Archives for the month of: September, 2015
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Bernie Horn: The Common Core “Results” Are Not Actually Test Scores: MUST READ!

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2015 //
32

This is a terrific article about the Common Core test results. It explains in layman’s language how the test scores are calculated and converted to scale scores.

When you read the “results” in the newspaper or get the results for your child or your class, you need to understand that the “scores” are not really scores:

The only things that have been released are percentages of students who supposedly meet “proficiency” levels. Those are not test scores—certainly not what parents would understand as scores. They are entirely subjective measurements.

Here’s why. When a child takes a standardized test, his or her results are turned into a “raw score,” that is, the actual number of questions answered correctly, or when an answer is worth more than one point, the actual number of points the child received. That is the only real objective “score,” and yet, Common Core raw scores have not been released.

Raw scores are adjusted—in an ideal world to account for the difficulty of questions from year to year—and converted to “scale scores.” A good way to understand those is to think of the SAT. When we say a college applicant scored a 600 on the math portion of the SAT test, we do not mean he or she got 600 answers right, we mean the raw scores were run through a formula that created a scale score—and that formula may change depending on which version of the SAT was taken. Standardized test administrators rarely publicize scale scores and the Common Core administrators have not.

Then the test administrators decide on “cut scores,” that is, the numerical levels of scale scores where a student is declared to be basic, proficient or advanced

The cut scores are the passing marks. They are arbitrary and subjective decisions made by fallible human beings. They can raise the passing mark to create large numbers of “failures,” or they can lower the passing mark to create a “success” story, to celebrate their wonderful policies. In some cases, the cut score is set high, so many students “fail.” The next year, or year after, the cut scores are lowered, and HOORAY! Our Wise Leadership Has Created Success!

As Horn writes:

Now, when a news story says that proficiency percentages were “higher than expected,” you should know what was “expected.” The Common Core consortiums gave the strong impression that they would align their levels of “proficiency” with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) nationwide standardized test. (That is, by the way, an absurdly high standard. Diane Ravitch explains that on the NAEP, “Proficient is akin to a solid A.”)

Score setting is a subjective decision, implemented by adjusting the scale and/or cut scores. If proficiency percentages are “higher than expected,” it simply means the consortium deliberately set the scores for proficiency to make results look better than the NAEP’s. And that is all it means.

It is no different from what many states did to standardized test results in anticipation of the Common Core exams. New York intentionally lowered and subsequently increased statewide results on its standardized tests. Florida lowered passing scores on its assessment so fewer children and schools would be declared failures. The District of Columbia lowered cut scores so more students would appear to have done well. Other states did the same.

The bottom line is this: The 2015 Common Core tests simply did not and cannot measure if students did better or worse. The “Smarter Balanced” consortium (with its corporate partner McGraw-Hill), the only one to release results so far, decided to make them look better than the NAEP, but worse than prior standardized tests. The PARCC consortium (with corporate partner Pearson) is now likely to do the same. It’s fair to say the results are rigged, or as the Washington Post more gently has put it, “proficiency rates…are as much a product of policymakers’ decisions as they are of student performance.”

You MUST MUST MUST MUST open the link to the cut scores announced by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, which Horn helpfully supplies. Scroll down to pp. 5-6. You will see that the cut scores predict that most students will “fail” in every grade. Only the top two levels are considered “passing,” that is, proficiency and advanced. In third grade math, 61% are predicted to “fail.” In fifth grade math, 67% are predicted to “fail.” In eighth grade math, 68% are predicted to “fail.”

The ELA predicted failure rates are slightly better, but even there, the majority of students are expected to “fail” because the cut score was so high.

If they chose different cut scores, the proportion passing or failing would be different, higher or lower.

This is not unique to the Common Core tests. This is the way all standardized testing is graded.

You can see how easy it is for political figures to manipulate the passing rates to their advantage.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Standardized Testing

MUST-READ: Bombshell Investigation of Charter Failures in Florida

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2015 //
27

Want to get rich quick? Hurry on down to Florida and open a charter school. You don’t need any experience in education, it doesn’t matter if you failed in the past, just come up with a good idea!

