Charter schools are created under state statutes, but they often retain a private character. Can they qualify as “state actors” for a plaintiff’s purpose of using Section 1983 of Title 42 of the U. S. Code, which is the main gateway for achieving relief? In the case from Arizona that the Ninth Circuit decided, the answer was no, and the claims of the plaintiff were dismissed.

The plaintiff, Michael Caviness, had been employed for six years as a teacher of health and physical education and a track coach at Horizon Community Learning Center, a nonprofit corporation that operated a charter school in Phoenix. A female student filed a grievance charging that he had crossed “the student-teacher boundary.” At a hearing, Horizon’s governing board learned that the student had a “crush” on Caviness and that the two had been communicating by telephone. The board concluded that he had exercised questionable judgment and kept him on paid administrative leave until his contract expired. When he applied for a job in the Mesa Public Schools, Horizon’s executive director declined to evaluate him, and Caviness claimed that what the director said to Mesa was “purposely false and incomplete” and intended to harm him. He further claimed that some Horizon employees had defamed him by falsely calling him a pedophile.

Caviness filed a complaint under Section 1983 alleging that Horizon had, without due process, deprived him of his liberty interest in finding work, in that it had not granted him a hearing to clear his name. To establish that the school was a “state actor,” he made five arguments: that Arizona law defines a charter school as a public school; that a charter school is a state actor for all purposes, including employment; that a charter school provides a public education, a function that is traditionally and exclusively the prerogative of the state; that a charter school is a state actor in Arizona because the state regulates the personnel matters of such schools; and that it is a state actor because charter schools, unlike traditional private schools, are permitted to participate in the state’s retirement system.

The district court granted Horizon’s petition for dismissal for lack of federal jurisdiction. It found no evidence “with respect to [Caviness’s] specific employment claims, that Horizon acted in concert or conspired with state actors, was subject to government coercion or encouragement, or was otherwise entwined or controlled by an agency of the State.”

Three circuit judges concurred that the actions that Horizon took or failed to take were all connected with its role as Caviness’s employer, and that what it did as such did not constitute “state action.” State action, it said, “may be found if, though only if, there is such a close nexus between the State and the challenged action that seemingly private behavior may be fairly treated as that of the State itself.”

Caviness failed because he did not establish the close nexus. It was not enough to argue that under Arizona law all charter schools are state actors. Without facts to show that Horizon was acting as “the government,” Caviness had no federal case.

While the Caviness case could be a harbinger of more cases to come, we would be surprised to see federal litigation lead to a broad characterization of charters as private actors. Charters will likely increase in both number and federal financial support under President Obama, and with federal aid comes the force of laws emphasizing charter schools’ public character. Charters are explicitly obliged to abide by federal statutes prohibiting discrimination, for example. And while no federal law applies, the Department of Education’s guidance has made clear that charter schools must be nonreligious as well. Balking at either constraint would put charters at risk of losing not only federal aid but also their status as public schools, which has been critical to the charter movement’s success.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

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Education Next: What is the evidence that inner-city schools are shortchanged on high-quality teachers?

Eric Hanushek: Inner-city schools and especially those serving the most disadvantaged students routinely display unacceptable achievement levels, ones that seal their students off from further education and from good jobs. Coupled with the general finding that effective teachers are the key to a high-quality school, it is natural to infer that the children most in need are systematically getting the poorest teachers.

Unfortunately, direct evidence on the distribution of teacher quality and its impact for disadvantaged students is hard to come by. Researcher Marguerite Roza and others have produced considerable evidence that teachers in schools serving the most-disadvantaged students have lower average salaries, reflecting in large part the movement of more-experienced teachers away from schools with a higher proportion of minority students and with lower-achieving students. There is also evidence that these schools tend to have more teachers with emergency credentials and without regular certification, although this appears to be declining over time. The problem is that these readily measured attributes of teachers have virtually nothing to do with teacher effectiveness.

Extensive research on teacher quality by me and others suggests that the only attribute of teacher effectiveness that stands out is being a rookie teacher. Teachers in their first three years do a less satisfactory job than they will with more experience. And this has an impact on schools serving highly disadvantaged populations, because the more-experienced teachers who leave these schools are generally replaced with new teachers. The net impact of this on disadvantaged schools is unclear, because there is also some evidence that the experienced teachers who leave these schools are on average not their most effective teachers.

Kati Haycock: No matter what measure of “quality” you look at, poor and minority students—and not just those in inner-city schools—are much less likely to be assigned better-qualified and more-effective teachers. Core academic classes in high-poverty secondary schools are twice as likely as those in low-poverty schools to be taught by a teacher with neither a major nor certification in the subject. The percentage of first-year teachers at high-minority schools is almost twice as high as the percentage of such teachers at low-minority schools. The list of disgraceful statistics goes on and on.

Even if we dismiss traditional measures as imperfect gauges of true teaching quality, new studies employing more-sophisticated measures reveal the same inequitable patterns. When the Tennessee Department of Education analyzed the state’s Value-Added Assessment System—which measures the impact of individual teachers on their students’ tested academic growth—it found that “low-income and minority children have the least access to the state’s most effective teachers and more access to the state’s least effective teachers.” Recently, researchers at the University of Virginia studying teaching practices and learning climate in more than 800 1st-grade classrooms were dismayed to find that lower-income and nonwhite students are much more likely than their counterparts to be placed in “lower overall quality classrooms.”

We also have clear evidence of just how damaging those inequities are. An analysis of data from Los Angeles found that the impact of individual teachers is so great that providing top-quartile teachers rather than bottom-quartile teachers for four years in a row would be enough to completely close the achievement gap between white and African American students. In fact, attending to this problem is the most important step policymakers can take to address the nation’s long-standing achievement gaps.

EN: Can we get higher-quality teachers to inner-city schools? What strategies are most likely to work? Regulation or incentives?

EH: Historically, the first policy response has been to try writing regulations. When these don’t work, the next response is generally to fine-tune the regulations. Developing regulations that ensure that local districts take appropriate action to deal with the teacher quality problem is not likely to be very successful. First, regulations work best when it is possible to measure precisely the underlying attributes that are important to success. Extensive research shows that commonly measured attributes of teachers, such as more than three or four years of experience, master’s degrees, and even state certification, are not related to effectiveness. In fact, all of the regulations that go into defining what is needed to be a fully credentialed teacher neither screen out bad teachers nor ensure that credentialed teachers are any more effective then uncredentialed teachers. Second, many union contracts in effect in inner cities vest rights to fill any teaching vacancies with senior teachers. New or reworked regulations would have to deal with collectively bargained teacher agreements.

An incentive approach must be the centerpiece of improving teacher quality in urban schools and in the most disadvantaged schools. It is necessary to reward success rather than try to regulate it. Unfortunately, we have little experience with how to structure incentives. Attempts to devise universal incentives from Washington or from state capitols are likely to be quite inefficient if not harmful.

Providing strong incentives is increasingly possible, however, as we develop better information linking teachers to student achievement, but incentives linked to so-called value-added measures are likely to be a small part of the overall answer. We need to refine the evaluation of teacher effectiveness, and we need to introduce the serious use of evaluations into the schools, evaluations that guide tenure, retention, and pay decisions.

