Another point to add to Josh’s post below: The State Board is rigging the game by putting charter school applicants in a catch-22. If a charter school application puts forth a superb proposal that mirrors what KIPP successfully does (indeed, Prism’s application for Fayetteville arguably is similar to KIPP), then the applicant will be rejected for not being “innovative.” But if the charter school applicant proposes to try something brand new, then the applicant will be rejected for not having enough experience and for not having a proven track record.

In reality, of course, the “innovative” requirement is meaningless. At the end of the day, charter school applicants are trying to establish a school. Unless someone comes up with a way to transmit knowledge via electro-magnetic stimulation, or perhaps telepathy, the essence of a school is that teachers use curriculum to impart knowledge to students, which is something that human beings have known how to do for thousands of years. A slightly different curriculum here, a slightly different schedule there, a slightly different way of arranging the classroom over there — nothing that schools do is that innovative.

Real Democrats visiting a charter school.

I was beginning to think that the State Board of Education could care less about the criticism they received after their rejection of six new charter applications last week.  But apparently Board member Brenda Gullett felt enough pressure that she was compelled to defend her reasoning in a speech to the Northwest Arkansas Senior Democrats.  In doing so she not only continued to beat up on and to generally be condescending towards the applicants, but also supplied us with some more illogical statements and humorous material.

The Democrat Gazette article begins with Gullett repeating her criteria for approving a charter school application.  She claims that applicants must “demonstrate innovation in education.”  The only problem with this criteria is that it is not laid out in either the charter school law or in the rules the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) uses to implement the law.  Ms. Gullett has taken it upon herself, as I suppose a benevolent dictator would, to create new requirements as she sees fit.

In the law the word “innovative” appears in the section discussing legislative intent.  Here the legislature states that one of the things they hope to accomplish with this bill is to “encourage the use of different and innovative teaching methods.”  First of all, this is only one of 6 stated goals, and second, there is no mention of the need for charter schools to demonstrate their innovative techniques.  Innovation is simply one of the things the legislature hoped to encourage by passing the charter school law.  Here is the section from Arkansas Code 6-23-102:

6-23-102. Legislative intent.

It is the intent of the General Assembly, by this chapter, to provide opportunities for teachers, parents, pupils, and community members to establish and maintain public schools that operate independently from the existing structure of local school districts as a method to accomplish the following:

(1)Improve student learning;

(2)Increase learning opportunities for all students, with special emphasis on expanded learning experiences for students who are identified as low-achieving;

(3)Encourage the use of different and innovative teaching methods;

(4)Create new professional opportunities for teachers, including the opportunity to be responsible for the learning program at the school site;

(5)Provide parents and pupils with expanded choices in the types of educational opportunities that are available within the public school system; and

(6)Hold the schools established under this chapter accountable for meeting measurable student achievement standards.

The word innovate does not appear at all in the ADE rules used to implement the charter school law.  You can check this for yourself by searching the rules for the word “innovate”, but I can save you the time, it does not appear anywhere.

Apparently Ms. Gullett doesn’t need law to guide her actions as a Board member, she is the law.  And how does she define “innovation”? Well kind of like the Supreme Court defines pornography.  She can’t put it into words , but she knows it when she sees it.  Both Dove and Prism are not innovative, but KIPP sure is.

She also spent some of her speech beating up on charter applicants saying, “Too often, the groups presenting the requests act like they woke up one day and decided to form a school.”  This statement is not only mean spirited, but also relies on some seriously flawed logic.  Her statement continues the faulty line of reasoning she started during the  Nov. 9th Board meeting where she exclaimed, “I can’t believe that anyone who’d never run a school could try to run a school.”  I’m sure this would be news to the 1,000 plus principals in Arkansas who, coincidentally, never ran a school until they had run a school.  I, for one, don’t understand how Ms. Gullett could serve on the State Board of Education having never served on a state board of education.  The flaw in this logic is obvious; for anything anyone has ever done in their life at some point they had to do it for the first time.  And further, insinuating that all of the applicants were ill-prepared or that they were not fully devoted to helping their students is improper and downright mean.  These applicants put a lot of effort into preparing their applications and laying the groundwork to start school next fall.

