Education Next » Features

Let the Dollars Follow the Child

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:04:18 +0000

Washington is at a crossroads on K–12 education policy. Policymakers can 1) continue down the path of top-down accountability; 2) devolve power to states and districts, thereby returning to the status quo of the mid-1990s; or 3) rethink the fundamentals, do something different, and empower parental choice.

The federal government’s involvement in K–12 education has accelerated through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. The best evidence indicates that this substantially heightened federal role has had only modest impact on student achievement, far short of what had been hoped. It might be that further centralization would yield more benefits, but it is doubtful that more federal control is politically possible, and, in any case, any additional yield is uncertain.

The second option—devolving recently accumulated federal power to the states—underlies recent reauthorization proposals for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that allow each state to establish its own accountability system and that require teeth only for the very lowest-performing schools. It is unclear to us how releasing states and school districts from federal accountability and granting them maximum flexibility is anything more than a return to the status quo. It is the regrettable consequence of that approach that motivated increased federal involvement in the first place.

The Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution (see sidebar, page 16), of which I am a member, believes that an evolved form of the ESEA that retains rigorous accountability is preferable to returning control of public schooling to local public-school monopolies and states, which will fall into old habits all too quickly. But we believe that the best interests of the nation require something other than either a return to the happy days of local school governance or evolutionary improvements to the type of top-down accountability found in No Child Left Behind.

We need a fundamentally new approach.

We propose to reform the nation’s schools on the basis of two principles that have served the nation exceedingly well throughout its history: federalism and choice. The federal structure of our government offers an opportunity to specify the role of Washington strategically, to leverage what it clearly can do best, while allocating to states and locales what they are best suited to do. Our particular view of federalism is disciplined by the laws of economics and empirical experience, a perspective known as fiscal federalism. The second organizing principle is choice. Much has been written and studied regarding choice in education—on charter schools, vouchers, choice among district schools, and much more—but the idea, so powerful in our economy and in other enterprises, including higher education, has rarely been examined in the context of federalism and the appropriate roles of Washington and lower levels of government.

A New Framework

What is fiscal federalism? Fiscal federalism argues that government services are most efficiently delivered if provided closest to the taxpayers or consumers receiving them, and that competition among local governments for residents and taxpayers will improve those services. In the context of public education, the challenge is to identify the areas of constraint for local providers of education services, determine which can be best addressed by state government, and assign the remainder to Washington.

But there is a fundamental flaw in fiscal federalism theory as it applies to education: the ability of taxpaying parents of school-age children to vote with their feet (leave school districts with which they are dissatisfied) is severely constrained for the low-income populations that are most likely to find themselves served by low-performing schools. This lack of geographical mobility for large segments of the population undermines the competitive pressure that low-performing schools and school districts would otherwise expect to face. This leaves those districts vulnerable to the interests of whoever is powerful at the local level, more often than not organizations that represent teachers who are employed by school districts, rather than to the influence of parents and taxpayers.

One way to correct the strong tendency of local school bureaucracies to cater more to adult than student interests is to intervene from above, the course of action taken by Washington over the last 15 years. We argue that this has been only weakly effective while imposing a heavy regulatory burden on schools. We propose instead to create real competition for students and the public funding that accompanies them among the providers of K–12 education services. Considerable research indicates that schools respond to competitive pressure. In a systematic review of 41 empirical studies on this topic through 2002, Columbia University researchers Clive Belfield and Henry Levin found that “a sizable majority report beneficial effects of competition.”

In our proposal, funding must follow students and be weighted to compensate for the extra costs associated with high-need students if schools are to compete for students and if parents are to have real choice. Parents must have the widest possible choice of schools for their children and be armed with good information on the performance of schools. Informed choice that is accompanied by financial consequences for schools will create a marketplace for schooling that will evolve toward greater responsiveness to what parents want, will be more innovative, and will become more productive.

A Role for Washington

The federal government currently funds a wide range of K–12 education initiatives (see Table 1). The task force has identified just four functions that are essential to its role in education: creating and disseminating information on school performance in each classroom and program effectiveness, including information on individual student performance; enforcing civil rights laws; providing financial support to high-need students; and enhancing competition among providers.

Information: The provision of information on the condition of education and on the results of education research is primarily a public service. In such situations, a serious free-rider problem exists: because it is impossible to prevent a class of consumers who have not paid for the information from consuming it, far too little evidence will be produced if it is not supported by an organization with the entire nation’s interests at heart. The free-rider problem is one reason that state and local authorities cannot be entrusted with the task of knowledge production. Furthermore, evidence does not merely need to be produced; it needs to be based on high-quality data. Gathering and auditing data are almost pure public services. Thus, it is easy to justify federal support for research, data gathering, and dissemination of information. Without valid information on the performance of students at each school relative to that of their peers across the country, the entire education enterprise flies blind, leaving parents, teachers, school managers, and policymakers with nothing more than intuition and consensus as the basis for making decisions.

Civil Rights: When state and local actions in education are discriminatory, the federal government should step in to enforce civil rights laws. Acts of unjust discrimination, such as those that would deny a student an educational experience for which the student is qualified based solely on race, gender, disability, or other protected status, are costly to society. Students who fail to be educated may need cash transfers as adults; they might take up crime or engage in other antisocial behaviors. Owing to mobility and society-wide redistribution, we all suffer in these cases. Thus, the federal government, and not merely state and local governments, has an obligation to curb discrimination.

