ORLANDO — Joining forces to form a powerful movement was the theme as the Florida Charter School Conference and School Choice Summit kicked off Wednesday.
For the first time, the annual conference that brings together the state’s charter school leaders included private schools as part of a strategy to unite the Sunshine State’s education choice movement.
Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr.
“After the passage of HB 1, it is one movement,” Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. said during his opening remarks at the conference, which was previously focused exclusively on charter schools.
This year’s event, held in Orlando, logged the highest participation rate ever with 853 attendees. Of those, more than 140 represented private schools.
Diaz said that while organizing this year’s conference, state education leaders had conversations about the importance of unifying the school choice movement, which historically had been more siloed.
“In Florida, we’re capitalizing on this historic school choice and charter school movement. We’re giving parents the ability to choose the best path for their students, regardless of background, regardless of income,” he said.
Florida enacted its charter school law in 1996 and launched its first private school choice program in 1999. Now, the state has more than 380,000 students attending more than 700 charter schools, and almost as many students enrolled in the nation’s largest suite of education choice scholarship programs. Together, those programs account for nearly a quarter of all the students in the state—a powerful political constituency if they joined forces.
Diaz called HB 1, which offered universal eligibility for education choice scholarships to all students regardless of family income and converted all traditional scholarships to education savings accounts, a “gamechanger” and urged members of the charter school and private school worlds to work together.
“The reason we have everybody together is it’s not two separate groups,” he said. “There’s so much collaboration that could go on between our charter schools and our private schools.”
In less than 30 years, Florida has come a long way from the days when parents had to lie about their addresses and risk criminal charges to gain access to the most desirable schools. Still, Diaz warned against complacency.
He wrapped up the opening session of the conference, which runs through Friday, with an admonition for everyone in the unified movement to keep innovating and creating new and better learning opportunities for students.
“Don’t make that mistake of becoming so mainstream that you become the status quo,” he said.
With the start of classes just weeks away, Florida’s top education officials finally got some good news about the progress of a charter school’s efforts to turn around a persistently struggling school in Escambia County.
With a long-delayed contract in hand, officials with Charter Schools USA told the state Board of Education they had hired nearly two-thirds of the staff they will need to welcome students to the newly rechristened Warrington Preparatory Academy.
They are now convening teachers for three weeks of training and culture-building before the first day of school.
“We truly believe that on the first day that students do come back, they are going to come into a welcoming environment that they deserve and that they can be successful in,” said Eddie Ruiz, the state superintendent for the charter management company, which operates 90 schools across five states and 60 in Florida.
Warrington Middle School struggled with low test scores for more than a decade and is now the latest school to be brought under new management by a charter school organization tasked with turning around its low performance.
After a months of stalled contract negotiations that drew threats from the state Board of Education members to launch an investigation and withhold district leaders’ salaries, the local school board approved the agreement for Charter Schools USA to take over Warrington on May 16.
The timing gave Charter Schools USA a tight window to hire staff, reassure parents, and enlist community supporters.
Ruiz, a top leader with the South Florida management company, was sent to the Panhandle community as a “boots on the ground” presence. He said the company has prioritized renovations, repainted the building inside and out, cleaned and waxed the floors, and refurbished the gym.
The company has also hired a new principal, curriculum specialist and social workers “right off the bat” and filled 47 of 72 open positions, Ruiz said.
Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr. and state board members pressed Ruiz for a contingency plan in case some positions remain unfilled when school starts Aug. 10. On its website, the school touts a $12,000 salary premium for new teachers compared to the surrounding school district.
“People are coming from all over the state and from nearby states to be a part of the changes happening at Warrington Prep,” Ruiz said.
He added that the company immediately reached out to parents to let them know about the new school, which will house grades six through eight this year and later be converted to serve students in kindergarten through eighth grade.
“There was a lot of confusion as to what had happened,” Ruiz said. He said they expect to have at least 660 students when classes resume.
State board members praised Ruiz and the company’s efforts so far but expressed a desire to continue monitoring the situation closely. They asked for another update in October and indicated they would be watching with interest when the school reports students’ fall and winter progress monitoring test results.
