Chalkbeat

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library keeps growing in Indiana but Marion County lacks full access

2024-08-23T18:46:14+00:00

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In 85 counties in Indiana, all children under age 5 can register to read free books delivered to their home through Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. That’s 31 more counties than a year ago.

But many children in the state’s most populous county, Marion, are still waiting for an Imagination Library.

Last year, the state announced a $6 million allocation to match local partners’ contributions to the Imagination Library. But right now, only two Marion County ZIP codes, 46201 and 46203 on the eastside of Indianapolis, can enroll in the program. According to the library’s estimates, that leaves more than 60,000 children in Marion County who need access.

By the end of the year, the staff at the library wants to close the gap and get more children reading earlier. It’s a goal that is personally important to many staff and partners as well as Parton, a singer and philanthropist and the program’s founder.

“This is for every child, no matter their income or where they live or what their parents do,” said Katie Mullins, community engagement coordinator for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library of Indiana. “This is a program that is for every child because [Parton] knows what it’s like to grow up without.”

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which started in 1995, gifts books to registered children from birth to age 5 across the United States and in four other countries. In 2022, the program mailed approximately 2 million books globally each month, according to its website. The organization partners with local affiliates in different states to provide the service.

To expand the program, the library requires affiliates with secured funding or a fundraising plan to pay for the cost of books. In Indiana, the state pays $1.10 for each book per child per month, or half the book’s cost, and the local partner is responsible for the other half.

That can be a challenge for ZIP codes with larger populations, like those in Marion County, Mullins said. In addition to Marion, Boone, Lake, and Morgan County don’t have all ZIP codes covered by the program. As of this month, Allen and Hamilton County have zero coverage.

In June, Gina Haile, an area director of United Way, helped launch an Imagination Library to cover all of Montgomery County. Paying for the program was the biggest obstacle, she said. She received grants for her library’s projected first two years of expenses, but so many kids signed up in the first few weeks that she predicts the funds will only last eight months.

“I laugh because it’s such a great problem,” Haile said. She’s happy to go find more money because “it’s just obvious our community wanted this.”

Gordie, age 6 months, from Noble County, Indiana, holds a Dolly Parton's Imagination Library book.

Most local affiliates need help with the library launch, Haile said, but after that, it’s easier to sustain funding. She believes partnerships between nonprofits, businesses, and local affiliates are the best way to achieve statewide coverage.

“It’s the initial start that is difficult,” Haile said. “The program and the mission and the vision and the impact will sell itself going forward.”

Mullins said the Indiana Imagination Library set the end of 2024 as the goal for statewide coverage because it will be the end of Gov. Eric Holcomb’s term. Holcomb prioritized expansion of the program as one of his early literacy initiatives.

To check county or ZIP code access or sign up for an alert when a program launches, use the Imagination Library’s lookup tool.

Haley Miller is a summer reporting intern covering education in the Indianapolis area. Contact Haley at hmiller@chalkbeat.org.

Gift from billionaire MacKenzie Scott seeds grant program to help Colorado’s youngest children

2024-04-17T22:10:02+00:00

A $2.5 million gift from billionaire MacKenzie Scott will jump-start a new grant program that aims to improve outcomes for Colorado’s youngest children.

Early Milestones Colorado, a statewide policy and research group, received the donation from Scott last year after what leaders there describe as an exciting and mysterious process. They used the gift to create the Impact on Equity Fund, which will begin awarding $100,000 grants this fall to Colorado organizations that work on prenatal and birth-to-3 issues.

The new grant program comes during a challenging moment for Colorado’s youngest children: Federal COVID relief funds for early childhood are drying up, and, in recent years, much of the state’s energy has gone toward 4-year-olds served by the state’s new tuition-free preschool program.

Jennifer Merva Stedron, executive director of Early Milestones Colorado, said the youngest Coloradans and their families need more help. She cited the state’s rising maternal mortality rate, mediocre toddler vaccination rates, and billions in economic losses because working parents can’t find care for babies and toddlers.

“It’s just not good enough,” she said. “We’re a better state than that.”

Merva Stedron said the new Impact on Equity grants — up to 10 this year — will be given to groups that propose innovative local early childhood efforts.

“We feel very, very firmly that those that are closest to the problem really have the solutions,” she said.

Early Milestones was one of at least three Colorado organizations that received gifts last year from Scott, a philanthropist who received a 4% stake in Amazon as part of her divorce settlement with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Valley Settlement, which provides a mobile preschool program and other services to Latino and immigrant families in the Roaring Fork Valley, received $2 million from Scott. Parent Possible, which provides home visiting and early learning programs to families with young children statewide, received $1 million.

Merva Stedron said she learned about the prospect for a major donation — though Scott was not initially named — when Early Milestones received an “out-of-the-blue” email in January 2023. The firm that sent the email, which she later learned vets potential recipients of Scott’s fortune, requested “loads and loads” of documents and an interview.

In the interview that month, staff from the firm told Merva Stedron, “If you don’t hear anything by the end of the year, you didn’t get a grant,” she said.

Even then, the Early Milestones team didn’t know who was giving out the money, how much was being awarded, or how much competition there was for the funds. Several months later, they learned the organization had been selected.

Merva Stedron, who hopes Scott’s donation will help attract another $7.5 million in donations for the Impact on Equity Fund, calls the money “a dream come true.”

Applications for the Impact on Equity grants are slated to open in June. Organizations can sign up here for notifications about the program.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat, covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Could a Newark early learning center funded by philanthropists be a model for child care?

2023-10-25T15:20:45+00:00

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At Clinton Hill Early Learning Center in the South Ward, everything is designed with the city’s youngest children in mind:

Many of the wall decorations are just 2 feet off the ground — the perfect view for infants and toddlers. The lobby overflows with plants and sunlight, the classrooms are filled with color, and the courtyard has climbing structures, toys, and, most importantly, padded flooring.

Clinton Hill Early Learning Center offers one solution for closing gaps in financing early childhood education. The center is funded by the Maher Charitable Foundation, a philanthropy that engages in early childhood education projects and policy efforts and has previously funded the expansion of Newark early learning facilities.

Maher built the $17 million Clinton Hill Early Learning Center, working closely on construction plans with community organizations Clinton Hill Community Action, Clinton Hill Community & Early Childhood Center Inc., and La Casa de Don Pedro. The three groups now share the responsibility of running the center day-to-day.

That partnership is helping provide some Newark families with access to state-of-the art programming and facilities at a time when infant and toddler care nationwide is both expensive and limited.

During the height of the COVID pandemic, federal funding helped to keep care centers operational. Now that money has expired, leaving many early childhood education and care centers struggling to stay open.

Khaatim Sherrer El, executive director of Clinton Hill Community Action, said the center’s goal from the beginning was to act as an example of what’s possible for Newark.

“We didn’t want to signal that we’re trying to put anybody out of business,” said Sherrer El. “We want to demonstrate what the children of Newark deserve.”

Early learning providers struggle without pandemic aid

The need for child care for Newark’s youngest children is great. The group Advocates for the Children of New Jersey reported that, as of March 2022, there was space for only about 18% of Newark’s infants and toddlers in the city’s programs.

Cynthia Rice, senior policy analyst for ACNJ said programs for infants and toddlers are both the most expensive to provide and historically underfunded. Now, the problem is getting worse.

“During and after COVID, the American Rescue Plan helped programs keep their doors open. But now, that money is gone. It had to be gone by Sept. 30,” said Rice.

Rice said the COVID-era relief funding primarily helped pay for staffers’ salaries. But without additional funds, early childhood programs are struggling to pay the number of employees necessary for infant and toddler care.

“You have one adult for every four babies. That’s what our regulations require, so it’s a lot more expensive than preschool,” Rice said.

The Century Foundation is calling the ending of the American Rescue Plan the “child care cliff” and predicts it will have severe consequences as child care programs adjust to the lack of funding. They expect that nationwide an estimated 3.2 million children will lose access to child care.

On Oct. 18, N.J. Gov. Phil Murphy announced that, in line with his administration’s universal preschool goal, $25 million in state funding will be awarded to 26 school districts to expand high-quality preschool programs. The funding, called Preschool Expansion Aid, will support over 1,715 new seats available by January 2024.

Rice said that while this is an exciting development for preschools, it won’t help programs that exclusively serve infants and toddlers.

Districts that applied for Preschool Expansion Aid were required to demonstrate their effort to include both Head Start and child care programs. Head Start is a federally funded program that supports low income families’ access to care or schooling for infants through 5-year-olds. Child care includes infant and toddler programming.

However, Rice said the state uses what is called a mixed delivery system, in which independent education providers contract with public schools in order to provide more seats for early learning.

Funding is given to school districts, which are then responsible for distributing the funds to contracted providers as needed.

Rice said certain groups seem to be taking priority.

“Many districts are applying for the money, but their engagement with child care and Head Start is not what we had hoped,” said Rice.

Between the “child care cliff” and funding distribution, Rice worries that programs specifically serving infants and toddlers could suffer financially in the coming months.

“Change will have to come from a federal, state, and local commitment to children. No city can do it alone. It’s just too costly,” Rice said. “But bringing attention to programs like Clinton Hill and engaging foundations like Maher can help advocate for what our children deserve.”

Children were the focus of Clinton Hill Early Learning Center’s design plans.

Maher models a solution for Newark’s youngest students

For years — after the state cleared homes and other properties for a school building that never materialized — the land Clinton Hill now sits on stood vacant. Then, in 2019, the Maher Foundation purchased the land from the state in an agreement to build an early education center.

Clinton Hill Early Learning Center opened its doors in March of 2022 and now serves 198 children — 48 infants and toddlers and 150 preschoolers. Families pay tuition on a sliding scale based on income, though many children attend free of charge.

Instruction at Clinton Hill Early Learning Center follows a research-backed curriculum, even for the youngest children. Sherrer El says calling the facility a learning center rather than a care center was intentional.

The center’s building also sets a high bar. While children enjoy bright colors and seemingly endless collections of books and toys, staff can access thoughtfully designed laundry, craft, and break rooms.

This fall, Maher received two awards in recognition of the center’s construction: A Smart Growth Award from New Jersey Future and a Community Builder Award from the New Jersey Institute of Social Justice.

Sherrer El said constructing an entirely new space, rather than repurposing an existing Newark building, allowed for more intentional design choices focused on kids.

One of his favorite things about the center is how engaged students’ fathers have been, a testament to the importance of having space set aside for parent engagement.

Many of the building’s classrooms are conjoined to foster collaboration between teachers, and some contain an observation room where parents can watch their young children play.

“We’re working on setting up a two-way mirror so that education researchers can use the space, too,” said Sherrer El.

Several of the center’s spaces are also available for public use. Teachers from other institutions may use a variety of resources, though Sherrer El said the lamination machine seems to draw the most attention.

Both Sherrer El and Rice hope that the center’s construction — and funding model — will serve as an example for other philanthropic organizations aiming to follow their lead.

Samantha Lauten is a fall reporting intern for Chalkbeat Newark covering public education in the city. Get in touch with Samantha at slauten@chalkbeat.org or reach the bureau newsroom at newark.tips@chalkbeat.org.

Mark Zuckerberg tried to revolutionize American education with technology. It didn’t go as planned.

2023-10-04T20:59:38+00:00

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Several years ago, Mark Zuckerberg had grand designs for American schools.

The Facebook founder and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, poured well over $100 million into an online platform known as Summit Learning that initially aspired to be in half of the nation’s schools. In 2017, Zuckerberg suggested that technology-based “personalized learning” could vault the average student to the 98th percentile of performance.

Fast forward to this summer: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the couple’s philanthropic arm, laid off dozens of staff on its education team and announced a shift in strategy. “Our understanding of what’s possible in the world of education — and in our world more generally — has changed,” Sandra Liu Huang, CZI’s head of education, wrote in an August blog post. “And so, at CZI, our education efforts must change too. Navigating these changes is humbling and challenging, but ultimately, necessary.”

It was an acknowledgement that the company’s prior education strategy had fallen short of its hopes. Through a spokesperson, Huang declined an interview request, but noted in her blog post that the company is continuing its work in education, albeit with a different strategy. “This moment demands not just investment but innovation — and that’s why we are building a team of experts and partners to identify opportunities where technology and grantmaking can drive coherence,” she wrote.

CZI’s shift in approach marks something of a coda to an era when various advocates and funders believed that computer-based “personalized learning” could dramatically improve education. Summit, CZI’s pet project, has not spread as far as once hoped, and there’s little evidence that it or similar efforts have led to the large learning gains that Zuckerberg envisioned. This gap between ambitions and results underscores the difficulty of using technology to dramatically improve America’s vast system of decentralized schools.

“People keep hoping that our technologies are the Swiss Army knives or steamrollers that they can do everything,” said Justin Reich, a professor at MIT and author of a book on the limits of technology in education. “Instead, our best technologies are very particularly shaped ratchet heads and the landscape of education is millions of bolts.”

A big bet on “personalized learning”

In 2014, Zuckerberg and Chan both visited Summit Public Schools, a Bay Area charter school network that had recently integrated technology into the school day. Zuckerberg was impressed and wanted to know how to scale their model nationally.

The following year, Facebook announced a partnership with Summit to help develop software that would be made available outside the charter network. “It came onto the scene with quite a bit of fanfare,” said Sarah Reckhow, a professor at Michigan State University who has studied education philanthropy. 2015 was also the year that Zuckerberg and Chan pledged to donate 99% of their Facebook fortune to charity, through the newly formed CZI.

Summit would be a key part of the couple’s education strategy. A case study from the time described Summit as a multipart model, which included time that students spent with an adult mentor, project-based learning, and “expeditions” in various fields like arts or computer science.

Summit also featured 16 hours a week of “personalized learning time.” Students worked at their own pace on a computer, which fed them a “playlist” of content where they learned specific skills. Students could move on once they got eight of 10 questions right on an online quiz.

That seemed to be the biggest draw for Zuckerberg, who contrasted the approach to “having every student sit in a classroom and listen to a teacher explain the same material at the same pace in the same way.” He suggested this could lead to transformational improvements in student learning. The goal, he wrote in 2017, was “scaling this approach to every classroom.”

Zuckberg was also a part of a $100 million investment in AltSchool, a private network of schools run by a former Google employee who hoped to spread innovations to the public schools.

At that point, the excitement was based more on hope than hard evidence. Still, Zuckerberg and Chan were hardly the only enthusiasts for technology-infused learning. Other funders, including the Gates Foundation, promoted similar ideas. (Gates is a supporter of Chalkbeat.)

“Personalized learning” had emerged as “a reliable buzzword in education circles, and right now, its star is rising,” wrote Michael Horn for Education Next in 2017. “Leading foundations, school networks, and nonprofits are putting it front and center in their efforts.”

Summit comes under scrutiny

Over the years, Zuckerberg ended up pouring large sums of money into Summit Learning. In April of 2019, The New York Times reported that CZI had made $99 million in grants to Summit. More recently, between 2019 and 2022 according to CZI’s grants database, the organization channeled $125 million to Gradient Learning, a nonprofit that now administers Summit.

These are vast sums in the world of education philanthropy.

Much of the money has gone to develop and maintain the Summit Learning Program and provide training to educators. Schools can receive the program and training free of charge.

Hundreds of schools have adopted Summit, and some parents say it’s helped their child. “Students who may understand a concept more quickly are able to move forward instead of having to wait for the rest of the class,” wrote Annie Thomas, a Colorado parent who defended the program in an op-ed last year.

But in other cases, parents complained about the newfangled approach to education or worried that students’ data would be shared with Facebook. (Summit says Facebook does not have any access to its data.) Some students said there was too much time on screens. In 2018, students at a Brooklyn high school walked out in protest, prompting a flurry of news stories. The following year, the New York Times published a piece featuring complaints from parents in Kansas. “We’re allowing the computers to teach and the kids all looked like zombies,” one parent told the Times.

It wasn’t clear how representative either the success or the horror stories were, though.

That’s in part because Summit struggled to produce evidence that its program was leading to the large learning improvement that Zuckerberg had hoped for. Summit declined to participate in a study of the program designed by Harvard researchers. (Asked about Summit’s effectiveness now, both CZI and Gradient Learning pointed to positive experiences in a number of schools, as well as a survey of school leaders in which nearly all said Summit had made a positive difference for their schools.)

Reich says the apparently varied experience of schools using Summit shows how contextual factors, like strong leadership or community buy-in, can make or break a school regardless of the technology. “Without all of the other things that the Summit Public Schools were doing to make that platform work, they were not scaling or transporting the most important parts of Summit,” he said.

Data previously obtained by Chalkbeat showed that 1 in 4 schools that began the program had dropped it by the 2018-19 school year, at which point just short of 400 schools were using Summit.

Presently, Gradient Learning says that over 300 schools are using Summit, indicating that in recent years more schools have left the program than have newly adopted it.

A post-pandemic pivot for CZI

In 2020, the pandemic thrust students online all across the country. It was a real-world experiment in the potential — and limits — of technology-based learning.

Zoom school was a struggle for many students and teachers alike. Test scores cratered. But the shift likely had the enduring effect of infusing more technology into the typical school day even when students returned in person.

More schools invested in laptops or tablets and tout that they are 1:1, meaning every child has a device. Some places have bought online learning programs in a bid to help catch students up. Some school districts have maintained fully online schools.

“Aspects of the technology-mediated ‘personalized learning’ do seem to be present in a lot of places,” said Reckhow. “It so clearly got accelerated by COVID.”

The scope and efficacy of these changes is not yet clear. But there’s little indication that this shift has delivered the large gains in student learning that Zuckerberg once touted.

And some of CZI’s own big bets have fallen short of its ambitions. By 2021, AltSchool had sold its schools and turned into a consulting firm. Most significantly, CZI now appears to be reducing its focus on Summit, apparently backing off of hopes that the model would spread to vast swaths of American schools. There are plans in place to “transition” the “core features of Summit Learning to a third-party platform,” CZI says.

What this means for Summit isn’t entirely clear. Both CZI and Gradient Learning have indicated that they are not giving up on the model altogether.

“We continue to have a firm commitment from the CZI team about their continued support of the Summit Learning program, in its current and future iterations,” according to an email sent to supporters by Gradient Learning, obtained by Chalkbeat.

Asked about CZI’s broader experience in education over the last several years, a spokesperson said, “Thanks to the work of our grantees and partners, more schools are embracing a whole-child approach to learning; educators increasingly have access to professional learning opportunities that incorporate the latest learning science research; and researchers and educators are developing new ways to measure student progress that more accurately reflect their full potential.”

CZI is not getting out of education. Huang, the company’s education head, said the company will now focus on “creat[ing] educational tools” that can help “address chronic learning and teaching challenges.” That includes exploring how artificial intelligence can improve education, according to a document obtained by Insider. (A spokesperson for CZI said in an email, “The public discussion about AI in education is evolving rapidly, and we are approaching it thoughtfully and cautiously.”)

John Bailey, a fellow at CZI and the American Enterprise Institute, recently wrote an optimistic essay about the potential of AI, with a headline that marked the end of one era and the dawn of a new one: “The Promise of Personalized Learning Never Delivered. Today’s AI Is Different.”

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott grants $1 million to Colorado early education nonprofit

2023-06-09T18:49:29+00:00

Billionaire MacKenzie Scott has awarded $1 million to a small, low-profile Colorado non-profit, whose leaders remain a bit stunned.

“The whole thing was very surreal,” said Heather Tritten, executive director of Parent Possible, which provides support for early childhood services. “When I look at who else has been funded in Colorado — organizations that are far bigger than Parent Possible, it feels very unreal that we were funded by MacKenzie Scott and that she wanted to invest in us.”

Parent Possible, which was founded in Colorado in 1991, works to equip parents with tools and education to prepare their children to learn. The nonprofit believes that investing in early childhood systems helps increase literacy and encourages students to graduate high school — which helps break the cycle of poverty.

It serves some of Colorado’s most low-income residents. According to its 2022 annual report, 87% of its client households earn less than twice the federal poverty limit. That would be less than about $49,720 for a family of three this year.

Tritten said Parent Possible was contacted in December to discuss a possible donation with an anonymous organization. In March, Scott’s foundation, Yield Giving, called to say it would donate $1 million to Parent Possible.

In the 15-minute conversation, they told her, “good luck with your organization and the important work you’re doing,” she said.

Tritten said the foundation will let Parent Possible use the funds for whatever is most important.

Scott, who as of last year was the fifth richest woman in the United States, has given away more than $14 billion since 2019. She has a 4% stake in Amazon as part of her divorce settlement with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. She has made waves in the world of philanthropy by making large gifts, including to schools and education nonprofits, with no strings attached. Last year, Scott gave $2.5 million to a Colorado Springs charter school.

The Parent Possible donation was announced this week.

Parent Possible provides 4,000 families with in-home visiting services and an additional 20,000 families in Colorado with virtual programs, like early learning education software and an app with learning tools and parenting help.

The app, called Vroom, was created with funding from the Bezos Family Foundation. It messages parents with suggestions for activities to do with their children every day.

Parent Possible provides some of its programs through partnerships with schools, family resource centers, departments of human services, and nonprofits. Its services are free of charge to Colorado families.

The home-visiting programs teach child development, how to promote the social and emotional development of young children and how to prepare 2- to 5-year-old children for preschool and kindergarten.

Parent Possible is still mapping out how to best use Scott’s donation to help the families it serves.

Tritten hopes to advance the group’s work and accomplish more than they had previously thought possible.

Sara Martin is an intern with Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Sara at smartin@chalkbeat.org,

‘We just hit the lottery’: MacKenzie Scott gives big to school districts

2022-11-16T00:38:16+00:00

Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has doled out more than $150 million to public school districts across the country — solidifying a spot among education philanthropy’s heavy-hitters.

“We’re still just trying to wrap our heads around it,” said Melissa Amon, superintendent at Cushing Public Schools, a district that serves roughly 2,000 students in central Oklahoma. “We feel like we just hit the lottery.”

This month, the school district received a $4.5 million donation from Scott, who on Monday released a list of 343 organizations that had received recent gifts. Though she did not disclose individual sums, she said the full amount totaled nearly $2 billion over the past seven months.

Among the organizations were a number of education nonprofits, charter schools, and over a dozen public school districts, including the districts in Chicago and Detroit. In her brief post announcing the list, Scott noted she had selected organizations that were “supporting the voices and opportunities of people from underserved communities.”

