I have been having a discussion with Max Brantley over at his blog. The discussion has centered on the Office for Education Policy reports that investigate the effects of charter schools on desegregation efforts in Pulaski County. Yesterday Max claimed that the authors of the reports had “fudged the numbers.”  Having read the reports and looked at the data, it was obvious that Max’s claims were far from truthful. I felt obliged to jump into the fray. I thought it might be interesting to our readers to repost the ensuing discussion in the comments section of our post dealing with the subject. You can find the discussion here.

Well, Little Rock School District lawyer Chris Heller and his little lap dog (Max Brantley) are at it again. Over at the Arkansas Times Blog Max, Heller’s ever-reliable mouthpiece, is claiming that the Office for Education Policy (OEP) “fudged the numbers” in their reports on charter schools and segregation in Pulaski County.  Heller dug through a bunch of OEP emails he got through a FOIA, and thinks he has found a “Gotcha.” Max, doing his part, was more than willing to believe him and post the allegations.

The claim of “fudging” is a serious one, amounting to academic dishonesty, if found to be true. However, if not true, the claims made by Max and Heller represent plain idiocy at best or a failure of morals at worst.

First off, let’s dispense with the ridiculous claim that the OEP “fudged the numbers.” I have read their report and looked at their data. There are no inconsistencies between the numbers in the report and the e-mail produced by Heller.  They in no way changed or otherwise altered the data to yield a  particular result.

Second, no information was withheld.  The email posted on the Arkansas Times Blog was sent a couple of days after the report was released.

In the end, Heller cares very little about truth. He simply wants and is paid well to keep the desegregation money flowing to the Little Rock School District.

So, what’s all the fuss about? Well, Heller takes umbrage to the fact that the researchers did not disaggregate the data presented in the report to the school level. The report considers the effect of charter schools on the traditional public school sector (of which magnet schools are a subset). The report finds that a majority of the transfers are enhancing the levels of racial integration for the traditional public schools. Nothing in Heller’s memo or the OEP email changes this result. In fact, Heller fails to address the substance of the report in any way.

Instead Heller is completely focused on a very small subset of schools, the magnet schools. Why you might ask? When the magnet schools were set up by the 1989 Settlement Agreement it was stipulated that the magnet schools should have a student population “which is fifty-percent (50%) black and fifty percent (50%) non-black.” Heller has been wielding this 50/50 standard, meant only to apply to magnets, as a means to limit charter school enrollment. The 50/50 standard is of particular use to Heller because the demographics of Pulaski County are nowhere near 50/50.  Thus no school which pulls representatively from the surrounding community will be able to meet the 50/50 standard. I’ve dealt with the 50/50 standard before here, but suffice it to say the standard is arbitrary and capricious.  Any school that has a 50/50 ratio in Pulaski County is segregated by definition because it deosn’t match the demographics of the community.

The bottom line is that Heller, in his infinite wisdom, decided post hoc what question the researchers should have answered. He then considers the fact that the researchers were so brazen as to not answer his specific question as evidence of wrongdoing.

Or will they?  After not receiving any raises last year, University employees are going to have to wonder for another six months whether or not they’ll ever see the merit raises that were promised to them this year.  (Bobby Petrino and John Pelphrey, however, will get their raises either way).

I don’t always agree with Mike Masterson of the Dem-Gaz, but his article about the UA-Board-of Trustees-approved merit raises was spot-on.  You can read it here.  Below I’ve reprinted some of his best points.

“Who can university presidents and chancellors trust if their decisions, and those of their trustees, can be overruled by a governor? Must university trustees now check with the governor before making decisions about managing their institutions? If so, then of what real use is a university president, chancellor or board of trustees?

Injecting state government directly into the decision-making machinery of a university sets a dangerous precedent. Doing so makes it extremely difficult for university leaders to confidently manage when they don’t know if their decisions might be nixed a week later by a bureaucrat or the governor.

Why would a governor even get involved in these sorts of decisions when the state provides less than half of what’s required to educate a college student? And where do the boundaries exist in such instances, if at all? With curriculum? Admissions? Hiring? Administration?

