surprising. We’ve known forever that when institutions face external threats—via competition or otherwise—they respond first by using their power to crush the opposition and quash the threat.

Macke Raymond, director of Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), and an expert on monopolies in the public and private sectors, made this clear at a 2006 forum organized by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “Change is the last thing districts will do,” Raymond said, with regard to competition from new schools. When threatened, Raymond argued, monopolies

…launch a series of wars. First is the war of entry: prohibiting new entrants into the market. They try to set high barriers through law and regulation. In general, the monopolist is dismissive of potential entrants. The second war is of survival—they launch games of irritation. These include delaying tactics, non-responsiveness, and nonpayment. They try to limit the discretion of the new entrants. The public relations strategy is to smear the new opponents, often personally. Third is the war of containment. They will heap on as many costs as possible to wear you down, such as more reporting requirements and cost studies. The public relations battle becomes more aggressive and organized. Fourth is the war of elimination; the biggest indicator is the legal challenge. The opposition forms into coalitions designed to destroy the new entrants. After all of these wars, you will see change. But you have to survive first.

That, I predict, is what the future holds for other communities that want to pull the parent trigger: more lawsuits, more “delaying tactics,” more smearing. But will it be worth it if the parent organizers survive these wars? Probably not. That’s the second problem.

Conversions a Recipe for More Failure

Let’s suppose that parent advocates run this gauntlet and manage to force a turnaround at a given school, as appears to be happening at Desert Trails. What are the chances of success? If the history of charter school conversions and district school turnarounds is any guide, the answer is: very low.

Ever since the beginning of the charter movement 20 years ago, most state charter laws have included a “teacher trigger” of sorts. A majority (or sometimes supermajority) of teachers could vote to turn their district school into a charter. And in the early days many did.

Yet enthusiasm for these charter conversions soon fizzled. Partly that was because they were seen as “faux charters.” Legally, they typically remained part of the school district; often their teachers continued to be covered by the district’s collective-bargaining agreement. They gained a few operational freedoms but not enough to make much of a difference.

School districts—and boards—generally haven’t known what to do with these charter schools. Usually they end up either micromanaging or ignoring them. The latter might sound good to advocates for greater school autonomy, but it has created many problems in terms of charter school quality. In fact, many of the charter sector’s quality headaches stem from school boards that abdicate their responsibilities as charter school authorizers, a role they probably never wanted to play in the first place. Recent research, again from Raymond’s CREDO, demonstrates that charter schools that start out mediocre rarely improve. One could imagine a similar dynamic playing out in charter schools created via the parent trigger.

Of course, the parent trigger can be used for more than just charter school conversions. Turnarounds or “transformations,” in the current lingo, are options, too. But there’s plenty of reason for skepticism on that front. As Andy Smarick wrote in these pages a few years ago (“The Turnaround Fallacy,” features, Winter 2010), “school turnaround efforts have consistently fallen far short of hopes and expectations.”

And most of those turnarounds were initiated, at least somewhat enthusiastically, by district officials. The people in charge of making them succeed wanted them to succeed. How likely is it that school boards and district officials will jump onboard a turnaround process after spending months trying to stop it? Turnarounds are difficult, if not impossible, under the best of circumstances. Turnarounds forced upon districts by angry parents seem destined to fail.

Can the Parent Trigger Change Local Politics?

Some advocates of the parent trigger acknowledge the concerns raised above, but still believe it to be a useful tool in forcing recalcitrant districts to change their ways. As Ben Austin of Parent Revolution has argued elsewhere, “There are parents right now who are organizing at schools around the parent trigger without really the intent to pull the trigger. They are organizing in order to have bargaining leverage, to basically say, ‘look, there are things about our school that we like, but there are things about our school that we are unhappy with and nobody has listened to us until now. Well, I represent 51 percent of the parents. We now have the power, for all intents and purposes, to fire you. So fix these things within x number of days. Otherwise we’re going to fire you.’”

