Georgia’s charters are meeting AYP at a rate of 85% and the publics are at 82%. Did the statisticians provide a margin of error or a reliability figure for those numbers? If not, I suspect they’re not statistically significant–in other words, charters would show no improvement.

Same for those ‘free lunch’ figures.

The magic here seems to be that Georgia has linked charters to higher education institutions. EVERY early-college program so far has been successful, as far as I know. True, not every student can benefit from PSEO or DECA or any of the other options–but the ones that qualify almost always do quite well.

A couple of years ago, the NY Times reported that a survey of high school dropouts revealed that the leading reason students quit is that they’re bored. College courses can be boring too (I supposed I’ve been responsible for some of that) but they take up less of the day and cover material only once or twice, not in endless repetition.

So I’m interpreting your report to mean that a seniors-to-sophomores initiative will do much more for the general education level than any charter school movement. And it will have the added benefit of proper oversight so that we won’t be embarrassed again and again by lax accountancy and funding snafus, as we continue to be by the amateurish Ohio charters.

Positive Lessons from Charter Schools in Georgia

By Andrew Broy

Georgia’s 71 charter schools are outperforming traditional public schools and are serving a more diverse and economically disadvantaged population, according to the Georgia Department of Education’s most recent Annual Report on Charter Schools.

The findings, based on 2007 data, correct many of the misperceptions that surround the state’s charter schools and are particularly significant in light of the increased attention charter schools have received from legislative leadership over the past two years.

In 2007, the General Assembly enacted a law that allows entire districts – not just individual schools – to apply for a charter. Districts promise improved student achievement in exchange for freedom from certain state and local rules. This session, the Legislature is considering the creation of a new statewide authorizing commission that would have the power to establish new charter schools.

Charter-related initiatives frequently generate controversy. The annual report helps those involved in the discussion differentiate between the facts and the fallacies and provides concrete data that policy-makers should consider when passing on charter policy. Most important, as education reforms generate increasingly rancorous debate, the report provides compelling evidence that charter schools in Georgia deserve serious consideration as a school improvement strategy and option for parents and students.

In 2007, charter schools in Georgia met state testing goals – or made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) – at a rate that exceeded traditional public schools. In 2006, fully 85 percent of Georgia charter schools made AYP, compared with 82 percent of traditional public schools.

By comparison just 42 percent of charter schools made AYP in Florida, the state with the third-highest number of charter schools in the nation. The national average for charter schools was 64 percent, compared with 73 percent of traditional public schools. Georgia’s success rate makes it a leader among chartering states and bolsters the notion that quality chartering, not merely more charter schools, is the key to charter success.

Indeed, while most reputable national studies of relative charter school performance have yielded mixed results, the performance levels in Georgia are increasingly encouraging. During the 2007 school year, for example, charter high schools in Georgia graduated their students at a rate of 90 percent, compared with an average of 72 percent for public schools generally. This is the highest graduation rate in the history of Georgia’s charter sector and comes at a time when state leaders are redoubling their efforts to improve high school graduation rates.

Much of this success can be attributed to the fact that many charter high schools in Georgia were designed specifically to boost graduation rates. Charter career academies, for example, work in partnership with technical colleges and community colleges to offer a more engaging curriculum and to target students who might otherwise have fallen through the cracks.

The results are all the more impressive when one considers the student population served by charter schools. During the 2007 school year, 56 percent of students enrolled in charter schools qualified for free and reduced lunch, compared with 50 percent for students statewide. In addition, Georgia charter schools are more likely to enroll racial minorities: Fully 61 percent of charter school students are racial minorities, compared with the statewide average of 53 percent. And 43 percent of charter school students were African-American, the highest percentage recorded since the first charter school opened in Georgia in 1995.

These performance levels should be lauded. They should not, however, obscure the reality that some of our schools – charter schools and traditional public schools alike – are not performing at acceptable standards. Moreover, given the relatively small number of charter schools in the state (charter schools enroll approximately 3 percent of public school students statewide), the significance of these trends should not be overstated.

Nevertheless, Georgia charter performance strongly suggests that we should encourage more schools to use curricular flexibility to help improve student learning. Simply put, Georgia’s charter schools are high-performing public schools serving a population that, on average, is more racially diverse and less affluent than Georgia generally.

