In November 2011, the Board of Education decided to put the city of Lawrence's public schools into receivership. With that announcement the power to install a receiver for the district was given to the state's education commissioner. The January appointment of Jeffrey Riley as receiver by the Education Commissioner was well received. Riley has experience as a Teacher for America and also as a principal of a challenging school. His work as the Chief Innovation Officer in Boston's schools was marked by a steady but persistent push for change.

So, yesterday the receiver and the commissioner made public the state's turnaround plan for the Lawrence Public Schools today with fanfare and much talk about urgency. The Lawrence Eagle Tribune lists key highlights of the state's turnaround plan for the city's public schools as:

• A requirement that starting in the 2103-2014 school year, all Lawrence public schools will be required to have a minimum of 1,330 school hours, adding 160 hours to the school year.
...
• Many of the changes will require a renegotiation of contracts for teachers in the district to accommodate for longer hours and duties.
• Funding for all the new initiatives will come from the school department budget.
• [...] Six principals have already been informed they won't be returning in the fall, a number of teachers will not be invited back.

Then there is the biggest change of all included in today's announcement:

Private education firms with proven track records of running successful charter schools in Boston, Chelsea and Lawrence will be brought in to take over management of Lawrence's worst schools, provide tutoring in two of the city's high schools and run a new alternative high school targeting dropouts.

Let's unpack exactly what this is and isn't. First, the private education firms we are talking about are charter schools and school operators--Unlocking Potential (UP), which has taken over what was the Gavin School (a district school) in Boston and changed its operation from inside the district; Lawrence Community Day Charter School (LCDCS), which is a longtime charter school operator in Lawrence; MATCH Charter Schools, an operator of three schools in Boston; and Phoenix Charter Academy, which operates a Chelsea-based school that focuses on putting at-risk students and dropouts on a college track.

• As is the case with the Gavin, UP will re-engineer the management and operations of a middle school;
• LCDCS will begin managing an elementary school;
• MATCH will provide tutors to two high schools; and
• Phoenix "will start a new alternative high school targeting dropouts."

All of this work will be done "within the system," that is, within the district and with unionized teachers but with carve-out agreements that will give the charter operators the flexibility to change the district schools for a period of years.

This is all good stuff to do, and the charter operators brought in are precisely the caliber of people with the level of commitment to get the job done... in the limited scope they've been given. But why is it that with such a dire reality in the LPS our education leaders still could not muster the courage to expand on the one proven mechanism for bridging achievement gaps--charter schools? Why couldn't the receiver and ed commissioner lead an effort to allow a special expansion of charter schools in Lawrence? Instead, this turnaround plan strikes me as a good initial step but a step in the continued dance of the adults who protect their turf and jobs and money.

If not, why insist that these charter operators tether themselves to the district schools and to the unions?

And isn't it odd that we are settling on a solution where at most these charter operators operating district schools will touch the lives of only 1,500 of the 13,000 students in the district? Put that up against the challenge recognized by the Massachusetts ed department and board when they declared Lawrence would be put into receivership:

Three-fourths of the schools in Lawrence experienced declines in student achievement from 2010-2011, and five of the 28 Lawrence schools are now in Level 4. District-wide performance in ELA and math is among the bottom one percent of all the state's school districts; Lawrence has the third lowest math Composite Performance Index (CPI) and fourth lowest ELA CPI in the Commonwealth. Less than one-half of Lawrence's students graduate from high school within 4 years, which is the lowest graduation rate of any (non-charter) district in the state.

The turnaround plan's second major element is an addition of 160 hours to the school year (that's around 4 weeks) -- and that could help. But the fact is that extended learning time efforts, as I have pointed out recently and admittedly to my own surprise, have not borne fruit five years into the experiment. So there is no empirical reason to be optimistic that in the Lawrence Public School setting additional time will translate into big gains.

And, after all, that's what this turnaround operation has to be about. It can't aim for modest improvement. The baseline is so low that any turnaround plan worth its salt has to aim for huge change.

I know the ed commissioner declared that he is "jazzed up about this" new plan. Perhaps he was referring to these two blogs (1 and 2) I did on how Lawrence should adopt the New Orleans model for a district turnaround.