This mirrors the longtime optimism among school choice advocates that the exodus of students and money—the threat of competition leading to hemorrhage leading to downfall—would change power relationships inside school districts. Reform-minded superintendents and board members, in particular, could force intransigent teacher unions to make concessions that would make their district schools more attractive to parents and thereby stem the losses.

Evidence of this happening in the real world, however, is quite thin. Perhaps a few cities have seen major, positive changes because of competition (Washington, D.C., comes to mind). In most, however, district dysfunction, and union intransigence, continues. (Think: Detroit, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Oakland.) And that’s even after losing tens of thousands of students and hundreds of millions of dollars to charter schools.

It’s hard to imagine, then, that the threat of a parent trigger at a single school is going to force school board members, district bureaucrats, or union officials to the bargaining table. Sure, it could happen. But if Macke Raymond is right, it will be a long time coming.

Conclusion

“Parent power” is a critical component of education reform; there’s little doubt that many of the problems in American education come from the mismatch in power between the workers in the system and its clients. To the degree that the parent trigger helps reformers to organize and empower parents, it should be embraced wholeheartedly.

But as a strategy to change schools or districts, it seems likely to fail. A more constructive approach is the road we’ve been traveling for 20 years now: expanding school choice via new, high-quality options. More independent charter schools. Additional opportunities for private-school choice via taxpayer-funded scholarship programs. Digital learning. And so forth.

Perhaps school choice, at scale, will finally force districts to improve. But even if it doesn’t (as I suspect will be the case in many cities), we will be left with lots more excellent options from which parents—as consumers—can choose. We might even put districts out of business altogether. Now that’s power.

This article is part of a forum on parent trigger laws. For another take, please see “Empowered Families Can Transform the System,” by Ben Austin.

Many state education leaders are taking a fresh look at school finance in hopes of containing costs. Some are reworking transportation formulas, or zeroing in on special education eligibility, or merging districts. Others are investing more in digital learning, charter innovations, and information systems. But state leaders too often overlook a common practice that inhibits both efficiency and productivity, namely, funding students who do not actually attend school in funded districts, herein called “phantom students.”

Policies that fund phantom students take several forms:

• protections against declining enrollment

• hold-harmless provisions for districts competing with charters

• small district subsidies

• minimum categorical allocations.

In each case, affected districts receive funds in excess of what they would receive if only the students on their rolls were funded. An obvious downside is that these policies cause less funding to be available for all other districts. But such allocations also insulate district leaders from having to make tough (and often productivity-enhancing) changes in the way they serve the students they have. Policies intended to “protect” districts weaken the incentives that should drive change and adaptation as enrollments fluctuate.

The Economics of Enrollment

While state policymakers often try to base funding allocations to districts on “costs,” the fact is that costs and revenues are interdependent. It is true that a district with more funds per pupil than its neighbors can afford to offer more or better services (in the form of extracurriculars, smaller classes, and individualized learning time, for example). It is also the case that the cost of delivering the same services as neighboring districts can increase with revenues, often as the result of concessions extracted by employees as part of the collective bargaining process. Each year, districts are under pressure from constituents and employee organizations to match expenditures to available revenues. If expenditures are projected to be higher than revenues, the district, to avoid running a deficit, will need to reduce spending. But if revenues are projected to come in significantly higher than expenditures, districts will also have a hard time squirreling away the surplus. As one of us has noted in these pages (see “Mounting Debt,” forum, Winter 2004), a surplus may suggest to employee unions that a raise is due and to parents that class sizes should shrink. There is immense political pressure for surpluses to be quickly soaked up, often in a manner that raises the per-pupil cost of services without fundamentally changing their delivery.

This adjustment works as revenues rise but not so well as they fall. In times of shrinking enrollment, districts can suddenly find themselves with unsupportable cost structures. Many a district leader has found that raising salaries and reducing class sizes is quite a bit more palatable politically than vice versa.

Consider a 10,000-student district that has an enrollment increase of 200 students from one year to the next. The district receives $10,571 in state and local funds per student enrolled, the national average in 2010. As Table 1 illustrates, insofar as state and local revenues are generated on a per-student basis, the school district will receive roughly $2.1 million in additional revenues for the new students.