Ms. Gullett also seems to have a strong aversion to Turkey — the country, not gobble,  gobble.  This is the only thing that could possibly explain ludicrous statements like this:

“The school’s representatives claimed they wanted to reach out to Hispanic students, yet they sponsor an annual trip to Turkey because many teachers are Turkish.”

So let me get this straight, Hispanic kids would get no educational value from traveling to Turkey, but white kids  from Fayetteville have a wonderful educational experience when they travel to Italy.  Or should we just ban all school sponsored travel opportunities?

It’s not clear why the Senior Democrats would want to have Ms. Gullett as a speaker when she is so out of step with modern Democratic policy positions.  I made this case in an earlier post.  Tuesday’s speech adds further evidence that she is definitely no Democrat, at least not an Obama-era Democrat.

If you need more evidence that Ms. Gullett is out of step with the Democratic party, check out the quotes below documenting the party’s position on education reform and charter schools.

Here is a quote from the official Democratic party platform.

“We need to adapt curricula and the school calendar to the needs of the 21st century; reform the schools of education that produce most of our teachers; promote public charter schools that are accountable; and streamline the certification process for those with valuable skills who want to shift careers and teach.”

And here is a section from the White House page on education.

“The President supports the expansion of high-quality charter schools. He has challenged States to lift limits that stifle growth among successful charter schools and has encouraged rigorous accountability for all charter schools.”

“Charter schools, I doubled the number of charter schools in Illinois despite some reservations from teachers unions. I think it’s important to foster competition inside the public schools.”

In a recent post Stuart referenced a NY Times column by Nobel winning economist Paul Krugman.  In his column Professor Krugman asserted that the reason for our nations mediocre education performance over the past 30 years is a lack of resources.  He claims that as a nation we have given in to our anti-tax tendencies and allowed our children to suffer.  He further argues that in order to bring our great nation back from the brink, Congress must pass another big stimulus package.  This time around the stimulus dollars should be aimed directly at state and local governments to make sure our education system survives the financial crisis.

Professor Krugman’s final sentence claims:

“…we need to wake up and realize that one of the keys to our nation’s historic success is now a wasting asset. Education made America great; neglect of education can reverse the process.”

And I agree with this statement wholeheartedly.  However, there is no evidence we have neglected to adequately fund our education system (equity is a completely different issue). Not to mention Professor Krugman completely ignores the  fact that Department of Education is about to dole out $4.3 billion in Race to the Top funds most of which will go to the big states facing the largest budget problems.  But the myth of inadequate funding has legs.  Just last week the Ford Foundation announced it was giving  $100 million to the teachers unions to “shake up the conversations surrounding school reform”.  In its press release the foundation stated, “Many state finance systems fail to allocate enough resources to provide quality schooling for all students.”  Its time we stopped tilting at windmills and dealt with the real problems with our education system.

To convince yourself that money is not the problem take a look at (and listen to) this presentation .  It was put together by leading education economists Caroline Hoxby and Eric Hanushek.  The first seven slides do a beautiful job illustrating that money is most definitely NOT the problem. Here is a brief rundown of the highlights:

• Student achievement has been flat since 1970
• The U.S. is below the mean in education attainment for OECD countries
• U.S. students perform poorly on exams that allow comparison of achievement between countries
• Education spending per pupil has increased dramatically (more than doubled) in real terms since 1970
• Only Luxembourg spends more per pupil than the U.S.

If you have the time and inclination, the remainder of the presentation is also very good. It details what the evidence does tell us about our education system. I would recommend this presentation if you are an education researcher or just a citizen interested in education who has difficulty sorting through all the conflicting claims we often hear.

UPDATE:  Edited to remove the embedded presentation that annoyingly played automatically on page-load.

Yesterday’s Northwest Arkansas Times had a story about Fayetteville Mayor Lioneld Jordan’s economic development team. The so-called “Fayetteville Forward Economic Accountability Council” was launched six months ago. You can tell this council is doing good work because acts that are accompanied by alliteration are always awesome. Now, I think the mayor’s done a fine job of running the city so far. Still, the to-do list of the Fayetteville Forward Economic Development Summit’s Priorities that was reprinted in the paper was pretty amusing. It lists all of the projects underway with the mayor bragging that “We’ve completed five of the eighteen projects.” But most of the accomplishments are little more than forming committees and declarations about future actions as opposed to any real accomplishments. Here’s the list for those of you who missed it:

First of all, you gotta love how “pending” sounds so much better than “nope.”

