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The Evolution of Standards, Charters, and Finance By Chris Pipho Illustration © 1998 by Mario Noche

SOMETIMES it's easy to assume that state policy issues are driven solely by gubernatorial, legislative, or state board actions. Events and people often seem to move on their own initiative. Their motivation to set out on a new policy course comes when a new opportunity arises or when a loophole or gap in existing policy can be found. And for others, just blocking someone else's action is enough reason to jump on a new idea.

The fall of 1999 has produced a wide array of events that, by themselves, might appear to have only local interest. However, when viewed through a trend-finding lens, they start to show an evolution in thinking about standards, charters, and finance.

Standards Influence Finance

In Colorado, it was billed as a "performance promise." Nationwide, it was viewed as pushing accountability to a new level. Two Colorado school districts, Colorado Springs and Jefferson County, have taken steps to tie increases in property taxes to gains in student achievement. Both put their proposals on the November ballot for voter approval.

The Jefferson County ballot issue promised to raise $25 million a year in its first two years, and that figure could rise to as much as $45 million a year if test scores warrant. In the third year, the district would be capped at $25 million a year unless the test scores move up. Increases would ratchet up at $1.5 million for each percentage point of improvement on the Colorado Student Assessment instrument. The goal is a 25% gain over three years to pick up the full $45 million. Jefferson County officials had help with the details of the plan from an economist in a local investment firm.

The Colorado Springs proposal guaranteed voters a 15% increase in the number of students reading at grade level as they move from third to fifth grade and a similar increase in the number of students performing at grade level in mathematics as they move from fifth to eighth grade. School officials did not name the test they will use to measure these gains.

Nationally, experts viewed the two proposals with a mixture of surprise and caution. Hal Seaman, deputy executive director of the National School Boards Association, was quoted as saying, "It's like an incentive contract for an athlete. It puts accountability at a different level. It's something we'll want to watch closely." Others cautioned that the proposals might be too simplistic and asked about the districts' plans for improvement if the goals are not met.

As school opened this fall, 16 states were using new tests, and the move was on to tie textbooks, curriculum, and staff development to state standards. In Alabama, starting this year, high school juniors will have to pass tests in reading, writing, grammar, math, and science before they can graduate. In Texas, a third-grade proficiency test is scheduled for 2003, but the state is also starting to focus on kindergarten preparation so that these students will be ready four years from now.

Charter School Victories

The matter of what constitutes "strong" and "weak" charter school legislation has been debated since 1993. Important elements in such laws are the powers granted to local school boards and the power of charter applicants to appeal negative local decisions to the state board.

In Colorado, the issue came to a head with the Denver school board's refusal to approve a charter proposal for the Thurgood Marshall Middle School. While the appeal process doesn't give complete control to the state board, it does allow that body to mandate that a local board negotiate "in good faith." The issue eventually ended up in court when the Denver school board said that the state board had "exceeded its statutory authority" by asking for status reports on the progress of negotiations between the Denver Public Schools and the Thurgood Marshall applicants.

After six years of negotiations, the proposal has yet to be approved. But in mid-September the Colorado Supreme Court issued a decision saying that the state has the power to overrule local school boards. Charter advocates were cheered by the ruling, which may be the first such decision in the country.

In issuing its ruling, the court looked at history and found an 1877 law that gave the chief state school officer the authority to hear an appeal from "any person aggrieved by any decision or order" by a local school board. This law is much stronger than the current charter school law. In reality, the state board can order a local board to accept a charter application that it has previously denied, but the state board cannot specify the terms of the contract and cannot dictate what goes into the application itself. The Thurgood Marshall applicants now have a stronger case, and progress on the contract is expected.

Currently, approximately 18,000 students attend 69 charter schools in the state. Fifteen of these schools exist because of an appeal to the state board of education. The state's first two charter schools opened in 1993, and advocates expect another 15 or 20 to open in 2000.