The donations won’t make up a significant slice of a school district’s budget. But large, unexpected, and unrestricted donations are rare. School district officials who spoke to Chalkbeat or publicly commented on the donations noted that the money had been given without limitations on its use — allowing the school systems to allocate it however they determined would be most effective.

Melissa Arnold Lyon, an assistant professor at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy who has studied education philanthropy, called it a departure from modern conventions.

“The venture philanthropy style, with [expected] returns on investment, often has very tight guidelines and a lot of top-down control over how the money would be spent and what the philanthropist should expect to see as a result,” she said. “A strategy that’s kind of like, ‘Here, I think you’re worthy, and here’s some money, spend it as you need to,’ is much more reminiscent of the older style of philanthropy.”

In Cushing, district officials are looking to use the donation to continue programs that they have been funding with federal COVID relief money — like expanded tutoring, transportation, and after-school programs.

“To be honest, right now, we’re still just trying to completely wrap our brains around getting this money and what it’s going to look like,” Amon added. “We’re sitting down with some of our stakeholders and trying to figure out what other programs might be useful for our kids that we don’t have — looking into additional mental health supports, or even school nurses — things that haven’t even been on our radar up to this point because it just wasn’t financially possible.”

Detroit’s public school district received $20 million, and officials said Tuesday that it will use the funds to help students struggling with reading and math. “This will come with the hiring of more academic interventionists to work with students one on one and in smaller groups,” Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said in a statement.

While not all school districts disclosed the amount of money they had received by Tuesday, contributions to the 10 out of 16 districts that did provide figures totaled at least $159 million.

The large and widespread donations will likely draw attention from other organizations and schools, Lyon added, noting Scott was “definitely making a splash.”

“Other organizations are going to be wanting that money, and they’re going to look at the list and they’re going to try to make some sense of, ‘What do we need to do to get on that list?’” she said.

What other school districts received gifts

In Texas, Killeen Independent School District received $18 million, while Grand Prairie Independent School District received $16 million.

North Carolina’s Durham Public Schools received $18 million. Kentucky’s Jefferson County was gifted $20 million.

Chicago Public Schools received $25 million, while local charter school networks took in an additional $23 million.

In California, Fresno Unified School District received a $20 million gift, while Escondido Union School District received $16 million.

White River School District 47-1 in South Dakota received $1.5 million.

A spokesman for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District in Ohio declined to say how much money the district had received, stating only “We are excited to be selected as a recipient” and that an official announcement was forthcoming.

Tacoma Public Schools in Washington, Lindsay Unified School District in California, Santa Gertrudis and South Texas Independent School Districts in Texas, and Marion County School District in Mississippi also received donations.

The school districts did not immediately respond to Chalkbeat requests for comment.

Lori Higgins contributed reporting.

Haslams want to hire a thousand college students to tutor Tennessee children this summer

2020-05-12T16:08:38+00:00

A new Tennessee Tutoring Corps aims to recruit at least a thousand college students to provide summer tutoring for elementary-age students whose education has been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

Funded by the family foundation of former Gov. Bill Haslam and his wife, Crissy, the program will run from June to August in partnership with organizations representing nearly 90 Boys & Girls Clubs across the state, from Memphis to Bristol.

The goal will be to stem learning loss for up to 5,000 students from low-income families who participate in Boys & Girls Clubs.

At a price tag of about $1 million, the program marks the first major statewide investment in addressing learning loss due to the public health emergency. The Tennessee Department of Education is reviewing how best to spend up to $26 million in federal funds expected to arrive this summer to respond to COVID-19 for needs that range from technology, to summer and after-school programs, to mental health services.

Research shows the pandemic will significantly worsen summer slide, a learning phenomenon that occurs between school years when low-income students tend to lose ground in reading and math. Meanwhile, their more affluent peers tend to make slight gains through enriching activities like travel, summer camps, and outings.

“The summer slide is a very real problem,” the former governor said in a statement Tuesday. “With students being out of school for so long because of the coronavirus, this year could be more of a summer avalanche.”

Additionally, the program wants to leverage the talents of college students, about a third of whom have lost summer internships because of COVID-19. Tutors will be paid stipends of up to $1,000.

“We hope to attract students who care about their communities, about making a difference during this difficult time, and about helping younger students learn and grow,” said Crissy Haslam, a literacy advocate during her husband’s eight-year administration that ended in January 2019.

The tutoring sessions will be conducted in person, not via digital devices as some other summer learning programs are doing during the public health crisis. Organizers say the Tennessee Tutoring Corps will show deference to how communities are reopening their economies.

“Flexibility is an important part of launching this initiative,” said Alexia Poe, a spokeswoman for the foundation. “Reopening will look different in different parts of the state, and we’ll be mindful of that and make adjustments accordingly. The Boys & Girls Clubs have protocols in place that will apply to this program and program tutors and participants.”

About 10% of the organization’s clubs are currently open, while the others are determining when to reopen, said Ryan Hughes, executive director of Boys & Girls Clubs in Tennessee.

Clubs now in operation are conducting temperature checks, using face masks, elevating cleaning practices, and limiting the number of people in each program space.

“Safety is our No. 1 priority while we seek to fulfill our mission,” said Hughes. “Summer slide is an issue we focus on every year, and this partnership allows us to double our efforts at a time when it’s especially needed.”

Candidates to serve in the corps must currently be enrolled in college and pass a background check. Preference will be given to students who have a 3.0 GPA or higher, have completed at least their freshman year, and are Tennessee residents. The deadline to apply is 11:59 a.m. EST on May 29.

Will COVID-19 change the norms of education philanthropy? We hope so.

2020-05-08T14:00:00+00:00

In the midst of a crisis, there is a tendency to look for rays of hope for a better future. In the case of the coronavirus pandemic, we are optimistic that some of the temporary changes we are seeing in how the philanthropic world is operating now might lead to long-term improvements in educational giving.

Prior to our current roles at The Moriah Fund, a private foundation with a goal of improving access to quality educational opportunities for at-risk students, we worked in and ran education nonprofits. In those roles, we experienced extreme difficulty in getting nonprofits to work together toward shared or overlapping goals.

We attributed this to the fact that so many nonprofits were competing for the same scarce dollars from the same foundations. Many of those foundations, meanwhile, didn’t incentivize nonprofits to help one another. In fact, the way it worked meant that nonprofits with similar goals often missed opportunities to work together and, at times, even worked at cross purposes in order to try to distinguish themselves in the eyes of their funders. And since funders have far more power in these interactions, the onus is now on us, as philanthropic partners, to create the conditions that lead to coordination and collaboration, not competition.

At Moriah, even before the outbreak of COVID-19, we were trying to find ways to approach our work differently and see what we, as a modest private foundation, could do to help.

As the outbreak began, we immediately reached out to our grantees, nearly 60 in all, to see if they needed Moriah to accelerate our grants and get them money now, versus in our typical June and December grant cycles. Needless to say, we ended up paying out more than 60% of our 2020 grants before the end of March — much sooner than we otherwise would have and often without proposals in place until after the checks were cashed.

In addition, we convened all of the grantees from our education program on a recent weekend for what we’re now calling our Saturday Check-in. With one grantee presenting a current challenge to the group, leaders from our other organizations had an opportunity to weigh in and offer expertise and resources. In our inaugural call, Josh Thompson, CEO of Civics Unplugged, a new youth empowerment and leadership organization, received advice from seasoned nonprofit executives including Education Reform Now President Shavar Jeffries, Teach for All CEO Wendy Kopp, CityBridge Education chair and founder Katherine Bradley, and Jon Schnur, senior advisor to Bloomberg Philanthropies.

While this may not sound revolutionary, it’s getting some very promising results, and we hope those new connections will benefit these organizations and the people they serve well into the future.

On the other side, we are also seeing much more cooperation among philanthropies themselves.

A new collaborative of nearly two dozen foundations is meeting several times a week to share data on how COVID-19 is affecting the vulnerable populations served by the nonprofit sector and information on funder investments meant to address challenges arising from the pandemic. This includes sharing previously tightly-held information on giving strategies, likely grantees, and even discussions of shared requests for proposals. Some foundations are pooling resources to assist with the emergency response, too.

These changes will help ensure that a wide variety of COVID response strategies are funded, and may help streamline the workload for overburdened grantees. This information-sharing and testing of assumptions is growing our knowledge and improving our understanding in a way that will inform our future giving.

This level of transparency and collaboration won’t be easy to maintain after this national emergency. But it would be worth the effort.

While so much about this pandemic is truly heartbreaking, we see this time as a tremendous opportunity to approach our work with a fresh set of lenses. For that, we are grateful.

Gideon Stein is Chalkbeat’s treasurer and president of The Moriah Fund. Alice Cain is the senior program officer at The Moriah Fund and a former delegate in the Maryland General Assembly.

Summit Learning emphasizes role mentors play amid ed tech pushback

2020-02-14T21:17:16+00:00

CHICAGO — Teacher Traci McCullough sat beside an eighth-grade student, her laptop open, scanning the notes he had left her ahead of their mentoring session. Lots of complaints about science, she noted.

“Without teacher-bashing, what is the deal?” asked McCullough, who teaches English and history.

As the student started to explain, McCullough clicked through a computer program. He hadn’t submitted a science project on time, she saw, hurting his grade. She nudged the student to email his science teacher.

“We’re going to word this correctly — you get more flies with honey than you do vinegar,” she said. “I would start off with what you have done, and then build off of that and what you need help with.”

“Science is not my specialty,” the student said, as his classmates worked independently on math problems behind him.

“But this looks good,” McCullough said, pointing to a chart he’d made for another assignment. “Give yourself some credit.”

The interaction took place earlier this week at Chicago International Charter School Bucktown, an early adopter of Summit Learning, the Mark Zuckerberg-backed “personalized learning” program that launched five years ago and is now used in some 400 schools across the country.

That kind of one-on-one communication between teachers and students is increasingly at the heart of Summit Learning’s public pitch, as it tries to make its way into more schools amid skepticism about students’ screen time and pushback in schools where some say the program relies too heavily on computers.

“This is this concrete thing that the schools that are part of the Summit program actually do,” said Sarah Reckhow, an associate professor at Michigan State University who studies the role of philanthropy in schools. “And mentoring is very popular. Who doesn’t want their kid getting one-on-one attention?”

Students who attend schools that use Summit Learning split their time by working on group projects, completing self-directed work on computers where they move at their own pace, and receiving traditional classroom instruction. When students are working independently, teachers can meet one-on-one with students.

The platform, which is free for schools to use, was developed with the help of Facebook engineers and has received tens of millions of dollars in funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic organization backed by Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. (CZI also supports Chalkbeat.)

Summit Learning formalized the mentoring component in the summer of 2018 when it added a tool allowing teachers to automatically schedule time with students and offering agendas to structure that time, said Kate Bondurant, a spokesperson for TLP Education, the nonprofit that runs Summit Learning. TLP recently took over the program from Summit Public Schools, the charter network where the model was first created.

More recently, the organization has placed a heavier emphasis on marketing the mentoring aspect of its program. Newspapers across the country have run opinion pieces about mentoring and Summit Learning over the last month and a half, bylined by local educators. Some contain identical or nearly identical language.

“Reaching students is bigger than just one teacher and one student; it builds a culture of learning with students at the wheel,” wrote two Nevada teachers from a school that uses the program.

“Mentoring is bigger than just one teacher and one student. It builds a culture of learning with students in the driver’s seat,” wrote a Washington teacher at another Summit Learning school. An Idaho teacher from a third school using the program wrote the same thing.

A spokesperson for TLP Education did not respond to a question about the similarities.

“While mentoring is an important part of the Summit Learning program throughout the school year, National Mentoring Month was a special time for teachers and students to highlight the importance of mentoring and celebrate the successes they are experiencing as a result,” Bondurant said, noting the organization marked this event last January, too. (The month was established in 2002 under President Bush.)

Summit Learning’s focus on mentoring is part of a larger trend among advocates of personalized learning to de-emphasize technology in their communications. It’s also not necessarily unique — schools across the country have created intensive advisory periods or mentoring roles.

But teachers like McCullough say the specific tool helps. McCullough, who was recognized by her school for her mentoring work and later was highlighted in a CZI press release, has 15 or so mentees who she meets with for around 10 minutes every week or every two weeks, though it can be more if the student needs more attention.

Though she’s always been the kind of teacher who gets to know her students, Summit Learning’s tool offers useful structure for her notes and ensures there is dedicated time in her school’s schedule for checking in with her students, she said.

“You talk to kids all day, you don’t remember what you say sometimes,” she said. (Still, she acknowledged that sometimes she opts to log her notes in a Google Doc and paste them into the Summit Learning tool later.)

A TLP Education spokesperson would not provide data from surveys given to students and teachers nationwide about the platform, and there has been no external research on its effectiveness in schools.

Sophia Halkias, an assistant principal who oversees curriculum and instruction at CICS Bucktown, said while mentoring is “a smaller piece” of the Summit Learning platform, it “makes the most impact.” The school was already mentoring students before the introduction of the tool, she said, but teachers were creating their own questions and logging their interactions with students in spreadsheets. Now, she said, the tool poses questions automatically and they match up with where the student is in the school year.

“I wouldn’t say technology is the reason why we’re able to mentor,” Halkias said. “It’s just a way to enrich the conversation that would be happening without technology.”

Mike Feinberg, out at KIPP after sexual harassment and abuse allegations, continues work in education reform

2020-01-09T20:52:17+00:00

Mike Feinberg, who was fired from the KIPP charter network he co-founded in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment and abuse, continues to work in the charter school sphere, both nationally and in Houston.

Feinberg, who has denied the allegations and sued KIPP for defamation, has worked to help start new charter schools in Texas and is also employed as a consultant by the Center for Education Reform, a D.C.-based nonprofit that backs charter schools and private school vouchers.

“I’ve never been guided by a group think mentality, and whatever KIPP believes or alleges about Mike is absolutely not my experience nor a concern,” Jeanne Allen, the CEO of the Center for Education Reform, told Chalkbeat in an email. “I have known plenty of people in this life who have been accused of myriad things that turned out not to be true.”

Allen, who says she has known Feinberg for many years, said he is managing the organization’s rural education initiative and creating content for a project aimed to increase D.C. charter school students’ “appreciation for this country’s founding.”

Feinberg has also drawn support locally in Houston, where he founded KIPP more than 25 years ago. He’s served as a consultant to an effort by a local furniture company to open three schools in North Houston.

“Until the allegations are proven he’s innocent to me,” Jim McIngvale, who founded Gallery Furniture and is a longtime KIPP donor, told Chalkbeat. “I’m loyal to people.”

Feinberg was fired in February 2018, with KIPP citing an investigation into sexual misconduct. Court filings in late 2019 offered more detail: A former student claimed that he sexually assaulted her under the guise of a medical exam, and a former KIPP employee said he offered her money in exchange for sex, according to an investigation by an external law firm.

McIngvale said that Feinberg would not be involved in the schools’ day-to-day operations.

”My role has been to help [McIngvale] connect educators and industry leaders to ensure more people in his store’s community have the skills to get and keep great jobs,” Feinberg said in an email.

This work is connected to Texas School Venture Fund, the organization Feinberg launched soon after he was fired to help individuals, particularly KIPP alumni, start charter schools.

The organization’s board of directors includes Chris Barbic, the founder of the YES Prep charter network and now a partner at The City Fund, and Howard Fuller, a longtime school choice advocate recently in the news for challenging Elizabeth Warren’s plan to limit charter schools.

Neither responded to requests for comment.

Fuller previously told Chalkbeat that he did not believe the allegations against Feinberg because he had denied them. “Mike is a very close friend of mine,” Fuller said in 2018. “Mike said he did not do it.”

Laura and John Arnold — Texas billionaires who have supported the growth of charter schools and KIPP in particular — donated personally to Texas School Venture Fund in 2018. A spokesperson for Arnold Ventures would not disclose how much the Arnolds gave, but did say they have made no donations since. (Chalkbeat is supported by Arnold Ventures.)

Tax filings from 2018 indicate that Texas School Venture Fund had taken in $320,000 in revenue. Feinberg declined to identify other donors.

It’s unclear how much school planning work Texas School Venture Fund has done. It did serve as the fiscal agent for a proposed charter school in Houston that was spearheaded by early KIPP alumni. (The school was not approved by the Texas Education Agency.)

“Texas School Venture Fund has been working with various educators, parents, and community organizations to help plan the creation of new types of schools where existing schools are not serving all the children well in certain communities,” Feinberg said. “These new school plans range from community-based schools to Career-Tech schools to special needs schools.”

Feinberg maintains a valid teaching certificate in the state of Texas, but state records indicate it is currently under review. Feinberg said that review will take place next month, and there he expects to “finally receive due process.”

A spokesperson for the Houston Police Department said he could not comment on whether Feinberg was under any sort of criminal investigation. Feinberg said he had not been contacted by the police about any allegations against him.

Late last year, KIPP moved to dismiss Feinberg’s defamation suit. A hearing on KIPP’s motion is scheduled for next month.

More charter operators are offering a plan B to alumni who drop out of traditional college. Will it work?

2020-01-08T16:55:15+00:00

Since he was a young child, Nick Chapa’s teachers told him over and over: you’re going to college.

That focus on higher education drew his family to IDEA’s flagship charter school in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, where students receive years of coaching in preparation for the college admissions process. But when Chapa actually got to college in 2009, his plans unraveled.

Struggling with deadlines and the anxiety he felt during exams, Chapa dropped out after his first year. After Chapa and his wife had a son, Chapa re-enrolled, hoping a change in major would help. But he left again after a semester, continuing his part-time job at Toys ‘R’ Us.

Then Chapa got a call from an administrator affiliated with the IDEA charter network. She told him about a new college program called IDEA-U that would allow him to take his coursework online with the support of a coach. Chapa signed up.

“I figured I didn’t have anything to lose,” said Chapa, now 28. “I guess I was desperate at that point.”

Chapa is now part of a growing effort by charter school operators to help their graduates earn college diplomas in a nontraditional way — by overseeing some of the college experience themselves.

By partnering with Southern New Hampshire University, which enrolls tens of thousands of students from across the country in its low-cost online college programs, the charter operators are coaching students through college. The university provides the coursework and confers degrees, while an arm or affiliate of the charter networks recruits and mentors students.

The Noble charter network in Chicago launched its partnership last year, following the IDEA network in Texas and Match Charter School in Boston. Together, the three programs now enroll nearly 1,000 students, and other charter operators say they’re watching closely.

It’s a notable extension of those networks’ mission, which for years has been to send their mostly low-income students of color to college. More recently, though, it’s become harder to ignore the reality that many of their alumni are leaving higher education without degrees.

“It’s clear for students who stay in college and complete how that support looks through our alumni counseling, but it just didn’t feel like we were doing enough for the students who were ‘stopping out’ of college,” said Eric Rapp, who oversees Noble’s program. “We saw this as an opportunity to provide something different and new and innovative to help re-engage those alumni.”

If successful, these programs will provide students another chance to earn a degree that could bolster their financial futures, while also boosting the charter networks’ college completion rates.

“Just like the charter school movement has been able to successfully set a new bar for student achievement” for K-12 students, said Phillip Garza, the chief college and diversity officer for IDEA Public Schools, “we believe that IDEA-U could set a new bar of access, persistence and completion rates for low-income, first-generation, minority students” in college.

So far, though, students in the programs have earned only a few dozen bachelor’s degrees. And the expansion of these programs worries some observers, who question whether students are getting a high-quality college experience — and whether the degrees students do earn will pay off in the job market.

How it works

IDEA launched IDEA-U in 2017 with around 40 students, including Chapa. Now, the program has around 400 students from across Texas enrolled, about half of whom are IDEA graduates.

Around 95 students are enrolled in Noble’s program, known as Noble Forward, which launched last year. Nearly all are graduates of a Noble school in Chicago.

Match’s program, initially called Match Beyond, began in 2013 by enrolling mostly Match alumni, but was spun off as a nonprofit called Duet in 2018. It now serves around 500 students who graduated from high schools across the Boston area.

The programs differ slightly, but the academics work the same way. Students enroll in one of a handful of “competency-based” degree programs offered by Southern New Hampshire University and progress by completing projects designed to show they’ve mastered key skills.

There are no lectures, professors, or class discussions, but students are assigned readings and videos. Students work at their own pace — instead of on a set academic calendar — re-submitting projects as many times as they need, though the university says students average around two tries. Their projects are evaluated by a university “reviewer” with at least a master’s degree.

“It very much feels like a workplace scenario where your boss is probably not going to give you a lecture before sending you out on a project,” said Amy Stevens, who oversees these programs for Southern New Hampshire University.

The charter networks then offer students an additional layer of academic and personal support. IDEA-U requires its students to come to its facility — open late and on Saturdays — for 12 hours each week, in addition to an hour-long meeting with their coach. In Chicago, Noble Forward coaches hold their one-on-one meetings at a public library or in a rented space that resembles a cozy bookstore.

In December, coaches Yara Shadid (left) and Angela Crawford Neven (center), and director Eric Rapp, work at the space Noble rents to run the Noble Forward program.

One Wednesday night in December, 25-year-old Afrodita Salgado met with her coach at a library in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. Salgado’s 5-year-old daughter, Amelia, came too, wearing a T-shirt that said “Mama’s squad” and doodling as the adults reviewed her mother’s progress.

Salgado graduated from a Noble high school in 2013, and recently earned her associate degree in science from a Chicago community college. She hoped her next step would be the University of Illinois at Chicago, a four-year public university.

But she works full-time as a school clerk in addition to caring for her mother and daughter. At community college, most of her classes were held at night — still, she sometimes had to bring her daughter along — while most of the classes she wanted to take at UIC were in the morning. That schedule, plus the knowledge that her Pell Grant wouldn’t have covered the tuition, made her open to other options.

She enrolled in Noble Forward in October after learning about it from a family member and fellow Noble graduate.

“With this I can actually turn in quality work, instead of whatever I have at the moment,” Salgado said. “I do like having the interaction with teachers, but I feel like for me, right now, this is what’s going to work.”

The flexibility of online courses can keep students from falling through the cracks of a higher education system not designed for them, the charter programs say, whether they’ve struggled academically like Chapa or found the logistics of attending class daunting, like Salgado.

The additional support from coaches also makes a big difference, several students said. Southern New Hampshire University gives its partners access to data about when students are logging in and how many times it takes them to master a project, so coaches can see when students are struggling.

