PROFICIENCY
I defined proficiency in the customary way: as the proportion of students at a charter school that scored a Level 3 or higher on the ELA or Math tests. In order to look at overall school performance, I averaged the proficiency rate across grade levels broken down by subject, and then took the average of both the ELA and Math tests to come up with a single “proficiency” number. The schools that had the highest average proficiency rates were Harlem Success Academy, Icahn Charter School 2, the Bronx Charter School for Excellence, and the Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School. (The other two Icahn Schools also scored in the top ten of all charter schools.) To be clear, different schools serve different grades and comparing performance across grades can be misleading.

I’ve posted a chart below that lists the average proficiency rates as well as the ELA and math proficiency rates, for every charter school that posted test results during the 2009-2010 school year. Scroll over the name of the school to find out what grades the school services, which grades were tested, and other salient information relating to the school’s performance.

PEER PERFORMANCE
I also compared average charter school performance to average traditional public school performance in neighborhoods in which there is a large cluster of charter schools. This gives a rough sense of how charters compare to traditional public schools with somewhat similar demographics. The neighborhoods I chose were the same that the UFT looked at in their analysis of charter schools: the South Bronx, Central Brooklyn, and Harlem.

Using this simple metric, I found that charters in the South Bronx, Harlem, and Central Brooklyn performed much better than their traditional public school counterparts. Average charter proficiency in all three neighborhoods was about 50% compared to 35% in traditional public schools. Charters performed significantly better in math than traditional public schools, which mirrors the trend citywide. Charter schools located in the South Bronx in particular had a proficiency rate that was around 25 points higher than that of traditional public schools in the same neighborhood. The chart below summarizes my findings.

My analysis of charter school test performance did not take into account demographics, such as the proportion of ELL or special education students or the number of students who are eligible for free or reduced priced lunch. These factors, of course, can make a significant difference in test performance.

As always, I welcome your feedback for ways that I can improve this analysis, as well as other methods that I could use to make the data more understandable.

But this is only part of the picture. Another source of political spending can be found in financial documents that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) filed with the federal government.  According to this "LM-2" filing, the UFT spent around $31 per teacher, or a little over $2.4million overall, out of a $202 million budget, on political activities during the 2008-2009 school year.* The UFT membership, however, consists of more than just teachers. If you included total UFT membership—164,462—spending on political activities would be around $16 per member.  (To be clear, Antonucci only considered active teachers in his calculations.)

In addition to this spending, which includes things like lobbying, buses to events, and phone banks, the UFT has a political action committee (PAC). The PAC is a stand-alone group whose specific purpose is to dole out money to politicians, groups, and ballot measures that the union supports. The UFT's PAC, known as the Committee on Political Education ("COPE"), is funded by voluntary member contributions as well as other sources.

COPE spent $187,411 in 2008-2009 on donations to politicians. The fund’s balance—that is the amount that can theoretically be given away—has also dramatically increased, to $1.35 million in July 2009, from an average of $124,000 during 2000-2005.  Furthermore, contributions to the COPE—that is, the amount that members decide they would like to contribute to the union’s political activities—have reached their highest level in ten years. In contrast, the amount the UFT spent on political activities independent of COPE has remained relatively constant at around two and a half million dollars annually.

Much of the increase in political giving could be due to the pressure
that teachers unions around the country have faced. According to an
article in the Wall Street Journal today, charter supporters outspent
the UFT during by about $100,000 during this same period. Last year
spending could have been particularly high due to the mayoral race,
although the increase in COPE’s political spending pre-dated the race
by several years.

Although the dues for UFT members vary by job type, teachers are required to contribute $47.27 of their paycheck semi-monthly to the UFT. This means that around 3% of a typical teachers UFT dues is spent on political activity. UFT members can also elect to send part of their paycheck to COPE. According to the UFT handbook, this voluntary contribution is usually around $5 per paycheck.

The UFT’s LM-2 also lists the amount of time that UFT employees spend on various activities. My analyses found that 61 of the 623 paid UFT employees, or around 10%, spent more than a quarter of their time on political activities. Overall, around 7% of all UFT employee activities are devoted to political lobbying.

The majority of the UFT’s funds were spent on benefits for members, consultants, and lawyers. However, the UFT, like the AFT and the NEA, also spends a significant amount of its funds supporting liberal causes. The biggest donations were to groups like ACORN and the National Action Network. The UFT also contributed small sums to a wide number of community organizations and to a number of religious, political and ethnic organizations like the American Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center, Empire State Pride Agenda, Inc. and the Hispanic Federation. (A full breakdown of the UFT’s contributions is available below and in this spreadsheet.)

Salary-wise, 85, or 13%, of the 624 UFT employees made over $100,000, with the highest salary paid in 2008-2009 being $228,705. The average UFT salary was $51,215, however, since many members work part-time, the numbers may be somewhat distorted.