But my real point here is that this list looks more like political showmanship than anything else. I know Jordan is, in fact, a politician, and he is motivated to manipulate the public’s perception of him as best he can. At the same time, smart people read the newspaper, and I think many of them see all of the politico-jargon, such as work, identify, promote, establish, explore, and support, for what it really is–a whole lot of nothing. Most people see this political mumbo-jumbo like employers see puffed-up resumes. Still, to-do lists are important. Just take a look at the to-do list I used to write this blog-post:

With a list like this, everyone can see I’ve accomplished six of eight of my goals! I know it’s probably in Jordan’s best interest to pad his public perceptions with some puffed up press release (gotta love that alliteration!) that makes it sound like he’s getting things done. But I just can’t help wishing our politicians were a little more straightforward, kind of like this guy.

A recent Paul Krugman column made a puzzling assertion about education:

The rise of American education was, overwhelmingly, the rise of public education — and for the past 30 years our political scene has been dominated by the view that any and all government spending is a waste of taxpayer dollars. Education, as one of the largest components of public spending, has inevitably suffered.

It’s hard to know what precisely he’s saying here, but he seems to be trying to imply that education has “inevitably suffered” because of a lack of government spending.

Any such implication would be difficult to defend. As you can see in the above graph (from an Education Next article by Arthur Peng and James Guthrie), education spending has skyrocketed in real terms precisely during the period during which, according to Krugman, our politics were “dominated” by an anti-government-spending view. So what’s the counterfactual here — how much more does Krugman think we should have been spending?

Columnist John Brummett had a piece in the paper on Sunday about the State Board of Education’s rejection of 6 new charter applications last week.  I’m pretty sure he agrees with me and my colleagues a little more than he cared to admit in his column, but overall it was a good piece.  I think the most significant thing he did was to point out that Chris Heller and the Little Rock School District have put themselves on the wrong side of this civil rights issue.  And make no mistake, providing poor, disadvantaged, or underserved children with good educational choices is absolutely a civil rights issue.  Here is how Mr. Brummett put it:

I’m not sure how a civil rights lawyer could argue that an African-American student is aggrieved by being allowed to choose either the regular public school or a new charter school that promises to try to serve his needs especially.

Preach on Mr. Brummett!

(Disclaimer: I work in the same department as the Office of Educational Policy.)

Since his election last year, President Obama has made it clear that education is one of his priorities.  Obama demonstrated his commitment to education reform when he appointed well known Chicago Public Schools reformer Arne Duncan to be Secretary of Education.  Then in February as part of the economic-stimulus package passed by congress, the Obama administration set aside $4.3 billion to be used to incentivize education reforms at the state level.  In an interesting wrinkle, states have been asked to compete to secure their portion of what the Department of Education is calling its Race to the Top Fund.  States who can provide evidence of their commitment to the specific reforms being emphasized by the Department of Ed will receive more funding.  Here is how Mr. Duncan put it in an interview on Wednesday, “This is not about getting in the game, this is about winning.  There will be a lot more losers than winners.”  Yesterday, the Department of Education released the finalized criteria against which the winners and losers will be judged. You can find the full document here or a summary here.  The stated goal of these criteria is to reward states for creating the conditions for education innovation and reform.  And, one of the specific criteria is that the states ensure successful conditions for high-performing charter schools and other innovative schools.  I assert that unless our State Board of Education improves its position on both of these items we will be among the losers.

I want to make it clear, I am not advocating the approval of all charter schools simply because we have the opportunity to secure federal money.  However, the State Board’s denial of all new applications in the presence of this incentive is further evidence of their anti-reform stance.  If a charter applicant submits an incomplete or insufficient application or there are legitimate concerns about the applicants character, then their application should most certainly be rejected. But, I find it highly unlikely that all of the new applications this year were flawed in this fundamental way.