Direct costs are unlikely to increase as dramatically. Even assuming that the additional students are all placed into newly created classes with new teachers making the average national salary, the additional costs are likely to be much less than the additional revenues. Assuming that no new schools are built to house these students, the district will have a large surplus to spend on other things, such as new district-wide programs, class-size reductions, and employee raises.

Now consider what happens in the same district when enrollment shrinks by 200 pupils and state and local funding declines accordingly. Assume the district reduces its teaching force by 10 teachers and no longer pays for these students’ supplies. It could reduce its expenses by about $910,000, but it is losing more than $2.1 million in revenue. If the $1.2 million surplus from prior growth is indeed being spent across the district, it will need to make general budget reductions or “cuts due to declining enrollment.” With their tendency to spend all that they have, districts create financial asymmetry around enrollment growth and decline.

A similar mind-set has dominated the thinking on small districts, namely that services should be delivered in small districts in much the same way as in large districts. Small districts, the argument goes, still require a full-time librarian, counselor, nurse, physical-education teacher, and so on, and thus some minimum level of fixed costs is unavoidable.

As a result, the discourse around enrollment loss and small district expenses often focuses on high “fixed costs.” This reflects a misunderstanding of what costs are fixed. Few in other industries consider personnel costs (which constitute the majority of district expenditures) fixed. Administrations could shrink, pay raises could slow, and schools could be closed if enrollment declines. In the case of small districts, many services could be purchased in smaller increments with part-time staff or by contracting with service providers (e.g., for online learning).

It does seem to be the case, however, that people feel worse about losing something they had than not gaining something they would like. As a result, declines in enrollment can be painful. And so state lawmakers have enacted phantom student-funding policies to help districts cope.

The annual cost of phantom student funding varies by the types of policies in place across different states. Table 2 highlights provisions in several states and computes their value as the portion of total state education funding to represent the relative scale of these policies. While the dollars at stake are obviously not a major driver of state education expenditures, they are significant, especially during times of tight budgets. At a time when districts may not be receiving funds to cover cost growth, however, even 1 percent of the state’s total spending is meaningful.

Protections against Declining Enrollment

As the 2012–13 school year opened, districts in Tucson, Cleveland, Newark, Philadelphia, and elsewhere were facing steep enrollment declines and a corresponding dip in revenues. Five years before, Baltimore, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon, topped the list of districts in fiscal chaos brought on by falling enrollment.

Enrollment shifts are certainly part of the landscape, and at any given time just as many or more districts may be facing enrollment drops as are seeing enrollment gains. But each time enrollment falls, district leaders seem to be caught off guard, forced to dip into reserves, pare down extracurriculars, and make out-of-cycle pleas for rescue funding in order to avert salary freezes, seniority-based layoffs, or school closures.

And so it goes. States attempt to ease the pain by jumping in with extra funds. In California, core funding for students (known as the Revenue Limit) is made to districts on the basis of average daily attendance (ADA). When district enrollment declines year over year, the allocation is made on the basis of the previous year’s average daily attendance. While this provides districts with only a one-year reprieve, the amount spent is substantial. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, in 2005–06 the total cost of this protection was $402 million or about $111 per student in declining-enrollment districts. Taken together, the 89,234 phantom students funded last year by California’s declining-enrollment provision would have been California’s third-largest district, larger than Long Beach, Fresno, or San Francisco.

Massachusetts distributes state aid to districts on the basis of a complex formula that considers enrollment, student need, and local ability to pay. However, the state legislature usually inserts into the budget a “hold harmless” provision that does not allow total state aid to any district to go down, essentially ignoring the careful rationale behind the state’s own formula. Extra payments to select districts are projected to total $180 million in FY13, more than 3 percent of total state education spending. Districts that are overpaid have no incentive to attract new students, as their state aid would not go up, and, in fact, would be better off on a per-pupil basis if some of their current students left. In other states, protection policies take the form of one-off allocations made to large city districts as students disappear. Pennsylvania, for instance, funds the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia districts according to a different formula than it does all other districts in the state. The effect is to grandfather them in under a higher expenditure structure than their current enrollments warrant.