Remember: Almost all of the money going into the Lawrence Public Schools come from the state. The money for the additional extended learning time proposed in the turnaround plan will be paid for by the state.

So let me summarize: The situation is dire, with a "four-year gradutation rat eof 52 percent in the 2010-11 school year, 31 points below the state average, and nearly a quarter of high school freshmen fail[ing] to be promoted to the 10th grade." The state pays for the schools and is going to pay more for extended learning time. Extended learning time has a poor track record in improving students' academic achievement in district schools. We have refused to expand charter schools, which are the only proven mechanism for bridging achievement gaps.

I wish the charter operators the very best and know they will work incredibly hard and make their important efforts successes. I wish the teachers in LPS the best of luck in making extended learning a success. I wish Jeff Riley the best of success in making progress on this plan, however limited it is.

But why is it, if the situation is as dire as the data suggest and as the parents themselves tell us, that the adults in the system always win out? Why not a deeper, district-wide transformation based on proven models?

This plan falls far short of the target, no matter how often our top officials crow about how they are bringing Lawrence schoolkids "the world-class education they deserve."

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

A round-up of various perspectives on Governor Romney's education policy announcement yesterday. I'll post later on today to help you navigate through the noise, but it is always good to have a broad set of perspectives when big announcements are made.

Here is the full education "white paper" entitled A Chance for Every Child and a list of the Romney education team.

Here is a transcript of Governor Romney's speech before the Latino Coalition’s Annual Economic Summit in Washington, D.C.

From today's Boston Globe, here is Matt Viser's article.

The Wall Street Journal's video take below:

Trip Gabriel's take in the New York Times.

And Paul West of the LA Times.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Dear David,

Congratulations on becoming the new head of the College Board. I know, as a Founding Father of the national standards effort, you may have read certain things I have written that you do not agree with. While I haven’t met you personally yet, I look forward to it. I have heard universally that you are a smart guy and reputed by all to be a nice person.

I hope you and the Coleman family are well, and I am writing to say I’m sorry.

In addition to writing about school innovations, charter schools, vocational technical schools, school choice, accountability to results, and teacher quality issues, I’ve written with some frequency about academic standards and curricula—and especially recently about the effort to advance national (Common Core) standards.

I’m sorry because I think I may have gotten some of the intentions of Common Core's supporters wrong. Considering the heavy hand of the Gates Foundation and DC-based trade groups and their support of an effort that violates three federal laws; the imposition of $16 billion in new unfunded mandates on states and localities; and the feds’ shoehorning of states into adopting mediocre/community college readiness academic standards; I thought there may have been a well-thought-through plan at work. I thought the fact that many of the same players were involved in the 1990s in similar efforts meant that they had learned from past mistakes and decided to bypass congressional scrutiny and state legislative processes.

I thought they (and by association perhaps you) were consciously flouting the rule of law, the Constitutional Framers, and 220-plus years of American constitutional history. After all, supporters of national standards know their history and what is legal and illegal, and why all this was a bad idea.

Well, I just watched this national standards promo video by a couple of Gates Foundation clients—the Council of Chief States School Officers (CCSSO) and the Jim Hunt Institute, what I have affectionately in the past termed the EduBlob (perhaps too often uploaded with cheesy 60s’ movie posters). The video features you and it illustrates to me how I was wrong on the question of intention.

The video (see especially 2:07 to 2:49) does not dissuade me from my view that the national standards are a mediocre race to the middle, or that they are illegal, or needless centralizing and expensive.

In it, you articulate how you would use Madison’s Federalist #51 to teach students and teachers about carefully reading primary sources like Madison’s work and how to understand concepts like “faction” as the authors themselves understood these terms. The video comes with a nice-looking pictorial text of Federalist #51 on the screen. Listening for a few minutes, I thought it sounded good, especially where you note:

I want to say a little more about what we mean by building knowledge through reading and writing. It doesn’t mean simply that students can refer to a text they’ve read in history and social studies and mention that in Federalist Paper 51 someone named Madison had some ideas about faction. To be able to read and gain knowledge to analyze that document would be as the [national] standards require to examine precisely what Madison said or didn’t say about faction and from reading that document carefully having a rich and deep understanding about precisely what Madison thought about faction. It’s about the close study of primary documents to understand from whence they come and what they might mean and not mean.