The Sun-Sentinel in Florida published a powerful indictment of the unsupervised charter industry.

In the past five years, 56 South Florida charter schools have closed, expelling thousands of students. Five charter schools in Broward and Palm Beach counties didn’t survive three months.

Jeb Bush boasts at every opportunity about his “reform” policies of privatization in Florida.

Read this article and see what you think about Jeb’s “miracle.”

Unchecked charter-school operators are exploiting South Florida’s public school system, collecting taxpayer dollars for schools that quickly shut down.

A recent spate of charter-school closings illustrates weaknesses in state law: virtually anyone can open or run a charter school and spend public education money with near impunity, a Sun Sentinel investigation found.

Florida requires local school districts to oversee charter schools but gives them limited power to intervene when cash is mismanaged or students are deprived of basic supplies — even classrooms.

Once schools close, the newspaper found, districts struggle to retrieve public money not spent on students.

Among the cases the newspaper reviewed:

• An Oakland Park man received $450,000 in tax dollars to open two new charter schools just months after his first collapsed. The schools shuttled students among more than four locations in Broward County, including a park, an event hall and two churches. The schools closed in seven weeks.

• A Boca Raton woman convicted of taking kickbacks when she ran a federal meal program was hired to manage a start-up charter school in Lauderdale Lakes.

• A Coral Springs man with a history of foreclosures, court-ordered payments, and bankruptcy received $100,000 to start a charter school in Margate. It closed in two months.

• A Hollywood company that founded three short-lived charters in Palm Beach and Collier counties will open a new school this fall. The two Palm Beach County schools did not return nearly $200,000 they owe the district.

South Florida is home to more than 260 charter schools, many of them high-performing. Some cater to students with interests in the performing arts, science and technology, or those with special needs.

Like traditional public schools, charter schools are funded with tax money. But these independent public schools can be opened and operated by individuals, companies or cities, and they are controlled by volunteer governing boards, not local elected school boards.

It gets worse every year, since the state’s weak law allows almost anyone to open a charter school, without regard to their qualifications.

State law requires local school districts to approve or deny new charters based solely on applications that outline their plans in areas including instruction, mission and budget. The statutes don’t address background checks on charter applicants. Because of the lack of guidelines, school officials in South Florida say, they do not conduct criminal screenings or examine candidates’ financial or educational pasts.

That means individuals with a history of failed schools, shaky personal finances or no experience running schools can open or operate charters.

“The law doesn’t limit who can open a charter school. If they can write a good application … it’s supposed to stand alone,” said Jim Pegg, director of the charter schools department for the Palm Beach County school district. “You’re approving an idea.”

Of course, letting anyone open a charter creates a certain level of instability and lots of closures. But that seems to be the way Florida’s leaders like it:

Fifteen charter schools in Broward have closed in the last two years. That number doubled the county’s total closures since charter schools first opened in Florida 18 years ago. Seven charter schools have closed in Palm Beach County in the last two years. That’s more than a quarter of the district’s historic total.

Eight of those failed schools lasted about a year or less. Five didn’t survive three months.

“These are our tax dollars,” said state Sen. Jeff Clemens, D-Lake Worth. “And to let them be used for a school that is only going to survive for one or two years is a huge waste of resources.”

Another 29 charter schools are expected to open in South Florida this fall…..

Charter schools, which receive public money in monthly installments based on student enrollment, can be overpaid if they overestimate their expected attendance or shut down abruptly.

State law requires that furniture, computers and unspent money be returned to the districts, but when officials attempt to collect, charter operators sometimes cannot be found.

“We do know there have been a few [charter schools] … where hundreds of thousands of dollars were never spent on kids, and we don’t know where that money went,” said Pegg, who oversees charters in Palm Beach County. “As soon as we close the door on those schools, those people scatter … We can’t find them.”

When a Broward school district auditor and school detective went searching for Mitchell at the Ivy Academies in September 2013, he left through a back door, records show. District officials said they have yet to find him, or to collect the $240,000 in public money the schools received for students they never had.

The Broward State Attorney’s Office is also investigating Mitchell and his involvement with the Ivy Academies.