Board member Ryan Petty called the update “fantastic news” and recalled the concern he felt during a fact-finding visit to Warrington Middle School.
“I cannot get those images out of my head,” he said. “(Students) deserve better than they were receiving at that point.”
Debates over school choice accountability and regulations often become surrogate battles over whether states should have, or expand, options in the first place. This week saw several of these fights flare over charter schools.
Democrats in Philadelphia's mayoral race couldn't agree on whether they support charter schools, but they almost all seemed to agree on imposing a moratorium. In Newark, the city council took a different path, passing a resolution to oppose a bill that would limit charters.
An effort to clamp down on state-approved charter schools in A- or B- rated districts was defeated in Louisiana. A district judge there also ruled 33 charter schools authorized by the state are constitutional.
Differences in minority and special needs enrollment between charter schools and public schools had one Idaho teacher wanting a moratorium on the state's brand new charter school system.
Charter schools in Ohio aren't performing as well as charters in other states, so Republicans and Democrats are looking to overhaul their system of oversight. However, virtual charter schools feel some of the rules aren't appropriate.
Unexpected closures of charter schools in Florida have left legislators looking for ways to reign in unqualified operators. One Florida city is trying to take matters into its own hands by developing policies that may restrict new schools.
This week, a Connecticut columnist played the kitten card on charter schools.
Meanwhile...
President Barack Obama gave remarks on poverty and education at Georgetown University that provoked a strong reaction from conservatives, libertarians and school choice supporters.
Quotes of the Week:
"We have thousands of children in Newark alone who are on waiting lists to attend charter schools. The last thing the legislature should be doing is limiting their growth.” - , Newark City Councilman Anibal Ramos, Jr.
"So, it’s in our hands. Our friends—Governor Cuomo, so many assembly Democrats, and the Republicans—tell me they can’t get it done unless we back them and hold them as accountable as the opposition does. And, it’s not us bishops who have the clout, they whisper, but our parents and teachers You’re the ones who vote! They report to you!" - Cardinal James Dolan, proclaiming efforts in the New York Assembly to pass an Education Investment Tax Credit are not over.
We, for out part, report to you. Send your points and counterpoints to tpillow[at]sufs.org and pgibbons[at]sufs.org.
The increased scrutiny over shuttered charter schools have state lawmakers looking for ways to ensure that the people who apply to open and run new schools are up to the task.
Charter school closures aren't always bad things, but a recent investigation by the Naples Daily News found dozens of charters have closed "amid poor financial management, accounting and oversight." Those are the kind of closures lawmakers — as well as charter school advocates — hope to prevent.
A new article in Education Next suggests the responsibility for those sorts of problems lies squarely with charter school boards, the non-profits, municipalities or other organizations that oversee the schools and in some cases hire management companies that run their day-to-day operations.
Whose responsibility is it when a charter school gets into trouble—when its students aren’t learning or it misses its enrollment targets or money runs short or it closes?
Everyone I asked gave the same answer. “I’d point right to the board,” said Mark Lerner, who sits on the board of Washington Latin charter school. “The failure of a charter is the failure of the board,” said Tom Keane, who directs strategic initiatives at AppleTree, an early-learning charter with six D.C. campuses. “Every closure ultimately can get traced back to the board not doing the job,” added Marci Cornell-Feist, a Massachusetts-based education consultant and entrepreneur.
Charter legislation passed last week by the Florida House and up for a committee vote later this week in the Senate would bring charter school boards under greater scrutiny before they open new schools. SB 1552 and HB 7037 would require charter schools to disclose the names of governing board members, as well as the financial and performance history of any charter schools they may be associated with, when they pply to local school boards.
The article looks at the push by organizations like BoardOnTrack and Charter Board Partners to find qualified people and train them for positions on charter school boards in places like Washington, D.C. They also hold boot camps where recruits practice mock board meetings and learn about leadership evaluation and bone up on the nuts and bolts of corporate governance. In short, they prepare future board members to help lead what are, in effect, multi-million dollar startups.
