Robert Maranto

Small Districts in Big Trouble: How Four Arizona School Systems Responded to Charter Competition

How do district schools respond to competition from charter schools? To explore this question, we examine four small Arizona school districts which lost from a tenth to a third of enrollment to charter schools in a short time period. Districts lost market share to charter schools because they did not satisfy significant constituencies, thus providing demands for education alternatives. District responses to market pressure depend on overall enrollment trends, the quality of the charter competition, the quality of district leadership, and the size of the district. Districts respond to competition in various ways, including reforming curricula, changing leadership, vilifying charter competitors, and attempting to absorb those competitors. Responses suggest that competition improves schools, but that markets do not work quickly or without friction and must be understood in context.

School Choice in the Real World: Lessons from Arizona Charter Schools.

Real World School Choice: Arizona Charter Schools (Robert Maranto, Scott Milliman, Frederick Hess, and April Gresham) Theoretical and National Perspectives And This Parent Went to Market: Education as Public vs. Private Good (L. Elaine Halchin) The Death of One Best Way: Charter Schools as Reinventing Government (Robert Maranto) Congress and Charter Schools (David L. Leal) Charter Schools: A National Innovation, an Arizona Revolution (Bryan C. Hassel) Social Scientists Look at Arizona Charter Schools The Wild West of Education Reform: Arizona Charter Schools (Robert Maranto and April Gresham) Why Arizona Embarked on School Reform (and Nevada Did Not) (Stephanie Timmons-Brown and Frederick Hess) Do Charter Schools Improve District Schools? Three Approaches to the Question (Robert Maranto, Scott Milliman, Frederick Hess, and April Gresham) Closing Charters: How A Good Theory Failed in Practice (Gregg A. Garn and Robert T. Stout) Nothing New: Curricula in Arizona Charter Schools (Robert T. Stout and Gregg A. Garn) How Arizona Teachers View School Reform (Frederick Hess, Robert Maranto, Scott Milliman and April Gresham) Practitioners Look at Arizona Charter Schools The Empowerment of Market-Based School Reform (Lisa Graham Keegan) A Voice From the State Legislature: Dont Do What Arizona Did! (Mary Hartley) Public Schools and the Charter Movement: An Emerging Relationship (Lee L. Hager) Whose Idea Was This Anyway? The Challenging Metamorphosis from Private to Charter (Jim Spencer) Lessons In Lieu of Conclusions: Tentative Lessons From a Contested Frontier (Robert Maranto, Scott Milliman, Frederick Hess, and April Gresham).

Right Turn?: Political Ideology in the Higher Civil Service, 1987-1994

Principal-agent models can justify political management of career officials, while at the same time predicting challenges to it, in part reflecting the different ideological goals of careerists and political appointees. Indeed, the “administrative presidency” strategies Ronald Reagan pursued anticipated and heightened such conflict through attempts to “politicize” the federal executive. Such strategies may help account for the findings of Aberbach and Rockman that the political views of the permanent bureaucracy moved to the right from 1986-1987 to 1991-1992. We extend their work, using data from mail surveys sent to senior careerists in 1987-1988 and 1993-1994 to test propositions about the responsiveness of senior careerists to political principals and the relationships between careerists and appointees. The findings underscore not only the importance of agency mission in explaining senior civil servants’ relations with appointees, but also the flexibility in managing agencies available to appointees that careerists’ overall centrism and professional norms appear to provide.

Educational Renegades: Dissatisfied Teachers as Drivers of Charter School Formation

The U.S. charter school movement has expanded rapidly, but this growth is geographically uneven at the school district level. Focusing on Arizona—which has the least restrictive charter school law in the United States—we use district variables to determine the factors driving charter market share in 41 districts. Included in our analysis is an explicit measure of teacher dissatisfaction, which is not found in past work. Like previous analyses, we find that greater private school penetration prompts charter formation. In addition, we find quantitative confirmation of the fieldwork of Hess, Maranto, & Milliman (2001) and others suggesting that dissatisfied district school teachers drive Arizona charter growth by starting and staffing those schools.