David, I think at this point it would be helpful to introduce you to James Madison. Another Founding Father—but he was a key drafter of the United States Constitution. He drafted the 10 initial constitutional amendments, which we call the Bill of Rights.

He was the co-founder of a major political party. Author of the Virginia Resolution. Secretary of State (1801-1809). Fourth President of the United States of America (1809-1817). Unlike a president before him (John Adams) and many after, even in times of existential crisis for the nation (the War of 1812, when Washington, D.C. was being burned by the British), Madison didn’t abuse executive power to abridge the US Constitution or the Bill of Rights. He knew better than most the power of the Constitution and was its faithful implementer.

Despite almost incomparable Founding accomplishments, Madison is best known for essays he, along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, wrote called the Federalist Papers, the most enduring articulation of American constitutional principles ever committed to paper. It’s the kind of stuff our kids (and we) need to know.

I’m not sure if Yale and Oxford, while you were there as a Rhodes scholar, forgot to tell you this, but Madison’s Federalist #51 isn’t about “faction.” I know you repeat this point over and over in the video tutorial. But, as any well-educated 10th-grader knows (at least in Massachusetts before we switched to the national standards), Federalist #51 is actually about checks and balances. Here’s the title and most famous lines from Federalist #51:

The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments

In order to lay a due foundation for that separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government, which to a certain extent is admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty, it is evident that each department should have a will of its own; and consequently should be so constituted that the members of each should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the others...

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition...

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

In fact, David, I hope you and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the Hunt Institute, and the whole swarm of national standards proponents will take the time to read Federalist #10, which, incidentally is the most famous of all of Madison’s works. The term “faction” is mentioned 18 times (including the title) and is the major topic of Federalist #10. Madison’s views on “faction” are thoughtful and far-sighted. Let me share a section with you:

The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection (continued)

AMONG the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. He will not fail, therefore, to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which he is attached, provides a proper cure for it...

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community...

No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time...

David, I truly hope you and other supporters of the Common Core will come to read the Federalist Papers and demonstrate the skills to understand James Madison’s original intent. I further hope you will gain the ability to reflect on the premises of the American constitutional republic. Perhaps close attention to the section of Federalist #10 regarding not serving as judge in your own case would help you and the Gates Foundation understand that advancing a policy with hundreds of millions of dollars and then paying others to support that view is a no-no. I am convinced that, with this reading and study complete, you will understand why national education standards are anti-constitutional, illegal, and violate the public trust.

In truth, when crafting the Constitution and the Federalist Papers Madison and the Framers very much had in mind the reckless ambitions of the recklessly ambitious. The drive to advance the Common Core outside the boundaries of the Constitution and legal restrictions is just what Madison had in mind. And the EduBlob represents exactly the types of dangerous “factions” whose “common impulse of passion, or of interest” were contrary to the public good and the “aggregate interests of the community.”

The next time you would like to opine about why you and others should set national standards, curricula, and testing for America’s 50 million schoolchildren, I would ask you to reflect on your and your peers' lack of even the most basic understanding of our Founding principles.

Respectfully,

Jim

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

The Education Reform Act of 1993 was a complex piece of legislation but its principal components are four:

• High academic standards for K-12 schools;
• Accountability through the MCAS test and a state office that performs audits on schools and districts;
• Improved teacher quality through rigorous testing of teacher’s mastery of the content in the state’s academic standards; and
• Expanded public school choices for parents through charter schools.

The subsequent history of education reform in Massachusetts has been an ebb and flow of implementation of these elements. It took until 1996 for the state to truly embark on any of the first three reforms listed above (and it took a long time and lots of public debate to move them ahead--one example). After 2001 charter expansions slowed to a trickle until the 2010 education law doubled the number of charters. After 2007, our academic standards were first injected with greater emphasis on “soft skills” rather than academic content and then switched for lower quality national standards; and the state’s school auditing office has been all but shuttered.