Did the governor and the state’s chief financial guru not realize that UA-Fayetteville already had announced and programmed the raises into its computers? If so, why didn’t they talk with UA leaders before issuing what amounted to a political edict to recall those increases for the time being?

It’s the poorly timed, uncommunicative and needlessly heavy-handed way this unexpected disappointment unfolded that has left leaders at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville wondering what authority, if any, they truly have within their own institution.”

I would add one more point.  Masterson mentions that University leaders are left wondering what power they have, and in the case of Chancellor Gearhart and Vice Chancellor Pederson, I agree.  They’re out there trying to do what is best for their employees but they lack the power to do much in this situation.  I have less sympathy for Sugg (whose annual salary, by the way, is over a half-million dollars a year).  He didn’t have to accept the recommendation from the governor, there was nothing binding about it.  In the end, the most Beebe could do was “encourage” that the U of A not give raises at this time.

But Sugg quickly announced that there would still be no raises because he felt “we should honor the request of our governor.”

Honor the request of our governor?!   What kind of good-ole-boy rhetoric is that?!

Here’s an idea for Alan Sugg:  If you feel like honoring someone, how about honoring your commitment to the 1,200+ employees of the U of A who were promised raises?

Our friend Max Brantley over at the Arkansas Times seems to trumpet every marginally negative charter school study story rumor that rolls across his desk, especially if the story appears in the New York Times (charter schools are thriving in NYC by the way).  Yet somehow he missed a screening of a charter school movie playing at the same LR film festival he attended, and he seems to miss most of the positive stories that speak well of charter schools.  So we thought Max and those like him in the state would be happy to hear some more great news about KIPP (see earlier good news about KIPP here), a charter school operator who is expanding in Arkansas.

Mathematica released a report today that takes a close look at academic performance in 22 KIPP middle-schools across the nation. You can find the full report here and the Ed Week article here. The report makes use of a matched longitudinal dataset as well as data from the traditional districts around the KIPP schools to answer several interesting questions.

Do KIPP schools take the best, brightest, and whitest from the traditional public schools? The resounding answer from the report is NO.

We find that students entering these 22 KIPP schools typically had prior achievement levels that were lower than average achievement in their local school districts.
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On average, KIPP middle schools have student bodies characterized by higher concentrations of poverty and racial minorities, but lower concentrations of special education and limitedEnglish proficiency (LEP) students, than the public schools from which they draw.

What about retention? Do KIPP schools simply counsel out those kids who can’t cut it? Again, the data demonstrate that retention rates at KIPP schools do not differ significantly (higher or lower) from the surrounding traditional school districts despite more rigorous monitoring.

Cumulative rates of attrition vary widely in different KIPP schools, but we did not find systematically higher (or lower) levels of attrition among these KIPP middle schools as compared with other schools within their districts. 

However, the report does find a couple of important differences between the KIPP schools and their traditional counterparts. The first difference is that KIPP is more likely to require students to repeat a grade. This finding is meaningful because there is some evidence that retention programs help struggling kids reach higher achievement in the future.

The second difference is that students who attended KIPP schools exhibited higher academic achievement in math and reading across multiple statistical specifications.

Within two years after entry, students are experiencing statistically significant, positive impacts in 18 of 22 KIPP schools in math and 15 of 22 KIPP schools in reading.

Not only are the results positive but they are also statistically significant and meaningfully large. The additional learning accumulated by the average KIPP student over the 3 year study period was equivalent to an additional 1.2 years of learning in math and 0.9 years in reading. To put it another way, the average KIPP school produced gains that would cut the black-white test score gap in half in math and by a third in reading over three years.

Now I’m sure there will still be the Debbie Downers out there who will try to downplay the continued positive findings for KIPP.  Some people just won’t let evidence stand in the way of their beliefs.  But I think we should be heartened that the KIPP model continues to demonstrate success with some of our poorest students.

Others will surely say that KIPP is not a workable solution because it cannot be scaled to help all the kids who might need it.  But I say abandoning KIPP because you believe it cannot be taken to scale is like firemen standing outside an apartment building in a poor neighborhood watching it burn, explaining their inaction by claiming that they could not save everyone.

Helen Ladd and Jacob Vigdor have a new new CALDER Center/NBER working paper looking at how home computers and broadband access help students. (Interestingly, an earlier version of the same paper listed Charles Clotfelter as a third author.)

