Children's Education Council of Missouri » Missouri Charter Schools

Missouri’s Race to the Top Application Hit on Limited Charters

earl — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 20:12:24 +0000

Race to the Top Reviewer’s Comments

Ensuring Successful Conditions for High Performing Charter Schools

Average of scores: 17.8 out of 40 possible points

Reviewers of Missouri’s $743.5 million Race to the Top application had numerous negative comments for the state’s application as it related to charter schools and state law restricting them to only the districts of St. Louis and Kansas City. Below are some of the comments taken directly from the review forms.

“Low points were given to this subsection because the Missouri charter school law has geographic and sponsor limitations.” – Reviewer #4

“Low points are given to the Missouri proposal on this subsection concerned with charter law because the Missouri charter school law has limits on both geography and sponsors.” – Reviewer #4

“The state has a charter school law that only allows charter schools to operate in Kansas City and St. Louis. Although a considerable percentage of students in these locations are in charter schools, the effect of this law limits the educational choices available to students who do not live in these cities.” – Reviewer #5

“Missouri’s charter school law is restrictive in that it limits the establishment of charter schools to locales with populations greater than 350,000 residents.” – Reviewer #1

“The geographic restriction for charter operations imposed by state law, has the effect of establishing a low cap on the opportunities for more charter school operations.” – Reviewer #1

“There are concerns about why charter schools are limited to two urban school districts…” – Reviewer #3

It is clear that in order to compete for Missouri’s share of this $4.35 billion federal program that the legislature must lift the geographic restrictions on charter schools immediately. SB 838 and HB 2200 both significantly increase the geography where charter schools could operate and increase accountability standards for authorizers beyond what the State Board of Education has requested. These two bills should receive fair hearings in each chamber’s education committees at the next available committee meeting. The Children’s Education Council of Missouri fully supports the passage of both of these bills.

Full scorecards and review sheets can be found online at http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/phase1-applications/index.html

Missouri Out in Round One of Race to the Top

earl — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:27:59 +0000

Missouri was not among the 16 finalists for the US Department of Education’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top competitive grant program. The news was delivered last week by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who named Colorado, Delaware, Washington, D.C., Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Tennessee as the top applications. Missouri had applied for nearly $750 million in the first round. Forty states and the District of Columbia also applied for the first round of funds. The winners will be announced in the first week in April.

While the scorecards and comments for each state’s application will not be available until April, not placing in the top 16 out of 41 applications is a clear sign that Missouri’s application did not go far enough toward implementing quality reforms. Noticeably absent from Missouri’s application was a push for expanding charter schools outside of the St. Louis and Kansas City school districts. While leaving charter expansion out of the application may not have been the “determining factor” in not making the finalists, ten states that were among the finalists moved to lift or raise caps on charters, or had strong charter laws already in place. Also, missing from Missouri’s application was teacher tenure reform, the main reason the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did not award Missouri a $250,000 grant to help with the application process.

Thankfully, there is still time in the legislature to pass legislation expanding charter schools to districts across the state. Missouri’s limitations on charters, allowing them only in the St. Louis and Kansas City school districts, is clearly an artificial cap that Secretary Duncan has repeatedly said would put a state at a disadvantage for winning the much needed funding. State Senator Scott Rupp and State Representative Scott Dieckhaus have sponsored legislation that would significantly expand charter schools throughout the state. These bills have yet to receive hearings in committee, but should now be a top priority of the Education Committee in both chambers when they return from Spring Break.

Passing charter school expansion during the remainder of the legislative session will show the US Department of Education that our state is serious about reforming education and competing for the second round of the program. Missouri Education Commissioner, Dr. Chris NiCastro, has already stated that the state will apply for round two of the program. Those applications are due June 1st and winners will be announced in September.

CECM Weighs In on Charter School Study for St. Louis Beacon

earl — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 22:22:01 +0000

Does school choice lead to resegregation?

By Dale Singer, Beacon staff

Posted 4:47 p.m. Wed., 02.24.10 – A new report on the racial makeup of enrollment in the nation’s charter schools says two goals seem to be colliding: deregulation and desegregation.

The research conducted by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA says that as more students attend classes in charter schools, which are funded by tax dollars but separate from traditional school districts, the ideal of integration too often has been ignored.

As a result, in the words of Gary Orfield, co-director of the project, “The charter school movement has been a major political success, but it has been a civil rights failure.”

Orfield, who wrote the foreword to the report — ”Choice Without Equity,” which was released earlier this month — called on the Obama administration to make sure that as it pushes for expansion of charters, civil rights considerations are not overlooked.

“I’m sure that a president who benefited from integrated schools and colleges and is a proud follower of Martin Luther King would not want to use federal funds to further accelerate resegregation of students of color or perpetuate inferior schools for those same students,” Orfield wrote.

“Many parents trapped in weak schools want a choice. We need to make certain that the choices are good ones, that they are fairly available to all, and that they provide, as much as possible, real paths into the mainstream of American society.”

But Orfield and the report’s conclusions have been disputed by charter school advocates, who say the researchers at the CRP reached their conclusions by misusing the data.

Specifically, according to Nelson Smith, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the numbers used to measure how well charter classrooms are integrated unfairly compare charter school demographics to those of entire metropolitan area school systems.

The result, Smith wrote on the alliance’s website is “a remarkably shoddy job.”