Brenda Gullett is quickly establishing herself as the standard bearer of the anti-reform contingent on the Board.  One of the issues facing the Boad is the effect of charter schools on desegregation efforts in Little Rock.  At last month’s board meeting Board Chair Dr. Naccaman Williams asked that a faculty member from the University of Arkansas be allowed to present a report on this very subject.  Ms. Gullett quickly shot the proposal down with an ad hominem attack on the authors of the report.  Here is documentation of the exchange taken from the minutes of the meeting.  You can access agendas and minutes for Board meeting here.

Dr. Williams stated that the Office of Educational Policy (OEP) at the University of Arkansas has prepared a report on charter schools that might prove informative prior to the review of the next round of charter application. He suggested this report might be contained in a work session prior to the next meeting. Ms. Gullett stated that the research from OEP has been questioned by other informed groups and that there are opposing views. Ms. Gullett stated that it is her opinion that OEP is very pro charter schools and their reporting does not provide a balanced approach. Mr. Ledbetter observed that the next meeting will be very compressed due to the joint session and he does not believe that compressing the report or reports into a 15 minute time slot would be productive. He suggested sending any reports to the Board for personal review prior to the next meeting.

This disregard for evidence and a free exchange of ideas is disconcerting in a Board of Education member.  By the way it is fairly obvious who the “other informed groups” are.  I would bet a significant sum of money that she is referring to our old friend Chris Heller.  In this space we have defended the OEP report against unsupported claims made by Little Rock School District lawyer Chris Heller (the latest post is here).  We have raised a specific concern with his method of quantifying the level of segregation and assert that the OEP report, which is based on student level data, does a better more comprehensive job.  Both Heller and Gullett, on the other hand, ignore both the evidence and our methodological concerns, and engage in name calling and baseless attacks.  It is important to note neither Heller nor Gullett have yet to raise any substantive evidence based contentions with the OEP report.  The OEP report should be heard and evaluated on its merits.

As for Ms. Gullett, I believe she is clearly out of step with both the President and national Progressive Democratic movement.  If she does not change her stance on reform issues, the Governor should reevaluate her appointment.  And, if any other board members will not serve the state in a way that is not simply beholden to traditional public school administrators, then the Governor should take action to remove them, and appoint board members who will serve the children of Arkansas instead of the interests of adults.

UPDATE:  The Dem Gaz has an article today discussing Race to the Top.  You can find it here, but you will need a subscription.

Although I may not like that a bevy of school officials from Springdale and Fayetteville took time out from the instruction of our children to head to Little Rock to oppose the openings of 2 charter schools in the region, I understand their reasoning.  I am sure that the school officials sincerely believe that the charters would lead to some reduced funding and thus hamper their ability to provide a quality education to the remaining students.  Further, I believe these school officials are genuinely concerned that the would-be charters in Springdale (aimed at serving English Language Learners) and in Fayetteville (aimed at serving economically disadvantaged students) would not necessarily do a better job with the students.

However, this argument is misguided in large districts like Springdale/Fayetteville.  First, there is no risk of these districts becoming so small that there would be dis-economies of scale.  Second, the new public schools that would have been created would have been schools of choice.  That is, no child would be forcibly exposed to a bad education.  If these schools did not meet parents’ expectations academically, organizationally, civically, or on any number of  dimensions, parents would be free not to send their children to the charter (a choice, incidentally, we don’t have in traditional public schools).  Sure, it is possible that all of the proposed charters may have not provided a high quality education, but it is also likely that the traditional public schools are underserving certain families.  Certainly, even the best educators (and we have many of those in Springdale/Fayetteville) may not be able to serve EVERY family perfectly well.  Here is what district officials from Springdale/Fayetteville should have said at the end of their presentations before the State Board of Education.

…. In conclusion, we have outlined for the Board the many ways in which we do our best every day to serve ALL students, including academically at-risk students in our district.  However, it is certainly possible that, while doing our best to serve thousands of students each day, we are unable to satisfy all students’ and families’ needs.  Therefore, we school leaders of Springdale/Fayetteville ENTHUSIASTICALLY SUPPORT the opening of the Dove/Prism charter school as yet another option for our students.  Because, of course, the academic progress of of our students is our ultimate goal, we trust the families in our great district to make reasonable choices, and the last thing we would want to do is deny any family the opportunity for an educational opportunity.  And if we find that the Dove/Prism charter school finds a way to better serve our needy students, then we will borrow the strategy so that all of our children can benefit.

