Education Chief to Warn Advocates That Inferior Charter Schools Harm the Effort, The New York Times Mon Jun 22 2009, Sam Dillon [excerpts]

The Obama administration has made opening more charter schools a big part of its plans for improving the nation's education system, but Education Secretary Arne Duncan will warn advocates of the schools on Monday that low- quality institutions are giving their movement a black eye.
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Mr. Duncan's speech will come at a pivotal moment for the charter school movement. The Obama administration has been working to persuade state legislatures to lift caps on the number of charter schools.

At the same time, the movement is smarting from the release last week of a report by Stanford University researchers that found that although some charter schools were doing an excellent job, many students in charter schools were not faring as well as students in traditional public schools.
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Mr. Duncan's speech calls the Stanford report -- which singles out Arizona, Florida, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio and Texas as states that have done little to hold poorly run charter schools accountable -- "a wake-up call."
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The Stanford study, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, used student achievement data from 15 states and the District of Columbia to gauge whether students who attended charter schools had fared better than they would if they had attended a traditional public school.

"The study reveals that a decent fraction of charter schools, 17 percent, provide superior education opportunities for their students," the report says. "Nearly half of the charter schools nationwide have results that are no different from the local public school options, and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their students would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools."
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Mr. Duncan has been working to build a national effort to restructure 5,000 chronically failing public schools, which turn out middle school students who cannot read and most of the nation's high school dropouts. In his speech, he will urge states, school districts, nonprofit groups, teachers' unions and charter organizations "to get in the business of turning around our lowest-performing schools."

"Over the coming years," the speech says, "America needs to find 5,000 high-energy, hero principals to take over these struggling schools, and a quarter of a million great teachers who are willing to do the toughest work in public education."

Mr. Smith said he believed that some charter school operators would react favorably to Mr. Duncan's call, but only if they were given flexibility over hiring and firing teachers, structuring student learning time and other issues.

"They have to be able to maintain the integrity of the charter model," Mr. Smith said.