Research that Steve Rivkin and I have done indicates that the largest variations in teacher quality are found within the typical school, and that quality variation between schools is considerably smaller than that found in any given school, including high-poverty schools. The policy implication of this is quite clear. It is not a matter of trying to swap all of the teachers in high-poverty schools with those in suburban schools. It is very much a matter of focusing on student achievement gains and of keeping those teachers who do a good job while eliminating those who are inept. For this, it is more a matter of will, combined with eliminating the rigidities that have been built into teachers’ contracts.

KH: We know it is possible to bring high-quality teachers into urban schools from recent efforts in New York City and other districts. The question is whether we will do what is necessary to provide low-income and minority students with the kind of powerful teaching they need and deserve. To solve the problem on a large scale, policymakers will need to think beyond simplistic, false dichotomies like “regulation or incentives” and embrace a robust combination of broad reforms coupled with targeted interventions.

First, we should press forward with efforts to provide education leaders with more sophisticated information on teacher effectiveness, to both maximize the impact of strategies that address distribution and to ensure cost efficiency. Education leaders need to be able to identify the strongest teachers in order to recruit and retain them, and assign them to the students who need their expertise the most. Similarly, they need to be able to identify weaker teachers in order to get them the support they need to join the ranks of effective teachers or to move them out of classrooms if they cannot improve. That is why the Obama administration is using the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to insist that states tear down the “walls” that prevent them from linking teacher and student data and come clean on teacher evaluation systems that rate all teachers “satisfactory.”

But it will take time to develop richer and more sophisticated measures of true effectiveness. Until then, policymakers should use a combination of the best available measures to analyze teacher distribution, report on it, and act to increase equity. A study in North Carolina found that having teachers with a combination of characteristics and credentials can more than offset the gap in annual learning gains between African American students whose parents did not go to college and white students whose parents did. We need to act on the information we have available, even while we work to create more sophisticated measures.

Next, we need new policies that empower local superintendents and principals to use that information to better recruit and distribute highly effective teachers. Districts can move up timelines for teacher resignations and transfers and give principals in hard-to-staff schools first dibs on new entrants and transfers. States and districts can establish a policy of “mutual consent” that gives principals the right to choose their own teachers. States can take actions to pump up the supply of stronger teachers by using data on the effectiveness of graduates to improve teacher training programs, expanding those that produce strong teachers and shrinking or closing those that do not. States and districts can eliminate seniority-based layoffs, which should consider effectiveness instead, and make it easier to transfer or remove ineffective teachers who cannot improve.

Finally, policymakers need to make these schools much more attractive places to work, including but not limited to improving financial compensation. Effective teachers who choose to work in the most challenging schools often sacrifice pay and professional status. State leaders should reverse that relationship, offering such teachers higher pay, visible respect, strong and supportive principals who provide effective instructional leadership, and opportunities to collaborate in meaningful ways.

EN: How can we measure teacher quality on an ongoing basis?

KH: Measures of teacher quality should be based primarily on teachers’ effectiveness in promoting student learning, but should also consider evidence of classroom teaching practices known to contribute to greater student learning. All states now have at least the raw capacity to use value-added techniques to measure teachers’ contribution to their students’ academic progress. Where those data are available, they should be front and center in efforts to measure teacher quality. But since the data rely on annual standardized assessments, such analyses will not be available for all teachers. Moreover, since value-added data by themselves do not tell much about why a teacher is more or less effective or how exactly he or she can improve, such “outcome” measures can productively be coupled with new kinds of “inputs” measures, provided the two are strongly correlated.

For example, researchers at institutions such as the University of Virginia, Stanford, and Michigan State and at programs like the Teacher Advancement Program and Teach For America have developed protocols for observing classroom practices and analyzing teaching “artifacts” that produce ratings sufficiently correlated with outcomes. Typically, they use highly specific frameworks and rubrics that describe effective teaching practices, ensure that all evaluators are trained in their use, require multiple classroom observations per year, and employ quality controls to ensure reliability across evaluators. Such systems can help administrators and teachers understand why value-added scores look the way they do and how they can be improved.

Some districts are experimenting with systems that incorporate an even broader range of measures. For example, the evaluation system currently being implemented in Washington, D.C., incorporates a schoolwide value-added measure, a gauge of how much the teacher participates in and contributes to the larger school community, and measures of student growth on instruments other than standardized tests.

EH: We have devoted a lot of research to identifying the attributes of effective teachers, attributes that might be used for hiring or for policy purposes. This research has not succeeded, leading me to agree that the best way to identify a teacher’s effectiveness is to observe her classroom performance. Most other professions are assessed by performance, including that of doctors, lawyers, accountants, and so forth. Indeed, one definition of “profession” might be an occupation in which one is willing to be judged (and rewarded) according to performance.

Research suggests that we can identify effective teachers from the value added to student achievement, although there are limits to the accuracy of doing this. Moreover, Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgren, in the most recent of this research, show that principals reach many of the same conclusions about effectiveness in their evaluations; at least they seem able to distinguish effectiveness in the classroom within broad ranges, i.e., bottom, middle, or top.

The long-run hope would be that we develop both better quantitative measures of a teacher’s value added and better subjective evaluations by principals, supervisors, and peers. This approach is unlikely to satisfy a regulatory view of allocation of quality teachers, but if we are truly interested in improving student achievement, we cannot shy away from incorporating performance information of all sorts into our management decisions.

EN: All the evidence says that experience does not affect teacher quality much after the first three or four years, so should we be concerned that the more-experienced teachers leave for different locations?

EH: It is a concern if experienced teachers systematically leave the most-disadvantaged schools, because the first few years tend to be a little ragged. On the other hand, this fact by itself should not be overstated. Among all rookie teachers there is still a wide variation in skill. Take, for example, Teach For America teachers. On average, they start out looking like the typical experienced teacher from traditional training programs (even though TFA teachers will themselves improve with seasoning). More than that, the best and the worst TFA teachers or other rookies in the system are dramatically different from each other, and the difference is much larger than the performance growth typical for the first few years.

Policies that concentrate on single proxies for skill, like initial years of experience, miss the much larger differences. Yes, if we say we can do nothing about retention related to individual performance levels, it would be good to have more-experienced teachers in the disadvantaged schools. But such a focus overlooks the place where truly large changes are possible.

A policy that simply stabilized movement from these schools would not really accomplish much and might even be counterproductive if no attention were given to actual performance. On the other hand, if we made inner-city schools more attractive places to work and if we developed policies that actively reward high performance by teachers, we would probably get a bonus of lower teacher turnover in our most-disadvantaged schools.

KH: While experience in no way equals effectiveness, we still should be concerned about teacher attrition. Here’s why: high attrition rates in high-poverty schools create a “revolving door” environment with more job vacancies which, because such schools have a harder time recruiting teachers, tend to be disproportionately filled with first-year teachers. And experience does matter for inexperienced teachers. As a group, first-year teachers tend to be less effective than those with even a little more experience, and effectiveness tends to climb steeply for any given cohort of teachers until it begins to plateau after a few years. According to research by Eric Hanushek and others, disproportionate exposure to inexperienced teachers contributes to the achievement gap.