We will continue to work every day so that our students and families are satisfied and would not want to leave any of our district’s traditional public schools.  But, if they do want to leave, the last thing we, as educators who care about kids and learning most of all, would want to do is to hold them hostage in schools that they would otherwise choose to leave.  Thank you for your time, and we look forward to a positive working relationship with Dove/Prism.

Had any of our leaders taken this high road approach, they could have had their cake and eaten it too.  They would have appeared remarkably gracious and humble, and they would have appeared extraordinarily student-focused rather than institution-focused. Moreover, they would not have lost one single student to charters, because 5 members of that State Board had their mind made up on a NO vote long before any presentations were made.  Ghandi himself would have been denied a charter from this group, of course unless Ghandi started a KIPP school!

Fresh from traveling to the State Board of Education meeting to argue that a new charter school simply isn’t needed in Springdale, the Springdale school board met Tuesday to discuss . . . the need to open new elementary, middle, and junior high schools because of population growth.

The main reason for denying charters that was bandied about at the meeting in Little Rock was that the proposed charter school wasn’t innovative enough. That is, it wasn’t offering anything the district wasn’t already offering. From what I can tell, however, the new schools the Springdale board is considering will not provide anything different or more innovative than existing schools. By their own logic, they shouldn’t be allowed to create any new public schools either.

On another front,  Max Brantley continues to make the thoroughly debunked claim that charter schools harm desegregation efforts. At some point he will have to provide evidence for his assertions, right?  Or, I suppose he could just keep leaning on his tired old strawman of racist white parents who would do anything to get their kids away from the black kids. In Max’s version of this story, these parents would go so far as to start a PUBLIC, in the sense that anyone can attend, charter school.

The State Board of Education has decided not to Race to the Top with the rest of the nation.  The Obama administration plans to allocate the $4.3 billion in Race to the Top funding based on a set of requirements outlined here.  One of the requirements is that states do “not prohibit or effectively inhibit increasing the number of charter schools in the State.”  This week the State Board denied several (6) charter school applications making it clear that they have no intention of relaxing the cap, either defacto or legal, on the number of charter schools in the state.  If the State Board maintains this anti-charter stance, they will essentially be leaving federal stimulus dollars on the table.  Apparently they feel we have enough money here in Arkansas.

So, why did the State Board deny the charter applications?  Board members often make the claim, as they did yesterday, that they are denying charter applications because the new schools would simply be duplicating services already provided by the local districts.  This is a fairly ubiquitous argument often made by those who are opposed to parental choice (Max Brantley makes it here).  I find this argument to be on its face ridiculous.  Of course charter schools would be duplicating education services, they are after all schools.  The issue is not the provision of services per se, but the quality of the service.  Check out Stuart’s post from yesterday for a more interesting treatment of this issue.  Proponents of parental choice, myself and Obama included, feel that choice and competition can be used as a mechanism to improve the quality of our education system.

Another interesting takeaway from the meeting was the Board’s very uneven response to the applications.  The two applicants from Northwest Arkansas received rather harsh interrogations, while KIPP Academy simply sailed through.  Prism Education Center organizer Misty Newcomb faced tough questions about her youth and inexperience, while the Dove organizers faced (racist?) concerns about their Turkish heritage.  It is no surprise KIPP cruised through this process.  They have done such a great job in the delta that Arkansas Law says they should be approved (search for Knowledge is Power Program).  However, I don’t believe the rough treatment of the two applicants mentioned above was in any way justified.

I hope that in the future the State Board of Education can dispense with all the ideological clap-trap and judge charter schools on the merit of their applications.  There will be both good and bad operators, but parents will be free to leave the bad schools.  And the good schools will remain.   It is an undue burden to force charter applicants to demonstrate radically new techniques or ensure high student achievement before they open their doors.  This unattainably high standard means that the Board can arbitrarily grant charters at their whim while under-served children face no choice at all.

UPDATE:  Edited for clarity.

Three more charter schools were rejected on Tuesday.

Beebe discusses desegregation and charter schools.

Max Brantly continues to make the thoroughly debunked claim that charter schools harm desegregation efforts.