Yesterday, the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution released a report titled “Learning from the Successes and Failures of Charter Schools” authored by Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer. The study built on Dr. Fryer’s earlier work in 35 New York City charter schools to identify common practices among high-performing schools. Five practices were identified from the NYC charters and then applied to low performing traditional schools in the Houston and Denver in hopes of raising student achievement. The Hamilton Project study reports “promising” results from the early data.
The five practices implemented in Houston and Denver are:
extended time at school,
strong administrators and teachers,
data-driven instruction,
small-group tutoring, and
creating a “culture of high expectations.”
According to Dr. Fryer, these elements explain roughly 50 percent of the variance between high and low performing schools. He emphasized that “you can’t cut your way to excellence,” since turnaround isn’t just about replacing the adults in the system, but giving them ample support and training. Other panelists at the Hamilton Project event included Terry Grier, Superintendent of Houston Independent School District. He noted that the five practices identified by Dr. Fryer aren’t new or even surprising: “We know what works…why do we need so much political will to do it?” Seth Andrew, Superintendent and Founder of Democracy Prep Public Schools—a high performing charter network in New York City—noted that the charter model gave him the flexibility to allocate resources that impacted school culture and success, such as higher salary for teachers to attract and retain top talent. There were many other interesting data points and experiences shared during the session, which can be viewed on C-SPAN.
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