Therefore, policymakers should either seek to limit the number of rookie teachers hired to work in high-poverty and high-minority schools or ensure that beginning teachers come from programs or institutions with a proven track record of supplying teachers who are much more effective than average. Then they should track the effectiveness of beginning teachers in those schools over the first few years, offering substantial retention incentives to those who demonstrate high levels of effectiveness—not only salary incentives, but also career pathways that provide opportunities to exercise leadership while they continue to teach.

EN: If we force teachers to teach in particular schools, will they just leave for another district, or for an administrative position, or leave education altogether?

KH: We don’t know, since it’s never been tried on a large scale. More to the point, I would suggest that this is the wrong question to be asking, as nobody thinks forced reassignments are a good solution and nobody is seriously proposing it. Every once in a while, district leaders become frustrated and make noises about the possibility of forced reassignments. But no large district has done it because they know that it would be met with too much resistance and resentment.

Instead, as district leaders are discovering for themselves, a better solution lies in a creative combination of targeted incentives for teachers and policies that empower administrators and school leaders to recruit and retain effective educators.

EH: Coercion is generally costly, particularly when it violates the expectations of workers. The U.S. military found that the draft was not a good policy, even when it allowed them to get soldiers cheaply. With schools, the situation is more complicated. There are many jobs (including the all-volunteer military) where the employer can establish the right to make specific job assignments, but in general the employer must pay for that ability. Today’s urban teachers frequently have a contract that gives the more-experienced teacher certain transfer rights across schools, and changing that provision would generally require bargaining with compensation involving higher salaries or other benefits that the teachers value.

The current contractual arrangements are in many cases overly concerned with teachers’ rights and less concerned about student outcomes than is desirable. It would make sense to work toward more assignment flexibility by school districts. But, again, this may be lower priority than simply having more control over retention based on classroom effectiveness.

EN: If we pay teachers more to teach in inner-city schools, will that really attract the best teachers?

KH: Financial incentives can have a positive impact on teacher distribution, but how much of an impact depends on the size of the incentive and to whom it is being offered. Research from North Carolina suggests that smaller financial incentives can help retain teachers in hard-to-staff schools, but experience in places like Dallas and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system suggests that incentives need to be fairly large to convince highly effective veterans to transfer and remain there. That shouldn’t stop leaders from offering higher salaries for effective teachers who successfully take on more-challenging jobs. But the qualifiers in that sentence are important: Pay incentives should be offered only to teachers of proven effectiveness, and a portion should be in the form of bonuses contingent on continuing high performance.

Policymakers can free up resources by putting a stop to or limiting counterproductive incentives in current salary schedules. For example, they can set a ceiling on the percentage of teacher compensation districts can base on seniority, and they can stop the practice of paying teachers to earn master’s degrees, which study after study has shown to have no discernible impact on student achievement.

But higher pay alone might not be enough to solve the problem. Some districts have found that even large financial incentives, in the absence of better working conditions, fail to attract and retain strong teachers in high-need schools. The reason is simple: like any other professionals, great teachers place great value on a positive and supportive working environment characterized by strong leadership and opportunities to collaborate with colleagues.

Rather than being discouraged to know it takes more than money to attract stronger teachers to struggling schools, leaders can leverage that knowledge to devise creative solutions. For example, when recruitment bonuses failed to solve the teacher inequity problem in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, leaders came up with a comprehensive “Strategic Staffing Initiative.” The district transferred high-performing principals into targeted schools, allowed them to handpick a team of strong administrators, and gave them the opportunity to recruit up to five highly effective teachers from a roster of volunteers identified and recruited by the district. Everyone who transferred received substantial financial incentives, but, just as important, all were offered the opportunity to work with a team of teachers and administrators committed to achieving success.

EH: There is a simple economic axiom that bad teachers like more money as much as good teachers. Providing higher salaries will do little to improve the quality of urban teachers or teachers of disadvantaged students unless this is coupled with a clearer judgment about effectiveness. If the objective is raising achievement, there is no real substitute for observing achievement and taking actions based on it.

School accountability systems move in this direction when the rewards to principals and teachers are linked to the growth in student learning. At that point, higher salaries, if directed toward more effective teachers and administrators, can be effective. But if higher salaries are awarded by geography and not demonstrated effectiveness, there is little reason to expect improvement.

The central message of this discussion must be that improving student outcomes in the inner city cannot be done by proxy. We must use the direct and available information on teacher effectiveness that comes from objective achievement data and subjective evaluations for both administrators and teachers to guide rewards and management decisions. We may conclude that this is too difficult—because of union contracts, traditions, or other issues. In that case, we must be willing to live with disastrous results or, alternatively, be prepared to give parents the real opportunity to choose better schools. We have a long track record of regulating that schools should “do good”; of following the current ideas, including simply paying teachers more; and of holding out for the perfect, fully tested alternative. We are left with stagnant achievement results that are especially egregious for poor, inner-city kids. More of the same will not work.

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Charter High Schools

For far too long, studies and reports about our nation’s high schools have been great at diagnosing prob­lems and highlighting failures. “The Unknown World of Charter High Schools” (research, Spring 2010) offers a refreshing change from the typical “gloom and doom” by providing evi­dence that public charter students in Chicago and Florida have significantly higher graduation and college atten­dance rates than their peers in tradi­tional public schools.

“The Unknown World of Char­ter High Schools” is an important research document for two reasons. First, it focuses not on student achieve­ment, but more importantly, on edu­cational attainment, specifically, high school graduation and college matric­ulation. Unfortunately, this “bottom line” research focus is rare. While studies showing growth on standard­ized tests can prove helpful, schools exist to prepare students to be produc­tive and successful adults. Educational attainment is a much clearer indicator of school quality. A similar bottom-line approach has been central to our success at YES Prep Public Schools, and it is why we require every stu­dent to secure acceptance into a four-year college in order to receive a high school diploma.

Second, the methodology used in the study effectively addresses the usual creaming and self-selection arguments that arise with any study demonstrating positive student out­comes in public charter schools. By limiting the high school students in the study to those who attended a charter school for 8th grade, the authors account for the argument that charter students perform at higher levels simply because they are more motivated or come from families in which the parents are more involved in their education.

This outcomes-based focus and thoughtful research design gives the study the credibility that it needs to serve as an important “proof point” that extends beyond charter high schools. The study serves as an important step in identifying factors in school success. With this knowl­edge of “the what,” we can confidently dig deeper and better understand “the how.” Research like this com­bined with over a decade of practical experience and significant results at high-performing charter public high schools like YES Prep will unlock “the how” to high school reform so we can move past diagnosing the prob­lem and begin implementing real and effective solutions for increasing high school and college completion rates across the country.

Chris Barbic
Founder and Head of Schools
YES Prep Public Schools

Coleman’s Legacy

Thanks to Paul Peterson for inves­tigating the links between James Coleman’s adolescent experiences and his studies of adolescent life and high schools (“A Courageous Look at the American High School,” features, Spring 2010). Peterson provides a great service to scholars.