Angela Crawford Neven, who coaches Salgado and others in Noble’s program, said she sends lots of reminder texts and makes lots of check-in calls, assuring students they can restart their coursework even if they fall behind — a message they likely didn’t receive during their previous attempts at college.

“There are things that are going to come up: transportation or family issues or access to technology,” Crawford Neven said. “My main goal is to build a solid, strong foundation in a relationship so that they can feel comfortable coming to me with any of those issues.”

The cost factor

Southern New Hampshire’s partnership programs have another critical advantage: they are affordable.

IDEA-U costs $5,500 a year. Noble Forward costs students $6,000 a year, while Duet costs $7,000. That’s low enough that federal Pell Grants for low-income students cover most or all of the tuition. Southern New Hampshire University also offers scholarships to undocumented students, who don’t qualify for federal financial aid.

Students pay tuition to Southern New Hampshire University, which sends back a portion of that money to the programs to pay for the coaching and other wraparound support. Duet gets 57%, while IDEA-U and Noble officials both say they get around 40%.

The low cost can be especially appealing for students who have already accumulated student debt or previously defaulted on a student loan. Students who return to school are often under intense financial pressure, typically working and caring for children or other family members. Nearly all Noble Forward students work full-time, for example, and about a quarter are parents.

Students sometimes still struggle to pay. For this reason, Noble awards scholarships to cover transportation costs and emergencies, like a missed internet bill, while IDEA offers one-time, no-interest loans funded by donations from IDEA employees.

But the low cost also reflects what the students are getting: a pared-down academic experience that doesn’t involve many of the hallmarks of college.

Johann Neem, a history professor at Western Washington University who recently wrote a book about the purpose of college, worries that programs like these focus too much on helping students get a degree at the expense of experiences like building relationships with professors, exchanging ideas with other students in class, and completing hands-on research in labs.

“This is college reduced of so much of what makes college valuable for people’s hearts and minds,” he said of Southern New Hampshire’s online competency-based programs. “If that’s all people are getting from this, a degree … without the kind of rich intellectual experiences that traditionally have given that piece of paper value, we’ve done something wrong. We’ve cheated people.”

Instead, he said, universities should invest in making a liberal arts education more accessible to low-income students who want that, but need a more flexible schedule. States and the federal government could also spend more to help that happen.

Paul LeBlanc, the president of Southern New Hampshire University, has defended the program against this criticism before, saying it incorporates aspects of a liberal arts curriculum. The partners also try to make up for some of the missing socialization. IDEA-U, for example, holds monthly events for students. And others who’ve worked with Southern New Hampshire University, like Mike Larsson, who co-founded Duet and is now its CEO, argue that the curriculum is high-quality and rigorous.

“This isn’t some alternative program,” said Larsson, pointing out that students do interact with the person who reviews their work. “The curriculum is intentionally designed. There’s no mailing it in.”

IDEA-U students gather at the organization’s facility in Weslaco, Texas.

But because these partnership programs offer a limited number of degrees, there’s also some risk that students are taking courses that don’t match their career ambitions. Two students who want to be teachers, for example, told Chalkbeat they were working toward degrees in management and communications, respectively.

Larsson says more general degrees allow students to explore multiple career paths. And IDEA-U allows students to enroll in online programs that operate on Southern New Hampshire University’s traditional academic calendar — which lead to degrees in more subject areas — if they want.

Others, like Heather Lattimer, the dean of San Jose State University’s college of education, worry that if students decide they want to transfer elsewhere, it’s difficult to get credit for the work they’ve done. Noble, for example, advises students against transfers and tells them they should be prepared to finish their degrees with Noble Forward.

Lattimer, who studied a partnership between Southern New Hampshire University and Da Vinci Schools, a charter network in California that allows students to stay on for an extra year to take college classes and complete internships, sees promise in these partnerships for students who are older, need a flexible schedule, or can’t get to a college in person, especially when the programs offer extra coaching support. But she’s not sure they are a good idea for traditional college-age students.

“Not to say that our public universities and community colleges are perfect, we aren’t,” Lattimer said. “But they are the option that is both going to provide more comprehensive choices and pathways for students and is going to be recognized more broadly by future employers.”

The charter programs walk a fine line here, promoting the programs as a plan B, not a first choice, for their students. IDEA students can’t apply to IDEA-U until after they’ve graduated high school.

“We want to give them a crack at the traditional system,” Garza said. “We do believe in sending our students to the country’s best colleges, because [they] are set up to receive and support low-income, first-generation, minority students given their endowments, given their resources.”

The problem is, that support doesn’t always materialize, and sometimes isn’t enough. And that leaves students searching for other options.

Who benefits?

All of these partnerships are part of a program called College for America that Southern New Hampshire University launched in 2013. It’s since expanded to include a dozen “community partners” that enroll around 1,400 students.

But the university, known for its national marketing effort, has ambitious expansion goals. Working with charter school operators, which have close relationships with their students and expertise advising their alumni in college, offers access to a ready pool of students.

Rapp, of Noble Forward, said he knew at least two students who enrolled in the program after previously considering online college.

“But they were hesitant about the programs because they didn’t know anything about them, and there was a sense that the online programs weren’t legitimate,” he said. “Once we approached them with this option, the students trusted [it].”

Some charter operators who are looking to improve how they help students who’ve dropped out of college, like Uplift Education in Texas, say they’re watching these partnerships and are considering starting their own. Other networks are already experimenting with online college partnerships.

The New York City and New Orleans branches of the KIPP charter network, for example, have worked with Southern New Hampshire University over the last few years to allow high school students or alumni to take online college classes, while Collegiate Academies, a charter school network in Louisiana, has a partnership for its high school students.

“In general, there should be more models like this,” said Elena Sanina, who leads college access and alumni success work at the Charter School Growth Fund, a nonprofit venture fund that has funded both Noble and Collegiate’s programs. “It might be something we see popping up across the country.”

Noble’s program is too new to have graduated any students. So far, 87 students have earned associate degrees through IDEA-U, while eight have earned bachelor’s degrees.

Data from Duet, which is the oldest of Southern New Hampshire University’s community partner programs, provide more insight.

Of the 793 students who’ve enrolled in an associate degree program through Duet since 2013, about a quarter graduated, a quarter withdrew, and half are still enrolled. Among the 163 students who enrolled in a bachelor’s degree program, 13% got their degree, 20% withdrew, and the rest are still enrolled.

Overall, Southern New Hampshire University officials say, about half of the students who start an online bachelor’s degree at the university, which includes full- and part-time students, get one within six years.

Expansion plans

Noble Forward hopes to enroll around 1,000 students within eight years. IDEA-U has plans to serve thousands of students across 30 locations over the next decade. Both say they plan to enroll more students who aren’t alumni as they grow. Duet, too, wants to expand to 2,000 students over the next four to five years.

The programs could change as they grow. Right now, IDEA-U shares a brand name and some resources with the K-12 charter network, but it’s technically a separate company that contracts with Southern New Hampshire University and employs IDEA-U’s staff — an arrangement Garza says prevents the mixing of taxpayer dollars meant to go to K-12 public schools with money for higher education.

That setup also means IDEA-U is allowed to take in a profit. (In 2019, Garza said, IDEA-U ended the year with a surplus of around $11,000.) IDEA officials are deciding whether it should become a standalone company, its own nonprofit like Duet, or maintain its connection to the network.

For now, the Noble charter network is running Noble Forward as a program of its own. Officials there say they take care to fundraise and budget separately to avoid mixing those funds with public dollars meant for Noble’s middle and high schools.

There are other open questions. Some students wonder how employers will view their online degrees. One experiment found that employers were less likely to call back applicants who held a business bachelor’s degree from an online for-profit college than if they attended a less selective public university or college. (Southern New Hampshire University is a nonprofit.)

Larsson, of Duet, says graduates of his program have landed jobs or gained admission to graduate school.

“Four or five years ago, we wondered if students were going to take a discount in the job market, but we have not seen that at all,” he said. “That college degree is often just the toll that people have to pay to get considered.”

Since Chapa enrolled in IDEA-U in October 2017, he has earned his associate degree. He estimates he’s about two months away from finishing his bachelor’s degree in management with a concentration in public administration, which he often works on while his 7-year-old son is at school. He’s hoping to apply for government jobs when he’s done.

“I feel like it’s a lot better than having no degree,” he said. “I’d much rather have an online degree, even if it’s a little inferior, which I don’t think it is. But even if it is, I’d rather have that than nothing.”

To learn more about the challenges low-income students of color face in college, and what colleges are doing to help them, read Chalkbeat’s Ready or Not series by reporters in our Newark and Detroit bureaus.

Looking for a home? You’ve seen GreatSchools ratings. Here’s how they nudge families toward schools with fewer black and Hispanic students.

2019-12-05T13:00:28+00:00

What’s the right way to judge a school?

Across the country, states and school districts have devised their own systems of letter grades and color-coded dashboards based on test scores and graduation rates. But arguably the most visible and influential school rating system in America comes from the nonprofit GreatSchools, whose 1-10 ratings appear in home listings on national real estate websites Zillow, Realtor.com, and Redfin. Forty-three million people visited GreatSchools’ site in 2018, the organization says; Zillow and its affiliated sites count more than 150 million unique visitors per month.

GreatSchools’ stated mission is to help all parents, especially those who are low-income, make more informed decisions about where to send their children to school.

But GreatSchools ratings effectively penalize schools that serve largely low-income students and those serving largely black and Hispanic students, generally giving them significantly lower ratings than schools serving more affluent and more white and Asian students, a Chalkbeat analysis found.

And yet, according to GreatSchools’ own data, many schools serving low-income, black, and Hispanic populations are doing a good job helping students learn math and English. But those schools still face long odds of getting an above-average rating on GreatSchools — likely because their students are arriving far behind.

The result is a ubiquitous, privately run school ratings system that is steering people toward whiter, more affluent schools. A recent preliminary study found that as the site rolled out an earlier version of its ratings, areas with highly rated schools saw increases in home prices and rises in the number of white, Asian, and better-educated families. After three years, the study found, property values in those areas increased by nearly $7,000, making it more difficult for low-income families to buy into the areas.

As parents decide on where to live, “these scores really were on the top of the list of almost all of the parents that I talked to,” said Sharique Hasan, the Duke researcher who authored the study of GreatSchools. “They wanted to be in a school district with schools that were rated a 9 or a 10.”

GreatSchools revamped its ratings in 2017. Chalkbeat’s analysis shows that the correlation with demographics has declined somewhat as a result of the shift — but is still substantial.

GreatSchools rejects the notion that its ratings contribute to segregation. “On the contrary, we believe that information drives equity. Parents, especially low income parents, deserve to know how their schools are doing,” said its CEO Jon Deane. “There are real issues at play here, but keeping parents informed, so that they can act on behalf of their children, isn’t the issue.”

Here is the paradox at the heart of GreatSchools ratings: They are available to all, which means they can help low-income families choose a school or pressure officials to make improvements. But they can also help affluent families cement access to areas other families cannot afford, while bolstering stereotypes that schools in certain neighborhoods are uniformly of poor quality.

“I think GreatSchools has a lot of responsibility to think deeply about how their platform is being utilized or not in relation to patterns of segregation,” said Francis Pearman, a Stanford professor who has studied the relationship between school choice and housing. “The notion that a quality school is necessarily one that is white and affluent is a problematic stance.”

Watch a video produced in partnership with Vox based on the reporting in this story.

Two decades in, GreatSchools rates public schools in every state

When Bill Jackson started GreatSchools in 1996 as a project of a Silicon Valley business association, he personally visited schools in the Bay Area and talked to principals about how their schools worked.

“We wanted to build a public appetite for a view of school quality based on a school’s own conception of what’s important,” Jackson told Education Week in 1999, a year after the organization became an independent nonprofit.

As GreatSchools expanded, first across California and then nationwide, that approach proved unsustainable. Fortuitously, the organization gained a new source of information: test scores for nearly every public school in the country, thanks to new requirements in federal education law. “The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act put a lot of wind in the sails of GreatSchools,” Jackson, who served as CEO until 2016, says now.

Around the same time, charter schools and other school choice policies were gaining traction. More choices meant information about school quality was more valuable — and sparked concerns that such information might be most accessible to well-connected parents.

By democratizing that information, which otherwise might have lived only in unwieldy spreadsheets on government websites, “GreatSchools had intentions to provide some equity,” said Janelle Scott, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

GreatSchools also partnered with real-estate websites, starting with Zillow in 2012, to embed its ratings, since schools are often crucial in homebuying decisions. GreatSchools, a nonprofit, draws a licensing fee from those partnerships, which accounts for less than 20% of its revenue, according to a spokesperson. Most of its funding comes from philanthropic dollars, including foundations supportive of school choice.

The Walton Family Foundation, for instance, has poured nearly $25 million into GreatSchools since 2004, citing the need to help low-income families choose among schools and advocate for better ones. (Walton is also a funder of Chalkbeat.)

At the same time as GreatSchools was growing, all the new data from state tests had kicked off debates across the country about how to use it. Proficiency rates don’t take into account where students started, or how much schools helped them learn. Researchers developed ways to isolate the “value added” by a school, but those metrics proved controversial too, because they also rely on test scores, can be difficult to understand, and may bounce around from year to year.

Jackson recalled experimenting with different approaches, including directly accounting for poverty. But this didn’t resonate with families: “I’ll never forget one parent in Redwood City when we did a focus group who said, ‘So you mean this is a good school for poor kids?’”

So proficiency rates would remain the primary ingredient in the GreatSchools formula — which meant most schools serving students from low-income families would continue to rate poorly.

Jackson, though, said the organization did try to ensure the ratings got into the hands of less-affluent families. In addition to real estate websites, GreatSchools ratings are embedded on GoSection8, a site for people using federal housing vouchers. GreatSchools says that its own website is fully accessible in Spanish, is written in an easy-to-understand manner, and allows for clear comparisons among nearby schools. Some of this came on the advice of Innovate Public Schools, an advocacy group that works with low-income families and has supported the growth of charter schools.

GreatSchools also sees itself as a tool for those parents to demand better from their schools and their school systems. Jemima Hernandez, a San Jose parent, uses GreatSchools ratings to recruit parents as a volunteer for Innovate.

When families see the often-low ratings their children’s schools get, “They can’t believe it,” she said. “Then they start to talk to you.”

But GreatSchools was dogged by criticism that its scores were crude measures of school quality that penalized schools for serving low-income students.

When the organization overhauled its ratings in 2017, it included a host of new metrics. A GreatSchools representative said at the time that the new ratings would “more accurately reflect what’s going on in a school besides just its demographics.”

It was a striking acknowledgement of the flaws in the prior system. The new ratings also marked the start of a new approach for GreatSchools.

Across several cities, GreatSchools ratings give schools with whiter, wealthier students a clear leg up

Two years into this new system, Chalkbeat took a closer look.

We examined the ratings of elementary and middle schools in Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Nashville, New York City, Phoenix, and San Francisco, combined with several of each city’s suburbs.

The results are striking. On average, the more black and Hispanic students a school enrolled, and the more low-income students it served, the lower its rating.

The average 1-10 GreatSchools rating for schools with the most low-income and most black and Hispanic students is 4 to 6 points lower than the average score for schools with the fewest black and Hispanic students and fewest low-income students.

In most places, only a tiny fraction of schools with the most low-income and most black and Hispanic students score a 7 or better, the number that earns an “above average” label from GreatSchools. (New York City was a notable exception. There, a relatively large number of predominantly black and Hispanic schools — particularly charter schools and especially Success Academy schools — earned above-average ratings.)

Chalkbeat focused on metro areas because families tend to choose schools and homes locally. GreatSchools argues that only statewide comparisons are appropriate; in six states where GreatSchools provided data, a substantial connection between student poverty and school ratings remained — though in some cases it was smaller than the connection in the metro area Chalkbeat focused on in the same state.

Chalkbeat’s analysis also confirmed that the ratings’ connection with demographics is weaker than it was a few years ago, thanks to new factors included in the ratings. The most notable addition, for schools in states that calculate it, is test score “growth,” or how much students progress in a year compared to others who started at a similar level. Most researchers say growth scores are a more accurate way to measure a school’s performance, and accounting for growth is also where schools serving students who arrive behind can shine.

“The ability to look at growth, college readiness, equity — these subratings that we have — really helped elevate schools that have higher [low-income] populations,” said Deane, GreatSchools’ CEO.

Differences by race and income persist, though, and they are quite large. Probably in part because many schools serving low-income students of color are genuinely struggling. But it remains difficult even for seemingly successful schools serving many low-income black and Hispanic students to score well, too.

Take Denver’s Knapp Elementary School, where most students are Hispanic and come from low-income families. Educators there describe Knapp as a collaborative place where they are respected and asked to push themselves to help students, nearly two thirds of whom are learning English as a second language.

Knapp has won statewide accolades for its ability to help its students improve on state tests. By fifth grade, Knapp’s share of students reading on grade level is higher than the district’s.

Principal Shane Knight, who is in his seventh year at Knapp, is proud of the school’s environment and its academic success. “If you come into Knapp, you feel that level of genuine care for kids,” he said.

Under GreatSchools’ formula, Knapp is rewarded for its students’ growth, earning a 9 out of 10 in that category. But overall, Knapp still earns a 4 — and a “below average” label.

On real estate websites featuring GreatSchools, users encounter the overall score, not the details. And if you type Knapp’s ZIP code into GreatSchools’ search bar, the school won’t even appear initially, because the site prioritizes schools with higher overall ratings. The schools that do show up are in a different Denver ZIP code and in most cases have whiter, more affluent student bodies.

Knapp fares poorly on two other, less widely used third-party rating sites too. SchoolDigger gives the school 2 of 5 stars, while Niche awards it a C. Those sites don’t consider student growth at all.

The low ratings frustrate Knight, who worries families who might help integrate the school will overlook it.

“Are you going to choose a house in the neighborhood where Knapp is? Maybe if the rating is good, but if the rating’s poor, I’m going to look to a different neighborhood,” he said.

Shane Knight, principal of Denver’s Knapp Elementary School, in the school’s office in November 2019. Photo by Andy Colwell, special to Chalkbeat

Why is Knapp’s rating mediocre? GreatSchools’ formula.

Growth, where Knapp scored a 9, counts for only about 25% of its overall rating. Proficiency rates remain the biggest factor: 45%. There, Knapp earns a 3, because most of its students don’t meet the proficiency bar on state tests.

The rest of the formula isn’t even based on Knapp’s students. That’s the “equity” score, which is supposed to gauge test score gaps within a school. But Knapp is too homogenous — racially and economically segregated — for an equity rating to be calculated, GreatSchools explains. So the site assigns it the average equity rating of other schools in the state with similar proficiency rates: a 2, which counts for nearly 30% of Knapp’s overall rating. (Carrie Goux, a spokesperson for GreatSchools, said about one in 10 schools nationally receive such adjusted equity ratings.)

In a sense, GreatSchools penalizes Knapp for being segregated, even as GreatSchools ratings could make it more difficult for the school to attract a diverse student body.

Knapp is not alone in the Denver area. Among 88 schools that serve predominantly low-income, black and Hispanic students, just one scored above average on GreatSchools’ overall rating; looking at growth alone, 25 of them scored above average. That likely reflects the fact that low-income students of color arrive to school with lower achievement levels due to numerous factors, including the effects of poverty and racism.

Knapp’s scores highlight the challenges that high-poverty schools face in attaining a high rating, but also GreatSchools’ difficult balancing act. Some argue that proficiency should be a major factor in school ratings, as it is now in the GreatSchools formula, to hold all students to high standards.

Goux, the GreatSchools spokesperson, said the organization works to ensure all facets of school performance are visible. “We have displayed the sub-ratings prominently so parents can see how schools are doing across several important measures,” she said, pointing to data showing that these sub-ratings are widely viewed on GreatSchools’ site. “We know parents engage with the sub-ratings and are looking past the Summary Rating to understand schools on multiple levels.”

Goux also said that school searches can be easily adjusted across a number of dimensions — including distance and academic growth — to match a user’s interests.

Finally, she pointed to six schools in other cities that have a high share of low-income students and also earn high ratings. Most of these examples, though, are atypical in that they require at least some students to perform at a certain academic level to enter or remain enrolled.

Tomas Monarrez, an education researcher at the Urban Institute, says GreatSchools’ approach doesn’t provide an accurate picture of how a school is performing. The enduring connection between poverty and GreatSchools ratings in Denver and beyond “is evidence that these measures of school quality are contaminated.”

“Are these schools good because they are actually providing value for these kids?” he said of highly rated schools. “Or are these schools just enrolling more privileged populations?”

GreatSchools now — and in the future

What GreatSchools shows users matters, because millions encounter the ratings each year in their search for homes and schools, both on GreatSchools’ site and on real-estate sites.

Alex Robinson is among them.

She used the website to pick a new school for her son, a second grader; it helped her realize that a charter school she hadn’t considered was a short drive from her home in South Los Angeles. The school was rated a 5, whereas many other schools in the area scored only a 1, she said, and her son is doing well after the switch.

“GreatSchools ended up being my best resource,” said Robinson.

Other research has shown that GreatSchools ratings can affect where families who receive housing vouchers choose to live — an indicator that low-income families are using the scores to pick schools, too. Families offered GreatSchools ratings ended up in areas where schools earned an average rating of 4, as opposed to 3.7, a modest but real improvement.

The study, and Robinson’s story, are victories for GreatSchools, which argues that it offers a nuanced overview of school quality that is accessible to all families.

Still, labeling schools in poor communities and communities of color as bad could make it even tougher to create integrated schools, which research has found benefit students. “Segregation operates through stigma,” said Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies race and education.

Plus, there’s the research showing that the expansion of GreatSchools across the country has made residential segregation somewhat worse. (Notably, though, that study was done prior to the ratings shift in 2017, and there does not appear to be any research that looks specifically at GreatSchools’ effect on school segregation.)

“We show that broader access to information increased segregation because high-income families could more readily leverage school ratings to move to neighborhoods with better schools,” wrote researchers Sharique Hasan and Anuj Kumar. “In this case, knowledge was indeed power, but only for the powerful.”

Of course, there are many other powerful, longstanding forces in the way of more integrated schools.

A primary one is entrenched residential segregation, the product of government policies that have restricted who can live where and who can accumulate wealth. Potential changes to enrollment rules and school zone lines that would integrate schools often prompt backlash from more advantaged parents. Racism and bias may stop white families from choosing schools with more students of color.