Turns out that home computers harm students:

Do students’ basic academic skills improve when they have access to a computer at home? Has the introduction of high‐speed internet access, which expands the set of productive tasks for which home computers might be used, caused further improvements? This paper addresses these questions by studying administrative data covering the population of North Carolina public school students between 2000 and 2005, a period when home computer access expanded noticeably, and the availability of home high‐speed internet rose dramatically.

. . .

Models with student fixed effects, which restrict identification to within‐student variation, by contrast, show modest but statistically significant negative impacts. In these models, we can trace the impact of home computer introduction for periods of up to three years; there is no indication that the negative effect of access diminishes over this time period. . . .

Similarly, the introduction of high‐speed internet service is associated with significantly lower math and reading test scores in the middle grades. Moreover, student fixed‐effect specifications reveal that increased availability of high speed internet is associated with less frequent self‐reported computer use for homework. On the margin, then, access to broadband internet appears to crowd out studying effort, presumably by introducing new options for recreational use by students and other family members. In addition, we find that the introduction of broadband internet is associated with widening racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps.

The state released the 2010 benchmark results yesterday. You can find them here. 

Those who “don’t believe” in tests or think students are being tested to death should probably stop reading now.  You wouldn’t want to gain any knowledge that resulted from torture.

For everyone else, here is the Dem-Gaz article about the results.  And here’s an excerpt.

More Arkansas students scored at grade level or better on the Augmented Benchmark Exams in math and literacy this year as compared to 2009, with two-thirds or more of students scoring at proficient and advanced levels on 11 of the 12 exams.

“We are excited by what we see in these test scores,” said Tom Kimbrell, who became Arkansas’ education commissioner in September. “We’ve got areas we need to focus on, and we’ve got areas in which we can celebrate success.”

Kimbrell said he was most pleased with the continued year-to-year progress in student achievement and, for the fourth year in a row, a narrowing of the achievement gaps among the subpopulations of black, white and Hispanic students.

In conjunction with the Benchmark exams, the Arkansas Department of Education also released the results of state’s 11thgrade literacy test and the Stanford Achievement Test, 10th edition. The Stanford results also showed gains in virtually all categories and particularly strong performances in math.

The Benchmark Exams, which test students’ mastery of state academic standards in grades three through eight, are required by state law and by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which calls for all students to achieve at grade levels in math and literacy by 2013-14.

The tests are used to identify students who need individual academic improvement plans.

Arkansas has submitted it’s application for Round Two of the Race to the Top grant.  The Dem-Gaz’s coverage can be found here. After finishing only 17th in the first round, it doesn’t appear that the State’s application has changed much, except that the amount of money requested this time is significantly less ($175 million).  Most notably, no changes have been made to Arkansas’ charter school law, which cost the state a significant amount of points in Round One.

The application can be found here.  Winners are to be announced in September.

In a last ditch effort to keep the state money tap flowing, the Little Rock School District (LRSD) filed a motion last month claiming that the state is in violation of the 1989 desegregation settlement because it has approved charter schools in Pulaski County.  Here is the Dem Gaz article. LRSD attorney Chris Heller put it this way:

A key complaint is that the state has “unconditionally” approved independently run, open-enrollment charter schools in Pulaski County, draining students away from traditional public schools and hindering efforts to desegregate the three Pulaski County school districts, said Chris Heller, an attorney for the Little Rock School District.

“The combined impact has been to undermine the student assignment aspect of the 1989 settlement agreement,” he said.

Twenty seven years after the initial suit was filed and twenty one after the settlement agreement, the state continues to pay the three Pulaski County districts a sum just shy of $70 million annually. However, these payments may be coming to an end. The LRSD was released form court monitoring in 2007, and the other two districts will likely be declared unitary in the not so distant future. This seems to have left the LRSD leadership grasping for straws to keep the state payments rolling in, and charter schools seem like as good a scape goat as any.

As we have noted before, the claims made by LRSD simply do not appear to be true. Last week the Office for Education Policy provided more evidence on this point with the release of an updated version of their previous report on racial segregation in Pulaski County schools. You can find the updated report here and the Dem Gaz article about the report here.

