I take your point on the first suggestion and this will get considerable attention in the redraft of the legislation. The amended senate version, which already made changes in this area, is not yet available online.

Thank you very much for these valuable thoughts.

My strong sense is that many of the urban legislators who support additional charters are listening closely to their constituents who desperately want alternatives — they are not listening to economists.

I agree that there is a lot of hogwash out there in the academic discussion of education issues. One of the biggest fallacies is that educational failures are always the teacher’s fault or the school’s fault. Yet, asking schools to bring every child along is a good ask — it makes it much harder to abandon kids. I’ve heard from a lot of parents how valuable the standards have been in focusing attention on the needs of their children.

Re the concern about unfairness in the choice of metric, I think that most reasonable metrics turn out to be highly correlated. You are going to pick more or less the same set of schools for attention whether you look at MCAS, graduation rates, other test results, or even school violence or teen pregnancy. It’s important to say that those schools are not “bad schools”. Too often we talk about identifying the “worst schools.” No, those schools may be doing great work against long odds. But they are nonetheless the schools where we aren’t taking kids where they need to go and therefore change is worth trying.

Thank you for the opportunity to provide input on the latest version of the Education Reform package. Although I applaud the administration and the education committee for their intentional focus on closing the achievement gap through re-tooling underperforming schools, I have two thoughts on how the legislation could be improved.

First, I have to agree with Nate in that the portion of the legislation that deals the turn around of underperforming schools places an unbelievable amount of power with school superintendents. As the daughter of a recently retired public school teacher with 40 plus years of experience in the classroom, I grew up hearing stories about administrators who made poor decisions that negatively impacted the teaching staff, school culture and ultimately the students themselves, due to the disconnect between them and the work of teachers. Clearly this is likely the exception rather than the rule, but at least raises the point that there could be cases where the superintendent is part of the problem, and as such, should not wield as much power as is set forth in the bill. Further, as someone who has student taught with excellent lead teachers, it would be a missed opportunity not to engage these talented professionals as partners in the turn around efforts.

Second, as others have stated in their comments, the issues at hand are very complex, and require an all hands on deck approach to making significant progress on educational outcomes for young people. With that in mind, I think it would be in the interest of all involved to include at least one representative from any youth serving organizations functioning within an underperforming school in the stakeholder group convened by the superintendent and the commissioner to provide recommendations for the school’s innovation plan. Organizations that are already working within schools care deeply about the success of students, and have significant value to add to the conversation around student outcomes, as well as additional resources to bring to the table.

The bill would make the lowest-scoring 20% of schools and 5% percent of districts eligible to be declared “underperforming” based on MCAS reading and math scores. The problem with this, it seems to me, is that there will always be a lowest-performing 20% or 5%, even if schools and districts are improving. Jack Welch famously fired the lowest-performing 10% of GE employees every year. That solution might work for certain types of corporations (though Jack Welch is now known to have manipulated the numbers at GE to achieve illusory earnings growth year after year), but schools are not corporations and it is pointless to try to run them that way, the illusions of many not especially knowledgeable business executives notwithstanding. Incidentally, I wonder how many business executives—who, if they are smart enough, think long and hard about the kinds of metrics they focus on in managing their businesses—have any serious understanding of the limitations of standardized testing for evaluating the progress of students and schools. (Notice that I say “limitations,” not “uselessness”—I am not an anti-testing fanatic.)

I am also concerned that the criteria for determining which schools and districts will be declared “underperforming” and “chronically underperforming” are subjective and capable of being abused by those whose blanket solution for underperforming public schools is privatization. Plenty of wooly-headed academic economists and their acolytes in worlds of business and politics believe that the profit motive is sufficient to motivate desirable change in any kind of human endeavor, but nobody who has ever spent any time in a school or with teachers believes this. I can believe that urban legislators are so desperate for a solution to “underperforming” schools that they are willing to buy this malarkey, but I wonder how many of them give the care and attention to the content of legislation (especially bills that are being given the rush treatment this one is) as you do, Rep. Brownsberger. I admire the conscientiousness with which you do your job and I thank you for it.

We already know that the students who perform poorly in school are often tied to parents who don’t follow up with them on homework, reading with them and encouraging them to be focused on their school work.

There is only so much the teachers can do in a the short school day and I would suggest that if you need to focus on charter schools as a solution, we design charter schools that the parents go to after a regular day in public school with their children to teach them how to study, read, and search for answers to the questions they have.

Without parental commitment to follow through with their children after school, it is a hard hill to climb even for the children that try their hardest.

Assistance and motivation by parents would increase the children’s rate of success significantly. And this would, in the long run, cost the taxpayer less and have stronger results.

Thanks,
Anne

Re the dicatorial powers, I’ll be giving this feature of the bill a close look.

Also, I wish that charter schools provided the choices that you allude to, but I am not convinced. Aside from the research that BGoodman points out above, the charter school movement is not about establishing choices, it’s about making money. Across the state, the business model is as follows: Find a district that has high per-pupil expenditures and propose a charter school there. Like a parasite, the charter school will try to draw away as many students as possible in an effort to be profitable. In order to ensure success (in terms of test schores, etc.) the charter school will reject underperforming students and seek to attract the best students; in essence skimming the cream off the top of the district.
By lifting the cap on charter schools, I’m afraid that we will be opening the floodgates, and districts that have decided to invest in their students will be the primary targets.

Charter Schools are not silver bullets. Recent research locally and nationally provide little evidence of their effectiveness.
see: http://credo.stanford.edu/ and
http://www.massinc.org/index.php?id=743&pub_id=2475

Why are we making such a big investment in something that has such poor results. We have had Charter schools in MA for 16 years. Only a very small group has benefited and the students remaining in the traditional schools have born the cost.

There are volumes and volumes of research articles on the multitude of factors that contribute to the achievement gap. It is a complex issue with education being only one important variables. For educational reform efforts to have a meaningful impact they must work hand in hand with new economic and social policies.
see bg

I don’t see charters as being about getting away from collective bargaining. Charter schools can and have been unionized. Charter schools are about getting away from dysfunctional school systems more broadly — weak school committees and management teams, often more importantly than weak teachers.

I’d be the first to agree that when kids aren’t learning, it isn’t necessarily the teacher’s fault or even the school’s fault. Kids have a lot of things going on in their lives outside the building. But if a system is failing consistently, it’s worth shaking things up and seeing if something better might come out — these are systems that have outcomes can’t get too much worse.