Two things are a constant throughout the history of two-decades-old reform effort. First, charter schools have proven over and over again in Massachusetts a high level of consistent performance and markedly higher performance than their district peers. Nothing has changed since a 2006 Massachusetts Department of Education report concluded that

In both English Language Arts and Mathematics, at least 30 percent of the charter schools performed statistically significantly higher than their CSD [ed. note: charter sending districts--i.e., district systems sending kids to charters] in each year with the exception of 2001.

That report goes on to observe that another 60 percent of charters were either as good or better than their district peers. As I’ve noted elsewhere:

A January 2009 Boston Foundation report shows Boston charters blowing the doors off of Boston district schools. To show you just how good their performance is, you might think about the impact of charters over middle school years as akin to bridging the gap between Boston public school performance and Brookline public school performance.

Not a bad outcome for people who cannot afford, or don't want, to move to Brookline.

That’s important as we see the effects of the 2010 education law doubling the number of charters. Boston will benefit greatly with up to 18 percent of its students in charter schools by 2016. We have thus far seen far less expansion outside of Boston, notwithstanding the fact that the 2010 law also increases the potential for charter growth to 18 percent in most major Massachusetts cities. (More on that another day.)

There is an additional constant in the state's history of education reforms, and that is choice options have been expanded beyond Commonwealth charter schools (CCS), which are highly flexible schools that operate without the requirement of teachers unions and oversight of local school committees. In additional to the CCS, we have seen a series of in-district efforts to gain the benefits of charters without sacrificing the interests of the adults in the system. Were it so simple…

We have seen pilot schools championed by teachers unions, Horace Mann (unionized, in-district) charter schools, Commonwealth pilot schools, and more recently innovation schools and extended learning time (ELT). The first three charter-lite options have not borne significant fruit. We are at the experimental stage with innovation schools and will know more within a year or two.

ELT is right about at the stage of development where we have to look ourselves in the face and make some hard choices. I understand the adults’ push for the charter-lite solutions. It keeps all the usual political alliances and interests intact; no difficult political decisions are necessary; and we can continue going to the same cocktail parties and cookouts. That’s important with the weather getting nicer just about this time.

As I wrote in a 2010 post,

I understand the political impulse to push ELT -- just more money and more time will solve the problem. Nothing against more time. If kids in Japan go to school more like 240 days a year, and we go 180, sure, there is no way we can keep up.

Intuitively, it makes sense, right? Reporters and radio journalists like Anthony Brooks of RadioBoston suggest that, in fact, charter schools have longer days, so longer days must be what makes them work.

But, before we jump to conclusions, let's ask the question: Do Massachusetts' ELT work? And are the results we are getting from these programs worth the $14 million a year we are currently spending on it. Roll the data. In 2010 the data, the data on ELT provided in Abt Associates' "Year 3" report suggested that

• ELT had a significant, positive effect on 5th grade science MCAS scores in year two, but no statistically significant effects on other MCAS outcomes in year one or two.
• ELT had a statistically significant, negative effect on school attendance in both year one and two.
• While very few students received suspensions or were truant, ELT schools had slightly higher rates of out-of-school suspensions in both years.
• 8th-grade students in ELT schools were more likely to use a school computer for school work at least once a month in year one, but not year two. ELT students were no more likely to spend > 3 hours a week on homework in year one, and less likely in year two. 8th grade students in ELT were no more likely to use a home computer for school work at least once a month, or two or more hours per week.
• 5th grade ELT students were less likely to participate in non-academic clubs at school (no other significant effects).
• ELT had no effect on 5th grade students’ perceptions about their relationships with teachers. ELT had no effect on 5th grades students’ perceptions of the learning environment offered at their school or level of school engagement.

That was an interim assessment admittedly covering only the first three years of implementation of ELT programs. Has anything changed in the two years since? Happily, Abt Associates has continued to update its reports. Unhappily, many of the key findings remain negligible. Consider, for example, page XVII of the "Year 5" assessment from Abt:

On average, there were no statistically significant effects of ELT after one, two, three, or four years of implementation on MCAS student achievement test outcomes for 3rd, 4th, or 7th grade ELA, 4th, 6th, or 8th grade math, or 8th grade science.

and

There was a statistically significant positive effect of ELT after four years of implementation on the MCAS 5th grade science test.

