Public Impact

  • Home
  • Who We Are
  • What We Do
  • Media
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Subscribe
Innovation. Excellence. Service. Impact.
  • Opportunity Culture
  • Teachers & Principals
    • Teacher Leadership
    • Recruit, Select, and Keep Education Talent
    • Competencies of High Performers
    • Evaluating Teacher and Leader Performance
    • Teacher and Leader Compensation
    • Professional Development for Educators
  • Turnarounds
    • Turnarounds Within Schools
    • Restarts by Charter Operators
    • Innovation Zones
  • Funding
    • School Funding
  • Charters
    • Charter School Authorizing
    • Scaling Up Quality
    • Restarts in Failing Schools
    • High Market Share Cities
    • State and Federal Charter School Policy
    • Help for Charter Schools
    • Serving Students with Highest Needs
  • More Topics
    • Big Ideas for Education
    • Entrepreneurship in K-12
    • Parents and Community
    • Philanthropy in Education
    • Special Populations
    • Technology in Schools
    • Assessment and Data

Public Impact News & Views

Welcome to the Public Impact blog, offering news and views from the Public Impact team. Questions or concerns? Contact editor Sharon Kebschull Barrett.

Explore Eight Years of Data in Interactive Restart Dashboard, Progress Report

written by Paola Gilliam and Sharon Kebschull Barrett on October 13, 2020

When a school struggles to support student learning year after year, schools need dramatic changes, but for too long the choice seemed to be to close the school or attempt an internal turnaround. How has the third option—restarting a school with the same students but with a new operator and flexibilities—made a difference to student success?

Read our new study analyzing the progress of restarts that began between 2010 and 2016, and visit the new, interactive, national database dashboard to see eight years of data on the country’s restarted schools.

In Restart as a School Improvement Strategy, the Public Impact team, including Lyria Boast and Preston Faulk, define a restart as a new organization—most often a charter school operator—taking responsibility for managing a chronically low-performing school.

The study’s main takeaways include:

  1. Restarts Positively Affected School Performance: On average, restarts have a positive and statistically significant impact on both English language arts (ELA) and math after six years, and those gains were larger than the average gains their surrounding districts made. The gains were also larger than in schools using the “turnaround” and “transformation” methods under the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG).
  2. Restarts Remain Relatively Low-Performing. But restarted schools still did not, on average, become high-performing; the average restarted school remained in the bottom quintile after six years.
  3. Restarts Made Largest Gains in First Years After Implementation: On average, restarts made their largest gains in ELA in the first three years after restarting and their largest gains in math in the first two years, based on the adjusted statewide percentile ranking of their schoolwide proficiency rates (SPR). Gains slowed after that, with school performance actually declining on average in the fifth year after restarting. These results suggest that the first three years provide a reasonable window for gauging initial restart success, and that more is needed to maintain success.
  4. Top Restarts and SIG Schools Offer Reason for Optimism: On average, top-quartile restarts made three to four times more growth by year 5 than the average restart, causing schools to jump to the 26th and 34th percentiles in ELA and math, respectively. Top-quartile SIG turnaround and transformation schools made similarly large gains, suggesting a large opportunity for success if school leaders implement these strategies well.

See the report for more, and use the database dashboard to see where restarts are located and results by city, both created with support from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation.

“We’re pleased to be able to offer the field this comprehensive database, with interactive tools that allow users to delve into the details,” said Lyria Boast, Public Impact’s vice president for data analytics.

What’s next?

The field needs more research into why restarts seem to outperform other intervention methods, and what sets top-quartile restarts and other SIG schools apart from their peers. And as more operators run a city’s schools, and the lines between district and charter blur, research should look at how those efforts affect one another—and student learning—throughout a city.

Read the report and view the database dashboard.

Rethinking School Staffing

written by Public Impact on October 8, 2020

AEI, October 8, 2020, by Nat Malkus

As schools confront massive budget shortfalls in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, it is critical that they examine how they might use existing funding more efficiently. On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus talks with Bryan Hassel about how districts might rethink their staffing models in a way that will increase students’ access to excellent teachers and create opportunities for advancement within the teaching profession, all without spending more money. Byran is the co-president of Public Impact and a contributor to the newly released volume, Getting the Most Bang for the Education Buck. Listen to the podcast…

Cost-Effective Ways to Rethink School Staffing

written by Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel on October 1, 2020

Education Week, October 1, 2020, by Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel

Even before COVID-19 sent students and educators home, teachers’ jobs had grown increasingly complex. Rightful demands for standards matching those of other nations—and for equitable opportunities allowing students to meet or exceed those standards—swelled over recent decades.

With research clearly indicating how important teacher and principal quality are to student learning growth, a thoughtful school staffing and compensation strategy would have been a natural response. Instead, decades of benevolently intended policy shifts snatched dollars from teachers’ pockets as their jobs got harder, while failing to innovate like other professions.

As we explain in Getting the Most Bang for the Education Buck, the consequences have been devastating for students and committed educators. A vigorous pivot is long overdue.