Here are some excerpts from that article:

The impact of charter schools on the Little Rock School District is “quite insignificant” because so few Little Rock students transfer to Pulaski County-area charter schools, a new analysis from the University of Arkansas’ Office for Education Policy concludes.

“But if there is any impact at all, it would be one that is actually beneficial for the LRSD,” says the study, which was written by Nathan C. Jensen and Gary Ritter and is a follow-up to a similar study done last year. Ritter is director of the Office for Education Policy, and Jensen is a research associate.

Relatively few Little Rock students leave the district each year for the independently run, taxpayer-supported charter schools, the authors wrote.

*****

This year, 266 students from the Little Rock district transferred to charter schools, which was 1.2 percent of the district’s enrollment in the first through 12th grades. In 2008-09, there were 586 transfers from Little Rock, 2.6 percent. In 2007-08there were 102 transfers, or 0.7 percent.

“We found that a majority of these transfers are enhancing the levels of racial integration for the traditional public schools from which they transferred,” Jensen and Ritter said.

“This is because the majority of transfers involved black students leaving predominately black schools, white students leaving predominately white schools, or [low-income] students leaving predominately high-poverty schools. In all of these cases, the student transfers help the exiting schools because the LRSD TPS [traditional public school] is left less segregated as a result of these student transfers.”

For those who are interested in reading more, here is a more detailed listing of the report’s conclusions taken from the executive summary:

1. What are the general demographic characteristics of charter schools as compared to those of the Little Rock School District?
   • • Charter schools have shown significant growth in enrollment since 2004-05; conversely, the LRSD total enrollment has remained relatively stable in that same time period.
   • • Students enrolled in charter schools are more white than students in the LRSD and Pulaski County TPS (41.8% in charters, 21.8% in LRSD, and 33.0% in Pulaski County TPS). While there are more black students than white students in charter schools, when compared to the LRSD and Pulaski County TPS there are less black students (44.8% in charters, 68.0% in LRSD, and 58.4% in Pulaski County TPS). However, the overall racial composition of charter schools reflects more equal proportions of black and white students than LRSD and Pulaski County schools.
   • • There are fewer economically disadvantaged (as measured by FRL eligibility) students in charter schools (38.0%) than in the comparison Pulaski County TPS (63.3%).
2. Are charter schools in Pulaski County more or less segregated (racially and economically) than traditional public schools in the Little Rock School District?
   • • More black students in charter schools attend school in a hyper-segregated black environment (20.4% in charters and 10.7% in LRSD TPS). Conversely, more minority students in LRSD TPS attend school in a hyper-segregated minority environment (28.8% in charters and 52.4% in LRSD TPS).
   • • 26.4% of LRSD students eligible for FRL attend school in hyper-segregated FRL environments compared to none of the charter students.
   • • Neither charter schools nor LRSD TPS have racial compositions that are similar to that of Pulaski County. Both differ by roughly 20 percentage points in the percentage of minority students. However, LRSD TPS are more similar with regard to the percentage of students in Pulaski County eligible for FRL.
   • • More students in charter schools are enrolled in integrated school environments (40.4%) than their LRSD TPS peers (26.3%).
3. Where do students transferring to charter schools come from, and what are the racial and economic characteristics of these students?
   • • Since 2005-06, 31% of students who transferred to charter schools came from the LRSD. The rest were students from other TPS, private schools, other states, or home-schoolers. There are more black students transferring to charters than white students. But when compared to their LRSD peers, students who transferred to charter schools are more white (28.2% in charters, 21.8% in LRSD) and less black (59.8% in charters, 68.0% in LRSD).
   • • Similarly, 52.3% of students transferring to charters are eligible for FRL, compared to 68.1% of LRSD students.
   • • However, in the past two school years, the percentage of charter transfers eligible for FRL has been 52.2% and 52.3% respectively. This percentage has increased from 16.9% in 2005-06.
4. What impact do transfers to charter schools from the Little Rock School District have on the level of segregation in the Little Rock traditional public schools in which these students were previously enrolled?
   • • Overall, white students transferring from the LRSD to charter schools tend to leave LRSD TPS that have an above-average percentage of white students. As a result, these transfers likely have a positive impact on the racial balance of the exited LRSD TPS.
   • • Similarly, more black students leave schools with above-average percentages of black students; again, it is likely that these transfers overall have a positive impact on the racial balance of the LRSD TPS.
   • • Overall, 44.1% of the charter transfers from 2006-07 to 2009-10 involved black students leaving disproportionately black schools or white students leaving disproportionately white schools; 38.3% of the transfers were from schools that were integrated. Thus, it seems reasonable to conclude that the transfers to charters are having a neutral, or even a positive effect on racial integration in LRSD TPS.
   • • FRL students also primarily leave LRSD TPS with high percentages of FRL students. These transfers likely have a positive impact on the level of economic integration in the LRSD TPS.
5. Are students transferring to charter schools entering into more or less segregated school environments?
   • • White students enter into charter schools that have a higher percentage of white students than their previous schools (37.4% to 40.4% in 2009-10); however, the charter schools they entered had a more equal proportion of white and black students.
   • • Black students transfer into charter schools with a lower percentage of black students than the LRSD TPS in which they were previously enrolled (70.7% to 67.1% in 2009-10).
   • • However, these differences are quite small. Students who transfer to charter schools attend schools that have racial compositions similar to those of the schools they left.
   • • All students, both FRL and non-FRL, are more likely to enter into charter schools with substantially fewer FRL students.