Those are quotes, folks. For all the activity and all the spending, there are few positive effects, save for the 5th grade science test. And, ahem, the positive effects on the 5th grade science test seem to disappear by the 8th grade.

Then there are negative effects. Both staff and students report higher levels of fatigue; students were less enthusiastic about school.

The Abt study design in the "Year 5" assessment is impacted by the involvement of both Mass 20/20 and Focus on Results, two organizations that are the state's biggest advocates of ELT. Some of the impact is helpful. The qualitative survey work with teachers notes high teacher satisfaction with ELT because it "allows them to accomplish their teaching goals and cover the amount of instructional material their students need to learn than would be expected in the absence of ELT." While that is almost tautological, it is also a fact that allowing the time to go more in-depth or cover more material, as determined by the teacher, is a good thing.

The influence of these advocates, however, may have led to some self-interested conflation between ELT as implemented by the state and other programs that are categorized as 'extended.' For example, the study often folds charter schools into the discussion as examples of places that have longer days on average. But the fact is that charters (especially Commonwealth charters) are so much more than that: they have a different approach to achieving teacher quality, different approaches to culture-setting and expectations, a more entrepreneurial bent, and a level of urgency that is unique given the "high-stakes" accountability they have for results. If they don't work, they get shut down.

ELT has some encouraging results in a few schools, but on an overall basis the results are not terribly encouraging. Are the results described above worth $14 million? Should we continue to fund it? Those are tough questions, I know. Let me pose the question in an even harder way: Given the success of charter schools and the less-than-inspiring results of ELT, would it be better to spend the $14 million funding 800-1,000 additional charter school students rather than spend the money on ELT? (Note: charter school students are funded at about $10,000 per student, with another slug of money going to pay districts for the loss of students.)

In the public sphere, choices to do one thing are often decisions not to do something else. It's decision time on ELT.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

In a previous job, I spent a lot of time in major Massachusetts cities outside of Boston. Cities like New Bedford and Fall River, with their stunning coastal views, and cities at the edge of Boston with so much potential like Lynn and Brockton, always intrigued me. But I have to admit to two favorites--Springfield and Lawrence. They are indeed among the most troubled, but they are both architecturally unique, with strong neighborhoods and muscular industrial histories.

Whenever in Lawrence, I would try to make it to Saint Anthony's Maronite Church or eat at Cafe Azteca. The smells in each place are enough to keep you going for days. A sensation similar to the "beignet haze" you get walking within 50 feet of New Orleans' Cafe Du Monde.

With the Lawrence Public Schools now in state receivership, a few recent posts have focused on what could and should be done there. I am decidedly against the idea of waiting for Superman and seeking a centralized solution from the new school receiver Jeff Riley, no matter how many good things I hear about him. We've seen that movie before with Michelle Rhee and other heroic reformers. They quickly get ahead of the local population and the embedded interests, and politically their attempts are pretty certain to meet resistance and failure. I've written extensively about the need to move away from that model of the heroic reformer who fixes all of the schools from the central office.

So, what to do?
#1. Recognize the problem
I have made it a point in recent posts to draw a direct parallel to Katrina, calling the Lawrence school receivership Massachusetts' "Katrina moment."

A few folks challenged that parallel, with, for example, Kevin Franck, communications director of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, tweeting this:

KevinFranck May 08, 2:13pm via TweetDeck

1,800+ people killed? RT @JimStergios: Lawrence district schools = Massachusetts’ Katrina #mapoli #edchat

So, Kev, let's run the numbers.

The unemployment rate in Lawrence is a whopping 15.8 percent. The unemployed/Underemployment percentage is almost certain to be 1 of 5 people, and the number of those who have dropped out of the workforce completely only makes the number more alarming.

The unemployment problem in Lawrence precedes the recession and is structural. In 2005 the unemployment rate stood at 9.8 percent. (See page 11 of this report.)

Median household income in Lawrence stands at less than half the average in Massachusetts (in 2009, $31,000 vs. $64,000), and household income for Hispanics in Lawrence, by far the largest ethnic group in the city, has been flat since 2000.