Peterson mentions Coleman’s experience at Manual High in Louis­ville, Kentucky, where he adjusted by becoming a member of the school’s football team. Coleman’s athleticism had roots deeper than the limited opportunities at his high school, however. His father and grandfather were both football heroes. I recall a comical scene at a graduate-stu­dent baseball game. Jim wanted two captains to choose their teams the old-fashioned way: one player at a time. Considering that most gradu­ate students were working from their own adolescent experiences (i.e., their lack of childhood athleticism), a revolt was quickly organized. No one should have to be the last one chosen! All in jest, Jim settled for odd and even birth dates to establish the teams.

Coleman’s adult interest in ado­lescence was not limited to scholarly analysis. Most know of his attempts to develop academically related games that could stir the interest of adolescents. Fewer know of his weekly commitment to tutor a pub­lic high school’s mathematics team in Chicago.

While his competitive instincts remained with him as a scholar, so did his sense of fair play. As Tom Hoffer and I waded through all the commentaries and critiques of the study of public and private high schools, Jim had strict rules of engagement. Roughly, they were these: Concede well-founded criti­cisms first. Play on the critics’ court (i.e., you can’t use sociological argu­ments to criticize an economist). Protect the junior scholars and give seniors fair hits.

Sally B. Kilgore
President and CEO
Modern Red SchoolHouse Institute

In reading Paul Peterson’s thoughtful account of James Coleman’s research and its role in history, and of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s reaction, I was reminded that Coleman’s big study came out a year after the Moynihan Report (1965). (I had done the research for Moynihan.) At that time, Moyni­han’s report was in the middle of a firestorm, and I know he found some relief in learning from that study how important the family was.

While I have always thought that the family and neighborhood conditions were a very large factor in achievement differences, I have not thought that the Coleman report itself established the relative contributions of school and family. Poor neighborhoods and low-quality schools are interrelated, and it is very hard to sort it out.

Very much later I stumbled onto a 1972 article by Coleman titled “Pol­icy Research in the Social Sciences” and found that Coleman did not think his study had established such rela­tive contributions. He said that “The plan of the analysis was not appro­priate for study of the relative effects of background and school variables, but it was correct for study of relative weights of different school variables.” One wonders how many people heard this from him.

As the father of the concept of “social capital,” Coleman would be pleased to know how far that concept has come, and that it has been applied in the monumental longitudinal study by a team led by Anthony Bryk (Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago, 2010). The study established the strong relation­ship between the success of school improvement efforts and the strength of social capital in the neighborhoods where the schools were located. Our debt to Coleman is huge, as a pioneer on many important fronts.

Paul E. Barton
Education writer and consultant

Universal Pre-K

Elizabeth Cascio (“What Hap­pened When Kindergarten Went Universal,” research, Spring 2010) has estimated the effects of uni­versal kindergarten to inform the debate about universal pre-K. She claims existing research provides little insight into the relative merits of universal programs and those tar­geted to specific groups.

While Cascio’s results are not fully consistent with other stud­ies, the estimated one-fifth drop in incarceration for whites is intrigu­ing. Ultimately, her effort is unsatis­fying because her methods and data provide a weak basis for conclusions, and there is far more relevant infor­mation on the long-term effects than she acknowledges.

Too often the results of complex models such as Cascio’s owe more to the assumptions and idiosyncra­sies of the way data are selected and coded than to reality. Despite the model’s complexity, there is too much that cannot be adequately taken into account: for example, the potential for schools to use the resources freed by state support for kindergarten to fund other services or reduce class sizes for older children; the effects of large, sud­den increases in kindergarten enroll­ments on quality; large increases and decreases in cohort size over the time period studied; and immigration pat­terns over time. Among other prob­lems, Cascio’s speculations about Head Start fail to consider the impacts on children who begin Head Start a year earlier as kindergarten replaced Head Start for those who were age five.

Cascio seems unaware of sub­stantial evidence on the longer-term effects of preschool education pro­grams other than model programs and Head Start, evidence that bears more directly on the question at hand. Several literature reviews (including Barnett in 2008 and Nores and Bar­nett in 2010) have summarized much of this work. The evidence includes the longitudinal study of Child Par­ent Centers operated by the Chicago Public Schools and studies of the effects of several state pre-K pro­grams (including universal pre-K in Georgia) that find positive effects on achievement and reductions in grade repetition. Studies from abroad have found universal pre-K increased test scores, improved behavior, decreased grade repetition, and increased edu­cational attainment. Finally, interna­tional comparisons indicate that as participation in pre-K moves beyond 60 percent toward universal, average test scores at age 15 rise and inequal­ity in these scores declines.

Steve Barnett

Milagros Nores
National Institute for Early Education Research

Cascio responds:

Drs. Barnett and Nores leave the impression that I have overlooked a vast and relevant literature on the long-term effects of universal pre­school. Yet almost all the U.S. pro­grams they reference were targeted, not universal; short-term outcomes like test scores are not deterministi­cally related to adult well-being, which was my focus; and experiences of other countries—with very different policy landscapes and populations—provide at least as weak a basis for drawing conclusions for the U.S. Moreover, I estimate the net effects of a large public investment in early education, not the effects of attending preschool per se. Large interventions may have effects that offset any benefits from atten­dance. That my estimates incorporate such responses may make them more, not less, instructive.

Vouchers in New Orleans

Thanks to Education Next for pub­lishing Michael B. Henderson’s informative article on the voucher pro­gram in New Orleans (“In the Wake of the Storm,” features, Spring 2010). With so much attention being focused on the expansion of charter schools after Hurricane Katrina, these schol­arships tend to be overlooked. Mr. Henderson’s piece serves as a useful reminder of the program’s existence as well as an informative description of how the legislation was passed.

Unlike the charter schools, which have received broad support since their inception, the voucher program was a “heavy lift” for Governor Bobby Jindal. He and the legislature deserve much credit for taking this on. It would have been easy for reformers to use the continuing expansion of charter schools as an excuse for inac­tion on the voucher front, but thanks to their commitment hundreds of children can now attend the school of their choice.

In some respects, the expansion of charter schools made it harder for voucher advocates to make a com­pelling case for their need. But as Mr. Henderson describes, effective advocacy by organizations including the Archdiocese of New Orleans and the Black Alliance for Educational Options helped build support for these scholarships.

As Mr. Henderson points out, a number of conditions made it possible for New Orleans to become a hotbed of school reform. Some of these con­ditions may be replicable in other cit­ies and some may not. But what these reforms can do is lay the groundwork for change around the country.

Perhaps success in New Orleans will serve as a springboard for expanding school choice in cities that still cope with inflexible unions and reluctant policymakers. That could be a more likely, and more beneficial, outcome than hoping that someone can replicate the unusual path to school choice that has been taken here in New Orleans.

Kevin Kane
President
Pelican Institute for Public Policy

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Alternative East High School in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, was modeled after the famous Parkway alternative school in Philadelphia. From 1971 to 1983, Alternative East drew students from Philadelphia and the surrounding suburban school districts of Abington, Cheltenham, and Springfield. The principal, Gisha Berkowitz, took the job after first becoming known as an “active parent.”

At Alternative East, students could create their own courses. As long as the course met college entry requirements, students could develop it, find a faculty member to teach it, and then advertise the class on a poster. If 15 students expressed interest, they could register for the course during master scheduling days held twice during the year. Students seldom sat in classrooms all day. Instead of looking at slides, for example, an art class piled into a van to visit local galleries.