While the Fair Housing Act forbids real estate agents from steering potential homebuyers of different races to different neighborhoods, a recent Newsday investigation found that many agents on Long Island were doing just that, sometimes using schools as a vehicle to do so.

These issues long predate GreatSchools. Still, some lawyers consulted by Chalkbeat said the fact that the GreatSchools ratings are so correlated with race raises questions about whether their use by real estate companies could run afoul of the Fair Housing Act, because the ratings effectively nudge families away from communities with more black and Hispanic residents.

“It’s a legal gray area,” said Morgan Williams, the general counsel for the National Fair Housing Alliance. “I would discourage real estate service providers from providing information that may be used as a proxy for the racial demographics of a neighborhood.”

(Spokespeople for both Zillow and GreatSchools said their respective sites encourage families to look at multiple factors and visit schools in person; a spokesperson for Realtor.com said the ratings are among many data points it offers to homebuyers.)

Yet even some critical of GreatSchools say it would not serve parents to eliminate or obscure data about school performance.

“Making that information easier to attain enables [parents] to isolate themselves more if they wish to do so, which is worrisome,” Monarrez of the Urban Institute said. “But I would also be worried about taking that possibility and saying that’s a reason for information not be put out there at all.”

Could GreatSchools do things differently? It could put more weight on growth. There are some signs that families would choose more integrated schools and districts if offered that information.

Myron Long, who is starting a charter school in Washington, D.C., says emphasizing growth measures can shift widely held perceptions of schools serving students of color. “It changes the narrative behind schools and how we talk about them,” he said. “It has the opportunity for parents to see there are more options in the schools that they choose.”

But that approach has its own drawbacks. Several states, including California, don’t calculate growth scores, impeding efforts to make ratings depend on them more. And encouraging more affluent families to go to high-performing schools in low-income neighborhoods could have unintended consequences, such as displacing other students.

Meanwhile, any changes could anger affluent communities that have benefited through property values from the way the ratings are currently calculated. Changes could also encourage skepticism among those with deeply ingrained notions, perhaps biased ones, about what is and isn’t a quality school. That could mean GreatSchools loses credibility with a powerful constituency of families.

For its part, GreatSchools says it remains engaged with questions about how to measure school quality.

Last month, dozens of researchers and policymakers gathered at MIT to talk about school choice. Several speakers made the same point: Judging a school’s quality by looking at overall student performance is misleading.

Usually, school ratings say more about peers than schools, MIT Professor Parag Pathak told the audience. “That may actually end up further segregating schools,” he said.

“Peer ‘quality’ is not school quality,” Josh Angrist of MIT explained later.

Watching from the audience was Deane, GreatSchools’ CEO. His takeaway? “A strong reinforcement” of data that shows how much students learn over time, he told Chalkbeat.

“The question is, are we moving in the right direction towards providing the information that is going to give us a broader picture?” he said. “We feel an incredible responsibility to provide that information to the users as best we can. So of course we’re going to continue to evolve.”

Watch the video produced in partnership with Vox based on the reporting in this story.

Curious about how Chalkbeat did the data analysis for this story? We’ve got more details, plus answers to frequently asked questions about our findings and approach.

How Chalkbeat analyzed data on GreatSchools and answers to other FAQs

2019-12-05T13:00:12+00:00

Chalkbeat published a detailed story about the website GreatSchools and how their school ratings correlate with students’ race and income. The piece was based on an original data analysis. Here’s how we did it.

Chalkbeat collected data from the GreatSchools website for several cities and a number of their suburbs as defined by the Census Bureau’s metropolitan statistical area. The data, pulled in August 2019, included each public elementary and middle school’s GreatSchools ratings on a scale of 1-10, the share of students who qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch (a proxy for poverty), and the share of students who are black or Hispanic.

Then we examined whether there was a relationship between schools’ demographics and their ratings. We did that in two ways.

One was to create a correlation coefficient, which is a measure of how two variables are related to each other. Correlation coefficients range from -1 to 1.

A 0 indicates no relationship at all — complete randomness. A 1 (or -1) indicates a perfect positive (or negative) relationship, meaning the two variables move in lockstep.

Statisticians sometimes advise that a coefficient of 0.5 (or -0.5) is a strong relationship, though this depends on the context.

Using this approach, we found a fairly strong relationship between school ratings and a school’s share of low-income students, as well as its share of black and Hispanic students. In both cases, the correlation coefficient ranged from about -0.6 to -0.8, depending on the metro area. That means that one can use demographics to predict a school’s rating.

To make these findings easier to interpret, we divided schools in each area into five groups based on the proportion of their students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. We divided schools the same way by their share of black and Hispanic students. (Keep in mind that each bucket doesn’t not necessarily have the same number of schools.)

Then we calculated the average GreatSchools rating for schools in each group. We also figured out the range of ratings that account for the middle 50% of the schools in each category.

The difference in average ratings between schools in the first groups (with the fewest low-income students and the fewest black and Hispanic students) and last groups was large — between 4 and 6 points on a 10-point scale, depending on the city.

We also looked at what share of schools that serve predominantly low-income black and Hispanic students — more than 80% each — scored above average (higher than a 7) on GreatSchools ratings. In general, very few did. But that number went up substantially when we just looked at the growth component of GreatSchools rating.

Here are answers to a few other common questions.

When and how did you collect this data?

In August 2019, we took ratings data from GreatSchools’ website for all public elementary and middle schools (with a rating) in each focus city and some surrounding suburbs. Each school’s demographic data was also taken directly from GreatSchools’ site.

In a handful of cases, we found evidence that a school’s share of students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunch was off — sometimes implausibly low — likely reflecting errors in state reporting or known problems with using this measure as a proxy for poverty. In New York City, a number of high-achieving charter schools did not report the percent of low-income students. But because there were only a handful of such examples, we’re confident that this does not change the general thrust of the results.

How did you choose which cities to focus on?

Our aim was to include several large cities from across the country with a range of demographics. We also prioritized cities with a Chalkbeat bureau, and looked to include places both with and without state-provided growth scores.

Why look at cities and suburbs as opposed to entire states?

GreatSchools took issue with Chalkbeat’s focus on metro areas, suggesting that that a statewide analysis would show a less powerful connection between schools’ ratings and demographics. Chalkbeat focused on metro areas because families tend to choose schools and homes near a given city or town rather than across an entire state.

Still, to test GreatSchools’ concern, Chalkbeat analyzed data on elementary schools from six states where GreatSchools provided data — Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, and Tennessee — and compared it to data from a metro area in the same state.

In all six states, there was still a moderate to strong negative relationship between GreatSchools’ scores and elementary schools’ share of low-income students.

In three states (California, Colorado, and Illinois), there was virtually no change when looking statewide as opposed to the metro areas (San Francisco, Denver, and Chicago, respectively). In the three other states we did see a small decline when looking across the state — the connection was about one tenth of a point smaller. For instance, the correlation between ratings and a school’s share of low-income students in the Phoenix area was -0.72, but for Arizona as a whole it was -0.6.

Why did you just look at elementary and middle schools?

We focused on schools in earlier grades because that is generally when families make residential decisions with schools in mind. GreatSchools’ formula for rating high schools is also quite different from its formula for elementary and middle schools.

Our analysis of high schools in six states shows that a similar — though generally significantly less pronounced — relationship with demographics exists in those schools, too.

What about other third-party school rating sites like Niche? Why focus on GreatSchools?

GreatSchools ratings are present on many major real estate websites, including Zillow, Redfin, and Realtor.com. A preliminary study released in late 2018 also looked specifically at GreatSchools ratings, and found that economic and racial residential segregation increased as a result of their introduction.

In some areas, district- or state-created ratings may carry as much or more weight than GreatSchools ratings do. But we focused on GreatSchools because of its connection to real estate. GreatSchools says it had 43 million unique visitors to its site in 2018; Zillow and its affiliated sites count more than 150 million unique visitors per month. By comparison, Niche reports 22 million annual visitors.

Does the analysis prove that GreatSchools ratings increase school segregation?

It raises that possibility, but doesn’t prove it. That would require careful research that does not currently exist. One preliminary study did find that economic and racial residential segregation increased as a result of the introduction of GreatSchools ratings. This study was done prior to the site’s 2017 ratings shift, which slightly reduced the ratings’ relationship with student demographics.

GreatSchools rejects the notion that its ratings contribute to segregation. “On the contrary, we believe that information drives equity,” said its CEO Jon Deane. “There are real issues at play here, but keeping parents informed, so that they can act on behalf of their children, isn’t the issue.”

This question aside, it’s important to remember that entrenched residential and school segregation is driven by a myriad of factors, including past government policies that restricted who can live where and who can accumulate wealth. These, and other factors, long predate GreatSchools.

Do your findings show that schools don’t matter much for student achievement — that it’s all about demographics?

No. GreatSchools ratings are quite correlated with demographics, but there is still a range of scores even when looking at schools with similar populations.

Research also shows that school and teacher quality make a substantial difference for students. School spending, racial integration, and certain charter networks — among many other policy interventions — have all been linked to better academic outcomes.

Notably, the growth scores that GreatSchools uses as a subcomponent of its ratings are much less tied to demographics than the overall ratings because compare how much a student improves relative to students at a similar level. That helps schools that have students who come in far behind.

Is the relationship between school ratings and race really just a reflection of poverty?

No. Racial demographics independently predict school ratings, without directly considering poverty. That aligns with other evidence on how race and racism shape academic success in America.

In general, poverty and race are each equally predictive of GreatSchools ratings. This suggests that schools that serve a high share of both low-income students and black and Hispanic students are doubly disadvantaged under its rating system.

Doesn’t this just show that schools serving low-income and black and Hispanic students are less effective?

That is likely part of what’s going on, but it’s not the whole story.

GreatSchools’ own data shows that when using academic growth scores — which researchers generally say is a better judge of school quality — the relationship with demographics is substantially smaller than with GreatSchools’ overall rating.

What about the schools that buck the trend?

There are definitely some schools that don’t fit the overarching trend. For instance, in New York City a good number of charter schools, serving largely low-income black and Hispanic students, post high ratings — particularly Success Academy, which is well known for its high test scores.

Elsewhere, some virtual charter schools serve relatively few poor students but still produce low test scores.

Other outlier schools serve distinct groups of students. Rise Learning Center, for example, an Indianapolis school that scored a 1 but has few low-income students, serves students with disabilities.

Finally, a handful of outliers appear to have inaccurate demographic data, likely because it was misreported or because of problems with using free and reduced price lunch-eligibility as a proxy for poverty.

Aren’t families just looking for schools with more high-achieving students? Don’t these ratings show exactly that?

There’s some evidence that’s true. One study in New York City found that when selecting high schools, the key factor was the prior achievement of other students in the school. There’s also evidence that whiter, affluent families seek out schools with few low-income, black, and Hispanic students. That is also where GreatSchools ratings are directing them.

In that sense, the ratings may be providing what some families desire, but this approach could also exacerbate segregation. GreatSchools does not award points for schools that are racially or economically diverse, which has been linked to benefits for students.

There is some evidence that, when presented with certain data, families can be open to schools they might not have otherwise considered. In one experiment, parents, including white and affluent ones, were more likely to select a diverse school district when given data on academic growth (as opposed to just proficiency or demographics). Another study showed that white families in New York City were more likely to move into low-income Hispanic neighborhoods where teachers were more effective, after a public release of teacher performance data.

How did GreatSchools’ new rating criteria change things?

GreatSchools changed its ratings system in 2017 to include other measures beyond proficiency scores. For elementary and middle school that included a growth rating and an “equity” scores, which are both based on test scores.

We didn’t have access to older data. To figure out whether this change reduced the connection between ratings and demographics, we focused on the proficiency component of the current score. This essentially allowed us to examine what a school’s rating would have been under the old system.

This analysis suggested that indeed the relationship with demographics has declined under the new system. In some places, the correlation coefficient fell by over a tenth of a point; in other places it changed only slightly. For instance, in the Denver area the correlation with percent low-income would have been -0.84 under the old system; under the current one it’s -0.73. In the Chicago area, it fell from -0.8 to -0.75.

In no cases did the correlation dramatically change.

That’s likely because the biggest factor in GreatSchools ratings remains proficiency. Growth is correlated less with demographics, but it also gets less weight in GreatSchools’ rating formula, usually accounting for about 25%.

In some places — including California — the state does not provide a growth score, forcing GreatSchools to calculate its own score based on less granular data. This proxy growth rating is strongly correlated with demographics, similar to proficiency scores, according to our analysis.

How sometimes-overhyped claims about the future of work drive XQ, the organization helping NYC open new schools

2019-11-06T20:58:00+00:00

Packed in the basement of a branch of the Queens Public Library, roughly 40 New York City educators heard about an exciting opportunity — the chance at major grants to start their own schools or revamp existing ones.

In the background was an unmistakable message. A video showed a classroom with a decrepit chalkboard, then shots of a new car and an iPhone. “So cars are now this, and phones are now this — but high schools are still that?” asked the narrator as the barren blackboard reappeared. “American high schools are based on the same model, and it’s been over 100 years.”

Teachers at the event may not have realized it, but XQ — the deep-pocketed group helping New York City fund the creation and overhaul of a number of city high schools — holds a distinct philosophy about what ails American schools. (XQ is funded by Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, which also funds Chalkbeat through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.)

It’s an idea that has captured the attention of philanthropists, futurists, business leaders, and politicians of many stripes: that the economy is changing incredibly quickly while public schools are all but frozen in amber.

The evidence for this is not nearly as strong as XQ suggests, though. The world and the economy are changing, of course — post-secondary credentials are more important to getting a high-paying job than they were a generation ago, for example. But there’s also evidence that the rate of change in the economy has actually been slowing, and some economists worry that the economy isn’t moving fast enough.

Meanwhile, XQ has made a few specific claims about the future of work that are misleading or wrong — notable since, in New York City, the education department has accepted not just the organization’s resources but its framework for starting a school. On New York City’s website, those interested in applying for a cut of the $32 million in promised grants are told to explain how their idea will “prepare students for the complexities of a fast-changing future, including the world of work.”

“If schools have failed to adapt to a changing world, then we have a duty to act,” said Jack Schneider, an education historian at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who has been critical of XQ. “Yet how certain are we that the proposed reforms are going to solve the problem?”

The economy is changing, but perhaps not as rapidly as widely believed

The idea that the economy is rapidly evolving seems obvious. Our phones are continually being updated; automated check-out kiosks are proliferating; we keep hearing self-driving cars are around the corner. Some futurists describe the world as being at the onset of the “fourth industrial revolution.” But the evidence for a massive, ongoing economic shift is fairly weak.

In fact, some economists are worried that the rate of economic change is actually slowing. In recent decades, people have been switching jobs less frequently, fewer start-ups have been created, and there has been weaker growth in economic productivity. And contrary to popular belief, there’s little evidence of a rapid rise in the so-called gig economy.

“Yes, we’re seeing change, but compared to past changes, they’re fairly incremental,” said Joel Elvery, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank in Cleveland, whose own work has found that shifts in occupations have slowed in recent decades.

That hasn’t stopped the narrative that schools need to transform to prepare students for the fast-changing future of work from gaining traction, including among business groups and prominent education leaders, like Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

To Schneider, predictions about the future of work are useful to advocates because of their ambiguity. “Like the phrase ‘21st century skills,’ it’s as positive sounding as it is meaningless,” he said. “And that makes it a convenient package for almost any reform proposal.”

What is changing? Studies show, and XQ notes, that employers increasingly value interpersonal skills. American society is becoming more racially diverse. College degrees or other credentials are increasingly necessary for high-paying jobs.

And of course, no one can say for sure what the future economy will look like or how rapidly it will evolve. Michele Cahill, a senior advisor at XQ, says the organization’s goals for students — that they will be “holders of foundational knowledge” and “generous collaborators,” among others — will serve them well regardless.

“These kinds of goals are really what appear to both make for a purposeful education for young people, one that engages them in learning … equips them for adult life and for the economy, but also for more than that,” she said.

“You can’t argue that our politics, that our communities are not changing. We have a very complex society that these young people are growing up in.”

A New York City’s education department spokesperson echoed that sentiment. “We have heard directly from communities that education has to keep up with the changes and shifts happening in our world,” said Katie O’Hanlon. “To solve for the problems of tomorrow, students today need a skill set that goes far beyond what was typically expected in the past.”

But XQ has made a few specific, dubious claims about the future (and present) of work

XQ is pitching in $10 million to New York City’s initiative, called Imagine NYC Schools. XQ is also contributing much of the intellectual infrastructure. The application directs educators interested in pitching an idea to consult XQ publications like “Students in the 21st Century,” for example.

“It used to be common for Americans to graduate high school or college, get a job that would sustain a family, and stay in one field for life,” the opening section of that report says. “Nowadays, most people end up working multiple careers by the time they reach age 40.”

XQ cites no evidence to support this claim, and it does not appear to be accurate.

It’s true that young people change jobs more than older people, but that was true in the past, too. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics going back decades show the median length of time Americans spend in a given job has held fairly steady.

Other analyses show that workers, especially younger workers, are actually changing jobs less frequently than they used to.

In response to questions from Chalkbeat, XQ was unable to substantiate the claim in its report. A spokesperson pointed to other federal labor data that did just the opposite: While millennials held an average of 7.8 jobs between the ages of 18 and 30, baby boomers held slightly more, 8.2, during the same age range.

XQ has also promoted another future of work canard.

An image from an XQ video on the future of work. The video was taken down from XQ’s YouTube page after Chalkbeat inquired about the veracity of the statistic.

At XQ’s 2018 annual symposium, futurist Heather McGowan repeated a prediction that 65% of the jobs of the future hadn’t been created yet, though she acknowledged that the statistic was “debatable.” A promotional video released by XQ months later made a similar prediction: “Eighty-five percent of the jobs that will exist in 2030 have not been invented yet,” the XQ narrator declared.

But there is no credible analysis to support either number, and the predictions are wildly out of line with historical trends.

The XQ video was removed from YouTube after Chalkbeat inquired about the veracity of this statistic. (It does not appear that XQ has promoted this particular statistic in its published reports.)

When asked about this claim by Chalkbeat, McGowan acknowledged the statistic may not be accurate — “it was a silly, wild-ass guess” — but that it helped drive home her broader point.

“I use it because I need to get people’s attention that some large percentage of work tasks are going to change,” she said. “It really doesn’t matter. I could say 20% … If the provocation comes from a bigger number, fine.”

At the same XQ event, McGowan also claimed that life expectancy would reach 90 years “sometime soon.” Currently, American life expectancy is under 80, and has been inching downward in recent years. Asked about this, McGowan suggested that rapid advances in medicine to treat cancer and heart disease were on the way.

It’s not clear where all this leaves schools

New York City officials have also emphasized the changing world in explaining the Imagine NYC Schools initiative.

“We’re in the middle of massive shifts in society — the economy, the climate. Education needs to keep pace with those shifts and this initiative supports us in doing that,” deputy chancellor Karin Goldmark told Chalkbeat.

For educators in Queens and across New York City, how to design or redesign schools to do that and meet the expectations of both XQ and the city is not obvious. The advice offered is broad, like “Turn school design on its head. Start with your big idea, your vision.”

That is by design, according to XQ. “We’re not specifying a model. It’s not saying, this will do it,” said Cahill. “We’re specifying some design principles and some goals for people to grapple with in their communities.”

Ultimately, the New York City education department says it will decide which school ideas receive funding and which do not. A spokesperson for the department said criteria will include judgments about the school design and “involvement of student and community voice.”

In responses collected by Chalkbeat, some in New York City said the focus should be on more basic needs.

“Our schools need smaller class sizes,” wrote one respondent. “It’s not an innovation, it’s just good practice.”

“Innovation is secondary,” another commented. “First NYC students need everything that students in suburban schools get routinely.”

But others were enthusiastic, embracing the frame encouraged by XQ. “Innovation in schools today looks like making a meaningful connection between schools and the communities in which our students will soon play a more integral role,” wrote one person. “Schools need to update their pedagogy, design, and structure to align with the workforce in 2019.”

Alex Zimmerman contributed reporting.

Political arm of charter-friendly group The City Fund has $15 million — and is now spending on school board races

2019-10-24T22:57:30+00:00

The political arm of The City Fund, the organization with ambitions to spread charter schools and the “portfolio model” of school reform across the country, plans to spend $15 million to influence state and local elections over the next three years.

That political group, known as Public School Allies, has already directed money toward to school board races in Atlanta, Camden, Newark, and St. Louis, and state elections in Louisiana, Georgia, and New Jersey. Donations have ranged from $1 million to as little as $1,500.

The information was shared by Public School Allies and, in a number of cases, confirmed by campaign finance records. The $15 million comes from Netflix founder Reed Hastings and former hedge-fund manager John Arnold, the organization said.

“Public School Allies believes deeply in supporting local leaders running for office who share our belief in the need to create higher quality public school systems across our country,” Gary Borden, Public School Allies’ managing director, said in a statement.

The spending offers a window into the strategy of The City Fund, which has been relatively tight-lipped about its work since it launched in 2018. So far, most of the candidates Public School Allies has supported have won their races — illustrating how relatively small donations can have significant influence in elections with low turnout and limited spending.

“School board races have traditionally been very low visibility,” said Rebecca Jacobson of Michigan State University, who recently co-authored a book on the rise of big donations in school board elections. “A little bit of money can go a long way in some of these places.”

Using Public School Allies to influence political races is just one way The City Fund has been moving forward with its mission, which is to spread a philosophy in which successful schools grow and unsuccessful ones close or are replaced.

The City Fund held a convening of like-minded organizations early this year in San Francisco, according to an attendee who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the event was meant to be private. Hastings himself spoke at the gathering, the attendee said, emphasizing the value of schools governed by nonprofit organizations — as charter schools usually are — as opposed to by school districts.

The City Fund also appears to have ramped up spending of its own.

An email obtained by Chalkbeat shows a City Fund consultant telling Denver superintendent Susana Cordova in July that the organization “has invested more than $21 million to improve” schools in the city.

Last December, The City Fund told Chalkbeat that it had raised $189 million from Hastings, Arnold, and others, and had given out $15 million to organizations in seven target cities.

Neerav Kingsland, The City Fund’s managing director, declined to comment for this story.

Here’s more on Public School Allies’ campaign contributions to date.

