Fordham finds school reform isn't so easy
July 14, 2010
DAYTON DAILY NEWS
Markets can't fix everything.
Ironically, it's the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a right-leaning think tank and one of the nation's chief proponents of market-based education reforms, that will tell you so.
Some conservatives say school choice will force reform by making schools compete for students and funding. Good schools will attract more students while bad ones will wither and die.
Fordham's use of Dayton as a laboratory for seeding charter schools and voucher programs during the past decade helped make the city one of the country's earliest and most crowded education marketplaces.
But things didn't work out as planned. The buyers in the market (parents) didn't always focus on academic quality, allowing too many poor performing sellers (schools) to stay in business.
In a new book out this week, three authors associated with the Dayton-rooted foundation - Chester E. Finn, Jr., Terry Ryan and Mike Lafferty - chronicle its experiences in the school reform trenches here.
"Ohio's Education Reform Challenges: Lessons From the Front Lines," amounts to a short history of Dayton's charter school movement. It also should be a call to arms for tougher rules to address failing schools.
"The education marketplace doesn't work as well as we believed," the authors say, "... it should lead to either the improvement or closure of weak schools as the good ones gain market share. But in practice, really atrocious schools can languish for years when nobody intervenes."
Consider Moraine Community School, one of the area's first charter schools, still in operation today despite a decade of low scores.
Fordham - newly minted as a charter school sponsor in 2005 - was delighted to take on the reclamation project to turn Dayton's only south suburban charter school into a high performer.
But less than a year into the arrangement, the Moraine school had had enough and bolted from a stunned Fordham for a new sponsor with a reputation for tolerating poor schools.
"In hindsight, we were deluded about the Moraine school and our ability, through tough love, to turn it around," Fordham leaders say today. By the end, "It was clear to us they did not see their primary mission as delivering academic success to children."
This example is one of many in the book that show a continuing need for more accountability. The explosion of more than 300 charters in Ohio since 1997 has added some great new schools in the state. Sadly, though, a disturbingly large percentage of terrible schools have been allowed to stay open, doing more harm than good.
Lawmakers took several important steps to tighten charter rules in recent years, but they need to go further. A few ideas:
* Force swift action for consistently terrible schools. Schools that see their scores dip need a chance to fix the situation, but Ohio has too many schools - traditional and charter - with long track records of failure. That can't continue.
* Reward schools with track records of success. Top-notch charters, for instance, could be allowed to earn per-pupil funding that matches the local school district, or maybe get a chance to take control of a quality district school building (perhaps one that was closed for poor performance).
* Get tough on charter school sponsors. Too many sponsors have abysmal histories of managing schools with embarrassing academic records. Ohio should have a high bar that strips sponsorship from those that don't really oversee the schools they're responsible for.
* Prevent sponsors from charging schools under their control for services. Fordham, to its credit, has refused to charge fees to schools for services it provides, seeing the practice as creating perverse incentives that turn sponsored schools into cash cows that sponsors then can ill-afford to shut down if they fail.
But that's just what's happened with some dubious sponsors.
Dayton has long been one of the most interesting places to examine the impact of school choice. Fordham's honesty about what went wrong in its experience here is an important contribution to the greater understanding of school reform.
Ohio shouldn't miss the chance to learn from it.
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