In the South Park clip above Cartman takes on a Glenn Beck like persona after being given the responsibility of making the morning announcements.  In the course of the episode Cartman makes many outrageous declarative statements in the guise of questions. Is Wendy Testaburger using your lunch money to buy heroin? How can we know? Cartman claims to be just like other kids except he is brave enough to asks questions.

In his own Beck-like (or Cartman-like) moment, last week U of A Professor Paul Hewitt was brave enough to ask some important questions about charter schools in this Arkansas Times article.  He opens the article with a flourish of questions.

In the popular 1989 movie “Lean on Me,” about a Paterson, N.J., ghetto high school, Principal Joe Clark has all the troublemakers and under-performing students gather on the stage and he then kicks them all out of the school. With only the most serious students remaining, he restores his high school to its once proud position.

The movie, based on a real life situation, reflects pure fiction. Or does it? Is it possible to exclude the undesirable students and just skim off the best students to make elite, selective and even racially segregated schools? Can we, under current law, develop one school system for the “haves” and another system for the “have nots?” If you think this isn’t possible, just look carefully at the charter school movement and its more extreme sibling, voucher schools.

In this introductory paragraph Prof. Hewitt poses some relevant and substantive questions: Are charter schools creaming the best students?  Are charters leading to greater segregation economically or racially?  The problem with Hewitt’s questions, like Cartman’s, is that he primarily indicts by asking questions without really examining the evidence to answer them.

We do not have to wonder about the answers to these questions.  There is a fairly extensive literature that Hewitt fails to address or even acknowledge. Here is some evidence on whether charters cream taken from one of Stuart Buck’s old posts.

Parents whose children are doing well in the public schools often tend to stay put, while it is precisely the parents whose children are struggling who may tend to seek alternative schools (whether through vouchers or charters). Painting with a broad brush, many charter school and voucher parents have said, “Gee, little Johnny isn’t doing so well, maybe I should check into a different school.” Such “motivation” doesn’t give rise to some sort of huge charter school advantage.

Some evidence for this point: Zimmer et al.’s October 2009 paper analyzing data from locations representing 45% of the charter schools in the nation. They find NO evidence that charter schools are cream-skimming. To the contrary, “in all but one case (Chicago reading scores, which are virtually identical to the district-wide average), students switching to charter schools have prior test scores that are BELOW district-wide or statewide averages.”

On whether charters lead to great segregation, the best work (studies that use individual student data) on this question, such as that done by RAND in 2009, reveals that since charters generally locate in racially segregated urban areas, the students they attract come from relatively segregated traditional public schools.  In the end, as RAND tells us, students who move into charter schools generally choose schools with racial compositions similar to those of the traditional public schools they exited. My collegues and I have a piece in  the forthcoming summer issue of Education Next that finds a similar result with aggregate data .  Take a look at Brian’s post from earlier this week for a more detailed description of our article.

Hewitt never mentions any of this or other research on the questions he raises.  Instead, he offers information on two individual charter schools.  For example, Hewitt cites racial composition data for the LISA charter school in Little Rock and compares that to other surrounding schools to draw conclusions about the segregating nature of charter schools.

However, one data point does not constitute a pattern. Last fall the Office for Education Policy investigated the effect of charter schools on segregation in Little Rock using student level data, using information from all charter schools in the area, not just one. You can find it here. We have talked about this study many times before. Here is the money quote from the study.

…the majority of student transfers from LRSD traditional public schools to charter schools are actually resulting in students entering into more racially integrated learning environments. Over half of the white students that left above-average white schools enrolled in a charter school that was more integrated (with almost all white students that left integrated schools enrolling in similarly integrated schools). Further, minority students that leave above-average minority schools or well-integrated schools are enrolling in charter schools that are equally or more integrated than their previous school.

In other words, transfers to public charter schools have the net effect of both leaving traditional public schools more integrated as a result of the transfer, as well as increasing the level of integration at the schools they transfer to.

Prof. Hewitt continues with the rhetorical strategy of indicting by questions without examining evidence for answers when he suggests that charter schools discriminate against children with parents who don’t “truly care” or who don’t “monitor (their child’s) education.”