Alternative East was continually evaluated and received positive reviews. Berkowitz carefully kept the budget from getting “out of balance.” So why did the school close?

As is often the case, the answer at the time was money. In 1983, Abington’s school board, in a 5–4 vote, withdrew the district’s participation, forcing the school to close its doors. Nevertheless, minutes from board meetings praised Alternative East and its programs, which included production of a children’s play at a local mall and learning activities in genetics. The board justified its decision by saying that district schools had “highly skilled, highly paid people, and we should be able to provide for the needs of these [students].”

The underlying causes were probably more deep-seated. Times had changed. When the school opened, according to Berkowitz, students were politically alienated by the Vietnam War, racial segregation, and traditional schooling. There was a passion for hands-on, personally relevant education. But by the 1980s, Berkowitz explained, the students at Alternative East were “less interested in exploring.” The teachers weren’t as enthusiastic either, and that sapped energy out of the school. “The political milieu has to be [there]—everything has to be ‘right’…and unfortunately, [that] doesn’t happen enough.”

Even the storied Parkway Program, which in 1970 Time magazine called “the most interesting high school in the U.S. today,” fell victim to the changing political climate. Parkway was known as the “school without walls,” because students learned about journalism at local newspapers, auto mechanics at auto shops, and art from museum historians. I spoke with Dr. Leonard Finkelstein, the second director of Parkway, who said that as a concept, Parkway was “magnificent.” But reality did not always match up to its promise. Some students thrived in the loosely structured environment, while it became a “free-for-all” for others.

Dr. James Lytle, Parkway’s first principal, said that by the late 1970s and early 1980s the middle-class students angry at the system had disappeared. Parkway became a safe alternative to the neighborhood schools and had to recruit “very aggressively” to maintain a diverse student population.

In 1990, the district asked Ms. Odette Harris to become Parkway’s principal. For more than 30 years, Harris had been the principal of William Penn, a large, traditional urban high school. Her style and Parkway’s had little in common, and she remained principal long enough to alter most things alternative. As Ms. Catherine Blunt, Parkway’s union representative at the time, put it, the school changed “because we were in the district.”

As districts like Philadelphia seek to “turn around” their public schools, let’s not forget the lesson of the lost alternative schools. Inventive programs, even when successful, are easily swept aside and replaced by standard fare.

Lynne Blumberg is an ESL and English instructor and freelance writer.

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And Edutopia believes in us.

Let politicians and pundits speak darkly of the need to weed out bad teachers. Let them hold tests and accountability over our heads like the Sword of Damocles. In Edutopia, teachers rule. We are confident and inspiring. Enlightened administrators are courageous and brave. Grateful parents swoon, while bright, cheerful students meet their academic manifest destinies as their awesome teachers reject the discredited orthodoxies of industrial-age schooling in favor of hands-on projects and authentic, real-world tasks. In the bright light of Edutopia’s soul it is always six o’clock in the morning, and you cannot wait to jump out of bed and get to school.

More seductive than a fitness magazine on New Year’s Day, Edutopia inspires me. Edutopia gets me. Edutopia sees the teacher I am capable of becoming—no, the teacher I will be—and it wants to help me. True, I haven’t helped inner-city high-school students design and build a hybrid car that runs on fuel made from soybeans like that guy in Philadelphia. OK, I haven’t nailed down donations to buy an old farm so my students can garden and read Thoreau in the bosom of nature like that teacher in Vermont. Hell, I haven’t even found the time for that cool unit where my kids create digital avatars and use them to explore body issues. But I will. Yes, in fact, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Right after the tests are over. It’s possible.

Edutopia comes by its name honestly. Beyond aspirational, it is teacher porn. But here’s the thing: it’s serious. The George Lucas Educational Foundation, the 19-year-old organization that runs Edutopia, has given itself a mission to “spread the word about ideal, interactive learning environments and enable others to adapt these successes locally.” Its name notwithstanding, Edutopia does not see itself as peddling pie-eyed idealism.

Many people in education were only dimly aware of Edutopia until early 2009, when the organization suddenly became more aggressive about promoting its vision and products. Driven by a ubiquitous underwriting campaign on National Public Radio (NPR), Edutopia claims 10,000 paid members and a total monthly audience of over 300,000 educators for its web site and videos, a 70 percent jump in the past year. Its six-year-old bimonthly magazine, Edutopia, reached 100,000 subscribers until the foundation decided to go online-only starting in the spring of 2010.

Its unabashed idealism and cheerful optimism make it impossible to dislike Edutopia, which bills itself somewhat grandly as “What Works in Public Education.” What’s harder to define is Edutopia’s on-the-ground impact on America’s classrooms and the efficacy of its unique, ultraprogressive ideas. Lucas’s money has purchased an impressive collection of reported articles, videos, and web pages gathered on-site at schools across the country that practice at least bits of what Edutopia preaches. Still, foundation officials are hard-pressed to identify any school that has adopted its strategies as a whole. Thus a better Edutopia tagline might be, “What We Think Would Probably Work in Public Education If Schools Would Stop Being So Old-Fashioned and Just Try It. Plus George Lucas Thinks It’s a Good Idea.”

That might not make a compelling NPR underwriting credit. But it would be more accurate.

What Works in Public Education?

For Edutopia, “What Works in Public Education” boils down to six “core principles”: comprehensive assessment, integrated studies, project-based learning, social and emotional learning, teacher development, and technology integration (see sidebar). Project learning and technology get the biggest push, but even these two favorites serve a bigger picture. “The six core principles can be summarized in six words,” says Dr. Milton Chen, senior fellow and executive director emeritus of the George Lucas Educational Foundation. “‘School life should resemble real life.’ That’s what we’d really like to see happening in schools.”

Edutopia does not consult with schools or districts. It makes no grants. It offers no professional development or teacher training. Essentially, it’s a nonprofit media company. “Working for a filmmaker, we make films,” says Chen. “And we surround those films with other kinds of information that can support learning about how these innovative classrooms came to be.” The foundation has an annual budget of $6 million and a full-time staff of 18 editors, videographers, and web producers who work out of sleek and modern offices at Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, a 4,700-acre retreat in the Marin County hills near Nicasio, California.

Edutopia’s web site has more than 10,000 pages of content, plus videos, podcasts, and webinars that seek to redefine what is possible—even practical—in U.S. schools: Inner-city schools that stress empathy, collaboration, and personal responsibility. Green schools whose smaller carbon footprints reduce absenteeism and improve test scores. Schools where kids work alongside trained chefs to create school lunches made from scratch with fresh ingredients grown in once-abandoned local greenhouses. If these sound like the kinds of schools where you’d like to teach, that’s exactly the point. “The reaction we’d like people to have is to say, ‘I’d like that for my students,’” says Chen. “‘Whether I’m a superintendent or a parent, I want that kind of education for my kids.’ And then we have to answer the question, how do you do it?”

Let George Do It

George Lucas is an unlikely education philanthropist. The creator of the blockbuster Star Wars and Indiana Jones film franchises, Lucas’s $3 billion net worth places him in the top quartile of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans, along with Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and members of the Walton family, all of whom are more closely associated with funding education initiatives than Lucas, who by all accounts was a bored, indifferent student growing up amid the farms and factories of Modesto, California.