The Palm Beach County school district never got back the $113,000 it overpaid La Mensa Academy in Palm Beach Gardens, which closed after a year. La Mensa projected it would have far more students than the five who showed up on the first day of school in 2011.

My Choice Academy has not returned $56,000 to the Palm Beach County school district but is seeking to reopen in the fall. It closed in January 2013 after four months in Riviera Beach because of problems with its lease. The school’s founder, Altermease Kendrick, said the start-up challenges were overwhelming.

Charter fraud is rampant. Ah, the perils of privatization. Maybe one of the news anchors will see this story and ask Jeb a question or two after he boasts about what he has done to education in Florida.

Categories Charter Schools, Florida, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes

California: Common Core Tests WIDEN the Achievement Gaps

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2015 //
74

Howard Blume reports today that the achievement gaps among children of different groups widened on the Smarter Balanced Assessment tests whose results were just reported.

The tests are “harder,” “more rigorous,” and so the students who already had low scores have even lower scores.

This is akin to raising the bar in a track event from 4 feet to 6 feet. Those who couldn’t clear the 4 foot bar will certainly not clear the higher bar.

If anyone remembers, we were told repeatedly that the Common Core would close achievement gaps between whites/Asians and Blacks/Hispanics, and between upper income/low income students.

It hasn’t, and it won’t.

The tests were designed to fail a majority of students of every group. Here are the cut scores for the SBAC tests. The developers predicted mass failures last fall.

Let’s just say that the Common Core and the tests aligned to them are a disaster for American education. Kids don’t necessarily try harder when they fail again and again. They may give up.

Many people suspect that the purpose of all this manufactured failure is to make parents eager for charter schools and vouchers. They may be right.

Blume writes:

“This is going to show the real achievement gap,” said Chris Minnich, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. “We are asking more out of our kids and I think that’s a good thing.”

At the same time, he added, “there’s no question that when we raised the bar for students that we’re going to have to support our lower-achieving students even more so than we are now.”

Although scores declined for all students, blacks and Latinos saw significantly greater drops than whites and Asians, widening the already large gap that was evident in results from earlier years, according to a Times analysis.

Under the previous test, last given to public school students two years ago, the gap separating Asian and black students was 35 percentage points in English. The gap increased to 44 percentage points under the new test. Asian students’ results dropped the least on the new tests, which widened the gap between them and those who are white, black or Latino, the analysis showed.

White students also maintained higher relative scores than their black and Latino peers.

A similar pattern occurred with students from low-income families. Their scores in math, for example, declined at a steeper rate (51%) than those of students from more affluent backgrounds (16%). In the last decade, all ethnic groups made significant academic gains compared to where their scores started. But the gap separating the scores of blacks and Latinos from whites and Asians changed little….

In that subject, 69% of Asian students achieved the state targets compared to 49% of whites, 21% of Latinos and 16% of blacks.

Although even Asian students have room to improve, their relative performance stood out. In math, the percentage of Asians who met state targets declined 12%. White students went down 21%, Latinos 50%, black students 54%. More than half the students who took the test were Latino.

The future of California, Lucia said, will depend on students of color graduating from schools with the skills they need to succeed in college and careers.

A top-performing school district was San Marino Unified, which is located in a mostly high-income area and enrolls 56% Asian students; 84% of students met state learning goals in both English and math.

L.A. Unified, which enrolls a majority of low-income, minority students, fared much worse overall. Achievement gaps widened less in L.A. Unified than in the state as a whole but that’s largely because its white and Asian students declined more, according to the analysis.

In L.A. Unified, 67% of Asian students met state targets in English, compared to 61% of white students, 27% of Latinos and 24% of black students.

Categories California, Common Core, Standardized Testing

Ohio: Let Successful Districts Take Over Failing Charters

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2015 //
16

Bill Phillis of the Ohio Equity notes that significant numbers of charters in Ohio are failing. He has a modest proposal: let high-performing districts take over failing charters.

He writes:

“A proposed plan for high-performing school districts to take over the failing Ohio charter school industry

The idea for this plan was concocted after reading Diane Ravitch’s blog referencing a proposal by the Superintendent of the Cypress-Fairbanks school district in Texas. He proposed that his high performing district takeover and manage failing charter schools in Texas.