Determinants of Student and Parent Satisfaction at a Cyber Charter School

ABSTRACT Research indicates that in traditional public schools the subjective well-being of students and parents varies by gender, race, and special education status. Prior studies suggest that general education students are more satisfied with their schooling than special education students, that female students have greater satisfaction with their schooling than male students, and that Caucasian and Latino students report greater school satisfaction than African American students. No prior research has studied parental and student subjective well-being in a cyber environment. The authors investigate parental and student subjective well-being in a cyber charter school, using a student (n = 269; 53.7% response rate) and parent (n = 232; 48.7% response rate) survey. They find statistically significant differences in subjective well-being across demographic groups of students, and also significantly higher satisfaction among special education students in the cyber school environment. Implications are discussed.

Harnessing Private Incentives in Public Education

The authors examine how personnel managers in the educational public sector might employ variants of privatization to achieve public goals. Privatization supporters see it as a magic bullet to improve failing public schools, whereas opponents view it as a threat to public education. The authors argue for a more complex understanding of privatization in public education. Analysts typically overlook the potential for privatization to change traditional personnel practices and the incentives of public servants. Accordingly, the authors define privatization as including the incentives employed within organizations. By this definition, many public bureaucracies may currently serve private interests. The authors then discuss various means of privatization in public education, including vouchers, public charter schools, subcontracting public school management to private providers, and merit pay for teachers. After describing the extant literature and case studies of various forms of privatization, the authors conclude that privatization, broadly defined, can align the private interests of employees with public values.

Does Private School Competition H-arm Public Schools? Revisiting Smith and Meier's The Case Against School Choice

Smith and Meier (1995a) empirically assess the market hypothesis advanced by Chubb and Moe (1988, 1990), which holds that compettion improves schools. Using Florida school district data, Smith and Meier find that higher private school market share lowers public school test scores; they conclude that competition harms public schools. Hoever, they do not take into account the impact of family income on copetition in traditionally organized education markets: the lower the income, the less likely parents can exit the public schools, which implies less competition. Using their database but segmenting it into low and high income groups, we reanalyze the relationship between test scores and private school market share. We find that private school market share lowers test scores primarily in low income districts, where comptition is least due to low family income. We conclude that Smith and Meiers rejection of the market hypothesis is premature.

Why KIPP Is Not Corporate: KIPP and Social Justice

Critics see the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), a network of 141 charter schools, as part of the corporate based school reform movement (e.g., Horn, 2011; Grey, 2011), a view shared by many traditional public school educators. So-called corporate based school reform strategies allegedly exploit students and teachers, employ very narrow metrics of success, and seek to maximize growth and revenue rather than student well-being. Using the now substantial empirical literature on KIPP schools, supplemented by fieldwork, this article refutes these views. Compared to traditional public schools in disadvantaged communities, KIPP schools increase student achievement and attainment, and seek to build community rather than commodity among teachers, students, and parents. KIPP schools are driven much less by individual profit than by social justice, at least as defined by Gramsci (1971) rather than the more fashionable Freire (2007).

Bringing Back Boss Tweed? Could At-Will Employment Work in State Government and, If So, Where?

Abstract The lead author of this article[1] has proposed ending civil service tenure in the U.S. bureaucracy. Yet these arguments lose their force when applied to state and local civil service systems. In many states and localities limited media scrutiny, limited political competition, the weakness of existing bureaucracies, and a relative tolerance for spoils-oriented patronage make radical civil service reform risky. We develop a ranking predicting which states make the best and worst candidates for radical civil service reform. State level independent variables include corruption, traditional party organizations, media capacity, party competition, and bureaucratic capacity.

Praising Civil Service but Not Bureaucracy A Brief Against Tenure in the U.S. Civil Service

Public administration writers contend that because career executives have greater competence, the U.S. federal executive has too many political appointees. The author argues that opposition to more political appointees is based on misconceptions about both the political and career personnel systems of the modern federal civil service. The increased controversy of government policies since the 1960s and the concordant growth of the politics industry in Washington have increased demands for relatively high-risk political work in the executive branch. Furthermore, the state of the merit system does not suggest that extending that system to higher level positions would lead to a more effective or efficient civil service.