“There wasn’t much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult,” he said in a 1999 interview. As a teenager, Lucas spent most of his time under the hood of a car dreaming about automobile racing. He liked photography and briefly entertained the idea of going to art school, an idea shot down by his father, a stationery store owner, who once remarked, “George never listened to me. He was his mother’s pet. George was hard to understand. He was always dreaming things up.”

A near-fatal car crash days before his high-school graduation had a profound effect on Lucas. “The idea of trying to make something out of my life wasn’t really a priority,” he said in a 2007 interview with the Academy of Achievement. “But the accident allowed me to apply myself at school.” After dabbling in film at Modesto Junior College, Lucas won admission to the University of Southern California’s prestigious film school in 1967. USC Film School, said Lucas, “really ignited a passion in me, and it took off from there.”

And how. American Graffiti (1973) was Lucas’s second film and his first hit. That was followed by Star Wars (1977), which became the third-highest-grossing film series in history behind James Bond and Harry Potter. Waiving his director’s fee in favor of the licensing rights to the Star Wars characters earned Lucas hundreds of millions of dollars from toys, games, and action figures. His Lucasfilm studio, along with Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light & Magic digital-film effects companies made it nearly impossible to go to the multiplex without seeing Lucas’s thumbprint. At 47, the age at which Barack Obama won the White House, George Lucas took home the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in the film industry.

Clearly, boredom and daydreaming have been very, very good to George Lucas. But how did a gearhead kid with little interest in school end up making public education the object of his philanthropy? Chen describes listening to Lucas reflect on his childhood. “He said, ‘I know there are many, many students out there like me who are disengaged from school, who are kind of bored, not doing well, who in fact have skills and talents and curiosities. If harnessed they could be really great students.’”

A bit of Hollywood mythmaking could be at work here. Lucas has given mixed messages about his own public education. “Frankly, I was not very engaged in my classes,” Lucas said in an e-mail sent to me via Chen. “Occasionally, I had a teacher who would inspire me.” However, he sounded a much more generous note in accepting the Thalberg award at the Oscars in 1992, going out of his way to thank “a group of devoted individuals who, apart from my parents, have done the most to shape my life—my teachers. From kindergarten through college, their struggle—and it was a struggle—to help me grow and learn was not in vain. And it is greatly appreciated.”

Edutopia’s fixation with hands-on projects and technology is certainly consistent with Lucas’s lifelong interest in cars and computers. The source of the foundation’s other education touchstones, however, is not as easy to discern. An e-mail request for Lucas to identify his guiding lights in education went unanswered. Members of Edutopia’s National Advisory Council, which include teachers, administrators, technology experts, and ed school professors, report little influence of or even contact with Lucas. Who has his ear on “What Works”? “I have heard him talk about Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence work,” says Chen. “Also he has spoken of Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences.” Are Edutopia’s core principles the fully formed vision of a creative genius and polymath, self-educated in pedagogy? “Those core principles were developed in close communication with Mr. Lucas,” says Chen, who insists Lucas is “quite active” in Edutopia’s work. “Those are things that George Lucas feels are the linchpins of what he’d like to see in a modern school.”

Fair enough. But are those ideas—from wherever they sprang—any good? Are they “What Works in Public Education”?

Back to the Future

For all its earnestness, Edutopia can sometimes give the sense that it has a poor grasp of history. It is forward-looking to a fault. One senior Edutopia executive was genuinely surprised to learn that project-based learning is neither a new or revolutionary concept in education, but one that traces its roots to William Heard Kilpatrick’s 1918 essay “The Project Method.” No obscure figure, Kilpatrick was “the most influential teacher in the nation’s leading college of education,” spending nearly 30 years on the faculty of Columbia University’s Teachers College, notes education historian Diane Ravitch. In her 2000 book Left Back, Ravitch describes how progressive educators immediately hailed Kilpatrick’s work and its Edutopian call for “whole-hearted purposeful activity proceeding in a social environment,” as the quintessential statement of the child-centered school movement.

“Kilpatrick thought of the project as not just a method but a fundamental reinvention of education. The project was an activity undertaken by students that really interested them,” Ravitch observed. “Furthermore, it fulfilled Dewey’s demand that education should be ‘life itself’ and not merely a preparation for future living; what could be ‘a better preparation for later life than practice living it now?’”

In other words, Edutopia’s mantra—school life should resemble real life—has a century-old provenance. And while teachers are revered, “school” can be a dirty word in Edutopia. An article titled “Beats the Heck Out of School” describes a project that uses hip-hop to teach students critical thinking, technology, and business skills. “What do you think this is—school?” quips a student approvingly in another article about experimental outdoor education. Search “real life” on Edutopia’s web database and you turn up over 200 articles, videos, and blog posts. Search “hands-on” and find 400 more. Somewhere, William Heard Kilpatrick smiles quietly. Dewey, too.

“Project learning is an incredibly important tool. I think there’s ample evidence that it increases student engagement and the ability of kids to retain information,” says Nínive Clements Calegari, a member of Edutopia’s National Advisory Council and the founder of 826 Valencia, a San Francisco education nonprofit. “Every classroom should have old-fashioned multiple-choice tests and good old-fashioned lectures. But if you can engage the kids in a project that has the good tenets of project learning, the impact is more profound,” she says.

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham points out that most teachers believe in project-based learning and the methods promoted by Edutopia, yet classroom observation studies show that whole-class instruction and “seat work” account for more than 90 percent of the class time of American 5th graders. If teachers agree that project-based learning equals good teaching, if it has 100 years of momentum and George Lucas’s millions pushing it, why is so little of it happening in our schools? Teachers “do not yet have widespread support from principals, districts, and states to learn how to implement it,” says Chen. Another possibility is that even those who believe in it do precious little project-based learning because it’s nearly impossible to do well. Willingham points out that teachers, like all human beings, have “cognitive limits.” We can only pay attention to a small number of the stimuli that are competing for our attention at any moment. Small groups working independently to overcome unforeseen and unpredictable obstacles make effective planning a challenge. “This doesn’t mean that students should never do projects. It means that we should be clear-eyed about the challenges that projects present, and have a plan to meet them,” says Willingham. “Project learning is great when it’s done well, but it’s very hard to pull off,” he notes.

Edutopia is on firmer ground in its technology advocacy, where there is broad agreement on the capacity of technology to transform education, even if there is little consensus on implementation. “When done well, technology can positively impact student learning outcomes. The challenge is that most school systems are not doing it well for a variety of reasons,” says Scott McLeod, an educational technology expert and associate professor at Iowa State University. “The failings have been more in the doing, not the knowing,” adds McLeod, who credits Edutopia with helping schools think through technology implementation and get it right. “They see excellent and exciting things happening in various isolated locations around the world, tell those stories, and then try to learn and extrapolate from those to schools at large,” he says.

Technology is central to the Edutopian vision, and Chen and his colleagues are unabashed enthusiasts. “Regardless of the politics of human resistance, technology continues to show often a better and less expensive way of doing things,” says Chen. “We feel that corner is being turned in education.”