In Arkansas we call privately operated charter schools “open enrollment schools.” In reality, are these schools truly open enrollment? Does every child have an equal opportunity to enroll? The first ingredient is that the child must have a parent who truly cares and monitors his or her education. It is far less likely that children from an impoverished single-parent home will have a parent who is aware of the enrollment hoops they must jump through to enter a charter school. How about the child whose parents are drug addicted or don’t have the capability to enroll them in the charter school?

Are charter schools deriving additional revenue from selling heroin? How can we know?

Hewitt is not really making an argument with evidence by raising questions like this, he is just getting in touch with his inner-Cartman.

To answer these “when did you stop beating your wife”-type questions — Of course, charter schools are open enrollment. Legally they must accept anyone who chooses to attend, and this opportunity is available to all. This is in stark contrast to traditional public schools where attendance is limited to geographic boundaries. Think about schools located in wealthy neighborhoods; they would also fail to be truly public schools by Prof. Hewitt’s standard.  The barriers to entry for these schools are much more difficult to overcome than those required to attend any charter school.  To attend one of these well-to-do public schools, you must first be able to afford housing in the wealthy neighborhood, and I guarantee you this is a much higher bar than any “enrollment hoops” at a charter school.

As an interesting thought experiment, let’s apply the claims made by Prof. Hewitt to traditional public schools.

First, do traditional public schools teach every child? NO. They can and do expel many students every year. Not to mention that in Little Rock, as in many other districts around the nation, we have created magnet schools explicitly designed to recruit only high-achieving students.

Second, does our current system of traditional public schools lead to racial and income segregation? YES. To attend a school you must, by-and-large, live within it’s attendance zone, and if you look at residential patterns in the U.S. you will find we do a pretty good job of segregating ourselves by both race and income. If we are truly concerned about limiting segregation, then we should try to detach schooling from housing, which is precisely what charter schools do.

Later in the article we find Prof. Hewitt bemoaning the student turnover at KIPP saying:

The KIPP Delta College Preparatory Academy in Helena-West Helena reports, according to state Education Department figures, a “student loss” rate in the eighth and ninth grade that is between three and four times that of the Helena-West Helena School District. The “student loss” occurring at KIPP would be a scandal if it took place at a regular public school, but charter schools seem to remain under the radar when it comes to serious scrutiny. This process leaves the KIPP schools with only the most dedicated students and parents, while the rest go back to public schools.

In replicating Prof. Hewitt’s result I found out just how convenient it was that he limit his analysis to the 8th and 9th grades. If we include retention from the 7th grade in the student loss calculation, the story looks a lot better for KIPP.  KIPP has a student loss rate nearly 5 times lower than Helena, with a negative loss rate (or growth) of -1.6% while Helena has a positive loss rate of 0.4%.   Looking only at 8th and 9th grades is inappropriate because it emphasizes the student mobility that occurs between junior high and high school.  KIPP generally gains students, but at the 9th grade transition it loses some students to traditional high schools that offer more intra-mural athletics.

If you would like to replicate my analysis, I used enrollment data from the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 school years to complete this calculation, and you can find the data here. From what I can tell, Prof. Hewitt’s analysis (and my reanalysis) simply compares enrollment in a cohort from one grade to the next.

In the end Prof. Hewitt asks 11 “questions” in his piece.  He cites virtually none of the systematic research literature and offers only two school data points, one of which is incorrect.

It’s certainly important to raise these questions, but it is even more important to consider them carefully, making use of systematic evidence to answer them correctly .

Josh and I, along with our colleagues Gary Ritter and Nate Jensen, have a forthcoming article in the summer issue of EdNext, which has been released early on their website.  The article, A Closer Look at Charter Schools and Segregation,  checks the facts related to a charter school study released in February by the Civil Rights Project (CRP) at UCLA.  The CRP article calls charter schools a “civil rights failure,” and they support their assertion with a slew of improperly generated statistics.  Upon a proper re-analysis using the same data, we show that their flawed comparison led to improper conclusions.  We also have a guest entry on EdNext’s blog today.  Here’s an exceprt from the conclusion of our article:

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.

Update: Here is a link to an NPR interview with one of the authors of the CRP study, Gary Orfield.  NPR’s Michel Martin asks some tough questions, and clearly gets annoyed as Orfield repeatedly dodges them.

This skit is a pretty good follow-up to Stuart’s report on State Teacher Pension Funds.

Courtney Fortson is officially no longer a Razorback. It was announced today that he has signed with an agent and is entering the NBA draft.