In one sense, Georgia charter schools have come of age and are beginning to reach a scale where they can impact many more students. But even as the campaign continues to open more charter schools, Georgians must never lose sight of the ultimate goal: ensuring that every Georgia school is filled with quality teachers successful at improving student performance.
Andrew Broy is the Associate Superintendent for Policy and Charter Schools for the state of Georgia and a former Teach for America corps member. The Georgia Public Policy Foundation is an independent think tank that proposes practical, market-oriented approaches to public policy to improve the lives of Georgians. Nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before the U.S. Congress or the Georgia Legislature.

© Georgia Public Policy Foundation (March 14, 2008). Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided the author and his affiliations are cited.

Wait a minute. This is bass-ackwards. If any of the goals mentioned in the article are going to be achieved, then what needs to happen is that that experts should be spending a lot of effort LISTENING to the public that’s supposed to be served by schools. The public needs, not to be shown, but to show a vision of authentic education and purpose.

You can’t radically change the structure of an institution when you keep the fundamental flaw that threatens it in the first place.

The school in question is a Catholic School, which means it can be selective in a way public schools can not. But the kids this school, called Crossroads Foundation, does not select poor kids that are academic stars, but those who are poor, are motivated, but who have not yet performed to their full potential, and who have supportive parents. Lastly those who would probably not survive on the streets without the school. What do they get, huge amounts of attention, investment and intervention. They get tutoring, skills workshops, family counseling. A Catholic view of sex education, to be sure. But perhaps most significantly a personal touch from people in charge who know everyone, with hugs, handshakes and laughs all around, a sense of connection that makes the place work. 100% of kids graduate and go to college.

This picture runs up against some conundrums. Do you guess which kids can go the farthest and protect them against being held back by those with the most problems and deprivation? Former Dayton Superintendent James Williams said no, abolishing “gifted” programs because of what they said to those kids and parents who weren’t in them. Do you lavish resources on kids to overwhelm their problems? Won’t parents who gave advantages to their kids object? Can bureaucratized public schools deal with the multiple demands of working for everyone in any other way between being stifling bureaucracies that no one wants to be in? Can you have the kinds of caring relationships that make schools like this work, not just in specialty schools like Stivers or DECA but in the school down the street? Does a marketplace of small schools, high choice and high turnover allow the kind of consistency and stability in who the kids are that allows good schools to be good? Or does it just guarantee that there will be a lot of underresourced and underperforming schools?

All of this seems more real than the acronymns for these various theories of Deming and Baldridge. I have not studied these things and so do not share the enthusiasm of some of the other posters. An issue may be whether schools are the same kind of communities that factories and other private commercial organizations are. Or whether schools have to be communities in which teachers, kids, parents and the larger community relate together in a positive way to end up with people who are both productive enough to get jobs and be productive at the higher end of the brain using spectrums, as well as being citizens in a democracy and human beings one would enjoy sharing a neighborhood with.

(2) HOW do you foster an organizational culture conducive to HIGH PERFORMANCE and a motivated
WORKFORCE to accomplish the following:
• cooperation, EFFECTIVE communication, and skill sharing among all FACULTY AND STAFF, across classrooms, departments, schools, colleges, and locations, as appropriate
• EFFECTIVE information flow and two-way communication with faculty leaders, supervisors, and administrators at all levels…
• the ability to benefit from the diverse ideas, cultures, and thinking of your WORKFORCE”

And yes, the details are in the devil, I guess. Some institutions where things would be gotten right under any system will have a clue when AQIP’s cross-disciplinary communication is considered “appropriate” while those who will botch it anyway will run off on a frenzy of hodge-podge committee appointments.

And you seem to think that one voice crying in this wilderness is able to get the North Central Association to see the error of its ways? Sorry, but I’ve realized–perhaps too late–that NCA does not care to enforce its own standards; they and the other regional accrediting agencies have long functioned more as rubber stamps than as rigorous licensing organizations.

I’ve been at the same Baldrige training as your AQIP people. I don’t recognize the NIST Baldrige criteria in the “Baldridge fad” you relate–though I’m not disputing your observations. Please consider comparing the official Baldrige criteria with your organization’s quality improvement effort. Baldrige folks are collegial, recognize the difficulty of quality improvement, and ought to welcome polite, accurate, timely feedback. If AQIP (at some level) has strayed from Baldrige, you could perform a service for the nation by helping it get back on track.