A new documentary by Oscar-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (who made An Inconvenient Truth and It Might Get Loud) is promising to ask some tough questions about America’s schools.  According to the film’s website, Guggenheim “follows a handful of promising kids through a system that inhibits, rather than encourages, academic growth…Guggenheim undertakes an exhaustive review of public education, surveying drop-out factories and academic sinkholes, methodically dissecting the system and its seemingly intractable problems.”

A friend of mine who attended an advance screening of the film tells me that it’s excellent.  Here’s a trailer:

There’s no guarantee that the movie will play in Nortwest Arkansas when it opens this fall, but taking the pledge below surely couldn’t hurt.

A couple of weeks ago Brian mentioned an Ed Next article we wrote with our colleagues Gary Ritter and Nate Jensen. The article, titled A Closer Look at Charter Schools and Segregation, challenges the methodology used in a study of charter schools and racial segregation  released in February by the Civil Rights Project (CRP) at UCLA. Our article is scheduled to appear in print this summer, but the debate is already in full swing. Today the Ed Next blog is running a response to our original article from the CRP authors, followed by a reply from us. You can find their response here, and our reply here.

In their response it is evident that the CRP staff either misunderstand or choose to willfully ignore the substantive methodological concerns we raised in our article. Instead they simply chose to reiterate their rightness, failing to engage in meaningful debate.

Even though they failed to address the methodological flaws present in their report, it is a greater disappointment that they failed to acknowledge the larger and more damning points we raised in the concluding paragraphs of our article.

In the closing portion of our reply, we bring the discussion back to what we believe are the most compelling arguments for why the CRP report is fatally flawed.

1)    First, neither the traditional public schools nor charter schools are doing a particularly good job at drawing racially diverse student bodies. Those genuinely concerned with the racial segregation in schools should focus their attention on traditional public schools, where the vast majority (97%) of U.S. students are enrolled.

2)    Families that send their children to charter schools are making a choice that best fits what they seek in an educational experience. To compare this choice to the forced segregation that occurred a half century ago is a trivialization of the true oppression that occurred. And to refer to these schools as “apartheid schools,” which implies that families are legally and physically required to attend segregated schools, is nothing more than alarmist rhetoric.  Such charges would be more appropriate if they were leveled at traditional public schools where students in residential boundaries are forced to attend segregated schools.

The Civil Rights Project has a history of seeking justice and we commend that.  But the organization is simply on the wrong side of this issue. First of all, the empirical data do not support the CRP claims.  Moreover, although the group’s leaders have called for regulations to encourage more integrated charters, vocal critics of charters will certainly use the conclusions drawn from the CRP differently.  And, if critics of charters were successful in limiting the growth of charter schools, the educational options available to poor and minority students would be further restricted.  We and the CRP authors would certainly agree that this outcome would not enhance the civil rights of our nation’s disadvantaged students.