$1 million to a Louisiana voucher group to back candidates for state office

Public School Allies recently sent $1 million to the Louisiana Federation for Children Action Fund, an affiliate of the American Federation for Children, a group previously led by Betsy DeVos. It’s Public School Allies’ biggest donation to date by far — and on its face a surprising one, since AFC’s focus is private school tuition vouchers.

“The funds for Louisiana Federation for Children were to support their work advancing high quality public charter schools for students across the state,” Borden said.

The Louisiana Federation for Children supported five candidates for the state board of education — four won and a fifth advanced to a runoff earlier this month — as well as a number of state house and senate candidates.

The state board determines the fate of state superintendent John White, who has supported the growth of charter schools.

A number of the losing state board candidates were backed by teachers unions, and most raised much less money. The Louisiana Association of Educators spent roughly $50,000 to support a collection of candidates, according to a September campaign filing.

$80,000 for Camden group focused on school board races

In Camden, New Jersey, a group called the Campaign for Great Public Schools formed with the financial support of Public School Allies. It plans to support a slate of school board candidates in November, the first election since city schools started moving away from state control.

Borden said Public School Allies had given the organization $80,000 for this fall’s elections.

The leader of Campaign for Great Public Schools has praised the recent direction of the district, including the creation of Renaissance schools — which are run by charter operators KIPP, Mastery, and Uncommon — and a unified enrollment system.

$60,000 to Newark school board candidates

Public School Allies gave $60,000 to a political action committee supporting a slate of candidates in the city’s school board election this April. All three won handily, beating out a slate that was more skeptical of charter schools but spent less than $10,000.

The City Fund has donated to the New Jersey Children’s Foundation, which supports charter schools in Newark.

$27,000 to New Jersey Assembly campaigns

According to Borden, Public School Allies has also given $25,000 to New Jersey’s Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee, as well as $1,000 each to New Jersey senate president Steve Sweeney and state assembly member Eliana Pintor Marin, both Democrats.

It was a state law that enacted Camden’s Renaissance schools initiative, which might explain Public School Allies’ state-level involvement. Sweeney has also drawn strong opposition from the New Jersey Education Association, a teachers union that is one of the state’s largest political donors. In 2017, for instance, an NJEA committee poured $6.7 million into state legislative races, including $4.8 million in an unsuccessful bid to oust Sweeney.

$20,000 to support a St. Louis school board candidate

In St. Louis, Public School Allies directed $20,000 to a local PAC to support Adam Layne for school board, which recently regained control of schools from the state. According to campaign filings, no other candidate received PAC support — and the $20,000 accounted for about two-thirds of all spending in the race.

Layne, who was previously a teacher through Teach For America in the district and a board member at a local charter school, attracted some criticism for that support. He won one of the two open seats, neither of which went to candidates backed by the local teachers union.

The City Fund has donated to the Opportunity Trust, a St. Louis education nonprofit.

$12,000 to an education reform PAC in Georgia

Public School Allies has given $12,000 to the 50CAN Action Fund for elections this fall, Borden said. In the last legislative session, GACAN prioritized increasing funding for charter school facilities, among other issues.

$1,500 to an Atlanta school board candidate and KIPP parent

In Atlanta, filings indicate that “Campaign for Great Public School” donated $1,500 to school board candidate Aretta Baldon, a KIPP charter school parent and founding member of the parent group Atlanta Thrive.

Borden confirmed that this donation came from Public School Allies. (He said Campaign for Great Public Schools was the group’s original name, and that it’s up to candidates to complete filings. The filing also incorrectly states that the group is based in Georgia. Baldon did not respond to a request for comment.)

In total, Baldon raised $47,000, outstripping opponent Davida Huntley, who took in $14,000, including $1,500 from the Atlanta Federation of Teachers. The teachers union in the city has fiercely opposed the district’s practice of turning over struggling schools to charter operators.

Baldon won a seat, earning just over 500 votes in a low-turnout special election.

The City Fund has funded the nonprofit redefinED Atlanta, which has supported these charter-run turnaround efforts, as well as Atlanta Thrive.

$0 in San Antonio

Not all school board candidates are eager for outside support. When Patti Radle, the school board president of the San Antonio Independent School District, recently faced re-election, she had a meeting with Public School Allies officials, but told them she didn’t want their financial support.

She explained to Chalkbeat that she didn’t want the local teachers union, who opposed her candidacy, to try to link her to outside groups.

“The perception of it creates drama in people’s minds and creates upset among people who are concerned about charter schools,” she said. “They didn’t need that drama and I certainly didn’t.”

The City Fund supports the San Antonio-based City Education Partners.

Public School Allies didn’t end up spending to support Radle, who won re-election in May.

Correction: A previous version of this piece incorrectly stated that Democracy Prep operates some of the Renaissance schools in Camden. In fact, Renaissance schools are operated by KIPP, Mastery, and Uncommon charter networks.

Sixers’ Tobias Harris gives $1 million to education philanthropies

2019-10-23T02:59:42+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Philadelphia 76ers forward Tobias Harris is interested in educational justice and in giving back to his adopted home.

At a glitzy event on Tuesday dubbed Tobias Community Draft 2019, the basketball player gave away $1 million to nine organizations, including three in Philadelphia that collectively received $625,000 of the total. His focus is on promoting literacy and supporting excellent teaching.

Among the recipients were the Fund for the School District of Philadelphia, which received $100,000; the city’s Read by 4th campaign, which received $200,000, and the Center for Black Educator Development, which received $300,000. Team Up Philly, a nonprofit that works to empower girls, received $25,000.

Among the other organizations that received money was the fund supporting schools in Orange County, Fla., where he used to play for the Orlando Magic.

Harris, 27, who signed a $180 million contract with the Sixers last summer, has directed his philanthropic endeavors toward helping underserved communities, focusing on literacy and on supporting teachers and the education profession.

The event, held at Mastery Prep Charter School in Nicetown, was in the style of an NBA draft, with Harris counting down from nine to one in highlighting each organization. The recipients knew they would be recognized, but didn’t know the amount of their award until it was announced.

Harris and his team read about the Center for Black Educator Development and reached out to the organization, Harris said. The organization was founded this year by former Mastery-Shoemaker principal and longtime city educator Sharif El-Mekki.

“It’s a great organization. I really love what they are doing for African American teachers,” said Harris. “This will really give them a platform. The numbers don’t lie.”

He was referring to a study by Johns Hopkins University showing that black children who had just one African American teacher during their school careers were far more likely to graduate from high school. If they had two, their chances of attending college are significantly better.

The center is working on building a pipeline for African American youth to consider teaching careers, while also offering workshops and professional development to teachers.

Jenny Bogoni is executive director of the Read by 4th campaign, a coalition of many organizations working toward a day when all Philadelphia children read on grade level by the end of 3rd grade. When children reach that milestone, it is a predictor of future academic success.

“We’re trying to reinvent early literacy. … It takes more than one author,” Bogoni said in accepting the award. The money will help expand the presence of reading coaches “in all areas of the city.”

Donna Frisby-Greenwood heads the Fund for the School District of Philadelphia, which raises money and funnels it into specific District schools and programs.

The money, she said, will be split among four elementary schools that made their needs known through its Philly FUNDamentals initiative, which enables principals to publicize their wish lists and match them with donors. The schools that will benefit from this grant are Bethune, H.A. Brown, Kenderton and Penrose.

“We did a lot of groundwork in picking the right [organizations] in line with what I wanted to get across,” said Harris. As for Philadelphia, “This is a place I want to make home.”

3 things to know about XQ, the Laurene Powell Jobs-backed group set to help create new schools in NYC

2019-10-03T15:41:01+00:00

XQ is coming to New York City.

The organization — which has offered big grants to help start novel high schools across the country — will give New York City $10 million to support 10 new or restructured district high schools.

It’s a high-profile bet by XQ, which is backed by the Emerson Collective, the philanthropic arm of Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs. (Emerson is a funder of Chalkbeat through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.) The organization has branched out from backing individual schools to partnering to directly with governments, including in Rhode Island and Tulsa, Oklahoma. New York City is its latest and biggest such bid.

Chalkbeat has reported extensively on XQ. Here are some key things to know about the group.

1. It’s already spent millions trying to “reinvent” schools across the country, though it’s hard to say how successful those schools have been — and some have faced major setbacks.

The XQ Initiative launched in September 2015 with a call for applications from teams with ideas for innovative new high schools. A year later, it named 10 teams as winners of $10 million each. Since then, additional teams have been added, and XQ has promised $136 million to 19 winning teams.

Some of those teams have faced significant setbacks. Three have not opened or expanded their schools as planned; a fourth closed down earlier this year. The reasons run the gamut from performance issues to local school board opposition. (XQ has formally severed ties with two winning teams, meaning 17 remain in the cohort.)

More recently, at Crosstown High School in Memphis, students staged a walkout and the principal left, the second leader to depart in two years.

At the same time, a number of school leaders say the XQ has provided crucial support as they launched high schools taking a novel approach, and XQ says even some of the losing teams have continued working to open new schools.

“Clearly not all the investments they made turned out,” said Scott Bess, who runs Purdue Polytechnic, an XQ school in Indianapolis. “They didn’t want to be safe and wanted to stretch a little bit, and when you do that, not everything works.”

2. It has tried to avoid the school reform wars.

XQ, which is led by former Obama education official Russlynn Ali, has awarded grants to a mix of charter and district schools across the country. It’s also said little about the specific kinds of innovation it looks for from applying teams.

One thing XQ clearly is a fan of is “competency-based” learning, in which students progress once they’ve mastered specific material. A policy document with recommendations for improving high schools released by XQ includes increasing expectations for earning a high school diploma and bolstering teacher training.

But XQ has largely avoided the most polarizing aspects of the current school reform debate, like arguments about the value of charter schools.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, attended the TV special live and has promoted XQ on Twitter. Some of XQ’s ideas have also appealed to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who has visited Purdue Polytechnic multiple times and hosted an innovation roundtable featuring two XQ school leaders. In 2017, DeVos met with Powell Jobs and Ali, according to her calendar.

“They’re definitely trying to stay on this level of supporting innovation but not claiming a side in what have become perhaps overly ossified division in education politics,” Sarah Reckhow, who studies education philanthropy at Michigan State, told Chalkbeat earlier this year.

Still, XQ has faced criticism from some common critics of charter schools and private spending in education, including Diane Ravitch, the education historian and activist.

Notably, XQ’s investment in New York City will focus on district schools. (One of its existing 17 schools is a New York City charter school, Brooklyn Lab.)

3. XQ has a great deal of money, and has used it not just on schools but also to drum up support for its ideas — with mixed success.

Powell Jobs’ fortune is estimated to be approximately $20 billion, according to the Washington Post. The Emerson Collective, Jobs’ philanthropic arm, supports XQ.

Emerson is organized as a limited liability company, rather than a traditional philanthropy, so it does not have to disclose its financial resources or giving. But XQ, a nonprofit, does.

Tax filings show that XQ has spent millions on its program to reinvent schools, while also mounting a public relations campaign to drum up interest in their competition and support for its ideas. In 2016, XQ spent $38 million on “movement building and public awareness,” including a national bus tour.

In 2017, XQ produced a glitzy national television special, featuring celebrities like Tom Hanks and Justin Timberlake. XQ reported $27 million in spending on movement building, including the special, in 2017.

XQ says the special attracted 25 million views and garnered energy around its vision, including 300,000 combined social media and text subscribers. But Chalkbeat previously reported that internally, some at XQ were disappointed that the special didn’t get as much attention as they hoped. Others who attended the special weren’t totally clear what the point was.

“I think it was hard to discern the takeaway and wished there was more guidance about what to do as an action step,” said Nick Melvoin, a Los Angeles school board member.

How Khan Academy, the popular free tool for students, wants to play a more official role in America’s classrooms

2019-09-18T18:11:00+00:00

When teachers in Compton Unified School District first started using Khan Academy, they deployed the online learning tool on their own — allowing students to use its tutorial videos to review concepts and practice key skills.

But that started to change two years ago, when district officials saw Khan Academy had launched a partnership with Long Beach Unified, a neighboring school district. Greg Puccia, a Compton schools official who oversees curriculum, called up Khan Academy to see if his district could strike a similar deal.

“It was definitely a little neighborly competition to say ‘Hey, if Long Beach is doing this, why isn’t Khan over here working with us, too?’” Puccia said.

Last year, Khan Academy trained more than 200 Compton teachers to use its tutorials in their classrooms. This year, the district is also using Khan Academy to help high schoolers study for the SAT. And Compton officials are paying to use a dashboard that shows teachers and administrators how students are doing in their online lessons. Now that the district is a paying customer, Compton teachers with tech support questions get to jump to the front of Khan’s queue.

That partnership, which will cost Compton $44,000 this year, is an example of the growing role Khan Academy wants to play inside America’s classrooms. While the organization says it charged Chicago schools for one-off training sessions in the past, it is now formally selling its services to districts, putting it in direct competition with other education technology vendors — though there is little concrete evidence of Khan Academy’s ability to help students academically.

The organization is banking that its nonprofit status and its familiarity to students and teachers, will serve as selling points.

“I do think being not-for-profit increases the trust level that folks can have with us,” CEO and founder Sal Khan said. “If we really want to reach all of the students, especially the ones that might be most in need, we really have to triple down on our work with classrooms and districts.”

This fall, some 218,000 students in seven school districts will be using the new paid-for offerings, which include teacher trainings, data dashboards, and a tool announced earlier this year that helps students prepare for the NWEA’s MAP Growth test, Khan Academy says. In addition to Long Beach and Compton, those districts include the Glendale, Pajaro Valley, and Madera school districts in California, as well as Clark County schools in Nevada and Seminole County schools in Florida. The idea is to help teachers see what skills students have mastered and provide them with targeted practice questions to help students improve. “Videos are a small part of this,” Khan said in an email.

Districts like Compton that are using the dashboard and training pay $10 per student, while districts like Madera that are using all three pay $12.50 per student. Khan says those fees won’t cover the full cost of creating and running them, so the rest will be covered by philanthropy. (Though Khan Academy is a nonprofit, it’s allowed to take in more than it spends. In 2017, for example, it had a $15 million surplus. Last year and this year, Khan says, the organization ran a deficit, and will likely do so in 2020.)

Rich Halverson, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of education leadership and policy analysis, has watched Khan Academy grow since Khan launched it in 2008 as as way to tutor his cousins in math. To be successful in this latest endeavor, he said, the organization will have to prove that its tools are truly valuable for schools.

“If teachers think that ‘Wow, I can really see how this whole group of students is struggling with this whole group of concepts,’ as a result of looking at this dashboard, then that’s clearly a win,” Halverson said. “But if the dashboards do not provide a lot of insights for teachers, then it doesn’t matter how much credibility that the Khan group has.”

Khan Academy already offers free data dashboards to teachers. But the paid tool allows school district officials to see how students in multiple classrooms are doing in specific subject areas, like algebra or English.

After starting a partnership in 2017, Long Beach now uses Khan Academy in many grades and subjects. This year, it is paying Khan Academy to set up accounts for all students from sixth to 12th grade, and teachers are using its free videos in several Advanced Placement courses and in the district’s core math and science classes.

Khan Academy and Long Beach officials both say they’ve seen promising academic results. But there is not yet any rigorous research to back up those claims.

On Friday, Khan released a two-page brief on 89 Long Beach teachers who volunteered to use its videos in their classrooms during the 2017-18 school year and receive training. It says students who used Khan Academy’s tools for more than 30 minutes a week scored higher on the state math test than Long Beach students who didn’t use it at all. But the research can only say those were correlated — it’s unclear whether Khan Academy was truly behind those benefits. The brief also lacked information about its methodology; Khan Academy said more details would be released later this year.

“Future studies with a more rigorous research design may be able to provide better insight,” it says.

Something similar happened in 2017 when the College Board released data showing that students who spent time practicing for the SAT with Khan Academy saw score gains that showed up across student groups. It couldn’t be determined whether Khan Academy caused those increases, though, just that the two were correlated.

The most comprehensive study on Khan Academy, released in 2014, looked at how Khan Academy was used over two years in 20 schools. In surveys, most teachers said they believed Khan Academy made a positive impact on students’ learning and their understanding of material, especially in math. And about one third of students said they liked math more after using Khan Academy.

Again, higher math achievement for some students on California’s state test correlated with higher student usage of Khan Academy, but did “not constitute definitive evidence with respect to Khan Academy impacts,” the study said. The Khan Academy tools also changed over the course of the study, and not all teachers used them in the same way.

Daniel Kelly, an assistant professor of instructional technology in Texas Tech University’s College of Education, says though Khan Academy has been around for 14 years, the research on its use in classrooms is limited. Kelly put together a review of research on Khan Academy three years ago, and says not much has changed since then.

“There hasn’t been a lot of either transparency or research into what the outcomes [or] gains have been,” Kelly said. “The fact that information is not out there is concerning, especially now we’re going to pay for it.”

That hasn’t stopped districts like Compton from hoping that the expanded use of Khan Academy will translate to academic gains. This year, 2,500 sophomores and juniors in the district will use Khan Academy for PSAT and SAT prep during the school day. Officials hope it will make up for the fact that many of their students, nearly all of whom come from low-income families, can’t afford private tutors.

“We live pretty close to some very affluent neighborhoods … where the families really have the resources for these kids to take SAT prep classes at about $800 to $1,000 per class,” Puccia said. “And our students just don’t have those.”

This story has been updated to include additional information about Khan Academy’s finances. An earlier version of this story said that Khan Academy’s new dashboard allows district officials to see how students of different racial and ethnic groups are performing; it does not.

Summit Learning reports highlight big ambitions for personalized learning, struggles to prove academic success

2019-08-22T15:56:06+00:00

Leaders behind the Summit Learning technology platform and curriculum once set a goal that it be used in half of U.S. public schools by 2025.

That was always a long shot. But now it seems especially so, as Summit’s growth has slowed to a near halt. Catherine Madden, a spokesperson for TLP Education, the nonprofit that now administers Summit, says the organization expects to have a similar number of partner schools this year as it did last year — about 400.

It would take roughly 50,000 schools adopting Summit for the program to meet the ambitious 50% goal, which was briefly mentioned in a 2016 grant report to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. These numbers suggest a change in strategy, circumstances, or both for the high-profile initiative backed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a way to improve American schools.

“The Program has grown entirely based on educator demand,” said Madden. “At TLP Education, our priority is to provide schools that ask for our help with effective training, tools, and ongoing support to implement Summit Learning.”

In addition to the 2016 report, Chalkbeat also obtained, through public records requests, reports from 2017 and 2019 that detail how Summit Public Schools, the charter network that developed the Summit model, used large grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. (CZI is a funder of Chalkbeat.)

Those reports also highlight how Summit has struggled to show clear evidence of academic and non-academic success. In initial reports, Summit indicated plans to release external research on the program’s effectiveness. That hasn’t happened, and in its most recent report, Summit offers a tepid description of its academic impact.

“Across the entire Program, Summit Learning Schools performed as expected on traditional measures, which is no small feat based on Summit’s own experience,” reads a January 2019 report. “On average, Summit Learning students achieved an academic year’s worth of growth in math and reading.”

Madden said TLP is working to expand the research base on Summit.

Summit’s growth plans, and questions of its effectiveness, are noteworthy because CZI is now one of the country’s largest education philanthropies. It has staked its vision for improving education on the model, which combines a technology platform for students and teachers, one-on-one mentoring, and project-based instruction. CZI has given at least $99 million directly to Summit in addition to providing a team of engineers — allowing the program to be made available free of charge to interested schools.

CZI declined to comment.

To Josh McGee, a research professor at the University of Arkansas and former executive at the Arnold Foundation, the reports reflect the scale of ambition that philanthropies often want to see and that startups often aspire to.

“It is the goal of philanthropies to find things that make a difference and get them to scale,” said McGee, who also noted that much communication between grantees and their funders is not captured in grant reports.

“It’s still a challenge to build any evidence based around a particular program,” he said. “You see in these grant reports Summit struggling [with] how to do that and how to do that in a way that doesn’t disrupt their model.”

2016 and 2017 grant reports highlight Summit — and CZI’s — far-reaching ambitions

Summit describes “personalized learning” as a way to tailor instruction to individual students’ needs and interests — with technology making this feasible.

“After a lecture or classroom discussion, different students within a single class could be completing different projects about the topic, each tailored to their learning style,” explains a recent Summit blog post. “Technology in a personalized learning classroom supports each student in owning their learning path.” (Proponents increasingly downplay the technological side of personalized learning, and the CZI’s grantmaking includes tech-focused investments as well as others focused on things like social-emotional skills.)

Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have said they want to spread the idea to teachers everywhere. In line with that vision, the $20 million grant issued by CZI to Summit in 2016 had a sweeping goal: “scale personalized learning nationally.”

Summit described a marketing plan featuring Facebook Live videos, a podcast, and efforts to collaborate “with key influencers, researchers, and thought leaders.” Summit envisioned a growing movement where people became “convinced that their school(s) should be doing Summit Learning” and that “being a Summit Learning graduate is a competitive advantage for hiring by America’s top 100 employers.”

Rand Quinn, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied education philanthropy, said a vision for rapid growth can come from both sides. “It’s not necessarily solely the result of the ambitions of the grantee, as much as it’s this interplay between the funder and the grantee trying to demonstrate and achieve the broadest impact,” he said.

The report also shows that Summit wanted to prove that its approach and personalized learning more broadly are successful. “Our ultimate goal is for the Summit Learning community to be able to confidently and accurately answer the question, ‘Does Summit Learning work?’” the 2017 report says.

But on both counts — creating demand, and showing its effectiveness — Summit and the personalized learning movement have faced setbacks.

High-profile news stories have featured complaints from parents and students in schools using Summit, some expressing fear that children are spending too much time in front of screens. Other parents and educators have praised the program, and there’s not good data to support sweeping statements about Summit’s popularity.

The research on tech-based personalized learning remains thin, and is virtually nonexistent for Summit in particular. Summit decided not to move forward with a study that it paid Harvard researchers to design a few years ago.

Summit Public Schools has published a report titled the “Science of Summit,” which details the research that informed the design of its approach.

2019 report strikes different tone

The most recent report was issued in 2019 for a $23.8 million grant. This one had a less far-reaching purpose: “To support the Summit Learning Program, with a specific emphasis on partner school success.”