I’ve wanted to check out Birnbaum’s book (#525,343 in Books) since you first mentioned it. Sorry for the delay; is it something we would discuss, or would I be dismissed as a fool for not immediately conceding it to be a dispositive treatment?

Most of the attention has been focused on the poverty stricken urban schools, with some toward the large suburban schools that get most attention after a Columbine type shooting incident by suicidal, alienated gun wielding kids. Some of the posts here also look to the ideal school system that would produce ideal educated participants in the society of the future, often positing a society where poverty is presumed to be either nonexistent or irrelevant. However those who look seriously at poverty see education as about the only force that has a chance to break the cycles that preserve poverty and provide some kind of upward mobility. This does assumes that there will be non-poverty level jobs available for people who have successfully managed to make their way through the educational system.

Given the self replicating cultures of poverty that exists, it seems likely that the only way to accomplish this is to have a Marshall Plan of sorts for education of the poor, investing large amounts of skill, time, energy and money into working with people who get less at home and less from their surrounding culture than people in the well educated and affluent suburbs. Right now it seems that we lack the inclination and the structure to do this. In fact it seems like we lack the “Nexus decision”, as the term is used in a previous post, that this is worth doing. In fact things are organized for this not to happen. Each school system competes with other school systems, an arrangement that encourages people to flee the problem rather than fix it.

Rather school systems become the Nexus decisions for various interest groups interested in affirming and preserving their values into the future. Religious groups, ethnic groups, social classes, ideologues and people valuing various visions of society are all demanding their due. In addition, it seems like education has developed a jargon that separates it from everyone else. Does anyone else ever use the term “pedagogy” in their daily lives? This makes it difficult if not impossible to come to any sort of social consensus about what should happen with public schools

Deming comes to us from statistics. His “quality circles”, flat management hierarchy, and step-by-step problem solving procedures can be found mirrored in other theorists’ ideas, but his statistical methods for analysis are what makes his program successful. None of the other programs rely on data so much as Deming, and Deming would probably note that Baldridge complicates, rather than streamlines, decision-making. There’s the conflict.

Perhaps you’d appreciate the book “Management Fads in Higher Education” by Robert Birnbaum. It’s one example of the kind of education research we need more of–an objective, clear-eyed critical look at programs like these, rather than a subjective report on “how we feel about what we did” (which is the type of study that predominates the literature).

Summary: Birnbaum tracked seven management initiatives popular in higher education (and also K-12, tho’ he didn’t look there) since the 1970s, including TQM (the precursor of CQI/AQIP), Zero-Based Budgeting, Planning Programming Budgetary System, and Business Process Reengineering.

What he discovered is that every one of these programs followed a similar process. Each originated in business or in government, and quickly made the leap from one to the other. In every case, they were proclaimed the “magic bullet” that would resolve a plethora of problems. They would be adopted widely, but after a period of application, it became clear that they did not work as advertised. Their leading proponents then proclaim that the shortcomings were not due to failures in the program, but to incompetent implementation. Then the next fad would begin to spread.

AND ONLY THEN, after the programs failed to operate as advertised, does higher education begin to adopt them–with the same cycle of implementation, failure, and blame that had already played out in the private and government sectors.

Birnbaum might have been justified in simply concluding that the administrators in higher education are pretty stupid, but he dug more deeply. He noted that these programs do seem to lead to successes in some isolated instances, and he found that Baldridge had already explained it; Baldridge considered his “quality” initiatives to be far less important to the success of an organization than other factors, in particular “nexus” decisions–choices that must be made that will create enduring conditions in the organization, such as important personnel decisions.

So, Birnbaum concluded, the organizations where ZBB or TQM or Benchmarking worked were probably the ones that had done a better job of those “nexus” decisions–in essence, they had a superior workforce that was capable of making a program yield results despite its inherent flaws.

That being the case, it’s probably a far better idea to do management by walking around, to do professional development in hiring practices for greater validity, and to rely on a variety of decision-making processes that are applied based on the importance, timeframe, and technical difficulty of any problem to be addressed.

Sadly, we aren’t seeing that much wisdom.

Or are you objecting to AQIP?

In any event, if you believe Deming to be a better fit, have you made that suggestion? How was it received?

Baldrige and Deming both inquire “How do you know? By what means?“