Holding Harmless Districts Competing with Charters

Buried deep in numerous state charter laws are promises to districts, often made during charter law negotiations, that they will be protected financially when they lose students to charters. Called double funding in some states, these provisions work much like the declining-enrollment protections. The state funds students attending charter schools while still funding districts as though those students had remained.

In Connecticut, districts receive revenues based on the enrollments of students living in their region, regardless of whether those students attend the district schools or attend charters (or technical schools). According to researchers Bryan Hassel and Daniela Doyle, double funding students in 2008 cost Connecticut $186 million.

In Massachusetts, charter school students take with them the per-pupil net school spending (state and local) from their sending districts. To soften the blow to sending-district finances, Massachusetts provides a partial tuition reimbursement for up to six years after the district starts paying charter school tuition. When a district incurs new tuition costs, the state reimburses the district for 100 percent of the cost in the first year and 25 percent of the tuition cost for the next five years. Thus, the state essentially provides districts with 225 percent of a year’s tuition for each full-time equivalent student lost!

These allocations could create a disincentive to improve services in an effort to retain more students. When students leave a district to attend a charter school, the district may see an increase in per-student revenues.

Subsidies for Small Districts

Although some small districts may have lower salaries and transportation costs than larger districts, and opportunities for creative and cost-effective service delivery certainly exist, it is often assumed that larger districts necessarily enjoy economies of scale from which small districts cannot benefit. The result is that smaller districts in many states receive more funds per pupil than do their larger counterparts.

According to a 2010 Education Week report, 29 states have an explicit “weight” in their state allocation formula to account for district size. Others fund some items (e.g., staff or programs) in “one per district” amounts such that when the costs of those items are divided by the lower enrollment of smaller districts, per-pupil price tags are quite high.

These small-district subsidies add up. In Washington State and New Mexico, districts with student enrollments between 100 and 1,200 spend $104 million and $69 million more, respectively, in total public funds than if they were spending the statewide average per pupil in these districts. In Maine, the largest districts spend, on average, $8,033 per pupil compared to $11,027 for the smallest districts. This subsidy amounts to $9 million in total, enough to educate almost 40 percent more students than the small districts serve. In California, districts with fewer than 100 students receive, on average, more than $18,000 per enrolled student, or more than twice as much as districts that enroll at least 1,000 students.

Not all states have bought into the need for small-district subsidies. As Figure 1 indicates, the extent to which small districts (here defined as having 200 to 1,200 students) receive extra funds varies enormously. In states like California and Georgia, smaller districts receive a subsidy of 15 percent or more of the average per-pupil spending levels in their larger-district peers. Minnesota and Wisconsin, in contrast, have small districts that operate at funding levels on par with their larger peers.

Even if large districts do enjoy important economies of scale, small-district subsidies discourage merging or sharing services across districts, both potential means for gaining such economies. Charter schools (essentially single-school districts) have learned this lesson and often share purchasing, specialized services, or back-office functions. Even larger districts often share services across areas such as special education provision or vocational education.

Small-district subsidies also reinforce the assumption that there is one best method to deliver schooling: a traditional school building with a principal, a nurse, on-site teachers in all subjects including specialty courses, and so forth. This mind-set has prompted advocacy groups like the Rural School and Community Trust to seek both small-district subsidies and protection against loss of enrollment to charters. In contrast, some small and geographically isolated districts have found that with digital learning technology, they are able to provide students with better course options and at a per-pupil cost that provides for parity with other districts.

Minimum Allotments for Categorical Allocations

Formula minimums for categorical allocations create a fourth type of phantom funding. Forty-nine states target funds to specific programs or types of students, including bilingual education, nutritional programs, drug awareness, and dropout prevention. In some cases, the targeted allocation distributes a fixed-dollar amount for each eligible student (say, each bilingual education student) and then includes a minimum allocation for districts with very low numbers of the targeted population. Under such a policy, a district with only a handful of bilingual education students might receive a vastly inflated spending level for each of them.

