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NJ Spotlight - Two Private Schools in Newark Ask Permission to Become Charters …Four other organizations also seeking state Department of Education’s expedited go-ahead for schools
The Record - Study: DC teachers improving performance… ‘Public school teachers in the District of Columbia are improving their performance because they're motivated by the possibility of substantial pay raises or because they don't want to get fired… the study released Thursday by researchers at Stanford University and the University of Virginia found that teachers in the district did improve, at least based on the criteria devised by the school system to evaluate their performance.’
NJ Spotlight - Two Private Schools in Newark Ask Permission to Become Charters
…Four other organizations also seeking state Department of Education’s expedited go-ahead for schools
John Mooney | October 17, 2013
Two more private schools are bidding to become public charter schools in the latest round of charter applications in New Jersey.
Six applications in all were submitted to the state Department of Education by Tuesday’s deadline in an expedited review process meant exclusively for established schools or organizations seeking to become new charter schools.
The two proposals both came out of Newark, where the Link School and Affirmation Academy are both seeking to convert to public charters able to accept public dollars instead of tuition.
If the charter applications are approved, LinkSchool would start serving fifth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students from Newark, Orange, East Orange and Irvington, according to the state. Affirmation Academy would serve only Newark students as an elementary school.
The new requests come on the heels of last summer’s first-ever state approval of a charter conversion, or the new Philips Academy Charter School in Newark. Formerly the independent St. Philips Academy, the school sought more financial stability in making the switch while also facing more public accountability.
The other four charter-conversion proposals are each linked to an existing organization:
· Excellence Charter School, Camden – a K-9 school that would be part of the Mastery Charter School management network in Philadelphia. It would ultimately be a K-12 school or schools serving nearly 2,000 students.
· Bridgeton Public Charter School in Bridgeton – a K-2 school that would grow to a K-5 school of 300 students. It would be replicating the Vineland Public Charter School.
· Dream Academy Charter School in Newark – a K-8 school with more than 600 students. It would be affiliated with the Brick Academy Schools program in Newark, which is currently collaborating with two other schools in the city district.
· College Achieve Central Charter School in Plainfield – a K-7 school that would grow to a K-12 school with more than 1,700 students. It would be part of the College Achieve Public Schools, a new charter management organization based in New Brunswick that is run by the former director of the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy in Las Vegas.
As part of the expedited process for the conversion, preliminary approvals will be decided by February and the schools could open by next fall. The Christie administration has put more emphasis on picking established charter organizations, while approving fewer schools through the general application process.
Earlier this month, just three proposals out of more than 30 bids submitted through the general application process were given preliminary approval.
The Record - Study: DC teachers improving performance… ‘Public school teachers in the District of Columbia are improving their performance because they're motivated by the possibility of substantial pay raises or because they don't want to get fired… the study released Thursday by researchers at Stanford University and the University of Virginia found that teachers in the district did improve, at least based on the criteria devised by the school system to evaluate their performance.’
Thursday October 17, 2013, 7:53 AM BEN NUCKOLS Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Public school teachers in the District of Columbia are improving their performance because they're motivated by the possibility of substantial pay raises or because they don't want to get fired, according to an academic study of the groundbreaking teacher-evaluation system implemented by former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee.
The school system in the nation's capital is unique among large school districts for the complexity of its teacher-evaluation system, which scores the performance of teachers based on classroom observations, student test scores and other factors. Previous studies of pay-for-performance systems in public schools have found little to no correlation between merit-based pay and teacher performance.
But the study released Thursday by researchers at Stanford University and the University of Virginia found that teachers in the district did improve, at least based on the criteria devised by the school system to evaluate their performance.
Professor Thomas Dee of Stanford, one of the study's authors, said the district appears to have found a more effective pay-for-performance model than those studied previously. "D.C. is fielding incentives that are just very different from what we've seen before," Dee said. "Part of that is, it's not just cash for test scores. It's instead incentivizing things that teachers can control more directly." City teachers rated as highly effective are eligible for substantial bonuses, while teachers found to be ineffective — or minimally effective two years in a row — can be fired. "
Dismissal threats had substantial effects, both increasing the voluntary attrition of low-performing teachers and improving the performance of the previously low-performing teachers," Dee and James Wyckoff of U.Va. wrote. "Furthermore ... financial incentives further improved the performance of high-performing teachers." The study found higher departure rates for teachers deemed to be ineffective and better retention rates for those who were eligible for bonuses, which can be as high as $25,000 a year. Teachers in the district can earn a $131,000 annual salary, one of the highest in the nation for a public school instructor, after nine years on the job.
While other systems have fought with teachers' unions to implement evaluation systems based on test scores, the district was permitted to do so by an act of Congress. Rhee began to exercise that option in 2007 when she was hired by then-mayor Adrian Fenty. Rhee stepped down after Fenty lost his re-election bid in 2010. But the evaluation system has continued under Mayor Vincent Gray and chancellor Kaya Henderson, who had been Rhee's top deputy. Since the evaluation system took effect in 2009, 490 teachers have been fired for poor performance.
Schools in Houston, Memphis and New Haven, Conn., are among those that have implemented evaluation systems similar to the district's, and at least half the states are incorporating test scores into teacher evaluations. But other school systems have attempted unsuccessfully to implement pay-for-performance models, including New York, Chicago and Milwaukee, which returned federal grant money intended for establishing them.
Henderson hailed the study as evidence that the evaluation system, known as IMPACT, is working. "It absolutely validates the approach we have taken to our work," Henderson said in a written statement. Mark Simon, an education policy analyst with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington who has written about IMPACT and works with unions and school systems to design evaluation programs, called the study "exciting" but cautioned that it does not show that the district's evaluations have improved the quality of teaching.
"IMPACT is designed to identify a very small number of teachers at the bottom end for firing and a slightly larger but still small number of teachers at the top end for bonuses. So it tends to be a motivator at the extremes," Stein said. "But for the vast majority of teachers, the question is whether IMPACT is helping them to teach better, and that question was not addressed by this study."