Here is a plan for Ohio. Divide the state into five or more regions. Identify all of the top-rated school districts in each region and assign each low performance charter school to a district. For example–a designated district in central Ohio would take over the management of Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) and other low-performing charter schools in central Ohio. Ohio Virtual Academy and other low performers would be assigned a designated district in northwest Ohio. The charter sponsors would be eliminated to save costs and the management companies would be fired. Charters that don’t meet the expectations of the school district would be closed and students reassigned.

The public school districts, having eliminated the charter profit centers would plow those savings into the education of students.

This plan would have the added benefit of complete transparency and accountability.

William Phillis
Ohio E & A

Ohio E & A | 100 S. 3rd Street | Columbus | OH | 43215

Categories Charter Schools, Ohio

Laura H. Chapman on “This Grand and Nearly Maniacal Experiment in Standardized Education”

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2015 //
21

Laura H. Chapman, a frequent contributor to the blog, who has been a teacher, arts educator, curriculum designer, now retired, writes the following provocative contribution:

There is a well funded marketing campaign to sustain the Common Core and the associated tests.
One facet of the current campaign is designed to lower public expectations about the success of students on the SBAC and PARCC tests and to say, in effect, that cut scores on these tests will to set to approximate the operational definition of proficiency and the pass on NAEP tests, Only students who score at nearly the highest level on NAEP tests are dubbed proficient. 
There is also a bit of distraction going on, because SBAC has already announced cut scores based on its field trials in 21 states. There is another little known fact: When PARCC and SBAC applied for federal funding, they promised to make their scores comparable.
PARCC will “coordinate with the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium on… artificial intelligence scoring, setting achievement levels, and anchoring high school assessments in the knowledge and skills students need to be prepared for postsecondary education and careers.” Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. (2010, December 23). Proposal for supplemental race to the top assessment award. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/media/parccsupplementalproposal12-23achievefinal.pdf p. 3
Similarly, the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) asserts: “SBAC and PARCC are strongly committed to ensuring comparability between their assessments…[including] collaborative standard setting that will facilitate valid comparisons of achievement levels (cut scores) in each consortium’s summative test…” SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium. (2011, January 6). Supplemental funding budget narrative submitted to the U.S. Department of Education. p. 31. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/media/sbac-supplemental-budget-narrative_final.pdf p. 31

Producers of the SBAC tests have their set “cut scores” to report on four levels of performance. Level 1 signals failure. Level 2 indicates “at risk of failure.” Level 3 implies “safe harbor, doing well.” Level 4 means “proficient.” For students in grade 11, only Level 4 indicates readiness for entry-level, credit-bearing courses in college.

Across the grades, in math and ELA, about 11% of students are estimated to score at 4, the highest level and the one that indicates, in the eleventh grade, readiness for entry-level, credit-bearing courses in college. So, that will be very bad news, and it will make news when all of the test scores are gathered in.

The SBAC cut scores in math are estimated to assign 67% of grade 11 students to Level 1 or Level 2, with most (40%) at Level 1. In many states, students who score at Level 1 will also place teachers and administrators at risk of being fired, perhaps with the whole school in line for closure. In addition, many schools will just assign students even more test prep in math, at the risk of harming students’ love for learning and affinities for inquiries that are not driven by tests.

The cut scores for English Language Arts are estimated to place about 59% of students at Level 1 and Level 2, with about 32% at Level 1. Students with these scores are certain to be in the same boat, receiving more test prep. In states like Ohio that guarantee “proficiency” in reading by grade three, 62% of students are likely to fall short, up to 82% if that rule and the meaning of proficiency corresponds to SBAC’s Level 4 definition of “proficiency.”

In any case, the cut score issue is not a trivial matter given the high stakes that federal and state officials have deliberately and foolishly attached to tests, tests that are not “objective” and cut scores that are not “objective” but judgments–and these detached from any concern for the consequences to individual students and all public schools.

Proponents of the Common Core and tests are worried about the political fall-out when the test scores are released in a form that allows stack ratings among all the states that sighed up for the Common Core and have advertised that they have tests aligned with the standards.