That means that out of coach(?) Pelphrey’s 2006-07 recruiting class of six players, only Rotnei Clarke remains (and he was recruited by Stan Heath).  Gone are Fortson, Andre Clark, Brandon Moore, Jason Henry, and Montrell McDonald.  As I’ve said previously, with this many failures, it is hard to have any faith in Pelphrey’s ability to recruit and develop quality players.  The future of Razorback basketball is alarmingly bleak.

I’ve also criticized Frank Broyles for running off Mike Anderson when we had the chance to make him Nolan’s successor.  After another successful season this year coaching at Missouri, Anderson was courted by Oregon.  He ultimately turned them down.  In a semi-related note, Arkansas’ top prospect for next season, 6-foot-8, 240-pound forward Ricardo Ratliffe, recently bailed on Arkansas and will join Anderson at Mizzou.

However, while the speculation about Anderson’s decision concerning Oregon was ongoing, ESPN reported this little tidbit:

“Sources close to Anderson say that if he were to leave Missouri, the job at Arkansas–if open–is one he’d have strong interest in.”

What are we waiting for?

It is obvious to me that consequences and incentives matter.  For example, I had promised to get a blog post up yesterday, but I can’t really be fired from this blog, and I don’t lose or gain anything tangible from writing or not writing on time.  So, since much of my other work is connected to consequences of one type or another, the blog post languished while I completed other more “consequential” tasks.  To stay on topic, therefore, I decided to riff on consequences and incentives …

Incentives in education are in the news  all over the place these days.  Here are a few examples:

1. In Florida, the Republican-led Senate and House passed a sweeping bill that would radically reform teacher pay policy statewide.  If signed, the bill would have limited the job security and tenure of teachers and link teacher pay to growth in student learning (as measured by test scores).  The expressed goal of this legislation was to make it easier for school leaders to identify great teachers, reward great teachers, and – importantly – to get rid of bad teachers.  In other words, this bill would attach all sorts of positive and negative consequences to teacher performance.
2. The teacher groups in Florida, while professing that consequences don’t really matter since they teach only for love of students and not money, simultaneously showed how important they truly believed incentives are.  Their incentive, in this case, was the continuation of  current teacher compensation policies  which provide nearly unmatched job security to teachers and unmatched power to teacher groups.  Leaders of teacher groups worked tirelessly to defeat this bill because, if it became law, it would be harder to treat teachers as if they were all the same and this would dilute the power of their union representatives.  Hundreds of individual teachers worked similarly hard to keep a very valuable component of their compensation – untouchable job security.  Thus, these teachers saw the potential for consequences that they perceived as negative, and worked very hard to avoid negative consequences.
3. While these critics were unable to kill the passage of the bill, they did not give up.  They continued to make their opposition clear in the hopes that Governor Charlie Crist (who had expressed early support for the initiative) might step in and save the day.  Again, consequences DID matter!  Gov. Crist, you see, is locked in a race for a US Senate seat and perceived that the signing of the bill might lead to negative consequences for him, and thus he vetoed the bill last Thursday (April 15).  Crist judged that his support of the bill would have hurt his chances in the general election.  Of course, it now seems likely that his submarining of the bill will kill his chances to run as a Republican ….. some politicos believe he will now run as an independent and hope that he can go back to the teacher groups and seek support.  Since his consequences are based on predictions of the future, time will tell whether Charlie guessed right by shifting left!

In any event, it is clear that consequences mattered quite a bit to the teachers and to Charlie who, ironically, stopped a bill that would have injected some consequences into teacher compensation policy.

However, many have argued passionately for the stance taken by Charlie and the teachers, maintaining that consequences and incentives don’t matter in schools like they do elsewhere.  Who’s right?  When I am not sure about complicated issues like this, I like to check in with the kids.  Fortunately, just last week, a study was released that examined how kids in schools react to incentives.  Here is a quick summary, taken from the Washington Post and mostly Time.  The New York Times Freakonomics Blog even had something to say.  They all suggest that there may be something to this strategy.

1. Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. ran a randomized experiment in hundreds of classrooms in multiple cities. He used mostly private money to pay 18,000 kids a total of $6.3 million and brought in a team of researchers to help him analyze the effects.
2. “These are substantial effects, as large as many other interventions that people have thought to be successful,” says Brian Jacob, a University of Michigan public-policy and economics professor who has studied incentives and who reviewed Fryer’s study at TIME’s request. If incentives are designed wisely, it appears, payments can indeed boost kids’ performance as much as or more than many other reforms you’ve heard about before — and for a fraction of the cost.