Poverty is deep and broad in Lawrence. Fully 37 percent of households in Lawrence earn less than $20,000 a year (vs. 16 percent for Massachusetts). That embedded poverty, just like the embedded unemployment, feels a lot like the structural poverty "discovered" in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina.

In fact, New Orleans' unemployment rate prior to Katrina was only 5.6 percent. Median household income in New Orleans prior to Katrina was $31,369; the percentage of individuals earning less than $20,000 was far lower than in Lawrence.

As is well known, the poor student achievement data and outrageous dropout data lead to poverty, embedded poverty, poor health outcomes and high crime levels, which can lead to death, physical and mental impairment, and the demise of a once-great city.

The toll in terms of crime has been enormous since 2000. There have been over 50 murders, 228 rapes (which are routinely underreported), 1,642 robberies, 4,080 assaults, 5,885 burglaries, and almost 10,000 thefts (not including the largest category of thefts, car thefts).

Take all of these factors and then remember that our Lawrence is a small, small city covering only 7 square miles and with only 76,000. New Orleans (the city and the parish) extends a massive 350 square miles; and boasted 450,000 residents just prior to the hurricane. Truth be told, Katrina affected the entire metro region (1.4 million residents prior to the hurricane) and well beyond.

The comparison stands. Perhaps people like Kevin would like to compare the state of Lawrence schools with those in New Orleans? Happy to have that conversation.

In Lawrence we have had dropout rates north of 30 percent for some time now.

And a lot of the above statistics are related to the fact that over 40 percent of Lawrence's population has less than a high school diploma. Another 30 percent have only a high school diploma, which, if it is from the Lawrence Public School system, is not likely to have provided strong grounding for later learning. So you have nearly 80 percent of the population of Lawrence with either no high school diploma or no more than a high school diploma.

Education is the driver for unemployment, crime and the inability of the city to attract or grow businesses or jobs. Lawrence's schools are as bad as anything in NOLA before the deluge.

#2. Think big but not centralizing

The solutions are there if we simply have the courage to avail ourselves of them. In places where the state chips in well below 50 percent of the local school budget, I can understand the pushback from local mayors, who complain about dollars lost to their big central school bureaucracies. I don't agree with it for a minute, but I understand the (backwards) logic that the dollars belong to the adults in the system rather than to the students and parents.

But in Lawrence, the state is paying for almost the entire $135 million (soon to be $150 million) school budget. Moving to the New Orleans solution (with nearly all of its schools now public charter schools) has raised student scores and improved a number of key academic and school-based metrics. Doing the same in Lawrence is a no-brainer. There is little, if any, local money being put into the Lawrence schools and therefore no reason for the state to hold back on charterizing the entire district.

The blueprint is here -- and the results for Lawrence's kids would, over time, change not only their lives, but the trajectory of a once-great city.

It's all possible, but our political and education leaders need to have the brass to choose that course.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

The 2010 Achievement Gap bill that was passed by both the House and the Senate and signed into law by Governor Patrick lifted the limits on charter schools and the number of students in them in districts that were failing to see improvements in student achievement. Rather than limiting the number of students to 9% in these largely urban districts, the law allowed up to 18% of students to attend charter schools.

The six-year period for the expansion up to 18 percent of students was not coincidental. It aligns with the six-year reimbursement schedule for districts, by which districts:

• receive 100% of the per-pupil funding for in the first year after a student leaves for a public charter;


• continues to be reimbursed for the “phantom” student in years 2 through 6 at 25% of the student’s per-pupil funding.

That’s a lot of extra state funding, which is in part why many parents and district educators in Lowell feared negative impacts from the closure of a charter school in the city a couple of years back.

So, what to make of today’s front page Globe story ballyhooing the state's decision to release 1,000 charter seats in Boston and 360 in Lawrence as a "charter school cap lift?

Is that good news and something to be pleased about? Yes, on the practical impact, but not so much on the politics and policy of the decision.

On the practical impact, there is plenty of evidence of the strength of Massachusetts’ public charter schools, and even greater evidence of the strength of public charters in Boston. Massachusetts' and Boston’s charters are in fact pretty unique in the level of consistency they have, which is testimony to the good vetting process in place for many years (something that needs closer scrutiny given reason to believe that political considerations have played a fairly significant role in charter approvals and rejections in Gloucester and Brockton).