Formula minimums usually have their origin in politics. Those proposing legislation for categorical allocations know that before understanding its justification, many legislators will flip through the bill to see how much money is at stake for their district: the minimums are included to entice legislators to vote in approval.

The result can be windfalls for districts that don’t have significant numbers of students who qualify for the funding. In previous work, one of us found that Washington State’s 2004 compensatory allocation formula ensured that affluent Bellevue School District, in which only 18 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, receives $1,371 per poor student in state compensatory funds, while large urban districts received less than half of that for each of their impoverished students (see Figure 2).

The Hidden Costs of Phantom Funding

Declining enrollment, increasing competition, and small size all create financial challenges for school districts. If districts do not adapt by restructuring service delivery, they could go bankrupt. Perhaps funding phantom students is a reasonable state policy response.

We see three primary arguments against the funding of phantom students: First, by continuing to fund phantom students, states ensure that districts won’t restructure expenditures for smaller enrollments. If the district has a large professional development department, or too many kindergarten teachers, those positions may stay on the district payrolls because the extra state monies make it possible. A 2010 study of declining-enrollment districts by Pacey Economics Group found that, while districts face real challenges reducing transportation costs, they do have flexibility on “other categories such as other supporting operations and maintenance, instructional salaries and benefits, food service, and administration.” In other words, they can reduce costs when they have to.

Second, funding phantom students delivers the message that school districts should continue delivering education the way they have for the last century. If, indeed, we have found the “one best system,” this is all to the good. If we have not (which our relative international performance might suggest), or even if we are not sure, this system discourages needed experimentation.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, funding phantom students diverts public funding from other uses. Proponents of protections from declining enrollment or small schools rightly note the challenges of downsizing. In deciding whether to protect declining-enrollment districts, however, policymakers should consider alternative uses for that money. Clearly, the funds could be distributed more evenly across all schools, used for early childhood services or for augmenting children’s health care, or aimed at improving postsecondary options for students from lower-income families.

How States Can End Phantom Funding

Ending the funding of phantom students will not be easy politically or from an organizational standpoint. Even so, there are numerous actions states can take to prepare districts and the public for thinking about schooling and education funding differently and effect a fair transition.

Encourage districts to structure allocations in per-student terms. Education funding policy should address the misalignment between what drives revenues and what drives expenditures. On the revenue side, most funds are tied to student counts. For San Francisco, for example, a reduction in one student equates to a loss of $5,000 in state money.

The expenditure side is a different story. A loss of one student doesn’t automatically trigger any change in the budget. Districts have staffed their schools by estimating how many classes they’ll need and made sure each school has a counselor, a nurse, a parent coordinator, and so on. When a handful of students leave, these same line items cost more in per-pupil terms. Districts consolidate classes where they can, but then imagine that their only option is to pull some staff from the schools and eliminate programs.

Fluctuations in enrollment are inevitable. Knowing this, districts should create more nimble fiscal systems, in which expenditures (like revenues) are tied directly to enrollment. This means reconfiguring budgets so that allocations for schools and services are on a per-student basis. Each school would receive a specified dollar amount for each student so that its allocation automatically rises and falls with enrollment. School districts in Houston, Denver, and Oakland already allocate funds to schools in this manner.

Individual programs, too, might be funded in the same way. A program to create college awareness, for instance, might receive $100 per eligible student each year, instead of an allocation of some fixed number of staff. This kind of expenditure structure is currently being implemented for central departments in the Baltimore City Schools.

In this model, total spending on district schools and services automatically drifts up and down with enrollment, thereby better matching revenue trends. Within each school, incremental changes can be made on a yearly basis to reflect trends in the size of the student body. The more allocations that districts base on enrollment (not only to schools, but also to departments, services, operations, administration, and other district functions), the more protected the district is from sudden deficits stemming from shifts in the student population.

This kind of allocation model also protects programs from wholesale elimination with a drop in enrollment. College awareness services, for example, may need to be redefined when student counts drop, perhaps by rethinking delivery, or relying on part-time staff, but the program doesn’t go away. For each program or service, as enrollments decrease (or increase, for that matter), the per-pupil allocations stay the same. Where middle-school science was a priority, it is still a priority. Where parent engagement is thought to be important, the need may be met in a different manner than assigning a full-time staff person to each school to lead the effort.