“Where we brim with pride at the million or so minority parents who choose to send their kids to charter schools,” Smith said, “the CRP — well, it pretty much ignores them. Where we know high-quality charter schools are addressing a profound civil rights issue — the denial of educational opportunity — the CRP sees them as part of the problem.”

CHARTERS OR MAGNETS?

One area in which the CRP report most heavily criticizes the efforts of many charter schools is the claim that they are exchanging more choice for parents and students for more segregated classrooms.

“We know that choice programs can either offer quality educational options with racially and economically diverse schooling to children who otherwise have few opportunities,” Orfield says in his foreword, “or choice programs can actually increase stratification and inequality depending on how they are designed.”

Among the many pages of statistics in the report, some about the St. Louis area stand out. Missouri law allows charters only in the cities of St. Louis and Kansas City. The 18 charter schools in the city of St. Louis enroll about 8,200 students, or 2 percent of the total enrollment of the entire metropolitan area, which includes school districts in the suburbs. (The latest state figures show St. Louis public school enrollment as 26,108.)

Of the population of charter school students, in the 2007-2008 school year, 87 percent was black and 9 percent was white, compared with 27 percent black and 69 percent white enrollment in the area’s traditional public schools. (In comparison, 81 percent of students in the St. Louis public schools are black.)

Two other telling statistics: In the St. Louis area, 83 percent of the charter school students were in schools that were between 90 and 100 percent minority, compared with 13 percent of the students in public schools.

Orfield, who was active in shaping and analyzing the St. Louis area desegregation program in the 1980s, said in an interview that he realizes charter schools are in areas with a large minority student population, so he doesn’t necessarily expect the racial makeup to be the same as that of the traditional public schools in the metropolitan area as a whole.

But, he says, he wants to make sure that stronger efforts are made to ensure that charter schools don’t contribute to the resegregation of classrooms.

“There are a lot of good people in charge of charter schools,” Orfield added. “I just don’t think this issue has been raised for them.

“We’re not saying every charter school needs to be diverse. We are saying there should be policies that say they should be diverse.”

He also says it is somewhat ironic that a movement like charter schools, which began as a way to provide more choice for parents who want alternatives for their children’s education, should wind up being less integrated than many of the public schools they are competing with.

“Our view is that schools of choice that are receiving public funds should be subject to the same civil rights laws and goals,” he said. “There is no reason to favor one form of choice over another.”

In particular, Orfield would like to see choice programs concentrate more on magnet schools, which he says have been shown to be more diverse and more successful academically, than on the expansion of charters.

“There’s lots of research, but no data, to show that charter schools are superior,” he said, “so if they are not superior but are more segregated and don’t have civil rights policies, why not change things around so there are more elements of choice? This seems like a no-brainer to me.”

And if charters are the choice of government officials, he said, they need to pay more attention to the racial makeup of the classroom.

“The civil rights laws haven’t been repealed,” Orfield said, “and the constitution hasn’t been changed. The laws are still there. There are people in the Obama administration who are serious about this. If they are going to pump more money into the system and encourage states to have more charter schools, they ought to attach serious civil rights requirements.”

CHARTERS RESPOND

Officials with the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education had no comment on the CRP report. But Cheri Shannon, executive director of the Missouri Charter Public School Association, noted that the geographical limits placed on charter schools in the state inevitably lead to the racial separation that the report cites.

“You can’t cross district boundaries,” she said. “It’s only Kansas City and St. Louis, so that is going to paint a very skewed picture of the school populations.”

Shannon noted that because charter schools are required to have open enrollment, they have no say over the makeup of their student bodies.

“We cannot discriminate on the basis of race, so our applications are neutral when it comes to race, to income or anything else,” she said.

“Schools don’t make a conscious effort to recruit all white kids or all black kids or all Hispanic children or all Asian children. I don’t know how you get around that, because you’d be in violation of the law.”

Her first reaction when she read the CRP report, Shannon said, was that as far as the charter schools in Missouri are concerned, the results are purely a result of demographics. She said that efforts to expand charters in the state are concentrating on removing the geographic restrictions, so families anywhere can take advantage of the charter option.

“Missouri is the only state that has geographical caps,” she said. “Lots of them have numerical caps — in New York, for example, there can be only 100 charter schools and that’s it, but they can be anywhere.”

Earl Simms, state director for the Children’s Education Council of Missouri, also pointed out that as the law is written, charter schools in the state have no discretion over who enrolls; instead, the student body is determined by lottery.

His group is working for expansion of charters in the state, to give parents more options over where to send their children. He said that if charters are expanded, the racial makeup of each school is likely to become more diverse.

“We’re supporting charter expansion in order to give parents another option for their child,” Simms said. “If they feel a charter better for their child, great. If they feel that traditional schools are better for their child, that’s great too.”

CECM was interviewed for a story by the St. Louis Beacon on a UCLA charter study which concludes that charter schools are leading to resegregation.

Click the link here to read the entire story.

Race to the Top Op Ed Published

earl — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:39:59 +0000

The CECM OpEd, Race to the Top Application Incomplete without Charter Expansion, has been published the publications below. Logos are links to each story.

St. Louis Post Dispatch

Columbia Missourian

St. Louis Globe Democrat

Education Equality Project

Southeast Missourian (Cape Girardeau, MO)

Springfield News Leader