They should be worried. Gurus of spin at the American Enterprise Institute suggest how to spin that news. They suggest that the scores should be played down, that news should avoid crisis rhetoric about poor performance. They recommend framing the testing outcomes as just another step on a path “to continuous improvement” in student learning.

That soft “slow-and-steady-as-we-go message” provides cover for policy makers who want to delay high stakes decisions based on these test scores but still use them as a baseline for judging gains in performance for the following year. This delaying tactic may buy time to reset expectations for learning, but it will not stop the obsessive use of test scores and relentless test prep than now dominates life in many schools.

For advocates of the “one size fits all” standards and tests, the comparability in scores from SBAC and PARCC tests means this: Every state that signed up for this grand and nearly maniacal experiment in standardized education will be rated as winners or losers by these supposedly “objective tests.”

The governors and the state education officials who signed adoption papers for this grand experiment in standardized education may be out of office, but current officials will be questioned about the results. Handling the political fall-out will be tricky, especially with an election season heating up, budget problems in many states, and the dueling minds and messages of politicians (notably Republicans, but also Democrats) who support or condemn the Common Core and tests, and many others who have no mindful views other than spin provided to them.

All of the investors in pushing the Common Core–Achieve, the National Governor’s Association the Council of Chief State School Officers, the Gates foundation and buddies along with venture capitalists–want to keep PARCC and SBAC in place, including Common Core “aligned” tests other than those from PARCC and SBAC.

Why? Do not believe the spin about the global economy and needed skills for the 21st century workplace, and all of the other sales pitches.

Test scores with high stakes consequences are the weapon of choice for expanding market-based education. The more students, teachers, and schools fail, the faster the collapse of public education.

As Diane Ravitch and others have said over and over, the cut scores for NAEP “proficiency” are high. NCLB never defined proficiency, Race to the Top did but only in terms of college and career ready specifications, not cut scores or tests.

Achieve has manufactured a “proficiency gap” that looks impressive to a casual viewer, but it is hot air. The proficiency gap is a version of the achievement gap. The kids and the teachers are the problem. The standards and the tests are perfect.

Categories Common Core, Testing

Los Angeles: Let Parents Participate in Choosing the Next Superintendent, “Vet the Supe”

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2015 //
21

Parent activists in Los Angeles have started organizing a campaign to have a seat at the table when the school board picks the next superintendent.

They call their campaign “Vet the Supe.” See links here and here.

They are concerned that the Board might select another Broadie like Deasy, who collected $350,000 a year, wasted hundreds of millions of dollars in a botched plan to buy iPads, and now works for the Broad Foundation, training other superintendents. Is that the definition of chutzpah?

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Los Angeles, Parents

Paul Horton: Common Core=Corporate Control

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2015 //
18

Paul Horton, history teacher at the University of Chicago Lab School, got exasperated about the steady stream of articles endorsing the Common Core in the Chronicle of Higher Education. So he wrote a letter warning the professoriate not to buy the corporate-funded CC propaganda. The letter should have been published as an opinion piece.

An excerpt:

“1. They are the product of a push by private foundations acting in the interest of multinational corporations to colonize public education in the United States and in other areas projected be developed as core production and assembly areas in the emerging global economy. A recent Washington Post article using a well-placed source within the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation essentially confirmed what many critics have suspected: that Bill Gates effectively controls the Department of Education in the United States through his former employees who serve in leadership positions within the Department of Education.

Our education secretary also does a lot of listening to Michael Barber of Pearson Education. Although Mr. Gates and Sir Michael, as well as other reformers, are doubtless well intentioned, they view the colonization of K-12 education in this country and elsewhere as a “win-win.” In their view, the quality of education will improve with greater accountability, and they will make billions creating and delivering accountability for students, teachers, and education schools.

To implement their plan, they are willing to jettison all ideas of collective responsibility for public education in a classic privatization pincer move: Chicago School of Economics ideas of “free choice” and “free markets” are used to legitimate privatization through virtual control of the editorial boards of major papers—the Murdoch chain, the Tribune chain, The Washington Post (now run by a neoliberal libertarian), and The New York Times—as well as center-liberal media like PBS and NPR. Money is funneled into NPR and PBS by organizations that support privatizing school reform in the name of “support for education programing.”

