Although the founders of the public charter school movement had hoped that traditional public schools would begin to imitate the best practices of charter schools, the response from the traditional sector has often been quite the opposite. Traditional school districts have typically attacked charters for encroaching on “their” students and taking ”their” funds. But the story is different in Houston, TX, where the district has responded constructively, by proactively looking at charter practices that could work in the traditional district’s schools.
Terry Grier, the district’s s superintendent, told the NY Times, “We can’t sit idly by and let parents think that only the quality charter schools can educate poor kids well. If you see something good, why not try to replicate it?” To that end, Supt. Grier is focusing on immitating five key success factors that were identified in research conducted by Dr. Roland Fryer, an economist and head of Harvard’s EdLabs, a research group:
- longer school days and years;
- more rigorous and selective hiring of principals and teachers;
- frequent quizzes whose results determine what needs to be retaught (also known as “formative assessment”);
- “high-dosage tutoring” (more intensive for students who are furthest behind);
- a “no excuses” culture.
In 2009, Dr. Fryer published an article suggesting that those five factors primarily account for the success of charter schools like the Harlem Children’s Zone and KIPP (Knowedge is Power Program), a national operator of widely acclaimed public charter schools. Having visited scores of charter schools nationwide, he told the NY Times, “Some should be closed down this afternoon,” but others have virtually erased the achievement gap between poor minority students and their white peers.
Houston is already home to 105 public charter schools that compete with the district’s 300 traditional schools for students and tax dollars. Supt. Grier decided to bring the charter innovations to 11 district schools last year, and to 9 more elementary schools this year.
One person watching the experiment closely is Mike Feinberg, who co-founded the first KIPP school here in 1994, and now serves on the program’s national board while running its 20 Houston-area charters. Referring to a local high school that has struggled for years, Mr. Feinberg cites the example of the US Postal Service finally offering Priority Mail after losing so much of its business to FedEx. “They’ve been trying to fix Lee High School for 20 years,” he said. “But up until now, there’s been no competitive pressure for them to really get crazy and do transformational things.” Among the “transformational practices” now employed at Lee HS due to charter competition are:
- hiring 50 full-time math tutors, who are paid $20,000 a year (less than $14 an hour) plus benefits and possible bonuses if their students do well.
- exhaustive review of transcripts and test results to organize class schedules and tutoring for 1,600 students;
- more instructional time (the KIPP charters in Houston offer about 1,735 hours of instruction per year, compared with about 1,435 at Lee HS);
- persuading parents to sign KIPP-style contracts pledging that they would help raise achievement;
- replacing about a third of Lee’s 100 teachers (who received $6 million in severance to retire early).
Many will argue that these changes are not “innovative” — that these are things that Houston’s public school district should have been doing all along. True enough. But more and more, parents and community leaders are learning that “innovation”, at least in traditional public schools, can consist of simply doing more of the right things, and doing them better, even if the practices themselves are not all that new. And nothing seems to spur these changes more effectively in traditional schools than finally giving students a choice to attend non-district schools that are more suited to their needs.