So applaud the practical impact, with proven schools likely to expand in Boston and also in Lawrence.

On the politics, I can’t say that the release of the seats was a story for any reason except that the Commissioner of Education Mitchell Chester complied with the 2010 law. I am not grateful for that. He is expected to do that – it’s called the public trust.

The fact that he held up seats in the initial expansion was altogether understandable – but when the Department would make those seats available should never have been in question. It’s the law, and the fact is that the commissioner should have given a time certain for the release of the additional seats from the beginning.

Policy-wise, there is not much here. Lawrence has some of the worst-performing schools in the state—low student achievement in math, English, and science; scores that are not moving to anywhere close to acceptable levels; it has 30+% dropout rates. We know that’s not sustainable – and those facts affect most people and make them want to take real action, not just temporize and avoid responsibility.
But even from a purely financial perspective, the right policy is to take actions that have been proven successful. As Mark Vogler of the Lawrence Eagle Tribune recently reported:

Lawrence Public Schools' annual payroll will go over $100 million for the first time in the city's history in fiscal 2013.

A $4.8 million hike in overall salaries for the city's 2,000 School Department employees — due to step increases negotiated before the state placed the district in receivership — accounts for more than half of the $8.3 million increase in the proposed education budget for the 2013 fiscal year that begins July 1.

Nearly that entire eye-popping amount is paid for by the state. In addition, the state Board of Education stripped the local school committee of most of its powers and put the district in receivership, naming former Boston Public Schools official Jeffrey C. Riley Superintendent/Receiver. We own the problems of the Lawrence public school district.

Lawrence has some great charter schools, including the Lawrence Family Development Charter School and the Lawrence Community Day School. Given that, why are we just expanding 360 seats when there are 13,000 kids in the district?

Lawrence is Massachusetts' "Katrina moment." Let me put it another way to Massachusetts’ education officials: How would you respond to this crisis if your kids were in the Lawrence district schools?

They would respond just as the country did after Katrina, insisting on a new path for New Orleans schools – and one that has served the kids well, giving parents real choices and expanding charters to encompass nearly all the schools in the city. So here's the question I asked a couple of weeks ago – and it's a good one:

Lawrence has very good charter schools and could line up more charter operators very quickly. It also has the advantage of an existing network of high-quality parochial schools that could play a key role in changing the prospects of kids -- not after the successful execution of a five- or ten-year improvement plan but immediately.

Do we really have to wait for an act of god before we act?

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Massachusetts is a wealthy place. We are among the wealthiest states in the country, and the educational attainment of Massachusetts parents is well beyond that of parents in every other state. All this should point to high-powered students and schools in the Bay State.

In fact, “big thinkers” in education policy often point to those factors to explain why Massachusetts does so well on national and international assessments. In part, that’s true.

But what these big thinkers fail to see is that Massachusetts not only has risen from around 11th in the country on the national assessments to No. 1, but also that the performance of all Massachusetts student groups has gone up.

In fact, Massachusetts’ improvement in performance among Hispanic students is very much in line improvements in the states that have most concentrated on this issue, such as Florida (Florida’s improvement among Hispanics is a hair better and, ironically, they end up higher today in part because they started out ahead of Massachusetts due to pockets of highly educated immigrants).

However, the search for bragging rights is misplaced.

So let the games begin. Finally, the presidential candidates may get to education. For the greater part of a month, the presidential candidates have been sizing each other up, jabbing each other on jobs and the economy, who's more in touch with the average voter, and all sorts of distractions like who is waging that war on women and whether the president should play politics with foreign policy (as if that's anything new).

Given that education is a key factor affecting the country's ability to create jobs--and that it is one of the key sectors of public employment--you would have thought that education would have made the dance card a little earlier in the process. But no.

I’m conflicted about how to say this. Getting stuff done is about building relationships and trying to find ways to get along and in fact pulling the right people together toward a goal. But it is also about saying things straight and pulling no punches when what’s being debated matters a lot.