As always, I welcome your feedback and questions and encourage any UFT members to share their understanding of the UFT’s finances in the comments.

*I arrived at the $31/teacher figure by using numbers provided to me by the DOE and contained within the UFT filing: According to the UFT’s filing, the union spent $2,404,820 on political activities during the 2009 fiscal year. Documents provided to me by the DOE stated that the active teaching force as of January 2009 was 78,728 teachers.

Since school demographics can be correlated with suspension rates, I looked at charter school suspension rates as they compared to their traditional public school counterparts. I found that the results varied by neighborhood. In Harlem and the South Bronx, charter schools suspended a lower percentage of their student body. In Central Brooklyn, charter schools suspended slightly more students. A breakdown of suspension rates at co-located
charter schools is available in this spreadsheet.

Overall, suspension rates among charter schools varied widely, with some suspending no students and others suspending close to 40% of their student body. Out of the 77 schools that were open in 2008-2009, 18 suspended no students and 21 suspended 10% or more of their student body. However, as with all BEDS data, these numbers are self-reported by schools and thus could be unreliable. (This is the same as the traditional public school data, although there the data includes more severe superintendent’s suspensions, which are corroborated by a second person outside of the school itself.)

I did not disaggregate the data by type of school—that is,
elementary, middle, or high school—since I didn’t see any noticeable difference
in suspension rates between middle and high schools. (Elementary schools had slightly
lower rates.) Furthermore, this data only looks at suspensions, not expulsions—a
key difference, since expelling a student might be easier at a charter school,
where the board only has to approve a principal’s recommendation. At a
traditional public school, a student cannot be expelled unless he/she is 17
years of age. If the student is younger than 17, the most severe form of
discipline allowed is an extended suspension for a year or an involuntary
transfer, both of which can only be given with the consent of the regional superintendent
and/or the Director of Suspensions.

For more on traditional public school discipline policies,
see this primer.
For a sample of charter school discipline policies, see this folder. (N.B. I plan
on updating this folder after I look at more charter applications next week.)

As always, I welcome your feedback on ways to improve this
data, as well as other questions you might have.

A recent national study on Charter Management Organizations,
or CMOs, by non-partisan Mathematica Policy Research, sheds some light on the
role that these organizations play in the national educational landscape.
According to my own measures, CMOs ran 37 of the 77 charter schools in New York
City during the 2008-2009 school year – and they have plans to open dozens more
in the next decade. While CMOs attract large amounts of philanthropic support, anti-charter
critics charge that they are opaque and run their schools more like for-profit
institutions. This interim report offers fodder for both supporters and
detractors. I found five points to be particularly interesting:

• CMOs need philanthropy to exist: All
  44 CMOs in the study relied on philanthropic dollars to support
  operations. The average CMO relied on philanthropy for 13% of total
  operating revenues. CMOs funded by NewSchools Venture Fund report that 64
  percent of their central office revenues come from philanthropy. The
  report concludes: “At least for now, these CMOs are unable to support
  their central offices (which often comprise 20 percent or more of total
  CMO spending) and facilities costs on per pupil revenues alone.”

• CMOs rely on alternate certification
  programs, like TFA, for talent: According to the report, almost 20% of
  teachers at CMO schools come from alternative certification programs like
  TFA. In addition, many of the people in managerial and leadership
  positions are TFA alumni. CMOs claim that teachers trained in the TFA mode
  are accustomed to longer hours and “No Excuses” approaches and therefore
  require less training in the culture of the CMO. The authors question the
  ability of CMOs to expand if they rely so heavily on one source of talent.

• CMOs have had problems expanding to
  high schools: Across the country, CMOs operate a disproportionate
  number of elementary and middle schools. CMO leaders say that expanding to
  high schools has proven difficult, both because the students arrive with
  an array of problems that the schools are ill-equipped to deal with and
  because "a highly prescriptive education model that works for middle
  school students may become a liability in high school… [S]tudents
  accustomed to highly structured courses can become too dependent on their
  instructors. If that happens, these students are unlikely to acquire the
  skills needed to navigate the more independent educational environment
  they will encounter in college.”

• CMO growth alone will not be able to
  improve entire school districts: Although CMOs have expanded rapidly,
  the recent pace of new CMO creation has slowed dramatically. The report
  notes that Arne Duncan’s goal of turning around the lowest performing 5,000
  schools by 2014 can’t be reached by the current CMO crop alone, since these
  CMOs only plan on opening 336 new schools in that timeframe. Furthermore,
  the report points out that expanding often puts CMOs into shaky financial
  terrain: “Expansion may not equal sustainability: According to our survey,
  CMOs with two to six schools draw an average of 9.6% of their operating
  budgets from private funds. That proportion increases to an average of 14%
  for CMOs with seven to ten schools, and to 16.3% for CMOs with more than
  ten schools.”