This report includes two case studies of schools using Summit but no details on the overall performance of schools using the model, beyond stating that students had made an average of a year’s worth of growth on math and reading tests. Part of that may reflect Summit’s philosophy that “the definition of student success varies depending on the school.”

In one middle school in Massachusetts, Summit has expanded to all grades and “parents have been largely supportive” because of clear communication by the school, the report says. Another case study describes a charter network in Chicago that has seen growth in math and reading scores since adopting Summit.

McGee said that evidence is not particularly strong, but that this isn’t unique to Summit. “None of that is all that rigorous, but it is indicative of the type of evidence that is often provided by providers of education interventions,” he said. “That kind of information tells you something, but it can lead you to the wrong conclusions.”

The latest report does not mention the research described or proposed in the prior reports, or describe how Summit hopes to show external audiences that its approach works. Madden, the TLP spokesperson, said that the organization has recently “prioritized expanding research to help measure the long-term impact of our Program.”

This report also suggests Summit has changed its approach to working with partner schools, which are now required to implement all the three major components of the program.

“During the first few years of the Summit Learning Program, we supported schools in tailoring the Summit Learning instructional approach to their community’s needs,” the report reads. “However Summit Learning is a comprehensive approach to teaching and learning — not an add-on or technology intervention.”

This spring, Chalkbeat reported that 25% of schools that had adopted Summit before the 2018-19 school year were no longer using it.

It’s not clear how many schools added or dropped the program since. But the fact that Summit expects net growth to halt is consistent with the shift in grant priorities from rapidly scaling up to working with existing schools.

“There’s lots of diversity of experiences,” TLP Education head Andrew Goldin said in a recent interview with EdSurge. “But we are feeling like we have learned a ton about the conditions that let schools be successful.”

Read the full grants reports here.

One year in, Gates-funded networks of schools are getting off the ground — and more are on the way

2019-07-18T21:23:20+00:00

Baltimore’s school leaders have a clear goal: to improve their eighth and ninth-graders’ reading and writing skills. They also have $11 million from the Gates Foundation to help do it.

Figuring out exactly what to do, though, has been a messy, ongoing process. And that’s by design, they say. One of the 14 schools working on the issue took four or five meetings to decide what to try and how teachers would track improvement and make adjustments, a Baltimore principal said this week.

“Teachers had to come to the table and say, ‘Yeah, I’m not so great at this,’” said Kamala Carnes, principal of Briscoe Academy, at a Gates Foundation event. “Even as a leader, it was a lot of hard work, and we really had to dig deep to figure out what the problem was and come up with the solution.”

Baltimore’s work is one piece of a larger effort the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation launched one year ago to improve schools by grouping them together to solve common problems, with an emphasis on helping black, Hispanic, and low-income students succeed. The foundation has already given $93 million in grants to 21 nonprofits coordinating the networks, and Gates said it will announce at least 12 more grants in the coming months.

At the event earlier this week, participants in networks from California to Philadelphia offered a first assessment of their progress. (The Gates Foundation is a funder of Chalkbeat.) Baltimore served as an example of the complications that can come with giving more power to schools to design improvement efforts — and the optimism that leaders have about the “continuous improvement” work eventually helping more schools.

“I need 170 schools that can serve the young people of Baltimore City in a way that the continuous improvement cycle is realized in their results, and realized in how they view the world,” Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Sonja Santelises said.

Other grant recipients include Achieve Atlanta, which received more than $530,000 to increase the number of Atlanta Public Schools students who go to college and to decrease the number of students “undermatching,” that is, enrolling in colleges that are less selective than students’ academic records suggest they could handle. In Chicago, the Network for College Success got $11 million to increase the number of black, Hispanic, and low-income ninth graders on track to graduate high school.

Gates offered little data about whether the effort has shown early success. In a report released Tuesday, the foundation said it expects to publish research from Columbia University reviewing the initiative’s first year later in 2019. Student progress data, it said, will be available in the next three years.

By sharing what works, and letting schools take the lead, Gates officials say they hope the effort will offer roadmaps for schools elsewhere.

“We’ve recognized that education research needs to address more directly the questions and problems that matter most to these practitioners,” the Gates report said. “Even the best research typically needs to be translated into tools and practices that teachers and principals can use.”

That’s part of an ongoing shift for the foundation, which is among the biggest players in U.S. education philanthropy. Many of the organization’s past efforts, including breaking up high schools into new, small schools; an overhaul of teacher evaluations; and the expansion of charter schools have faced stiff resistance from some educators.

Perhaps cognizant of this perception, the foundation featured participants who said the latest effort has emerged from the ground up.

“The power of this work is really trusting the wisdom of practitioners and what’s happening inside of schools and building off of the understanding practitioners have of what is going on,” said Jenny Nagaoka, deputy director of the University of Chicago’s consortium on school research, during one panel discussion about measuring success.

There’s no indication that Gates’ latest effort has driven the sort of backlash that past approaches have.

Still, the foundation acknowledged that the continuous improvement model it has adopted might not prove effective — but argued it is important to try.

“Maybe in our goal to get flexible schools where working conditions makes sense and we can respond flexibly to the needs of teachers, it isn’t the right strategy,” said Bob Hughes, the foundation’s K-12 education director. “We have to take that risk, and we have to acknowledge that up front: that it may not work in every circumstance and every problem.”

Laurene Powell Jobs has given millions to reinvent the American high school. Is it working?

2019-06-27T23:43:00+00:00

The live, prime-time TV special had Jennifer Hudson singing, Tom Hanks driving a school bus, and Kelly Clarkson singing some more.

Their message was that America needed to reinvent high school. But although the 2017 show — a pricey effort by XQ, the nonprofit backed by Laurene Powell Jobs — attracted over 25 million viewers on a Friday night, it didn’t translate into the cultural moment the organization had hoped for, according to a former employee and another person with knowledge of XQ’s inner workings.

The TV special didn’t lead to the number of new social media followers the organization had counted on. Press reaction was tepid, even downright skeptical. And a later effort to get an Emmy nod for the special, including videos with the tagline “for the consideration of our students” — a play on the phrase “for your consideration” — didn’t pan out either.

It’s an example of how XQ, one of the most ambitious and best-funded school reform initiatives to launch in recent years, has struggled to translate its spending and unconventional strategy into widespread attention to its cause. The organization spent $127 million between 2015 and 2017, and has committed tens of millions more to teams that won XQ’s competition for innovative school designs.

But some of those teams have since run up against substantial, if common, roadblocks like unfriendly school boards and questions about low test scores. Three of 19 have not opened or expanded as planned; a fourth closed this year.

At the same time, a number of school leaders say the XQ has helped them launch high schools doing novel things, and they’re working hard to help other schools learn from their experiences. Nearly three years after announcing the first winners, XQ says even some of losing teams have continued working to open new schools — evidence that the competition has grown into a nationwide movement.

Has it? Scott Bess, who runs Purdue Polytechnic High School in Indianapolis, one of the winning schools, is optimistic about the XQ’s ability to make a broader impact. “The point of this wasn’t to get 15 or 16 schools that are successful, but to say the things that those schools are doing are now starting to show up in 4,000 schools,” he said. “Obviously, the jury is out.”

XQ schools see success, setbacks

XQ launched in September 2015 with former Obama administration official Russlynn Ali at the helm and with financial backing from Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective. (Emerson is a funder of Chalkbeat through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.)

Its goal was to change how American high schools worked. XQ pointed to the hundreds of thousands of students who drop out each year and surveys showing that most high schoolers don’t feel school is relevant to their daily lives. The experience hasn’t changed in 100 years, and badly needed fresh ideas, its leaders said. (That’s a common argument in education, and historians say it has some truth, but that schools have also changed in important ways.)

More than 700 teams from all 50 states submitted proposals to the competition XQ launched to identify and catalyze ideas for new kinds of schools. A year later, XQ announced that 10 teams had won $10 million to turn their ideas into reality over five years.

In the years since, more groups have won grants, bringing XQ’s total promises to $136 million across 19 teams.

Most of the XQ winners are now up and running. There’s a Washington, D.C. school that prioritizes computer science and getting real-world internships for all of its students. Another is a racially integrated school in Memphis focused on project-based learning, whose founder applied after driving by an XQ billboard; a third is a school-within-a-school meant to mirror a high-tech office in Florida. A school in Los Angeles focuses on helping homeless students, while another in Grand Rapids is based in an old museum.

It’s too soon to judge their records — most have grown slowly and still serve a small number of students — but some can point to early results, like Washington Leadership Academy, which has received top marks from D.C.’s charter board.

Others say they’ve seen less tangible successes.

“[We’re] redefining what education can look like in Memphis,” said Chris Terrill of Memphis’ Crosstown High School. Many local schools, he says, have been under pressure to focus too much on raising test scores, while his school has emphasized projects. A human geography class researching the experience of Somali refugees, for example, wrote about it and then physically recreated a Somali-style household. “It’s this moment for people that gave them goosebumps.”

Students at Crosstown High School, a first-year, project-based learning charter school, hosted an exhibit of their final projects May 16.

Four winning XQ teams haven’t opened schools as planned, though, and their struggles underscore the headwinds XQ faces in its effort to show that high school can be reinvented with enough money and the right ideas.

Compass Academy in Denver, for example, received an XQ grant to help it expand from middle school to high school, but it’s had to put those plans on hold. The existing middle school earned the district’s lowest rating for its first two years, and the Denver school board won’t allow Compass to add grades until it improves. (Results for the 2018-19 school year aren’t out yet.)

Compass’ executive director Marcia Fulton said the school is working to do just that, but also argued that the evaluation, which focuses on test scores, gives short shrift to the school’s work on social-emotional skills and bilingual education for its mostly Hispanic students.

XQ has continued to back them. “They rolled up their sleeves,” Fulton said, asking, “What else can we be doing? What supports do you need?”

Meanwhile, in Somerville, Massachusetts, a winning XQ team known as Powderhouse Studios saw its proposal for a 40-student school be unanimously rejected in March by the local school board. The superintendent cited potential financial strain on the district.

Alec Resnick, the head of Powderhouse, says the team is considering potential next steps, including reapplying to the district or bringing some of the ideas elsewhere. A spokesperson for XQ said the grant to Powderhouse was no longer active.

In Oakland, where XQ itself is based, the charter network Summit Public Schools won $10 million to open a school there. It scrapped that plan just months later, and the XQ money ended up supporting an existing Summit school in Daly City, California.

“It became a situation of where it was like, wait, what’s going on here? What do you mean there’s going to be a new charter school?” said James Harris, an Oakland school board member. Summit had not garnered enough support locally, he said, particularly as debates were swirling in the city about whether the district already had too many schools.

A spokesperson for Summit declined to comment on its experience in Oakland. XQ has since awarded a separate $10 million grant to Latitude High School, a charter school there that opened last year.

Finally, Design Thinking Academy, a charter school in Delaware, announced in May that it was shutting down at the end of this school year amid declining enrollment, among other challenges. XQ terminated its partnership with the school in April after issuing only $2.1 million of the awarded $10 million.

“XQ has been very concerned about DTA’s lack of progress toward implementing the Team’s Super School Application,” CEO Ali wrote in a letter to the school’s leadership, posted by a local blogger. “DTA is not using innovative approaches to curriculum and teaching.”

Are these sorts of setbacks simply to be expected for schools looking to shake things up?

“To have that kind of mortality rate at the end of three years — that would strike me as high given that huge amount of money,” said Larry Cuban, an emeritus professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education who has written about innovation in education.

Others see it as part of the innovation process.

“Clearly not all the investments they made turned out,” said Bess. “They didn’t want to be safe and wanted to stretch a little bit, and when you do that, not everything works.”

The other side of XQ: trying to build national momentum

As many of those schools were trying to get off the ground in 2017, XQ was working to pull off its star-studded TV special. The organization has launched a number of other initiatives in the years since, including a campaign to encourage people to run for school board and a series of live events with Pop-Up Magazine that featured “stories, selfie confessionals, viral gratitude, and multimedia adventures.”

It’s not clear how much these efforts outside of schools have borne fruit, though.

The TV special asked viewers to send a text to sign up for messages from XQ. The organization declined to say how many people receive its those messages, only that it has 300,000 combined social media and text subscribers. (One recent XQ text: “What happens when you let students take the lead in their own learning?” and a link to information about a lesson at one XQ school.)

SANTA MONICA, CA: (L-R) President of Emerson Collective Laurene Powell Jobs, CEO of XQ Russlynn Ali, XQ board member Geoffrey Canada, and Emerson Collective’s Darwin Valesquez. (Photo by Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images for EIF)

But the former XQ staff member said the sign-up effort was only modestly successful, even though the special did drive eyeballs to the issue of improving public education. According to the source with knowledge of XQ, disappointment about the special led to a new idea to garner attention: get an Emmy nomination for the TV program. (Both sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements.)

With Emmy voting underway in 2018, XQ’s social media accounts began posting videos with the tagline “for the consideration of our students.” A news story about XQ appeared on the awards show’s website. And throughout the June 2018 voting period, the organization dispatched a branded bus across Los Angeles, an effort meant in part to drum up awareness among Emmy voters, according to the source.

An XQ spokesperson said the special was successful in a number of ways, including its millions of viewers. The “primary goal” of the June 2018 bus tour through Los Angeles “was connecting with students through local community partners,” XQ’s chief marketing officer Chrysi Philalithes said in a statement.

Even some viewers sympathetic to XQ’s mission left the TV special confounded. “I think it was hard to discern the takeaway and wished there was more guidance about what to do as an action step,” said Nick Melvoin, a Los Angeles school board member who attended the live TV production in person.

And what kinds of change, exactly, XQ wants people to get behind remains unclear to some.

“They’re definitely trying to stay on this level of supporting innovation but not claiming a side in what have become perhaps overly ossified division in education politics,” said Sarah Reckhow, who studies education philanthropy at Michigan State.

That may have helped XQ avoid some polarizing aspects of the current school reform debate, like arguments about the value of charter schools, but it may have also made it harder to galvanize support.

XQ’s claim that it has started a nationwide movement “seems overblown,” said Reckhow. “The charter school movement — that is a real thing. I don’t even know what the XQ movement would be.”

“While we want to see a movement around high school transformation because of the need for change, we have never thought that we could build one alone,” XQ’s spokesperson said. “We are trying to support one on behalf of our nation’s young people and empower the folks who are hungry for change.”

Zak Malamed, a former XQ employee who helped organize the bus tours, said as he traveled around the country, he heard from people inspired by the competition. “It galvanized people to think about the future of school in ways that they weren’t — or didn’t feel like they could have — before,” he said.

Regardless, XQ’s efforts have come with a substantial price tag. Tax filings in 2016 list $43 million in expenses, including $38 million for a national bus tour. In 2017, the organization listed $58 million in expenses, including grants for winning schools; $26 million went to “movement building,” including the TV special. Those numbers don’t include most of the over $100 million promised to schools.

XQ did not respond to questions about the total cost of the TV special or the Los Angeles bus tour.

One point of comparison is the $100 million donation by Mark Zuckerberg to Newark’s public schools, which now serve about 50,000 students.

XQ said it expects 16 of its winning schools to be open next year, serving nearly 10,000 students — far fewer students than Newark, for a roughly similar amount of money directed to schools. But the number of students in XQ schools will likely grow since many plan to expand, and XQ’s mission extends beyond those individual schools.

Can XQ schools help others innovate?

In some cases, winning an XQ grant has come with its own challenges. The former staff member said that the size of the awards made tensions within some winning teams nearly inevitable, as members had to decide how to spend the money and which of them would have the final say. In some cases, this led to delays in the money reaching school teams.

Stacey Kane, the co-founder of Washington Leadership Academy, said the money had indeed led to intense debate. “We had many different ideas for how it should be spent,” she said. The school won XQ’s first competition in 2016, but just completed the first year of the five-year grant, a delay Kane said was in part due to that disagreement.

Eventually, Washington Leadership Academy developed a set of guidelines for spending the money to make sure as many students as possible benefit from XQ’s millions. So far, the school has used it to create a “competency-based” English curriculum and a set of computer science course tracks, including a series of classes meant to prepare students to study the subject in college and other courses to help students earn a certification that could lead to a job.

The school has largely scrapped early efforts to use virtual reality in class, something Kane said was a result of there being very little educational content to draw from. The computer science work, though, is something she thinks other schools could learn from.

“We wanted to make sure that whatever it was benefited our kids and kids in other high schools, because we recognized we were incredibly lucky to receive that level of resources,” Kane said, a sentiment echoed by Terrill of Crosstown High School.

The extent to which these schools’ practices spread depends on a lot of factors, including how different and how successful they really are. Some of the XQ schools are spending their money on more bread-and-butter concerns like building renovations, lowering class sizes, or hiring additional staff members while the school is growing.

Other schools nationwide have struggled to implement some of the ideas embraced by XQ schools, like competency-based education, and there’s limited research on whether these concepts will actually improve academic outcomes.

Cuban said there’s another hurdle to spreading these ideas: the appeal of more common structures, which he calls the “grammar” of schooling. “It’s very hard to change the grammar of schooling because most people in America want to keep it the way it is,” he said.

That’s the tide XQ is pushing against, and part of why the organization says it’s invested heavily in both individual schools and storytelling efforts like its recent live events.

“The extent to which they’ve had the greatest impact — it’s serving as an incubator,” said Melvoin, the Los Angeles school board member. “We’re notoriously bad at sharing best practices. I do think there’s something there.”

Summit Learning, the Zuckerberg-backed platform, says 10% of schools quit using it each year. The real figure is higher.

2019-05-23T10:00:14+00:00

When nearly 100 students walked out of their Brooklyn high school in protest last year, saying they were spending too much of their days in front of a computer, the story took off.

The students were complaining about their school’s use of Summit Learning, a curriculum and online learning system backed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. But the organizations behind Summit pushed back, saying the issues raised by the Brooklyn students weren’t representative of what was happening at the nearly 400 schools using the program.

One piece of evidence they offered: just 10% of schools quit using the platform each year, a number that ended up in multiple news stories.

New data obtained by Chalkbeat — from Summit itself, in response to a public records request — shows that figure is misleading. Since the platform was made available, 18% of schools using it in a given year had quit using it a year later.

Asked about the discrepancy, a Summit spokesperson explained that its 10% figure comes from averaging the dropoff rates for each of the first three years. The number of schools adopting the platform was 19 in the first year and 338 in the third year, so Summit’s approach is skewed heavily in favor of the first year’s low attrition number.

Looking just at schools that signed on to the platform last school year, a quarter of them are no longer using Summit this year.

“We are extremely proud that the vast majority of schools that launch Summit Learning continue to stay in the program,” spokesperson Catherine Madden said in a statement. A spokesperson for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which has also cited the 10% number, declined to comment.

The numbers offer a starting point for understanding the scope of pushback to Summit Learning — which has made headlines in Brooklyn, Connecticut, Kansas, and elsewhere.

Still, the data provide something of a Rorschach test for one’s views on Summit and the broader movement to “personalize” learning to better serve students. A solid majority of schools opting to use the program are re-upping the next year, the data show. On the other hand, if the current attrition rate holds, half of the schools now using it may stop within a few years.

John Pane, who has researched personalized learning at RAND, said an 18% annual dropoff rate would seem high if all schools planned to use Summit on a permanent basis, but would be more reasonable if many were just piloting the program. At least some schools in the program have described their adoption of Summit as a pilot, and Summit itself notes that many schools try it out in a single grade.

“This kind of thing, the ‘personalized learning’ model that Summit has, is a really big change to how schools operate,” he said. “When you’re making a big change like that, there’s a lot of work to do to get everyone on the same page, including parents.”

The Summit platform emerged from a network of charter schools in California and Washington state. The model includes a technology platform that guides students through lessons but also a structure for the school day and year that includes weeks set aside for investigations into specific topics and time to work with a dedicated mentor.

It’s grown with help from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The New York Times recently reported that CZI has given $99 million to Summit since 2016 — a number that doesn’t include the team of engineers CZI has paid to work on the platform. (CZI is also a funder of Chalkbeat.)

For the last several years, Summit has made its technology available to schools across the country for free. As more schools adopted it, scrutiny has ramped up, most prominently in the Times story highlighting complaints from parents and students in two Kansas school districts. Again, Summit and its supporters said that their experience was not representative.

The list of schools using the program each year sheds new light on this issue.

Of the first 19 schools to adopt the platform in 2015, all but two — nearly 90% — are using it this year. But as Summit has rapidly spread, attrition has also jumped.

Another way of looking at the numbers: about 25% of schools that have adopted Summit at any point before this school year are no longer using it.

Madden, the Summit spokesperson, told Chalkbeat last month that the the precise share of schools that left the program each year was 11%, or nearly a 90% re-up rate. Madden declined to provide more details, but Chalkbeat obtained additional information through a public records request to Summit’s charter network.

From there, Chalkbeat calculated that 18% annual dropoff rate. Summit’s number diverges from Chalkbeat’s because it weights each year equally, regardless of how many schools participated. Summit also didn’t count four schools that dropped the program shortly after adopting it.

Summit has recently spun off efforts to offer its platform to other schools into a separate nonprofit, T.L.P. Education, which would not be subject to public records laws.

So, is an 18% annual dropoff rate high, or in line with what one would expect for an effort to overhaul how classrooms work? That’s hard to say.

As one point of comparison, Education Week reported in 2017 that a quarter of schools that had ever used the math personalized learning program Teach to One eventually dropped it. Unlike Teach to One, though, Summit is offered free to schools, which might encourage some to try it on a trial basis.

“Maybe the district feels like it’s less of a risk, or may have less commitment, if they’re not making a financial purchase,” said Pane.

The Summit spokesperson said that some schools drop the platform because of changes in school leadership or the teaching staff or because their school district adopts a common curriculum and requires schools to follow it.

Some schools have done so in response to criticism from parents and students. A few have tried making compromises: After controversy, one Pennsylvania district allowed sixth-graders to opt into the program before announcing last month it was canceling Summit altogether.

“At this point there is declining interest, we couldn’t sustain it with the staff, and our other class sizes are rising,” said Superintendent Michael Vuckovich. “And we weren’t offering a program with the fidelity it should have had.” (This district is counted in Chalkbeat’s data as continuing to use Summit because it only canceled the program last month.)

But most schools are sticking with Summit.

“In our own schools, we’ve seen real progress since implementing this approach,” wrote Gordon Mohn, superintendent of one of the Kansas’ districts featured in the New York Times article. “As students become more comfortable with the changes, we see greater student engagement and increased interaction between the teacher and student regarding the learning process.”