This study is very interesting and worth reading – take a look at the clip from the Colbert Report above for an entertaining interview with the study’s author.  In any event — the teacher leaders are arguing that incentives don’t matter but acting as if they do while the kids are saying they do.

Whom do you think we should believe?

Over at The Daily Howler, Bob Somerby has a multi-part essay dissecting one of Diane Ravitch’s op-eds discussing her policy prescriptions for replacing testing and choice. See here, here, and here.

He’s quite scathing. Here’s a portion from the first essay, responding to Ravitch’s claim that states should help out low-performing schools by sending in “inspection teams”:

According to Ravitch, “every state should have inspection teams [which] diagnose what is wrong in these schools.” (As she ends, another Gardnerism: “Whatever the cause of low performance, the inspection team should create a plan to improve the school.”) But please note: As Ravitch has explained in her previous paragraph, the thing that is “wrong” with these schools will routinely involve matters of demographics: Often, the children in these schools will come from low-income, low-literacy, non-English speaking backgrounds. Question: When those “inspection teams” survey these types of schools, what type of “plan” should they create? In more than 800 words, Ravitch makes only the most Gardeneristic attempts to answer this question. (Extra bilingual staff! An after-school program! And even this: “Other resources!”)

Surely, no one but an expert would think of solutions like those. What should teachers of delightful, deserving low-income kids do to address their academic problems? In a familiar bit of evasion, Ravitch doesn’t say.

. . . After all these years—after all these decades—we find this type of column repellent. We’ve been reading columns like this for forty years—columns in which “educational experts” play the Gardner role, pretending that they have ideas for ways to help low-income kids. How should we help low-income kids? Under the previous Ravitch regime—the regime built around accountability and standards—the answer to this was fairly simple: We should threaten teachers with getting fired, and they will somehow magically figure how to get test scores up. In this new regime by Ravitch, the solution is no less magical. We’re now supposed to send “inspections teams” into these schools, and they will come up with a plan! But what sorts of proposals will be in their plans? Like “educational experts” of time immemorial, Ravitch doesn’t much say. And by the way: The various states simply don’t have such “inspections teams”—teams can somehow magically say how a low-income school can get right. These teams of savants simply don’t exist—except as a novelistic devise to let Ravitch continue to pose as an expert.

We’re certain that Ravitch is well-intentioned. But at some point in time, work like this becomes repellent. Unhelpful too are the liberal saps who line up to drink this Gardneresque stew. Also unhelpful: The familiar data-spinning found at the start of Ravitch’s piece. But when the lives of low-income kids are at stake, work like this—cheered on by liberals—has been the norm for years.

(guest post by Jay Greene)

EDITORS NOTE:  To get the full effect, play both videos at the same time.

The TV airwaves in Arkansas are filled with third-party ads supporting Bill Halter against Blanche Lincoln. Here’s one:

And here is a basic translation of what the ad says:

I’d like to be able to say that Senator Lincoln’s ads in response are any different, but they aren’t. And the Republicans aren’t yet running many ads, but their rhetoric is basically the same. Arkansas politicians seem determined to fulfill the worst stereotypes that people may have about the state.

UPDATE:  So, I commented on Jay’s blog that to get the full effect you should play both videos at the same time, and he replied with this:

My head might asplode

As Josh mentioned yesterday in this space, the Manhattan Institute and the Foundation for Educational Choice released a report written by me and Josh Barro. The title: “Unfunded Teacher Pension Plans: It’s Worse Than You Think.” The main finding:

According to the fifty-nine funds’ own financial statements, total unfunded liabilities to teachers—i.e., the gap between existing plan assets and the present value of benefits accrued by plan participants—are $332 billion. But according to our more conservative calculations, these plans’ unfunded liabilities total about $933 billion.

In addition, we have found that only $116 billion, or less than one quarter, of this $600 billion discrepancy is attributable to the stock market drop precipitated by the 2007 financial crisis. The Dow Jones Industrial Average would have to nearly double overnight to make up for the present underfunding of these plans.