A Gates-funded Washington consulting firm, GMMB, works 24/7 to sell the Common Core Standards and all other elements of the Race to the Top mandates that call for more charter schools, a standardized-testing regime, and value-added assessments of teachers based on this testing regime. Likewise representatives of the Washington-based Fordham Institute work together with GMMB to send weekly talking points to major editorial boards and education reporters to ensure that representatives from an “independent foundation” are relentlessly quoted.

Not surprisingly, the Fordham Institute is hardly independent, and is heavily subsidized by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Michael Bloomberg, and the Broad Foundation, and many more funders of privatizing education. While GMMB attempts to control the discourse in the country’s major media outlets (Arne Duncan’s past press secretary is helping to coordinate this propaganda campaign within GMMB), McKinsey sells Microsoft and Pearson packages to fit the Race to the Top mandates.

The Los Angeles Independent Schools boondoggle that packed Pearson Common Core Curriculum lessons within Microsoft tablets and software is the wave of the future. Districts are sold packages that they cannot afford to comply with federal mandates that are pushed by private multinational corporations. What I am attempting to describe is the tip of a corporate iceberg that amounts to corporate control of education policy with very little participation of classroom teachers, parents, or school boards.

The idea that the Common Core Standards are the product of a democratic process is simply misrepresentation of fact—a big lie that GMMB, our education secretary, Bill Gates, Pearson Education, and the Fordham Institute propagate. What many rightfully be called corporate-education reform has bypassed the democratic process. For this reason alone, university faculty and administrators should not support the Common Core Curriculum and the Race to the Top.”

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reform, Higher Education, Standardized Testing

Perdido Street School Blogger: Students Are Returning to School Without Test Scores

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2015 //
42

Talk about a messed-up, incomprehensible system!

Many students across the nation have returned to school or will return this week, without their Common Core test scores!

Didn’t the cheerleaders for the tests say that students needed to know, parents needed to know, teachers needed to know what those scores are? Didn’t they say that no one would know how students are doing compared to students in other districts and states without those scores? I don’t happen to know any parents who actually care how their child compares to another child across the nation, but someone does. Maybe someone in the U.S. Department of Education.

Blogger Perdido Street School points out that things go slowly because the benchmarks are set after the tests are given.

Just as with the New York Common Core tests, the benchmarks aren’t set until long after the students take their tests.

With the old New York State Regents exams, the benchmark scores were set before students took their tests and were posted right after the test ended.

That seems like a fair and honest way to do things – set the passing mark before students take the test.

But in the Era of Common Core, when educrats and reformers wanted to rig the tests for 70% failure rates, all of these Common Core tests, including the high school tests, are benchmarked long after students take their tests and the results are in.

Rigged?

You betcha!

If not, why not set the benchmarks before, the way they used to with the Regents exams?

Categories Common Core, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes, Standardized Testing

Please Send Me a Missing Post that I Published on September 9

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2015 //
37

On September 9, I put up a post in the morning titled “New York: Why the Regents Should Oppose Governor’s Teacher Evaluation Plan.” It has completely disappeared from my website and WordPress files. Maybe I deleted it by accident or maybe hackers in the Chinese military or an Eastern European internet cafe took it down.

In any event, it started like this:

The New York State Board of Regents was founded in 1784, then reorganized in 1787. In their wisdom, the state’s founding fathers (there were no mothers there) decided to place educational policy making in the hands of this body rather than the governor. Governors come and go. Educational decisions should not change with every election. Unfortunately, Governor Andrew Cuomo has seized control over educational policy, despite the absence of any state constitutional authority. [

If you have a copy of the post, would you post it in the comment section, and I will repost it and thank you. I hate to lose my work.

Categories Education Reform

Education Law Center Reacts to Washington State Court Decision Declaring Charter Schools Unconstitutional

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2015 //
25

A news blast from the Education Law Center:

September 11, 2015

WASHINGTON SUPREME COURT FINDS CHARTER SCHOOL LAW UNCONSTITUTIONAL

Olympia, WA — On September 4, 2015, in League of Women Voters of Washington v. State, the Washington Supreme Court voided the state’s charter school statute because it circumvents local control and diverts education funds away from district schools, in violation of the state constitution.

