Dr. Armand A. Fusco, via a kind email:

“No one has been able to stop the steady plunge of young black Americans into a socioeconomic abyss.” Bob Herbert / Syndicated columnist
Everything you wanted to know about urban education and its solutions!
For over 50 years this shame of the nation and education has remained as a plague upon its most vulnerable children. All reform efforts involving billions of dollars have not alleviated this scourge in our public schools. The rhetoric has been profound, but it has been immune to any antidote or action and it is getting worse; but it doesn’t have to be!
The following quotes summarize the 285 pages and over 400 references from my book.

Edited Insightful Quotes
The explanations and references are found in the contents of the book.

• School pushouts is a time bomb exploding economically and socially every twenty-six seconds
• Remember what the basic problem is–they are in all respects illiterate and that is why they are failing.
• Every three years the number of dropouts and pushouts adds up to a city bigger than Chicago.
• Politics trump the needs of all children to achieve their potential.
• One reason that the high school dropout crisis is known as the “silent epidemic” is that the problem is frequently minimized.
• Simply stated black male students can achieve high outcomes; the tragedy is most states and districts choose not to do so.
• In the majority of schools, the conditions necessary for Black males to systematically succeed in education do not exist.
• While one in four American children is Latino–the largest and fastest growing minority group in the United States–they are chronically underserved by the nation’s public schools and have the lowest education attainment levels in the country.
• Miseducation is the most powerful example of cruel and unusual punishment; it’s exacted on children innocent of any crime.
• Traditional proposals for improving education–more money, smaller classes, etc.–aren’t getting the job done.
• The public school system is designed for Black and other minority children to fail.
• The U.S. Department of Education has never even acknowledged that the problem exists.
• Though extensive records are kept…unions and school boards do not want productivity analysis done.
• Educational bureaucracies like the NEA are at the center of America’s dysfunctional minority public schools.
• Does bonus pay alone improve student outcomes? We found that it does not.
• Performance pay is equivalent to “thirty pieces of silver.”
• Data necessary to distinguish cost-effective schools are all available, but our system has been built to make their use difficult.
• Districts give credit for students who fail standardized tests on the expectation that students someday will pass.
• We saw some schools that were low performing and had a very high parent satisfaction rate.
• We’re spending ever-greater sums of money, yet our high school graduates’ test results have been absolutely flat.
• America’s primary and secondary schools have many problems, but an excess of excellence is not one of them.
• Not only is our use of incarceration highly concentrated among men with little schooling, but corrections systems are doing less to correct the problem by reducing educational opportunities for the growing number of prisoners.
• Although states will require school districts to implement the common core state standards, the majority of these states are not requiring districts to make complementary changes in curriculum and teacher programs.
• We can show that merit pay is counterproductive, that closing down struggling schools (or firing principals) makes no sense.
• The gap between our articulated ideals and our practice is an international embarrassment.
• It’s interesting to note that despite the growing support by minority parents for charters, the NAACP, the National Urban League, and other civil rights groups collectively condemn charter schools.
• Public schools do respond constructively to competition by raising their achievement and productivity.
• Gates Foundation has also stopped funding the small school concept because no results could be shown.
• The policies we are following today are unlikely to improve our schools.
• Our country still does a better job of tracking a package than it does a student.
• Indeed, we give these children less of all the things that both research and experience tell us make a difference.
• Reformers have little knowledge of what is working and how to scale what works.
• The fact is that illiteracy has persisted in all states for generations, particularly among the most vulnerable children, and getting worse is a testament that national policy and creative leadership rings hollow.
• We can’t change a child’s home life, but what we can do is affect what they do here at school.
• Only a third of young Americans will leave high school with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed.
• Black churches can no longer play gospel in the sanctuaries while kids drop out into poverty and prison. They must embrace school reform and take the role that Catholic churches have done for so long and for so many.
• There is only one way to equalize education for all–technology.
• Whatever made you successful in the past won’t in the future.
• The real potential of technology for improving learning remains largely untapped in schools today.
• Can’t read, can’t learn, can’t get a job, can’t survive, so can’t stay within the law.
• Of the 19.4 million government workers, half work in education, which rivals health care for the most wasteful sector in America.
• The only people not being betrayed are those who feed off our failing education system…that group gets larger every year.
• Mediocrity, not excellence, is the national norm as demonstrated by the deplorable evidence.
• Parents are left to face the bleak reality that their child will be forever stuck in a failing school and a failing system.
• The key is that unless there is accountability, we will never get the right system.
• The very public institutions intended for student learning have become focused instead on adult employment.
• We conclude that the strategies driving the best performing systems are rarely found in the United States.
• No reform has yet lived up to its definition!
• Minority males don’t get the beef, they get the leftovers.
• The cotton plantations have become the school plantations (children held in bondage of failing schools) and the dropouts move on to the prison plantations.

Julian R. Betts and Y. Emily Tang via a kind Deb Britt email:

Charter schools are largely viewed as a major innovation in the public school landscape, as they receive more independence from state laws and regulations than do traditional public schools, and are therefore more able to experiment with alternative curricula, pedagogical methods, and different ways of hiring and training teachers. Unlike traditional public schools, charters may be shut down by their authorizers for poor performance. But how is charter school performance measured? What are the effects of charter schools on student achievement?
Assessing literature that uses either experimental (lottery) or student-level growth- based methods, this analysis infers the causal impact of attending a charter school on student performance.
Focusing on math and reading scores, the authors find compelling evidence that charters under-perform traditional public schools in some locations, grades, and subjects, and out-perform traditional public schools in other locations, grades, and subjects. However, important exceptions include elementary school reading and middle school math and reading, where evidence suggests no negative effects of charter schools and, in some cases, evidence of positive effects. Meta-analytic methods are used to obtain overall estimates on the effect of charter schools on reading and math achievement. The authors find an overall effect size for elementary school reading and math of 0.02 and 0.05, respectively, and for middle school math of 0.055. Effects are not statistically meaningful for middle school reading and for high school math and reading. Studies that focus on urban areas tend to find larger effects than do studies that examine wider areas. Studies of KIPP charter middle schools suggest positive effects of 0.096 and 0.223 for reading and math respectively. New York City and Boston charter schools also appeared to deliver achievement gains larger than charter schools in most other locations. A lack of rigorous studies in many parts of the nation limits the ability to extrapolate.

Wall Street Journal:

A tragedy of American politics is that civil rights groups like the NAACP oppose education reform, even as reform’s main beneficiaries are poor and minority students in places like Harlem and New Orleans. The latest evidence comes in a study showing that black students in charter schools outperform their peers in traditional public schools.
The California Charter Schools Association looked at the state’s Academic Performance Index (API), which runs on a scale from 200 to 1000, and found that the average black charter student outscored the average black traditional school student by an average of 18 points over the last four years of publicly available data.
In reform hubs like Los Angeles, the charter advantage was 22 points, in Sacramento 48 points, in Oakland 51 and in San Francisco 150. In San Diego, the other major urban center, traditional schools outscored charters by an average of eight points.