To its credit, Edutopia seems not to adhere to a rigid orthodoxy in its coverage of schools. Its impressive “Schools That Work” series, in which Edutopia throws all of its multimedia resources into detailed coverage of an individual school, recently featured YES Prep, an urban charter-school network often mentioned in the same breath with KIPP, Achievement First, and other “no excuses” schools championed by advocates of test-driven education reform. The Houston-based schools have extended days, learning contracts signed by students and parents, school-issued cell phones for teachers, and classrooms bearing the names of colleges—the now-familiar features of what David Whitman dubbed “New Paternalism” schools in his 2008 book Sweating the Small Stuff (see “An Appeal to Authority,” features, Fall 2008). While Yes Prep’s fondness for project learning was highlighted, much of Edutopia’s coverage focused on how to re-create the school’s college-bound culture and tough-love discipline code.

“Story selection is driven first by our core values. For the most part we look for stories in these arenas. Second, we look for innovation and new approaches to reform so as not to become repetitive,” says Edutopia editorial director David Markus. “But in the end, it is about audience. Will the topic and our execution of our coverage plan quench their thirst for new insights and new solutions to improve the learning process?”

“Our core principles are very ambitious compared to where most schools are today,” Chen concedes. “So if a school is doing a great job on two or three of them, that’s a good candidate school for us. It’s very hard, for instance, to find a school that’s really doing the integrated studies piece well. That’s a complete change in the curriculum, certainly at the secondary level.”

Creating Edutopia in U.S. Schools

For all the True Believer energy and aggressive efforts to push an agenda, it remains difficult to discern the impact of Edutopia, either in winning converts to its vision for public education or changing the classroom practice of individual teachers. Most of its staff come from the media world and default to audience metrics as a proxy for influence. “People who use it feel connected to it and celebrated by it. It is absolutely successful for those individuals,” says Calegari, a former teacher. “When I was in the classroom I felt so isolated. It could have created a community for me of like-minded teachers,” she says.

Unlike fellow eduphilanthropists, Lucas has had little to say publicly about education reform. A private 501(c)(3), Edutopia does not lobby or explicitly advocate policy, “Our main role is to provide our media so that policymakers can be informed about and advocate for the policies behind the schools we cover,” says Chen.

Washington ed policy hands are skeptical whether Lucas’s “What Works” vision can gain the traction it needs to usher in an era of, well, Edutopia. “Gates, Walton, and Broad are driven by theories of action that emphasize structural reform” such as systems, incentives, and measures, says Andrew Rotherham, co-founder of Education Sector and author of the Eduwonk.com blog. “Edutopia seems more in the camp that what we need are additions and incremental changes to the current system. They’re not nearly as disruptive.” That’s ironic, he quips, “because you have to think that Luke Skywalker would have been more with Gates, Walton, and Broad. He was all about upending an established order that didn’t work.”

Edutopia rejects the comparison. “We consider our core agenda, when implemented at scale, to be very disruptive,” says Chen, who hopes to create more demand for the ideas Edutopia promotes from teachers, principals, parents, businesses, and others. “We leave it to policy experts to create the policies needed to bring them to scale,” he says.

A former 5th-grade teacher, Robert Pondiscio writes about education at the Core Knowledge Blog.

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We will show that, when examined more appropriately, the data actually reveal small differences in the level of overall segregation between the charter school sector and the traditional public-school sector. Indeed, we find the majority of students in the central cities of metropolitan areas, in both charter and traditional public schools, attend school in intensely segregated settings. Our findings are similar to those in a 2009 report by RAND, in which researchers focused on segregation in five large metropolitan areas (Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and San Diego) — areas that were also included in the CRP report. The RAND authors, with the benefit of student-level data, follow students who move from traditional public schools into charter schools and conclude that these transfers have “surprisingly little effect on racial distributions across the sites.” The authors of the RAND report write:

Across 21 comparisons (seven sites with three racial groups each), we find only two cases in which the average difference between the sending TPS and the receiving charter school is greater than 10 percentage points in the concentration of the transferring student’s race.

The RAND report, based on a superior methodology, provides strong evidence that the CRP claims are off base. Their findings, coupled with our own, offer a significantly different portrayal of segregation in charter schools than the CRP report. We find no basis for the allegations made by the CRP authors, who argue that charter-school enrollment growth, based on the free choices of mostly minority families, represents a “civil rights failure.”

While we find fault with the methodology employed by the CRP authors, and with their conclusions, we recognize that the questions addressed by the CRP, in this report and in scores of earlier ones, concern issues of importance for policymakers and the public alike. With the billions of dollars invested each year in public schools, both traditional and charter, and the millions of hours that we compel our children to attend these schools, it is critical that we have a basic understanding of the school environment that we are providing. Moreover, given the history of forced racial segregation in our nation’s schools, we must be ever-attentive to these issues.

Indeed, because these questions are of such significance, it is imperative that they be addressed carefully and correctly.

The Wrong Approach

Unfortunately, the analyses employed in the CRP report do not meet this standard. The authors begin by presenting a great deal of descriptive data on the overall enrollment and aggregate racial composition in public charter schools compared to traditional public schools. Based only on enrollments aggregated to the national and state level, the authors repeatedly highlight the overrepresentation of black students in charter schools in an attempt to portray a harmful degree of segregation. But comparisons of simple averages at such a high level of aggregation can obscure wide differences in school-level demographics among both charter and traditional public schools. It is like having your feet in the oven and your head in the icebox, and saying that, on average, the temperature is just right.

After this descriptive overview, the authors address the question of racial segregation in a more appropriate way. In this analysis, the CRP authors define as “hypersegregated” any school with a 90 percent minority population or a 90 percent white population. Their aim is to determine if charter students nationwide are more or less likely to attend school in such hypersegregated environments. However, a critical flaw undermines this comparison and all of the analyses that follow. In every case, whether the authors examine the numbers at the national, state, or metropolitan level, they compare the racial composition of all charter schools to that of all traditional public schools. This comparison is likely to generate misleading conclusions for one simple reason, as the authors themselves point out on the first page of the executive summary and then again on page 57 of the full report: “the concentration of charter schools in urban areas skews the charter school enrollment towards having higher percentages of poor and minority students.”

In other words, the geographic placement of charter schools practically ensures that they will enroll higher percentages of minorities than will the average public school in the nation, in states, and in large metropolitan areas. Further, because serving disadvantaged populations is the stated mission of many charter schools, they seek out locations near disadvantaged populations intentionally. Instead of asking whether all students in charter schools are more likely to attend segregated schools than are all students in traditional public schools, we should be comparing the racial composition of charter schools to that of nearby traditional public schools. Employing this method, we could compare the levels of segregation for the students in charter schools to what they would have experienced had they remained in their residentially assigned public schools.

If we acknowledge this standard for valid comparisons, we can quickly dismiss the national and state-level comparisons, which constitute the bulk of the CRP report. According to the authors’ own numbers in Table 20, more than half (56 percent) of charter school students attend school in a city, compared to less than one-third (30 percent) of traditional public school students. Thus, any national comparisons are inappropriate, as these two groups of students are inherently dissimilar. The authors employ this same flawed strategy individually for each of the 40 states included in their analysis. Again, comparing the segregation in charter schools in a state, which are concentrated in heavily minority central cities, to that in traditional public schools throughout the state, reveals nothing about the reality of racial segregation in charter schools.