Meanwhile, there remains virtually no external research on the effectiveness of Summit’s model. Chalkbeat reported earlier this year that Summit had paid Harvard researchers to design a study of its model, but ultimately decided not to move forward with being evaluated.

Asked recently by Chalkbeat about research on the model, Sandra Liu Huang, head of education at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, didn’t offer specifics.

“We want to be able to figure out how to do a broader scale research study of that, but also understanding … it is a living, evolving, growing program that looks a little bit different in every context,” Huang said during a question and answer session at the Education Writers Association conference earlier this month. “We’re trying to figure out the best ways to do that.”

What does Montessori mean in the age of school choice? Researcher Mira Debs explains

2019-04-30T21:41:55+00:00

Montessori education is about to get a significant jumpstart in the form of $1 billion from Jeff Bezos, the wealthiest man in the world.

That means the release of a new book on Montessori is well timed. In it, Mira Debs — now the director of Yale’s education studies program — traces the history of Montessori education and describes the experiences of families and educators at two Montessori magnet schools in Hartford, Connecticut.

Montessori can both contribute to and ameliorate school segregation, she points out in “Diverse Families, Desirable Schools” — and the programs offer a vivid example of how affluent families are able to prioritize finding a “good fit” school, while low-income families struggle to just find a decent option.

Mira Debs

“Montessori’s appeal among a wide range of families and its offer of an individualized learning experience has made it a key model for racially and economically integrated schools,” writes Debs, who helped start a public Montessori school in New Haven, Connecticut.

But, she warns, Montessori is “particularly vulnerable, both historically and today, to being diverted to serve predominantly middle-class and white students.”

Montessori, a philosophy developed by Italian educator Maria Montessori in the early 1900s, is often seen as the province of private school, and there are more than 2,000 private Montessori programs in the U.S. today. But it also exists within traditional school districts: Estimates suggest there are more than 500 public Montessori programs, about 40 percent of those are charter schools. Students in public Montessori are substantially more likely to be white and come from higher-income families than students in their school districts overall, according to Debs’ research.

There’s surprisingly little research on Montessori’s effects on student outcomes, though recent studies on schools in South Carolina and Hartford have found encouraging results. Still, Debs said, “There’s a lot more research that needs to happen.”

Chalkbeat spoke with Debs about how Montessori fits into the school choice ecosystem, why some parents are wary of the approach, and whether she’s optimistic about Jeff Bezos’ ambition.

The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Chalkbeat: If I walked into a Montessori classroom or Montessori school, what are some of the trappings and ways the school is run that might feel distinct?

Mira Debs: One of the things that you’ll notice if you go into a Montessori classroom is that there will be a full class of children who are all working on different things. You’ll see them working on the floor, on mats, you’ll see them working on tables, you’ll see them working in pairs or small groups, you’ll see them working by themselves, and it will take you a couple of minutes to look and find the teacher because the teacher won’t immediately be apparent.

As I write about in the book, there’s a really structured process by which students gradually work up to have that level of independence and control. People who are observing don’t often see what all of those processes are like.

In one classroom where I was observing, they have a student who monitors the noise, and when the noise gets to a particular level, the student’s job is to go to the front of the room and turn off the lights which then acts as a signal to the students that they need to bring their noise level back down. That all happened in the span of a minute, completely independent of the teacher having to say or do anything.

As you know, Jeff Bezos has committed $1 billion toward opening a number of Montessori preschools. Can you describe your understanding of what it is that he wants to do?

It’s called the Bezos Day One Academies. The idea is that they would create, open, and operate a series of free-tuition Montessori-inspired preschool programs in an unspecified number of cities. The Montessori community was very excited by that announcement, and people have immediately been trying to figure out, what exactly does does that mean? And what does he mean by “Montessori-inspired’ as well?

Because one of the things that has traditionally happened with people who start student-centered schools or progressive schools like Montessori is that when they take inspiration, but it’s only partial, there’s a really strong tendency to be pulled back into traditional ideas of schooling. Something can be Montessori-inspired but actually then not really be very strongly Montessori or very strongly anything else. That’s one big question that Montessori educators are trying to understand. My understanding from conversations with folks at the Bezos Day One Academies is they’re also working to figure out what exactly does that look like. I think that hasn’t been been answered yet.

Have they sought out your advice or guidance at all?

The head of the Bezos Day One Academies, Mike George, was at the most recent Montessori Event — the American Montessori Society conference that happened in March. So I was able meet him at that point.

To your knowledge have they spelled out any further details about what they want to do publicly?

No.

Can you talk about your own thoughts then — why you might be optimistic, pessimistic, or somewhere in between about this grant?

I think that it’s been great for raising the profile of Montessori. The historic amount of money that’s being donated and the potential for who it might give access to Montessori is really significant and really encouraging. It’s also garnered a lot of public attention and made other funders take note. It’s kind of like the Bill Gates effect — when one the richest people in the world decides to put on a lot of money towards something, then a lot of other people are taking note.

I absolutely support the idea of providing quality early child care to communities that historically have not been able to access it. As an education researcher, I really see the way that schools are very integral parts of the communities in which they’re created. They serve as community hubs. They serve as places of empowerment. They serve as places of exchange. So I’ve been really inspired by the grassroots Montessori educators who have built schools out of their communities, and in response to the needs of their communities. From my research I’ve seen how much these organizations are really working very hard to solicit funding.

As I wrote in a New York Times editorial in the fall, I would love to see Bezos’ money go to support organizations that are already doing the work rather than creating an entirely new initiative. But maybe it’s also possible to do a both/and — to create something new and also support the people who are already out there doing the work in their communities.

In your book you write, “The public Montessori story is a microcosm of the great challenges of school choice — balancing opportunity, diversity, and equity.” Can you tell me a little more about what you mean by that?

There are all kinds of ways that choice is appealing to families because it gives them the sense of control over their children’s education. It gives them the sense that they are choosing something that matches the individuality and the specialness of their child. But what we’ve seen overwhelmingly in research and reporting from city to city is that the cumulative effects of those individual choices can have really unintended consequences and can lead to greater racial segregation.

How do you see public Montessori schools fitting into that?

The promise of Montessori in the public sector has been a space for a really innovative model, a space that has spoken to families of a lot of different backgrounds and demographics, and a way to try something really different in the public sector. But the challenge has been that the very desirability of that model has then led to all of the effects that I was just speaking about. Because Montessori has a certain cachet, because it exists a lot in the private sector, families with resources have heard of it and flock after it.

Then that opportunity is not as available to the less-resourced families who may not know about Montessori and may not necessarily think about that as an option for their children. In Montessori, you see a dramatic version of a lot of these phenomena that are happening more broadly in the school choice landscape.

Montessori educators tend to think of themselves as creating a school and that school itself is is creating a positive good in the community. I think it’s really important for schools to also be thinking about what’s their impact on the ecosystem. I think of a school like City Garden Montessori School in St. Louis, which has really been leading the way in reflecting on what is what is their broader impact on their community. They located themselves in one of the few racially diverse neighborhoods in St. Louis because they wanted to create a racially diverse school. But because their school was a Montessori school, they actually started advancing the gentrification that was already underway in that neighborhood. And as a result the school has gotten involved in leading efforts to have conversations about affordable housing in their neighborhood so that they can ensure that they’re there working to sustain the diversity of the neighborhood. They’re also currently working on expanding to other parts of St. Louis that have less resources.

In your book, you point out that over two-thirds of public Montessori schools enroll fewer students of color than their surrounding school district. And nearly three-quarters of public Montessori schools enroll fewer low-income students than the surrounding district. Those are very striking disparities.

Yes. Although, on the other hand, if the district is a majority-poor district and a district that has a majority of students of color, Montessori can also be serving to create schools that are more racially balanced.

If a school, say, is 50 percent students of color and 50 percent white in a district that is 90 percent of students of color, is that school working to further integration or further segregation? It seems ambiguous.

Yeah, I would say I don’t know. But the other challenge to that I saw is that it’s really hard for schools to maintain a stable level of racial diversity.

Do you think it is possible or even common that the idea of Montessori is used by some white parents as a socially acceptable way to send their kids to white and affluent segregated schools?

Absolutely. In the same way that I think parents are often using the phrase, “Oh, this is a better fit for us” as stand-in for all kinds of other things that they don’t necessarily want to say. But on the other hand, we’ve also seen both historically and today that Montessori brings white families into schools serving predominantly students of color that they wouldn’t have otherwise considered because they want Montessori so much for their children. I think it does both things.

Can you describe how you define the idea of “school fit” in your book and why you find that problematic in certain ways?

A good fit is often talked about very naturalistically. You’ll look through a brochure from the city of New York or Boston and it just tells parents, “Pick a school that’s a good fit for your child.” There’s no discussion of what does that actually mean, and who is able to take advantage of this idea of fit and who is not able to take advantage of the idea the good fit. Part of the book, beyond talking about Montessori, is complicating and showing how this idea of a good fit is really socially constructed.

Part of it has to do with a set of choices that a family has available to them. Part of it has to do with the process that happens after they enroll in the school and what their interactions are like with the educators at the school and how the educators either make them feel comfortable or don’t make them feel comfortable. Part of the idea of a good fit is is the experience of the parent community or the student community and whether they feel integrated into that or not.

It does seem in some ways that Montessori is premised on the idea of school choice. I mean that in the sense that you speak to some Montessori educators who suggest that the model really requires parental and student buy-in to the idea of Montessori to work.

I observed Montessori educators being of two minds about this. On the one hand, people would say this is a universal model that’s about child development that works for all children. And if the model is not working for a child, the model needs to adapt to whatever the needs of the child are. On the other hand, I would also hear Montessori educators saying, this child is such a Montessori child, or, this child really needs to be in a different environment. Part of that is a tension between this view of the universality of Montessori and the real focus on maintaining the integrity of the model, which sometimes means saying these students are not fitting in the structure that we’ve created.

To what extent were comments like that from educators correlated with the race and socioeconomic status of children they were referring to — more pointedly, were Montessori educators more likely to say that low-income, black and Hispanic children were not good fits for their model?

I don’t know that I mapped the comments specifically. They were said to me in a lot of different contexts, so I don’t know that I have enough data to make a correlation. Educators also told me that would often happen with kids who were disruptive and kids who were from the most disadvantaged backgrounds.

You talked about how in some — not all, but in some cases — among the parents and families you talked to, there was more buy-in from some of the white parents into the model and some more skepticism from the black and Hispanic parents. There was one parent, for instance, who you were speaking about a gardening initiative as part of the Montessori program and he said, “I know it’s important, but can she read? Can she add? Can she do computer stuff?” Walk me through your findings on this.

One of the groups of people who I observed in my project were people who told me that they were the Montessori believers — they would say, “I drank the Kool-Aid.” Overall, of the people that I interviewed, a larger number of white parents fall into that category, and the black and Latinx parents that I interviewed were more split between that group and parents who are more ambivalent about Montessori and then parents who are kind of satisfied but didn’t have strong opinions about it.

Part of that was not about inherent incompatibility but it had to do with their set of choices and the context of the system of magnet schools in Hartford. A lot of the white families who came into the school were making a really intentional choice for Montessori. If white families were not happy with the school they were easily able to leave and go back to their suburban districts, which had very high-performing schools. The people who were there and were staying were the super adherents.

There was a group of middle-class and upper-middle-class black and Latinx parents who were at the schools who were more ambivalent. Part of that had to do with Montessori, but part of that also had to do with what their alternative set of choices was. If they were from inner-ring suburbs, they were not necessarily really thrilled with the quality of their alternative school choices, and if they were in the city of Hartford, they would have to go through the magnet lottery process again and there was a lot of uncertainty surrounding that. That led a lot of the families to be more inclined to just stick with the school.

Some of the specific concerns that they brought up for me that I had not been anticipating had to do with the way the school communicated about academics versus this personalized, whole-child learning. A lot of the educators assumed that the academic benefits of Montessori were apparent, and so they didn’t actually need to communicate about that to families, whereas what they really needed to communicate about were the additional benefits — that their kids were going to be gardening, that they were going to be outside, that they were going to be learning social and emotional skills. To families who were seeking reassurance that their kids were going to be academically successful first and foremost, a number of them still had questions about that, even after enrolling their children in the school and being there for a number of years.

Nearly a decade later, did the Common Core work? New research offers clues

2019-04-29T22:42:56+00:00

A 2008 report offered a dire warning: U.S. schools were falling behind their international peers. Its prescription: states should “adopt a common core of internationally benchmarked standards in math and language arts.”

The idea of the Common Core would soon gain steam. Thanks to interest from state leaders and financial incentives offered by the federal government and private philanthropies, most states adopted new academic standards over the next few years. That would soon mean new tests, new textbooks, and new teaching methods — and in many places, backlash to those changes.

But amid the fierce debates, there has been virtually no research on whether the standards were actually accomplishing their goal of improving student learning.

Until now. A new study, released in April through a federally funded research center, shows that states that changed their standards most dramatically by adopting the Common Core didn’t outpace other states on federal NAEP exams. By 2017 — seven years after most states had adopted them — the standards appear to have led to modest declines in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math scores.

“It’s rather unexpected,” said researcher Mengli Song of the American Institutes for Research. “The magnitude of the negative effects tend to increase over time. That’s a little troubling.”

Studying the effects of Common Core is challenging, since the changes reached so many students nationwide at the same time — so there is a good deal of uncertainty in determining whether the standards were successful. And another study, which has not yet been published, offers a more encouraging view: the Common Core may have led to modest increases in test scores, though it only looked through 2013.

But the latest research suggests that even in the best case scenario, the academic shifts led only to modest gains for students, falling short of the far-reaching ambitions of Common Core advocates.

“It’s a good paper,” said John Young, a researcher with the pro-Common Core group Student Achievement Partners, speaking in his personal capacity about Song’s research. “But in some ways, maybe it’s a little too early to really know, because we’re still watching teachers change and improve.”

Tom Loveless, who has analyzed the standards for the Brookings Institution, says there’s a simpler explanation.

“One thing standards advocates need to think about is that this doesn’t appear to work very well,” he said.

New study is among the first to try to establish the effect of Common Core

How do you a study a policy as far-reaching as the Common Core, particularly one that was introduced alongside a host of other school reforms?

It’s not easy, but Song and her colleagues reasoned that some states were more affected by the switch to “college and career ready standards,” which meant Common Core in almost all cases. So they categorized states by the “rigor” of their previous standards and how similar those standards were to the Common Core.

They divided states into those more affected by the switch (because their prior standards were deemed less rigorous or less similar to the Common Core) and those less affected. Then they compared how each group’s scores changed on fourth and eighth grade NAEP tests between 2010 and 2017.

Common Core didn’t seem to help students’ scores, and over time the standards may have had an increasingly negative effect, according to the study, which has not been formally peer-reviewed.

Other researchers consulted by Chalkbeat, including Laura Hamilton of the RAND Corporation, say the study’s approach is a credible one.

“I’m not ready to conclude that the adoption of rigorous content standards is bad for student learning,” said Hamilton. “But I don’t look at this and think this looks totally wrong. It definitely looks plausible.”

Still, the approach has limitations. Most important is that the study is comparing two groups of states that adopted the standards — so if Common Core universally helped or hurt the states that adopted it, this study would miss that effect.

Another Common Core study points to more encouraging results, though it hasn’t yet been released

Joshua Bleiberg, a doctoral student at Vanderbilt University, is also studying the impact of Common Core on NAEP scores. His study starts examining student scores when new standards hit classrooms, not when states decided to formally adopt the Common Core. He also excluded states that ultimately dropped the standards.

That all seems to lead to different results. In preliminary findings shared with Chalkbeat, Bleiberg finds that the Common Core had small positive effects on NAEP scores through 2013. His study has not been released publicly, so it can’t be fully examined.

“This is not going to be the type of thing that is going to turn around the whole ship really quickly,” Bleiberg said of the standards. “I would think about [the effects] as quite small.”

There’s very little other research on the Common Core. A 2015 Kentucky study showed students who were exposed to the standards made larger gains than students who weren’t.

Morgan Polikoff — a professor at the University of Southern California and co-director of the center that released Song’s study — said the challenges in studying whether the Common Core worked are steep.

“I think that this question is more or less impossible to answer,” he said.

If Common Core failed, why?

By virtually all accounts, the introduction of the Common Core didn’t go as planned.

In New York City, for instance, teachers didn’t get textbooks aligned to the new standards on time. In Massachusetts, teachers said their training was simply low quality. Across the country, teachers said that implementing a new set of standards and state tests at the same time as new high-stakes teacher evaluation systems was untenable. These challenges are one obvious potential reason for the results of Song’s study.

“The statewide transition from old standards to new standards is really a massive undertaking,” said Song. “Maybe the new standards are well designed with good potential, but to realize this potential requires a lot more.”

The challenges may have been even steeper for states with standards that were very different than Common Core — the group the study zeroes in on — so it’s not entirely surprising their results are less positive.

“Maybe there’s chaos in the system,” said Young of Student Achievement Partners. “The negative results that they find is really just as much due to that happening.”

But the results are not getting better over time, according to Song’s research, so it’s hard to pin the findings on bad implementation.

That leaves Song puzzled. “I don’t have a good hypothesis for why the effects actually grow over time,” she said. “That’s something I didn’t expect.”

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has made over $100 million in education grants since 2018, new disclosure shows

2019-04-01T22:33:04+00:00

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has issued $110 million in grants to education causes since January 2018, according to new details posted to the organization’s website.

The list of grants represents CZI’s first thorough accounting of its own education giving, and the total indicates that the organization remains one of the largest players in education philanthropy.

The information, which also includes a list of investments in for-profit companies, sheds new light on the strategy of CZI, which is funded by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook fortune and led by his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan. CZI says it donated to more than 80 organizations over the last 15 months, but other gifts were dwarfed by grants to the Summit charter network and New Schools Venture Fund, which together took in more than $40 million.

Summit Public Schools is a key player in the push for “personalized learning,” a charter network that has created an online platform and pedagogical approach now used by nearly 400 schools. NewSchools Venture Fund itself issues grants to support education technology, diversification of educational leadership, and innovative schools (largely charter schools).

CZI’s decision to publish grants on its website comes after it disclosed to Chalkbeat last year that it made $308 million in grants between January 2016 and late 2018. (Chalkbeat is a CZI grantee.) At the time, Chalkbeat also compiled a list of known grantees.

Grants made prior to January 2018 are not included in CZI’s database. CZI says it will update its list every February.

It also comes after CZI’s education department went through a leadership change: Sandra Liu Huang, who ran product teams at Quora, Facebook, and Google, replaced ex-Obama administration official Jim Shelton.

Sarah Reckhow — who has criticized the transparency of CZI and other organizations that are not organized as traditional philanthropies and thus don’t have to disclose their giving — praised the move.

“It is absolutely a step in the right direction to commit to publishing a grantee list every year,” said Reckhow, a professor at Michigan State University and close watcher of education philanthropy. “This is a bare minimum standard for transparency, and it would be great if CZI’s decision would spur similar annual reporting” by others.

The grants suggest CZI has made a big bet on Summit while continuing to invest in efforts to broaden the definition of student success beyond test scores, address students’ non-academic needs, and disseminate research on how people learn.

The largest single grant — $23.8 million for 2018 and 2019 — went to Summit Public Schools. Summit’s growth has been spurred by CZI, after Priscilla Chan and later Mark Zuckerberg were impressed by a visit to a Summit charter school and offered to provide engineering support through Facebook.

The grant total does not include in-kind donations to Summit, meaning it’s a substantial understatement of the support Summit has received, since CZI continues to provide a nearly 50-person engineering team. A spokesperson for CZI could not say how much in in-kind support the organization has provided to Summit. (Summit Learning, which is focused on the online platform, has spun out of the Summit charter schools as a separate organization, whose board includes Chan.)

Summit has drawn praise from many parents, students, and teachers but criticism from others. There is virtually no research on the efficacy of the Summit model specifically. Chalkbeat previously reported that Summit had entered into talks with Harvard researchers to study its model but ultimately declined to move forward, citing potential disruption to schools; the organization also said its underlying approach is backed by research.. Summit continues to promote its collaboration with the Harvard research team on its website.

A number of CZI’s grants focus on the use of technology in schools, including the International Society for Technology in Education; the Jefferson Education Exchange, which gathers teacher feedback on technology products; and Quill, an education technology organization that aims to help students improve their writing.

At the same time, many grants and support CZI’s broader definition of personalized learning. For instance, a $4.85 million grant went to Communities in Schools, a organization that provides wraparound services ranging from food for hungry kids to counseling services. CZI has also issued a host of grants to organizations disseminating research on how people learn (e.g. Deans For Impact), broadening measures of student success, (e.g. Collaborative for Social, Emotional and Academic Learning) and helping to diversify education leadership (e.g. Education Leaders of Color).

CZI has also made grants to news and communications outlets, specifically Chalkbeat, EdSurge, Education Post, The Hechinger Report, and The 74.

Beyond Summit, CZI has given to a handful of charter schools, though the grants have been relatively modest. That’s notable because Mark Zuckerberg’s first foray into education was a $100 million grant in Newark that was partially used to expand charter schools in the city.

KIPP Baltimore received $32,000 to support a partnership with a John Hopkins health center; Achievement First won $350,000 to support its Greenfield schools, which have a personalized learning focus.

Valor Collegiate Academies, a Tennessee charter network, won a $1.6 million grant to support development of its Compass program, which includes “a highly structured process of conversation and relationship-building that occurs during mentor groups,” according to CZI. Like Summit Learning, schools across the country are adopting this approach.

Notably, there is only school district — Pasadena, Texas — listed as a direct CZI education grant recipient, though other districts, including Pittsburgh and Chicago, participate in partnerships funded by CZI. (The organization has also given to some districts as part of its Bay Area-focused community work.)

“What also stands out is the lack of traditional public school districts receiving direct grants,” said Michigan State’s Reckhow. “CZI [is] largely supporting charter networks, nonprofits, think tanks, and other third party entities. This was already a trend among major funders — but CZI seems to take it to another level.”

The story has been updated to clarify NewSchools Venture Fund’s grant areas.

Achievement First charter network, still receiving Sackler money, joins nonprofits weighing opioid-linked donations

2019-03-18T11:00:07+00:00

The co-founder of the Achievement First network of charter schools faced a weighty question in a meeting with a few students earlier this year. Is the network still receiving money from any member of the Sackler family, which has been accused of fueling the national opioid epidemic?