Local control of K-12 schooling is essential and required in Washington. Local voters through their elected boards of education are the only entities permitted to govern public schools and receive public funds for “common schools.” Yet, the charter statute allowed charters to be authorized and run by private, appointed boards completely outside the control of local voters and school boards. And, the statute required the state and local taxpayers to fund the charters equally with the public schools.

The plaintiffs, including League of Women Voters, El Centro de la Raza, Washington Association of School Administrators, Washington Education Association, and individuals, were “[a]larmed over the lack of local accountability and [the] fiscal impacts of the Act,” the Court explained, and sought a judgment that the Act was unconstitutional.

Relying on longstanding and numerous precedential cases, the Court concluded that “Charter Schools Are Not Common Schools” and “The Charter School Act’s Funding Provisions Fail.”

Common Schools

The Court wrote that “This case turns on … article IX, section 2 of our state constitution and this court’s case law addressing that provision.” Article IX, section 2 provides:

The legislature shall provide for a general and uniform system of public schools. The public school system shall include common schools, and such high schools, normal schools, and technical schools as may hereafter be established. But the entire revenue derived from the common school fund and the state tax for common schools shall be exclusively applied to the support of the common schools.

To tap the funding sources identified in article IX, the charter law simply declared charter schools to be “common schools.” The law asserts that charter schools are eligible for local levy funding and state funding equal to that for the public schools. The law’s intent was to shift school funding from existing common schools to charters.

However, “common schools” have been defined in Washington for well over a century, as follows:

a common school, within the meaning of our constitution, is one that is common to all children of proper age … , free, and subject to and under the control of the qualified voters of the school district. The complete control of the schools is a most important feature, for it carries with it the right of the voters, through their chosen agents, to select qualified teachers, with powers to discharge them … .

School District No. 20 v. Bryan (1909). Several subsequent cases have followed and applied Bryan.

The charter law provides that charters are “governed by a charter school board” which is “appointed or selected … to manage and operate the charter school,” the Court stated, citing the statute. Furthermore, the charter board has the power to hire and discharge employees and may contract with other organizations to manage the charter. Charters are “exempt from all school district policies” and “all … state statues and rules applicable to school districts,” with a few minor exceptions stated in the statute.

The Court concluded that because the charters are to be run by an appointed board or other organization and not subject to local voter control, they are not “common schools.”

Funding Provisions Fail

The Court reminded the parties that “when adopting our constitution the people of this state ‘endeavored to protect and preserve the funds set apart by law for the support of the common schools from invasion, so that they might be applied exclusively to … such schools.'”(citing Bryan). The Washington Supreme Court has, throughout the 20th century and earlier, “struck down laws diverting common school funds to any other purpose.” The Court cited cases from 1995, 1939, 1914 and 1897.

Under the charter statute, money that is dedicated to common schools would be unconstitutionally diverted to charters, the Court wrote. “‘Once appropriated to the support of the common schools,’ funds cannot ‘subsequently be diverted to other purposes'” even if related to education. “This court cautioned that to hold otherwise ‘would be calamitous,'” the Court said, citing an earlier decision.

In conclusion, the Court declared the charter statute “unconstitutional and void.”

Related Stories:
IS WASHINGTON’S CHARTER SCHOOL ACT UNCONSTITUTIONAL?

STATE CONSTITUTIONS AND CONTROL OF CHARTERS
Please note that the Florida state constitution vests all control of public schools to boards.
Florida: “In each school district there shall be a school board … the school board shall operate, control and supervise all free public schools within the district … .” Fla. Const. Art. IX, § 4 (a)-(b).

I read this to mean that charter boards operating publicly funded charter schools and getting capital funding from the state legislature violate the state constitution in Florida.

Education Law Center Press Contact:
Molly A. Hunter
Education Justice, Director
mhunter@edlawcenter.org
973-624-1815, x 19

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Washington State
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