It is true that as districts shrink, some district services will miss out on economies of scale. At this point, the department may need to provide the service jointly with another district or contract out for the service on a per-pupil basis. But rather than having district leaders make those cuts from the top, adjusting to current enrollment becomes the responsibility of each school and program manager. That’s where adaptation and adoption of innovations can happen. Leaders of a high-cost speech therapy program, for example, are driven to explore technologies that enable remote speech therapy and decrease staffing costs. In this model of budget management, adaptation happens within each department as it seeks to hold per-pupil costs steady amidst enrollment changes.

Restructure true fixed costs: unfunded liabilities. In education, costs are often assumed to be fixed that actually are not. While it is certainly easier to reduce a teaching position than to merge a school or restructure administrative operations and services, most operational and personnel costs of school districts are variable and could be structured to vary more directly with enrollment and revenues.

Yet there is a critical exception haunting many districts. Lifetime health benefits and defined-benefit pensions, sometimes guaranteed decades ago, have created ongoing costs for districts that are unconnected to revenues and enrollment and cannot be easily reduced. As of 2009, the Los Angeles Unified School District, a shrinking district, had an unfunded actuarial accrued liability of $10.3 billion for employees’ future post-employment health-care costs, more than 200 percent of the active payroll. In 2011, the district paid $240 million in health and medical benefits for retirees and their dependents. Note that this cost relates only to the number of retirees, not the number of current students or employees. Thus, as the district shrinks, the per-student cost will continue to increase.

One answer to this challenge might simply be “Too bad!” Districts entered agreements to fund these benefits and did not set any money aside—they made their own bed. This is not quite fair. Those who entered the agreements generally did so years ago, and the administrators, voters, and union leaders that allowed this are all long gone. Indeed, one wonders whether knowing that the payment on these promises was going to be someone else’s problem rendered them easier to make. Today, in any case, payments are coming due.

A possible way out of this mess is for states to execute a grand bargain. States could assume existing liabilities from school districts, effectively spreading the costs across all current providers. Simultaneously, though, states should adopt strict requirements that, from this point forward, districts (and other providers) must fully fund all employee benefits in the year that those benefits are accrued.

Limit districts’ short-term ability to make long-term commitments. States should also take additional steps to regulate the ability of districts to make financial commitments they may not be able to fulfill. Several states require districts to show that they will remain fiscally solvent for one or a few years, and some require this as part of collective bargaining agreements. While this is a step in the right direction, districts are required only to show solvency under one set of reasonable assumptions. Instead, districts should be required to consider multiple scenarios and build revenue contingencies into agreements.

Defined-benefit and pension programs could be replaced with defined-contribution programs (a change already taking place in some locales). Tenure systems might be modified to allow for more fiscal flexibility, perhaps by including provisions for declining enrollment, or limiting the portion of the staff that can be tenured. However, it is unlikely that any of this can happen without states providing political cover.

Limit state restrictions on how certain funds can be used. Some state funding policies explicitly assume certain school structures: a specific number of students are expected to be in front of teachers within schools that have principals within districts that each have a superintendent. As a result, small schools or districts cannot leverage distance learning or rethink service delivery to maximize student learning and minimize cost. The state essentially requires these smaller schools and districts to have high per-pupil cost structures.

Supporting more adaptive district budgets won’t be easy, as traditional budgeting practices are deeply rooted in district habits and in local politics. School board members facing reelection may be encouraged to make promises that wreak fiscal havoc in years to come. State legislators will be reluctant to make changes that result in fewer dollars going to their districts. But the benefits of moving to more nimble expenditure structures with multiyear budgets that plan for contingencies are real, not only in terms of long-term fiscal stability, but also in that priorities can be articulated in district spending patterns. Under these conditions, district leaders will be better able to seek out and adopt promising solutions to their cost challenges as scale changes.

Marguerite Roza is director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University and senior research affiliate at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. Jon Fullerton is executive director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.