Meanwhile, a 1996 Colorado law permits districts with fewer than 15,000 students, after having obtained voter approval, to apply to the state board for districtwide charter status. The Park County School District, with 645 students, put the issue before the voters in November. The primary advantage for the district would be greater flexibility in seeking waivers from laws dealing with hiring, firing, compensation, and evaluation of staff. Park County has an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school in Fairplay and elementary schools in Lake George and Guffey -- all mountain towns serving a mix of ranchers and newcomers.

The Voucher Scene

As the school year began, the on-again, off-again decision by Judge Solomon Oliver, Jr., of the federal district court in Cleveland highlighted the voucher scene. On the day before school started, the judge stopped a four-year voucher program because a majority of the 56 private schools in the program were religious schools. A few days later, he partially reversed his order and allowed the 4,000 students already enrolled in the program to receive funds for at least the first semester. New students entering the program this year were excluded; Judge Oliver said he felt it would be less disruptive to prevent students from starting the school year while the decision was pending.

Parents and voucher advocates didn't agree. The Cleveland Plain Dealer set out to find parents who had transferred their children to the public schools after the first order and could locate only two of the 4,000 who had made this choice. While the original order was an injunction to stop the program while he considered the merits of a lawsuit, Judge Oliver also said that there was "no substantial possibility" that he would ultimately come down in favor of the program.

Support for the Cleveland program has been strong ever since Ohio legislators set aside some scholarship money in 1995 for poor families to attend private schools of their choice. Parents signed up in great numbers, and recent estimates are that 17,000 names are on a waiting list. This past year, the Ohio Supreme Court let stand the voucher program as long as the money flowed through the parents. However, the court did say that the program was not legal because it was attached to a larger budget bill. The legislature responded last spring by giving the program independent status and expanding it to include higher grades. Because of this change, opponents brought the case to federal court. Some think this case could be the one to move all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, Milwaukee has some 8,500 students enrolled in the state's voucher program, and Florida has 136 students enrolled in the first statewide voucher program. Private donations to voucher-type programs were paying for up to 40,000 students around the country to attend private and parochial schools of their choice.

Update on Summer School

Back in the September Stateline, I discussed mandatory summer school for students whose test scores were below grade level. In that piece I speculated that the overall "pass rate" for these summer school programs didn't appear to be any better than 50%. With the summer ended and the final numbers appearing for New York City, one of the larger urban programs, it appears that even this number was optimistic.

In late August, the New York Times ran the headline "Most Summer School Students Pass a Test for Promotion." By early September, a new headline read "Most Assigned to Summer School Will Not Be Promoted." And by late September, a scoring glitch produced yet another headline, "8,600 Wrongly Put in Summer School."

These three articles could foreshadow how school officials will have to handle the program next year. Looking from the top down, the details were not encouraging. At the beginning of the summer, 35,344 New York City students were required to attend summer school. At the end of the summer, 14,259 students either did not show up or failed to take the test, and 62% of those who took the test failed. The "no shows" may be the hardest group to fix. Some of these families were notified as many as three times since last January. For those who got to the program and passed, the effort was a success. How to turn out higher participation numbers may be the dilemma for all large urban school districts mounting such programs.

Meanwhile, Chicago was posting some overall gains. In 1997 and 1998, approximately half of the students in Chicago's summer school program were promoted, and this year 66% of the 25,039 students were promoted.

What Is Progress?

Many of these ideas, such as tying property-tax increases to student achievement gains, would have seemed revolutionary only a few years ago. The fact that they were not mandated by a state legislature but came from local school boards has to be viewed as turning some sort of corner on implementing standards. However, not everyone in the education establishment will view this development as progress. Will citizens understand the use of test scores for these purposes? Or will they see it as just another gimmick to raise taxes?

While public acceptance of vouchers and charters continues to grow, the courts will be playing a central role in sorting out the evolution of these two ideas and the role of local boards in implementing them. All of this activity looks like one-upsmanship designed to take the play away from legislatures and governors. One has to wonder whether these state-level policy makers will want to come back with even more radical ideas in the next legislative session.

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Last updated 8 December 1999
URL: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kpip9911.htm
Copyright 1999 Phi Delta Kappa International