Author June Kronholz says she repeatedly heard the number of charter school closures will decline as the sector becomes more mature "In part," she writes, "that’s because authorizers, bankers, and donors are paying increasing attention to how well the schools are governed."
Patrick Gibbons contributed to this post.
Broward County School DistrictRobert Runcie, the superintendent of the Broward County School District, wanted to help low-performing charter schools by partnering them with high-quality charter operators. He and his staff brought the idea to the school board and helped secure a $3.3 million grant from the state. But Runcie's bosses on the school board opted to turn the grant down. The reason defies logic.
“It’s not our job,” said board member Laurie Rich Levinson. Board member Patricia Good didn’t want to help either because, according to the Sun-Sentinel she believed, “it was up to individual schools to bring up their own grades.”
Laurie Rich Levinson
The apathetic approach to helping students in underperforming charter schools isn’t surprising given the Board’s history with charters. Repeated constantly by the Sun-Sentinel, board members claim charters are “easy to open but difficult to shutter if they fail,” and that this is entirely the state's fault.
Reality is more complicated. Broward shuts down a lot of charter schools. It also approves a lot of charters. According to the 2014 Authorizers Report, Broward recently approved 22 new charter schools, more than any other district in the state.
District staff say they are understaffed for charter school oversight, and the board grumbles about the proliferation of of poor-performing charter schools. But now the board is refusing money to help on both accounts.
Julian Vasquez Heilig, associate professor, University of Texas, AustinI am not sure whether Julian Vasquez Heilig wanted readers to laugh or cry when he published his latest brief on voucher research.
Vasquez Heilig sets up his paper by describing the attitudes, beliefs and motivations of voucher supporters. So who does he cite to provide a fair and accurate description of the beliefs of voucher supporters? None other than the National Education Association, the nation’s single largest voucher opponent (this is the actual citation).
To build a case against vouchers, he tries to show consensus among researchers, yet he provides few academic citations. The sources he does cite are over a decade old or inexplicably limited in scope. He even allows a blogger at an advocacy organization to summarize voucher research … twice. Interestingly, that blogger doesn’t have a single citation to back up her own single sentence summation.
Padding the support for his own argument is bad enough, but Vasquez Heilig ignores whole swaths of voucher research, claiming much of the research was either not published in peer-reviewed academic journals, or was funded by pro-voucher groups.
Of course, Vasquez Heilig publishes this claim in a non-peer-reviewed outlet in the same week he tweets about his NEA Foundation trip to China. It is also worth noting he’s a research fellow for the union-backed National Education Policy Center and, contrary to his accusations of corporate influence corrupting research, lists himself on his resume as a former Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Young Researcher.
Charter schools in Orange County, Fla. are increasing racial and economic segregation, or so say state Rep. Geraldine Thompson and Orange County School Board Chair Bill Sublette.
They make this accusation after finding a handful of charter schools with demographics at odds with the district-wide average. But averages mask extremes on one end or the other, so comparing a single school, or even a handful of schools, to the average of a large district is not only unfair but inappropriate.
According to data from the Florida Department of Education, district schools in Orange County range from 26 percent to 100 percent minority. Charter schools range from 24 percent to 100 percent minority. Not much difference.
The same is true for economic segregation. District schools run from 7 percent free- and reduced-price lunch (FRL) eligible to 100 percent. The charters run from 0 percent to 93 percent.
It is worth noting that district-run schools seem more likely than charters to have extreme concentrations of minority or low-income students. Forty-four district schools in Orange – nearly a quarter of all schools - are 90-percent-plus minority, while 40 schools have a student body that is 100 percent FRL eligible.
Charter schools in Orange are drawing students from local neighborhoods much in the same way as district schools. Rather than pointing fingers at the 19 charters where students voluntarily enroll, Thompson and Sublette might want to scrutinize the 183 district schools where students are zoned.