Over the past five decades, U.S. public education went on a spending spree benefiting nearly everything and everyone—except classroom teachers. Since 1970, real per-pupil spending increased 145 percent, yet real teacher pay was nearly flat, increasing just 7.5 percent (see figure). Teachers work longer hours, so hourly pay actually declined. If teacher pay had increased in proportion to K-12 spending, teachers today would earn nearly $140,000, on average, instead of less than half that. Read the full column…

Will Learning Pods Be Only for the Rich?

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett and Bryan C. Hassel on August 25, 2020

Education Week, August 25, 2020, by Bryan C. Hassel and Sharon Kebschull Barrett

To exhausted or worried parents deciding whether to send their children into school buildings this fall, “pandemic pods” may look like an appealing way out. Keeping their boys and girls at home learning alone may be better for physical health but not for mental health, and the arrangement is difficult or impossible for many employed parents. Equally undesirable is the greater risk of children catching and spreading a potentially deadly disease from a larger number of people at school.

Some parents are creating home-based, closed groups of a few families’ children to learn together under the rotating supervision of parents or a paid supervisor. Pods could keep students’ learning and social-emotional development on track while helping protect their and their teachers’ health.

But if pods are exclusively organized by parents and those parents are disproportionately well-off, this approach will inevitably further widen economic and racial gaps in learning opportunity.

Lower-income families are in fact more likely to need pods because the parents are more likely to have to go off to work. According to a study from the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago, 63 percent of jobs cannot be done from home, and these jobs are disproportionately lower paid.

Even if they can arrange adult supervision for a group of children, lower-income families may struggle to provide spaces conducive to learning in their homes. The KidsCount Data Center found that as of 2018, 14 percent of children live in overcrowded households. [Read more…]

New Report Highlights Charter Successes During Covid Shutdowns

written by Paola Gilliam on August 25, 2020

A sudden shift in the spring to effective online learning challenged all schools—but we quickly began to see anecdotal evidence of some charter schools reacting quickly and serving students well. In a new report we wrote with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, we offer evidence that some charter schools—smaller networks and schools that make up the majority of charters—were able to respond quickly to students’ and families’ needs, taking advantage of the freedom and flexibility built into the charter school model. Read what the schools did alongside vignettes highlighting some of the charter schools and their leaders.

We based the report on a database we created of 356 charter school operators, similar to the one CPRE (the Center on Reinventing Public Education) created in the spring that tracked some of the nation’s largest public school districts.

Our key findings:

  1. Charter schools appear more likely than school districts to set expectations that teachers:
    • Engage directly with students to provide instruction.
    • Provide real-time instruction.
    • Check in regularly with students.
    • Monitor attendance.
  2. School districts and charter schools were about equally likely to require the distribution of devices for online learning.
  3. Charter schools appear less likely than school districts to ensure internet access for all students.
  4. Few charter schools or school districts clearly communicate on websites how schools will support students with disabilities during COVID‑19 closures.

Charter schools were already known for their innovation, and the findings in this report show their ability and potential to adapt to students’ needs in unexpected circumstances.

Read the full report, written by Public Impact’s Lyria Boast, Beth Clifford, and Daniela Doyle, here…

Related: Charters Were Quicker to Provide Instruction, Regular Contact During Closures, Reports Say. But That’s Also How They ‘Keep the Kids,’ One Expert Explains (The 74)

Next Page »

Public Impact®

Public Impact, LLC
Chapel Hill, NC
919-240-7955

Public Impact encourages the free use, reproduction, and distribution of our materials, but we require attribution. If you adapt the materials, you must include on every page “Adapted from PublicImpact.com; Copyright Public Impact” in the font size specified here.

Materials may not be sold, leased, licensed, or otherwise distributed for compensation. See our Terms of Use page or contact us for more information.

Public Impact is certified as a living wage employer by Orange County Living Wage.

Search

Subscribe

Sign Up for E-News!
 


 
Read Back Issues of our
E-Newsletter

 
Subscribe to our blog with RSS

Follow

New from Public Impact

Employment Opportunities—Coordinators
Public Impact is seeking candidates for coordinators to provide support for logistics, sales and strategy, and our talent and DEI teams.

Learning in Real Time—How Charter Schools Served Students During Covid-19 Closures
Profiles highlight how charter schools were able to respond quickly to school closures during the pandemic and continue to serve their students well.

Building an Effective Staff—Profiles of Leaders of Color
Three-part series looks at how being a person of color affected the ways in which successful charter school leaders built schools where students, families, and staff learn, grow, and thrive.

Engaging Families—Profiles of Leaders of Color
Three-part series looks at how being a person of color affected the ways in which successful charter school leaders built schools where students, families, and staff learn, grow, and thrive.

Building a Strong School Culture—Profiles of Leaders of Color
Three-part series looks at how being a person of color affected the ways in which successful charter school leaders built schools where students, families, and staff learn, grow, and thrive.

The Impact of School Restarts—Lessons from Four Indianapolis Schools
Report analyzes how enrollment, demographic, and student performance data changed following the restarts of four charter schools in Indianapolis, IN.

Learning from Project L.I.F.T.—Legacy of a Public-Private School Turnaround Initiative
Report examines successes, challenges, and lessons from a private-public district turnaround initiative.

Public Impact, LLC | 919-240-7955 | Terms of Use | © Public Impact 2000-2021 | Wordpress website design by LeGa Design Group