The meat of what we did is this: Most state plans assume that their current investments will get about an 8% rate of return in perpetuity. So that means that they set aside less money now to cover the pensions that will be paid in 2015, 2020, 2025, etc. But the 8% assumption is wrong, we argue, for two reasons: First, recent history shows that it may be too optimistic. Second, investments that have an 8% expected rate of return necessarily carry some risk — risk that the plan will actually fall short in a given year or even decade. And when a plan falls short, the burden falls to the taxpayer to make up the difference.

So we reanalyzed the teacher pension plans using the same interest rate that private plans are allowed to use — about 6%, based on corporate bond rates. When we do that, it turns out that pension plans are way more underfunded than they are publicly admitting.

Over at The Quick and Ed, Chad Aldeman has a response to our study:

States, unlike private companies, do not fold under. Indiana, which according to the authors has a DB pension plan for teachers that is only 42% funded, is not likely to go out of business and take its workers down with it. The state of Indiana can assume a riskier investment return for its pension fund than an employer like those mentioned above or any other modern private firm (and, just for good measure, it’s worth pointing out that Indiana assumes only a 3 percent real rate of return).

All this is lost on the report’s authors, who would prefer states lower their assumptions on stock market returns from about 8 percent down to 6, the standard rate used by corporations in their calculations. This would mean telling a state like Pennsylvania, which has accumulated a 9.23 percent return in the stock market over the last 25 years (as of February 2010), that its 8 percent investment assumption is too high.

This is all irrelevant. We’re not saying that when states engage in risky investments, teachers then are at risk of not being paid their pensions. The problem is precisely the opposite: Teacher pensions are guaranteed by states that don’t go out of business. But that doesn’t make the risk magically go away. The risk just ends up being borne by the taxpayer. So if a state decides to blow all of its pension money gambling at a horse race, the teachers will still get their pensions, but taxpayers will suddenly find themselves paying higher taxes to make up the shortfall (or else seeing huge budget cuts to other important state services).

In the last sentence, Aldeman cites a document put out by the Pennsylvania pension system, but that document actually proves our point. The Pennsylvania pension system may have made an average of 9.23% per year for the past 25 years, but they still predict that looking forward, there will still have to be “significant and perhaps prohibitive tax increases at the State and/or Local levels.”

Moreover, to focus on the 25-year rate of return, as Aldeman does, ignores three things: 1) past performance is no guarantee of future success; 2) the PA pension system now has less assets on Dec. 31, 2009 than on June 30, 2004, which means it lost money over a 5.5 year period; and 3) this kind of variability (i.e., risk) requires taxpayers to pay extra when investments are disappointing for years on end.

The problem with Pennsylvania, as with many other states, is that when times were flush (the late 1990s or the mid-2000s), legislators did not have the foresight to let pension systems accumulate some savings for possible tough times ahead. Instead, they decided to lower contributions to pension systems and/or increase pension benefits, all on the assumption that high stock market returns would magically pay for it all. But when the stock market falls, the pension systems are left with extra liabilities that no one ever paid for, and the risk ultimately rests with the taxpayer.

It’s a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose system. That’s why taxpayers need state pension systems to use an accounting method that more properly and honestly accounts for all of the risk that they’re shifting onto us.

Sherlock Holmes (played here by our very own Stuart Buck) has solved the case of the missing teacher pension liability. In a new report, coauthored with Josh Barro and sponsored by Foundation for Educational Choice and the Manhattan Institute, Buck and his coauthor adjust state reported pension funding shortfalls to calculate the actual unfunded liabilities, and the results are quite striking. They find that “these plans’ unfunded liabilities total about $933 billion.”

This topic has been in the news quite a lot lately. Here and here are a couple of articles that appeared in the New York Times just in the last month.

Why should you care? First, because you, the taxpayer, are on the hook for nearly $1 trillion. And second, because these unfunded liabilities have the very real potential to strain state budgets to the point that other spending priorities, like education, might really suffer.

Check out the table below to see how Arkansas stacks up against our immediate neighbors.

HT Greg Forster over at jaypgreene.com

The Arkansas Department of Education has launched a new data visualization website.  Here is the ADE blog post announcing the launch. You can find the new sites here and here. The site, built on a flash framework, provides several tools that allow users to both view individual district data in unique ways and compare districts on various metrics. You should check it out when you get a chance. Between this new tool and the ADE’s data center, people in Arkansas have a wealth of interesting education data at their fingertips.