• The majority of CMOs are clustered in five states and
  a handful of cities in those states: More
  than 80% of CMOs are clustered in a handful of places: California, Texas,
  Arizona, Ohio, Illinois, New York, and the District of Columbia. They make up a
  large share of big charter markets, but are relatively sparse in smaller
  markets. Furthermore, CMOs tend to open schools in regional markets—that is,
  there are very few CMOs that have national ambitions.

List of NYC CMOs Counted in Study:

• Achievement
  First
• Beginning
  with Children Foundation – not
  included in survey because it had less than 3 charters open in 2007.
• Green
  Dot
• Harlem
  Children’s Zone – not included in survey because it had less than 3
  charters open in 2007.
• Harlem
  Village Academies – not included in survey because it had less than 3
  charters open in 2007.
• Lighthouse
  Academies Inc
• KIPP
  NYC
• St.
  Hope
• Uncommon
  Schools

Not Included in Study but Included in My List: (Most were
not included in the Mathematica study because they had only one school open in
2008-2009)

• Ascend
  Learning Inc
• Believe
  High School Network
• Boys
  and Girls Harbor Inc
• Explore
  Schools Inc
• Hyde
  Foundation
• Icahn
  Associates Corporation
• Public
  Prep
• Ross
  Institute
• Success
  Charter Network

Another interesting finding is that KIPP schools retained
students—that is, made them repeat a grade—more frequently than their
traditional public school counterparts. They write:

 “KIPP’s commitment to high
expectations of students does not encourage social promotion. KIPP expects
students to meet their standards for being academically prepared for the next
grade before they will be promoted. Consequently, KIPP middle schools retain
students at significantly higher rates than other public schools in the same
districts.”

Indeed, while the researchers found the evidence inconclusive
with regards to relative attrition rates and relative achievement levels of
incoming students, they found strong evidence that KIPP holds back 5^th
and 6^th grade students at a rate far higher than traditional public
schools.

This result augments my earlier
report, which found that the majority of cohort “attrition” detailed in the
UFT report on “Vanishing Students” was actually due to retention at charter
schools. Let's hope that there is further research into the impact of retention
and achievement at charter schools.

Teachers  accused of
incompetence or misconduct have been sent to notorious “rubber rooms,” where
they await a hearing, known colloquially by its paragraph number in the
Education Law, 3020a. While waiting, teachers are paid their full salary until
the dispute is resolved. (For more on teacher termination, these articles are
particularly detailed.)

Yet for principals, the process is less commonly discussed.
Are there principal rubber rooms? Who is in charge of documenting principal
incompetence? And just how hard is it to terminate a principal?

Managing the Numbers
offers some answers. Each principal signs a contract with the DOE in which they
agree to be held accountable for academic results. Principals are then
evaluated based on a principal performance review, which weighs student
progress (in the form of the much-maligned Progress Reports), the student
population served, the principal’s compliance with budgeting and school
services, and the principal’s ability to articulate and implement five goals
for the school. There is a fifth component—an outside quality review—that is
optional for schools that do well on their Progress Report. The largest parts
of the evaluation are the Progress Report and the self-assigned goals, which
basically mean that if a principal does well on the Progress Report, there
isn’t much incentive to dig deeper.

As soon as a principal receives a low Progress Report grade,
he or she can be transferred to another school, moved into an administrative
position, or, if the conduct was particularly bad, terminated. The procedure
for termination for a principal is similar to that of a teacher in that it
includes a 3020a hearing, but the principal is suspended without pay until the
hearing is resolved.

Under this new accountability framework, there has been an
enormous turnover in the principal ranks. Over 80% of the current crop of
principals started with the DOE after Klein took office.  More recently, though, principal turnover has
declined. Annual retirements have decreased from 11.8% in 2002-2003 to 3.8% in
2007-2008. 

To be clear, there is a distinction between principal removal
and principal termination. The report suggests that principals whom the DOE
wishes to remove from schools are simply sent into DOE staff positions – not
fired, and not sent to rubber rooms.  Anita
Gomez-Palacia, executive director of operations for the principals’ union, is
quoted as saying: “It’s very hard to prove incompetence based on test scores in
the school building. It’s hard to prove the administrator is the cause of the
problem.” In other words, it’s easy to get a principal out of a school, but
there is less incentive or less drive to get a principal off the DOE’s payroll.

This information is helpful, but still leaves me with more
questions. Just how many principals get removed from their classrooms? Is it
possible to remove a principal that students and teachers may dislike but who
has achieved good test results? How many principals have actually been
terminated? What is the hearing process like—and how is it different from a
teacher’s 3020a hearing? I would love feedback from principals and teachers to
get a better sense of how principal accountability differs from teacher
accountability.