Des Moines Independent Community School DistrictSchool districts aren’t allowed to base enrollment policies on race anymore. So, to achieve “racial balance,” the Des Moines Independent Community School District’s diversity plan allows it to base admissions and enrollment decisions on socioeconomic status.
The district looks at whether students are eligible for the free and reduced priced lunch (FRL). Eligible students are then designated as “minority students” (not kidding).
If a transfer request into the district, out of the district, or between schools within the district, causes the percentage of “minority students” within a school to tip 10 percentage points below or above the district average, the district will deny the transfer. According to The Des Moines Register, the district has already denied 245 of 386 open-enrollment requests for the upcoming school year.
Of course, basing racial balance on the demographic average of an arbitrarily drawn geographic boundary may be silly when you look at the big picture:
*data from the Iowa Department of Education
Des Moines Independent is surrounded by whiter, wealthier districts, making the effort to ensure racial balance within the district an exercise in futility. If one truly wanted more racial balance in schools, the quickest and easiest way would be to shut down Des Moines Independent and have it absorbed by neighboring districts.
Of course, the transfer denials could really just be about keeping $6,300 of state support per student within the district …
Like their elementary and middle school counterparts, Florida charter high schools earned higher concentrations of both A and F grades than district schools, according to the state’s latest school grades report.
Just how much higher depends on how you slice it. Bear with us.
The latest report, released Dec. 18, shows 63 percent of charter high schools earning A’s for the 2012-13 school year, compared to 46 percent of district high schools. But there’s a caveat.
The December report excluded at least 31 high schools (most of them charter schools) because the grades were reported last summer with the elementary and middle school grades. According to Cheryl Etters, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Education, some high schools were graded on an 800-point scale because the school was missing one or more data points for a complete evaluation. For example, a charter school without a senior class would not be able to calculate a graduation rate. Such a school would be unfairly treated under the full 1600-1700 point evaluation for high schools.
When combining high schools from the DOE’s two databases, the percentage of A charter high schools drops from 63 to 55. When A and B grades are combined, district high schools lead 78 percent to 66 percent.
It’s no surprise, given rocketing growth in Florida charter school enrollment, that the number of charter school teachers is on the rise, too. But the trend lines are still worth an update.
Last year, the number of instructional personnel in Florida charter schools reached 11,446, according to the most recent data from the Florida Department of Education. That’s up 7 percent from fall 2011, when the number topped 10,000 for the first time. (The number of instructional personnel in all Florida public schools is up 2.2 percent.) Charter teachers now account for 5.9 percent of Florida’s entire teacher corps.
We’ll try to corral the 2013-14 numbers once they’re available in a month or so. In the meantime, check out this spreadsheet from DOE. It shows the number of charter school employees by category, and offers a district-by-district breakdown.
Charter schools: Miami-Dade County school officials sign off on a $4.3 billion budget that for the first time includes $300 million for charter schools. Miami Herald.
Holocaust studies: For Broward and Palm Beach county students who face bullying, peer pressure and prejudice in school, learning about the Holocaust is becoming increasingly relevant. Sun Sentinel.
Ben Carson: The nationally renowned doctor turned public speaker shares his story of resilience and success with students of all ages at Lake Wales High School. The Ledger.
Tax credit scholarships: About half of the students in Flagler County's private schools use Florida tax-credit scholarships to pay tuition; so do a quarter of the students in Volusia County's private schools. Daytona Beach News-Journal.
Teacher pay: Pinellas County schools and the local teachers union tentatively agree to a 5.6 percent average raise for teachers and a bump in starting teacher salaries. Tampa Bay Times. Salary negotiations hit a snag as officials look at tutoring vs. teaching. Tampa Bay Times.
Report cards: Palm Beach County second-graders will get new report cards without the traditional A through F grades. Sun Sentinel.
Common Core: Hernando County School Board members share concerns about the new standards, including the fear of losing local control, financial constraints and the possibility of excessive testing. Tampa Bay Times.
City post: Annmarie Kent-Willette, who teaches communications at Jacksonville University, is Jacksonville's new education commissioner. Florida Times-Union.
