Escuelas charter exitosas en EEUU?

En 2009, Roland Fryer, economista de Harvard, identificó 5 políticas
comunes en escuelas charter exitosas en EEUU: jornada escolar extendida
y año escolar extendido, procesos rigorosos de contratación de docentes
y directores, pruebas frecuentes, programas intensivos de tutoría y una
cultura "sin excusas". Esta tratando de replicarlas en escuelas públicas
de bajo desempeño en Houston, Texas para ver si revertirían sus
resultados. Ver artículo adjunto por más información. Mientras esta
iniciativa puede o no funcionar (todavía no hay resultados), por lo
menos es un intento serio por orientar la discusión en EEUU sobre que
factores producen mejor calidad y equidad. Algo que hace mucho falta en
Chile.

Gregory
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NYTimes
September 6, 2011
Troubled Schools Try Mimicking the Charters
By SAM DILLON

HOUSTON — Classrooms are festooned with college pennants. Hallway
placards proclaim: “No Excuses!” Students win prizes for attendance.
They start classes earlier and end later than their neighbors; some
return to school on Saturdays. And they get to pore over math problems
one-on-one with newly hired tutors, many of them former accountants and
engineers.

If these new mores at Lee High School, long one of Houston’s most
troubled campuses, make it seem like one of those intense charter
schools, that is no accident.

In the first experiment of its kind in the country, the Houston public
schools are testing whether techniques proven successful in
high-performing urban charters can also help raise achievement in
regular public schools. Working with Roland G. Fryer, a researcher at
Harvard who studies the racial achievement gap, Houston officials last
year embraced five key tenets of such charters at nine district
secondary schools; this fall, they are expanding the program to 11
elementary schools. A similar effort is beginning in Denver.

“We can’t sit idly by and let parents think that only the quality
charter schools can educate poor kids well,” said Terry Grier, Houston’s
hard-charging superintendent. “If you see something good, why not try to
replicate it?”

When first conceived 20 years ago, charter schools — which are publicly
financed but independently operated — offered two distinct promises: to
serve as an escape hatch for children in failing schools, and to be
incubators of innovation that, through market forces, would invigorate
neighborhood schools. There are scores of examples of the former, but
almost none of the latter. Instead, years of bickering have ensued among
charter advocates, school boards and teachers’ unions.

“One of the rationales for charters was that they would figure out
practices that could be adopted by school districts,” said Grover J.
Whitehurst, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and former federal
education official. “I hope Roland succeeds, because if he does it’ll be
a very important demonstration that bad public schools can be fixed.”

Houston is an apt laboratory. It is the birthplace of the Knowledge Is
Power Program, or KIPP, a national charter chain, as well as home to 105
charters that compete with the district’s 300 schools for students and
tax dollars. Texas also bars union shops, so school districts often have
more leeway in managing teachers’ work than elsewhere.

The experiment, which is known as Apollo 20 and cost $19 million in its
first year, has had mixed results: Lee High School saw double-digit
gains on state tests last spring, moving to “acceptable” on the Texas
school report card system after many years of being rated
“unacceptable.” But four of the nine Apollo schools remained on the
unacceptable list, and at some the percentage of students passing state
tests actually dipped.

Dr. Fryer, an economist and head of Harvard’s EdLabs, a research group,
has gained national attention in recent years as the architect of
incentive programs that offered students cash for improved performance,
including one in New York City that was discontinued after being deemed
ineffective. In recent years, he has visited scores of charter schools
nationwide. “Some should be closed down this afternoon,” he said, but
others have virtually erased the achievement gap between poor minority
students and their white peers.

In 2009, Dr. Fryer identified five policies common to successful
charters, including those run by KIPP and the Harlem Children’s Zone:
longer school days and years; more rigorous and selective hiring of
principals and teachers; frequent quizzes whose results determine what
needs to be retaught; what he calls “high-dosage tutoring”; and a “no
excuses” culture.

He then set about trying to find a public schools superintendent willing
to embrace them. Neither Joel I. Klein in New York nor Michelle Rhee in
Washington bit; officials in Omaha decided the political risks of
copying charters were too high.

But in February 2010, Dr. Fryer spoke by phone with Dr. Grier, who had
been on the job in Houston for six months. As a superintendent in eight
other districts over 25 years, Dr. Grier had won plaudits from some
educators for trying things like pay for performance and teacher
bonuses. “How soon can you get down here?” Dr. Fryer recalled him asking.

Over the next six months, the two men selected the Apollo schools, hired
several new principals and scores of new teachers and recruited and
trained about 200 math tutors. In the process, the district paid $6
million in severance to 100 teachers who chose to retire rather than
participate, and agreed to pay others for working extra hours (something
charters often do not do). The Houston Federation of Teachers, the
city’s largest union, took no formal position on the project.

The preparations were intense: half an hour before Dr. Fryer’s wedding
in June last year, Dr. Grier called his cellphone to review some details.

“Literally, I said, ‘Terry, I’ve got to go, I’ve got to get married.
I’ll call you back,’ ” Dr. Fryer recalled.

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 and runs its 20 Houston-area charters. Mr.
Feinberg sees Houston’s education marketplace as akin to when FedEx
emerged to challenge the United States Postal Service. The result:
Priority Mail.

“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.”

One of those transformational things at Lee High was 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.

“I don’t get this,” Jennifer Martinez, a junior wearing an “I love boys”
bracelet, told her tutor, Gerald Frentz, an engineer, one day last week.

They were talking about integers. Mr. Frentz, 56, retired from the Navy
in 1986 and has since worked at Wang Computer and been a tae kwon do
instructor and substitute teacher. Jennifer’s puzzlement visibly faded
as he explained how negative 7 and positive 7 have the same absolute
value — definition: distance from zero — but are separated by 14 ticks
along a number line.

“It’s an addictive experience,” Mr. Frentz said of the tutoring.

Lee High’s new principal, Xochitl Rodríguez-Dávila, described a torrent
of challenges, including the exhaustive review of transcripts and test
results to organize class schedules and tutoring for 1,600 students;
persuading parents to sign KIPP-style contracts pledging that they would
help raise achievement; and replacing about a third of Lee’s 100 teachers.

“Teachers by far have been the biggest struggle,” said Ms.
Rodríguez-Dávila, 39, who previously was a middle school principal.

In faculty meetings, she said, some people insisted that Lee’s immigrant
students would never master biology or physics. Other veterans, though,
told the complainers to stop belly-aching and get on with the turnaround.

Dr. Fryer, who has made 17 trips to Houston over the past year, is
watching not only the Apollo schools but a parallel control group of
other Houston schools with similar demographics and prior test results,
to rigorously analyze the effectiveness of the three-year experiment.

Even without the formal study, Dr. Grier knows that the mimicking of
charter practices is, at best, partial. The academic year started Aug.
15 at the nine Apollo secondary schools, a week ahead of the rest of the
district — and the same day as KIPP. But even with Apollo’s lengthened
days, KIPP students had still more instructional hours last year: about
1,735, compared with about 1,435 at Lee High School.

“We got close, but we didn’t get there completely,” Dr. Grier said.


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Gregory Elacqua
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Director
Instituto de Políticas Publicas
Facultad de Economía y Empresa
Universidad Diego Portales