“Yes,” Dacia Toll said. Then she explained why.

The donations — $1.6 million from Jonathan Sackler between 2013 and 2017 — are critical to the 36-school network and its Connecticut schools in particular, Toll said.

“We could say to the Sacklers, we do not want your money. We could. Tomorrow,” she said, according to audio of the conversation obtained by Chalkbeat. “And as a result, some amount of things that we are able to do here … would go away.”

“I am so worried about the survival of our Connecticut schools.”

Toll repeated many of those sentiments in a statement to Chalkbeat, but indicated that the network is reconsidering its relationship with Sackler. “Without the philanthropy, we would have to lay off staff and cut core programs,” she said. “Our board is actively reassessing as we get more information.”

The comments underscore the quandary facing education organizations that have received donations from the Sackler family, which controls Purdue Pharma. The company and the Sacklers, including Jonathan, are the subject of lawsuits alleging that they knew that the drug OxyContin was addictive, but downplayed that as they continued to promote the painkillers — reaping millions in profit as many grew hooked and even died. The company and Sackler family have disputed claims made in a Massachusetts lawsuit.

Newly public documents detailing the Sacklers’ involvement have increased pressure on nonprofits that have benefitted from the family’s largesse — including charter schools, universities such as Yale and Columbia, and museums such as the Guggenheim — to give up funding they have grown to rely on. So far, many have taken a path similar to Achievement First, promising to review the situation but not yet disavowing future dollars.

“On the one side, some believe that so long as money is directed toward a good purpose, its source doesn’t matter,” said Rob Reich, a Stanford University professor who studies philanthropy. “On the other side, every nonprofit has to decide what boundary it will set for itself.”

Jonathan Sackler specifically has focused his philanthropy on education, giving to charter schools including Achievement First and pro-charter advocacy groups such as 50CAN, as well as a Chicago-based after school program and a network of district schools in New York City.

Most education groups that received money from Jonathan Sackler’s Bouncer Foundation in 2017, the last year for which records are publicly available, declined to comment on recent fundraising or did not respond to questions from Chalkbeat. (A few did: Students For Education Reform says it hasn’t received money from Bouncer this year. After School Matters says it hasn’t gotten money since 2017. The 74 says it has not asked for or received money from the Bouncer Foundation since 2017, while 50CAN says it is not currently asking for money from any Sackler family members.)

A spokesperson for Jonathan Sackler did not respond to a request for comment.

Achievement First’s relationship with Sackler is longstanding and was recently described in a New Haven Register story. The network has listed donations from his foundation in its annual reports, and Sackler was an Achievement First board member for over a decade before he resigned in January 2018.

The fact that Sackler money continues to flow to Achievement First has not been previously reported, though, and the network did not disclose its ongoing relationship with Sackler to the Register.

“I have not said anything about this situation privately that I wouldn’t also say publicly,” Toll said in her statement to Chalkbeat. (It does not appear that Toll herself has been publicly questioned on the matter before now.)

The network is now reexamining its Sackler-connected grants, Toll said, but she indicated that funding realities, especially in Connecticut, would make cutting ties challenging.

“We have to raise money for our Connecticut schools because they unfairly receive thousands of dollars less per child than the traditional schools,” Toll said in her statement. “We don’t use philanthropy for extras. We use it for core teacher salaries, books, supplies, and basic art, sports and music programs. Without the philanthropy, we would have to lay off staff and cut core programs.”

Similarly, in the meeting with students, Toll described the decision to continue to accept Sackler money in stark terms.

“I can see how people would say, ‘I don’t agree with that,’” she said. “And I would just say, if you don’t agree with it, literally tell me what you want to cut at the schools. Because I cannot raise enough money to do everything we want to do at the network.”

Leaders of Achievement First, whose schools have posted strong academic results, have said that providing schools with the resources they need is a particular challenge in Connecticut. In 2017, the network said it needed to merge two of its Hartford middle schools and halt the creation of an elementary school in part because of inadequate public funding.

According to its 2017 annual report, Achievement First schools in Connecticut, spent less per student but depended much more on philanthropy than the network’s schools in New York or Rhode Island. The Connecticut schools raised $2,800 from philanthropy per student, compared to just $81 per student in its New York schools, which relied almost entirely on public funds.

Turning down philanthropy, then, could make it more difficult to close those gaps. And it’s already a challenging moment for Achievement First, which has has faced pressure to address why a New Haven principal was allowed to keep his job after shoving a student in the fall. (The principal eventually resigned, and the network has promised other changes are coming.)

Reich, the Stanford professor, said nonprofits that continue to accept money from suspect donors must consider whether they are then “complicit in ‘reputation laundering’ for the donor, who can associate himself or herself with the good cause.”

The Sackler name adorns galleries, university centers, and endowed professorships at institutions across the country. That includes Yale, where Jonathan Sackler’s millions earned him a named professorship and a press release describing the Sackler family’s “transformative legacy.”

That’s not the case for Achievement First, Toll told the students.

“I think the question is, not are we benefiting from the Sacklers, but are the Sacklers benefiting from us?” she said. “And I am not aware of a way — they do not go around and say, ‘We’re good people, we support Achievement First.’”

But she said the issue is still weighing on her and the network’s leaders.

“It’s something we, our board, has struggled with,” she said. “Do you take money from people who, now, it is clear, engaged in some … not good [actions], or not?”

The Gates Foundation is hoping better curriculum will boost student learning. A new study says, not so fast

2019-03-11T04:01:28+00:00

Better curriculum was supposed to be one of the next big things in education.

In 2017, Bill Gates announced his influential foundation would invest fresh energy into helping create higher-quality classroom materials and get them into the hands of more teachers. A good curriculum, he said, “can improve student learning more than many costlier solutions.”

But new research, amounting to one of the largest-scale examinations of curriculum materials to date, suggests that the choice might not matter much — at least when it comes to elementary math test scores.

“We didn’t really find large differences in student achievement gains across different textbooks,” said the University of Maryland’s David Blazar, one of the study’s authors.

It’s a surprising conclusion for the six-state analysis, which was funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and released Monday. And though it is just one study — which clashes with prior research — the results raise questions about the likelihood that the Gates Foundation’s curriculum-focused approach will boost student learning in the way its leaders hope.

“This study throws some cold water on the idea that just swapping out textbooks would make a big difference,” said Morgan Polikoff, a University of Southern California professor and another of the study’s researchers.

The Gates Foundation has said it wants to influence not just what materials schools choose, but how teachers are prepared to use them. In a statement, the foundation suggested that it is not rethinking its approach in response to the latest study.

“Other research suggests, and we believe, that when well used, high-quality curricula can enable more students to learn and succeed in their classes,” said Bob Hughes, the director of K-12 education at the Gates Foundation. “The challenge is to understand how the conditions, professional development, and types of materials combine to make this happen reliably.”

But the results were discouraging enough to dissuade the researchers from their plans to conduct annual follow-ups to help schools identify which curricula were coming out ahead.

“That is, of course, not where we ended up,” Blazar said. “We’re not going to be doing this again next year.”

The analysis focuses on fourth- and fifth-grade math materials used in thousands of schools across six states — California, Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Washington — in the Common Core era, school years 2014-15 through 2016-17.

(In addition to Gates, funders of the study included the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which have also backed curriculum-improvement efforts. The Gates and Schusterman foundations are also funders of Chalkbeat.)

The researchers examined the 15 most common curricula in those states, including some that were not traditional textbooks, like the New York State–developed online curriculum EngageNY. They linked curriculum data with upper-elementary math test scores in each state to answer a key question: were certain curriculum choices consistently linked to students making bigger or smaller test score gains?

The answer was generally no. “No single text stands out as a consistent high- or low-performer in multiple states, nor in multiple years,” the researchers wrote.

Across the 15 options, only two (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Math Expressions and McGraw-Hill’s Everyday Math) stood out in a positive way. Even then, those improvements disappeared when looking outside California.

“It was surprising,” said Blazar.

The results are markedly different from research on another aspect of a student’s classroom experience: teacher quality. Studies have found that teachers vary substantially in their effects on students’ test scores, attendance, and even income as adults.

One explanation for the results is that most curriculum options available to schools today are of roughly equal quality and touch on similar topics because many states have adopted shared academic standards — perhaps a victory of the Gates-pushed Common Core.

The study finds some evidence of that. Among schools that still used pre–Common Core curricula — about 16 percent of schools in 2016-17 — student achievement varied slightly more based on the textbook.

It’s difficult to know, though, exactly how much a chosen curriculum represents what students are actually exposed to in class. The vast majority of surveyed teachers reported using their textbook frequently, but said they regularly draw from outside sources, too.

“No teacher or school of teachers use a curriculum,” noted Darleen Opfer, who directs education research at the RAND Corporation. A precise answer to the question of whether curriculum affects student achievement would require knowing the full mix of materials teachers are using and how they are using them, she said.

“Without that level of detailed data on use and practice, we can’t understand whether curriculum matters for student achievement or not,” she said.

The study didn’t find any evidence that textbooks make more of a difference when they were consistently used by teachers, though. There was also no evidence that textbooks had more of an influence at schools where teachers got more training.

The study doesn’t look at the quality of that training, though. The Gates Foundation has also backed efforts to give teachers more and better preparation focused on how to best use their materials, and plans to announce up to $10 million in grants for such training this May.

The research also doesn’t directly account for other differences among curricula that matter for teachers and students, like whether the textbooks are engaging, whether they are culturally appropriate and represent students of different races, or whether they are easy for teachers to use.

So where does all this leave the push to improve America’s textbooks?

“I don’t think that the appropriate takeaway from this is necessarily that curriculum materials or textbooks don’t matter,” Polikoff said. “We have several studies that show that they do.”

What’s not obvious is why the new research looks so different. Some past studies used a higher-quality methodology, but were smaller; others focused on different grades or subjects. The recent study involves a much larger pool of schools and it is among the first to examine the issue after many districts adopted new textbooks because of the Common Core.

“Its conclusion is an important if disappointing one to ‘curriculum reform’ advocates like me,” said Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank. But he argues the idea still holds promise, especially for helping newer and weaker teachers.

“A great curriculum — one that is aligned with standards, designed with teachers, and usable in real classrooms — can help teachers become more effective,” he said in an email. “At least if — and this is a big ‘if’ —those teachers receive lots of training, support, coaching, and feedback regarding how to implement the program with their own students.”

Blazar said it would be good news if that kind of support for teachers made a difference. “But in order to decide whether that is an efficient policy strategy,” he said, “we need to understand how effective those implementation supports are — and at what cost.”

Summit Learning declined to be studied, then cited collaboration with Harvard researchers anyway

2019-01-18T01:44:43+00:00

Summit Learning, a fast-growing “personalized learning” system, touts a partnership with Harvard researchers even though Summit actually turned down their proposal to study the model.

The online platform is backed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy and is now being used in 380 schools across the U.S.

The program “is based on collaborations with nationally acclaimed learning scientists, researchers and academics from institutions including the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research,” Summit’s website says. “Summit’s research-backed approach leads to better student outcomes.” Schools have used that seeming endorsement to back up their decision to adopt the model.

In fact, though, there is no academic research on whether Summit’s specific model is effective. And while Summit helped fund a study proposal crafted by Harvard researchers, it ultimately turned them down.

“They didn’t tell us explicitly why,” said Tom Kane, a Harvard education professor and faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research. “All I can say is that the work that we did for Summit involved planning an evaluation; we have not measured impacts on student outcomes.”

Summit’s founder Diane Tavenner said the organization had a number of reasons for not moving forward with the proposed study, including its potential to burden teachers and to limit the platform’s ability to change or grow. Their general approach is backed by other research, she said, and their track record as a charter network.

As to the mention of the Harvard center on Summit’s website, Tavenner said the organization had learned a lot from the process of developing a potential study. Tavenner said that, after Chalkbeat began reporting this story, she offered to change the website’s language, but said Kane had not asked her to do so.

More broadly, Tavenner says she is skeptical of the usefulness of large-scale research of the sort the Harvard team proposed, saying the conclusions might be of interest to journalists and philanthropists, not schools.

“I’m not willing to give up what’s best for kids for those two audiences,” Tavenner told Chalkbeat last month.

It’s a notable stance for Summit, given its ambitious claims and the platform’s wide reach.

As “personalized learning” becomes a more popular idea among those trying to improve America’s schools, Summit’s platform has been adopted for free by schools across the country. That’s thanks largely to the backing of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropy poised to receive Zuckerberg’s billions. Summit’s model has drawn praise from parents and teachers in some schools, but proven controversial in others.

Regardless, CZI’s support means Summit could continue to grow rapidly — which has some observers wondering when its backers will show that what it’s offering is particularly effective.

“I do think that there is an obligation to provide credible evidence to schools when you’re trying to convince them to adopt things,” said John Pane, a researcher at the RAND Corporation who has extensively studied personalized learning initiatives.

Summit spreads, but research talks with Harvard team fizzle

Summit’s claims about a Harvard collaboration have their roots in conversations that began in late 2016.

Zuckerberg’s wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, took a fateful tour of a school in the Summit Public Schools charter network two years earlier. The network soon began working with a Facebook engineering team to build out its technology.

Summit’s model has a number of components: a curriculum in core subjects for grades four through 12; weeks scheduled for students to deeply examine a topic of interest; long-term mentors for students; and a technology platform, which serves as the approach’s organizing structure. The goal is to better engage students and to give them more control over what and how they learn, Summit says.

By the 2016-17 school year, Summit had rolled out its program to more than 100 schools outside its own network. That’s also about when Summit started talks with Harvard professors Marty West and Kane.

An ideal study might have randomly assigned schools or students to use the learning platform, creating two groups that could be compared. That was a non-starter for Tavenner, as it would limit schools’ access to the platform. If 250 schools were assigned to use it, and another 250 expressed interest but were not, for example, that would be bad for students, she said last month while discussing the organization’s approach to research.

“Am I really going to say to 250 people, ‘You know what, we’re not going to actually help you, even though we actually could right now?’” she said.

Kane says they came up with a few alternatives: comparing students using Summit to others not using it in the same school or comparing schools that had adopted Summit to similar schools that hadn’t. They suggested tracking test scores as well as suspensions and attendance, measuring the effectiveness of the support offered to teachers, and using surveys to measure concepts important to Summit, like whether students felt in control of their schoolwork.

But Summit passed on an evaluation. “After many conversations with Harvard and the exploration of multiple options, we came to recognize that external research would need to meet certain baseline criteria in order for us to uphold in good faith our partnership with schools, students, and parents,” Tavenner said.

Metrics were a particular concern. “Standardized tests are not good measures of the cognitive skills,” a Summit spokesperson said, saying the organization had developed better alternatives. “Attendance and discipline are not measures of habits of success, full stop.” Tavenner said she feared that a study could stop Summit from being able to make changes to the program or that it might stop participating schools from adding new grades. (Kane and West say their plan wouldn’t have limited growth or changes.)

Tavenner told Chalkbeat that research of the kind the Harvard team was offering isn’t needed to validate their approach. Summit is based on decades of research on ideas like project-based learning, she said, citing the organization’s report titled “The Science of Summit.”

Dan Willingham, a University of Virginia educational psychologist, said that’s useful, but not the same as knowing whether a specific program helps students.

“You take a noticeable step down in confidence when something is not research-based but rather research-inspired,” he said, while noting that many education initiatives lack hard evidence of success. “There’s a hell of a lot going on in education that’s not being evaluated.”

What about Summit’s original charter network, now 11 schools? Summit cites internal data showing its graduates have success being accepted to college. But outside research is limited. A 2017 study by the Stanford-based group CREDO found that attending Summit led to modest declines in students’ reading scores and had no clear effect in math, though it looked at only a small portion of the network’s students.

The Summit charter schools are also part of an ongoing study of economically integrated charter schools, and a few were included in two widely cited RAND studies looking at personalized learning, though they didn’t report any Summit-specific information. California’s notoriously limited education data access has stymied more research, Tavenner said.

What does philanthropy owe the public?

Today, Summit’s learning platform has far outpaced its charter network. About 380 schools, with over 72,000 students, use the platform; the national charter network KIPP, by comparison, runs 224 schools serving around 100,000 students.

Summit now gets its engineering help from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, not Facebook. That philanthropic partnership has fueled its growth: While CZI has not disclosed how much it’s given to Summit, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation — through which CZI funnels much of its education giving — lists grants to Summit totalling over $70 million in 2016 and 2017.

Summit has also netted $2.3 million for the platform from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2016, and another $10 million in 2017. (CZI, the Gates Foundation, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation are all funders of Chalkbeat.)

Some major foundations regularly invest in research to better understand whether their gifts are doing good, noted Sarah Reckhow, a Michigan State professor who studies education philanthropy. In a number of instances, that research comes to unfavorable conclusions, like a Gates-funded study on its teacher evaluation initiative or a Walton Family Foundation-backed evaluation of charter schools’ propensity to screen out students with disabilities. (A Gates spokesperson said that part of its $10 million to Summit was set aside for “measurement and evaluation.”)

Reckhow said she hasn’t yet seen that same inclination from CZI. And she worries that school districts might be less likely to carefully examine programs that are offered free of charge, like Summit.

“If you reduce that barrier, you’re making it potentially more likely to adopt something without as much scrutiny as they otherwise might do,” she said. “That increases the obligation of Summit and CZI to evaluate the work.”

CZI spokesperson Dakarai Aarons said the organization is committed to research and to Summit, and pointed to a number of schools and districts that saw academic improvements after introducing Summit’s platform. “As the program grows, we look forward to expanded research to help measure its long-term impact,” he said.

Tavenner said Summit is exploring other options to prove its approach is working, including talking to researchers who study continuous improvement. “We can’t just keep saying no to [randomized studies],” she said. “We’ve got to have another way, but I don’t have another way yet.”

Researchers Kane and West, for their part, say Summit’s concerns about evaluating its evolving model should also raise questions about Summit’s swift spread.

“The evaluation we proposed would have assessed the impact of the model at that point in time, even if the model continued to evolve,” they wrote in an email. “When a model is still changing so radically that a point in time estimate is irrelevant, it is too early to be operating in hundreds of schools.”

“Unfortunately, Summit is closer to the rule than the exception,” they said.

Philanthropist Gerry Lenfest remembered by those he helped in education

2018-08-06T20:52:31+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, 88, a Philadelphia philanthropist who died Sunday, donated more than $1 billion to education, journalism, and the arts, among other initiatives in Philadelphia and surrounding areas.

“It’s hard to look around the city and not see some pillar of our community that he has not touched,” said Pedro Ramos, CEO of the Philadelphia Foundation, who worked closely with Lenfest to create the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.

Despite his large monetary contributions, the attribute that his friends and colleagues remember most is that he invested in people.

Scott Gordon, CEO of Mastery Charter Schools, got to know Lenfest when he and his son, Brook Lenfest, invested in Mastery.

“For someone who was an icon in Philadelphia, he was incredibly personal and down-to-earth,” Gordon said. “I remember one time we got sandwiches, and he knew the guy at the deli who made the sandwiches and his whole story.”

Gordon said Lenfest took time to meet with him to give him management advice consistently after they met.

“He just believed in people,” he said. “He helped me believe in myself and the work we were were doing. He gave encouragement that the impossible could be done and put confidence in us as an organization to face and persevere through whatever obstacles or controversy we were facing.”

Ramos said Lenfest was eager to use his business and journalism experience to be more than just a benefactor for the Lenfest Institute.

“He wasn’t one to do things in incremental, tentative ways. If he committed to something, he wanted to do it right,” he said. “With the journalism institute, it’s really incredible that he invested so much of his time and experience along with his money to make sure it got off to a strong start.”

Other than journalism, Lenfest’s philanthropy focused largely on education. He donated to initiatives for high-quality education throughout the region, working with organizations such as Philadelphia School Partnership and Public Citizens for Children & Youth (PCCY). He left a lasting impact on the Philadelphia charter community by being an early supporter of Mastery Charter Schools, along with his son Brook.

“The Lenfests believed that education was a gateway to opportunity and that education could change lives,” Gordon said, “and he was a passionate believer in the power of entrepreneurs to do things that hadn’t been done before.”

Mark Gleason, executive director at Philadelphia School Partnership, said, “He understood deeply that you need different learning pathways for different students. Gerry and [his wife] Marguerite’s immense education philanthropy had impact for young students and high school students, and private and Catholic schools, and charter schools and traditional public schools.”

Donna Cooper, executive director at PCCY, knows Lenfest in part because of his friendship with her grandparents and in part because of his involvement with PCCY.

“Philly is a small town,” she said. “Whenever I would talk to him about relationships with people in my family, he was always so warm.”

Cooper said she is grateful for Lenfest’s homegrown approach to philanthropy.

“Just the fact that a private, family foundation like Lenfest was investing in things to boost kids’ opportunity, is unique,” she said.

“A lot of other private foundations were turning their eyes toward charters. He supported Mastery, but he wasn’t dogmatic in how he thought education could be improved. If you could truly improve the schools, he was there for it.”

Superintendent William Hite said Lenfest was a tireless champion for providing educational opportunities for all children in Philadelphia.

“Countless numbers of students and teachers benefited from his generosity,” Hite said. “From supporting our early literacy work, after-school programs and Career and Technical Education offerings, to providing professional development opportunities to our teachers, Gerry was truly devoted to making life better for so many of us.”

He said that people at the District are “saddened and immensely grateful.”

The Lenfest legacy lives on through his three children and his wife. Brook Lenfest continues to support Mastery Charter Schools; Chase Lenfest is the founder of the Lenfest Center, a youth center in the Hunting Park community in Philadelphia; and Diane Lenfest runs the Allerton Foundation, which is focused on animal welfare and land conservation.

“He transferred [the philanthropist’s spirit] to his children, all three,” Gordon said. “I work most closely with Brook, but all of his children have a philanthropic mission and sensibility that they’ve carried on.

“He loved this town. One of the things I admire about him is that he stepped up boldly. He would do things because he thought they were right. He wanted to benefit kids. He wasn’t afraid to push boundaries. He just lived fully and fiercely.”

Ramos said, “I always especially admired that he never forgot where he came from. He gave back, he valued education, he made lives better.”

Added Gordon: “This city needs more people like Gerry Lenfest, and more people to pick up that mantle.”