The examples that the authors draw from these state-level comparisons are almost humorous at times. For example, consider the following point from page 43 of the report:

In some cases, like Idaho, charter school students across all races attend schools of white isolation: majorities of students of all races are in 90–100% white charter schools.

No kidding! The state of Idaho is nearly 95 percent white. Obviously, this is not a charter phenomenon, yet the authors brazenly use this as evidence for their claims without making any mention of the corresponding figure for the traditional public schools in the state.

Finally, the authors consider the hypersegregation in charter and traditional public schools individually within 39 metropolitan areas. But even within the large Census Bureau–defined Core-Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs) used as proxies for metropolitan areas, charters are still disproportionately located in low-SES (socioeconomic status) urban areas, while traditional public schools are dispersed throughout the entire CBSA. For example, the authors note that in the Washington, D.C., CBSA, 91 percent of students in charter schools attend hypersegregated schools, while only 20 percent of students in that same area attend hypersegregated traditional public schools. A quick look at the geographical placement of charter schools in the D.C. metro area, however, shows why such a comparison is inappropriate. The D.C. metro CBSA contains 1,186 traditional public schools, 1,026 of which are in Virginia, Maryland, and even West Virginia; only 13 percent of the traditional public schools in the D.C. CBSA are actually situated in the racially isolated District of Columbia. On the other hand, 93 percent of the charter schools in the D.C. CBSA are located in D.C. In other words, nearly all of the area’s charter schools are in D.C., while the vast majority of the traditional public schools the authors use in their comparisons are located in the largely suburban or exurban areas of surrounding states. For the 39 CBSAs examined by the authors, only 22 percent of the traditional public schools were located in central cities, compared to 51 percent of the charter schools.

A Tighter Comparison

It is indeed likely that, with the right analysis and the proper questions, the conclusion would not be as clear as portrayed by the CRP authors. We modified the CRP analysis by comparing the percentage of students in hypersegregated minority charters within the central city of each CBSA to the percentage of students in hypersegregated minority traditional public schools within the same central city. For example, for the Washington, D.C., CBSA, we included only schools located within the District of Columbia. The data we obtained for this comparison are publicly available from the Common Core of Data, so the CRP researchers could have conducted their analysis at this level. Of course, even this analysis is not perfect. Only following students at the individual level would reveal precisely what effect charters are having on segregation.

We focus our reanalysis on the data presented by the authors in their report, (Table 10). The focal measures in this table are shown in the last two columns, where the authors present the percentage of charter school students (from the entire metropolitan area) in schools with greater than 90 percent minority students alongside the similar figure for traditional public schools. The problematic figure in this table is the percentage of traditional public school students in hypersegregated schools used as the point of comparison. (See Table 1) which shows the bias entailed for the 8 largest metropolitan areas by the CRP report.

Whether or not we believe that charter schools are more segregated than traditional public schools depends largely on which set of traditional public schools serve as a comparison. The data for these eight very large metropolitan areas, representing more than half of the enrollment for the entire dataset, demonstrate how the CRP method overstates the relative levels of segregation in the charter sector. For example, under the CRP method, 91.2 percent of the charter students in the DC CBSA are in hypersegregated minority schools, as compared to just 20.9 percent of the students in traditional public schools. Using the central-city method, the percentage of students in hypersegregated minority charters stays roughly the same, but the percentage of students in hypersegregated minority traditional publics skyrockets to 85 percent.

In fact, in the vast majority of the 39 metro areas reviewed in the CRP report, the application of our central-city comparison decreases (relative to the flawed CRP analysis) the level of segregation in the charter sector as compared to the traditional public school sector. (Click here to view a table with these figures for all 39 CBSAs.) Importantly, unlike the CRP authors, we also compute and present the overall average results. Using the best available unit of comparison, we find that 63 percent of charter students in these central cities attend school in intensely segregated minority schools, as do 53 percent of traditional public school students (see Figure 1). Thus, while it appears that charter students are, on average, more likely to attend hypersegregated minority schools, the difference between the charter and traditional public sector is far less stark than the CRP authors suggest.

The Right Question

Our analysis presents a more accurate, but still imperfect, picture of the levels of racial segregation in the charter sector relative to the traditional public-school sector. Ideally, to examine the issue of segregation, we would pose the question, Are the charter schools that students attend more or less segregated than the traditional public schools these students would otherwise attend? Unfortunately, our data linking schools to cities do not allow for this analysis.

Even within many of the central cities in the metropolitan areas listed above, there is a great deal of racial segregation. And most available data suggest that charter schools are popping up in areas where the students are poor and disadvantaged and need additional educational options. Public charter schools are simply less likely to open in economically advantaged, mostly white neighborhoods. Thus, even our analysis likely underestimates the true levels of racial segregation in the specific traditional public schools that charter students are leaving. Indeed, a more fine-grained analysis (similar to the study conducted by RAND) in which we compared the levels of segregation in public charter schools to that of the traditional public schools in the same neighborhood would be preferable. The RAND report is particularly relevant here because it focuses on student-level data from Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and San Diego, five metropolitan areas highlighted in the CRP report. By examining student-level transfers, the authors are able to determine the extent to which students move into schools with higher concentrations of their own race and thereby increase the overall level of segregation. Using this strategy, the RAND researchers found,

Transfers to charter schools did not create dramatic shifts in the sorting of students by race or ethnicity in any of the sites included in the study. In most sites, the racial composition of the charter schools entered by transferring students was similar to that of the TPSs from which the students came.

Our own similar analysis of student-level transfers to charters in the Little Rock, Arkansas, area over the past five years tells much the same story. While many of the students transferred into Little Rock charter schools that were racially segregated, these students generally left traditional public schools that were even more heavily segregated.

Conclusion

The authors of the Civil Rights Project report conclude,

Our new findings demonstrate that, while segregation for blacks among all public schools has been increasing for nearly two decades, black students in charter schools are far more likely than their traditional public school counterparts to be educated in intensely segregated settings.

Our analysis suggests that these claims are certainly overstated. Furthermore, the authors fail to acknowledge two significant truths.

First, the majority of students in central cities, in both the public charter sector and in the traditional public sector, attend intensely segregated minority schools. Neither sector has cause to brag about racial diversity, but it seems clear that the CRP report points its lens in the wrong direction by focusing on the failings of charter schools. As the authors themselves note, across the country only 2.5 percent of public school children roam the halls in charter schools each day; the remaining 97.5 percent are compelled to attend traditional public schools. And we know that, more often than not, the students attending traditional public schools in cities are in intensely segregated schools. If we are truly concerned about limiting segregation, then this is where we should look to address the problem.

Second, and perhaps more important, the fact that poor and minority students flee segregated traditional public schools for similarly segregated charters does not imply that charter school policy is imposing segregation upon these students. Rather, the racial patterns we observe in charter schools are the result of the choices students and families make as they seek more attractive schooling options. To compare these active parental choices to the forced segregation of our nation’s past (the authors of the report actually call some charter schools “apartheid” schools) trivializes the true oppression that was imposed on the grandparents and great-grandparents of many of the students seeking charter options today.

Gary Ritter is professor of education policy at the University of Arkansas. Nathan Jensen, Brian Kisida, and Joshua McGee are research associates in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

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