Compensatory Funding: Regardless of whether the underlying cause is disability, lack of English proficiency, or poverty, high-need students are more expensive to educate than other students. Failure to provide additional resources can provide an incentive for other students to move to another school if they are able. The burden that the high-need student produces will thus be disproportionately borne by those who are too immobile to avoid it, most likely other high-need students. The federal government can counteract these inequities through cash transfers. The difficulty is figuring out the right financial supplement and the best mechanism for distributing it.

Title I of the ESEA and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) are designed to disburse funds to states and school districts for the education of high-need students. Rather than the complicated federal schemes under which funds are currently disbursed to districts, funds should be attached to the student. Individual schools would receive federal funds based on student counts, with a weighting formula to adjust for factors such as the increased burden of educating high-need students and for regional differences in costs. Sometimes called “backpack funding,” weighted funding that follows the student has been shown to direct proportionally more funds to schools that serve needy students than traditional distribution schemes.

Choice and Competition: The federal government can and should restrict education monopolies and support school choice for parents and students. The current system, which relies on residential mobility to drive school districts to improve education services, does not work well enough to improve education outcomes or to ensure equity. Such a system consigns the poor and immobile to inferior schools and leaves the control of schools in the hands of those who benefit most from the status quo. The simple feature of eliminating a default school assignment by the school district—thus requiring every parent to engage in school choice—eliminates socioeconomic differences in the likelihood that parents will shop for schools. Further, if parents could exercise school choice through web-based portals that highlight the important variables of school performance, socioeconomic differences in knowledge could be muted. Here, again, the federal government has a role to play, for example, by funding open competitions for designers and implementers of school-choice portals.

Market-based competition cannot prevail in public education unless the consumers of public education can choose where to be schooled. We propose that as a condition of the receipt of federal funds to support the education of individual students, schools be required to participate in an open enrollment process conducted by a state-sanctioned authority. Such a process would maximize the matches between school and student preferences. Unified open-enrollment systems that encompass as many choices as possible from the regular public, charter, private, and virtual school universes are essential to the expansion of choice and competition in K–12 education. These systems have to be designed so that all schools have the same time frame for applications and admission decisions, and so that they cannot be gamed by either schools or applying families.

The federal government has a legitimate role in overseeing the marketplace for schooling, including the architecture of parental choice systems. It is in the interest of society that the concentration of high-need students not increase in particular schools. Choice systems have to be carefully and explicitly designed to avoid students being sorted by race, economic background, and other conditions. Several options exist for ensuring that schools cannot discriminate against groups of students, including a lottery system (currently required in federal regulations for start-up charter schools), controlled choice (in which algorithms are used to maintain balanced enrollment), and a financial or fee supplement attached to students in protected classes.

Charter Schools

To ensure a supply of schools from which families may choose, states should establish a system for authorizing charter schools that enables the charter sector to expand to meet demand; that provides funding under the same weighted formula that applies to all other publicly supported schools; and that offers charter schools access to capital commensurate with district school funding. Where there are charter schools, they are frequently the only alternative to regular public schools for low- and moderate-income families. Relative to statewide averages, charter schools tend to attract a disproportionate number of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch as well as minority students, especially African Americans. Initial test scores of students at charter schools are usually well below those of the average public-school student in the state in which the charter school is located.

Research on the effectiveness of charter schools in raising student achievement presents a mixed picture. In general, charter schools that serve low-income and minority students in urban areas are doing a better job than their traditional public-school counterparts in raising student achievement, whereas that is not true of charter schools in suburban areas. Charter schools do require careful oversight through appropriately funded authorizing bodies, equitable funding via a backpack model, and the opportunity to grow based on their ability to attract students. Fulfilling the latter condition means that states that do not allow charter schools, or that arbitrarily cap their growth, or that turn their authorization over to the very school districts with which charters compete should reform their practices. The Obama administration included these conditions in Race to the Top. They should be incorporated into the reauthorization of ESEA.

Cybercharters and Other Choice Schools

Bringing the provision of K–12 education services into the 21st century by unfettering technology as a delivery mechanism will substantially enhance competition and productivity. Unfortunately, virtual courseware and distance learning providers often must make their sales to school districts rather than to individuals. School districts are likely to be reluctant customers because their operations are disrupted by distance learning. The result is that market demand is suppressed and investment in new technologies for K–12 education curtailed.

Much of the anticompetitive force of local school districts is exercised through requirements that link publicly supported education services to geographical constraints. A leading example is restrictions on cybercharter schools, i.e., schools that offer most or all of their instructional programs over the Internet and do not have brick-and-mortar physical locations where students assemble. To the extent that such schools are allowed to operate at all, they typically do so in the context of charter school laws. These laws include conditions such as a minimum number of hours of daily instruction that do not make sense for courses that are delivered over the Internet, can be taken at a student’s own pace, and frequently define completion in terms of mastery rather than seat time. Further, there is currently no provision in any state’s laws or at the federal level for students to attend cybercharter schools that are out of state in the sense of having no physical place of business within a state. States and school districts should be prohibited from establishing policies that unreasonably interfere with the provision of education services by out-of-state or out-of-district providers, including online charter schools and distance learning providers. They should, instead, make enrollment in such schools readily available.

The federal government has a long history of promoting interstate markets through its authority under the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause. As the judicial interpretation of the commerce clause has evolved over time, it has come to include the federal authority to nullify state or municipal laws whose object is local economic protectionism (the so-called dormant or hidden commerce clause). The dormant commerce clause could be applied to the provision of education services through the Internet, that is, the federal government could take legal action or support legal claims against states and local school districts that restrict or prohibit access to Internet-based education services that are provided outside district or state borders.

In cybereducation, as in many areas of school administration and performance, it is useful to compare K–12 with postsecondary education. In 2006, the most recent year for which national data are available, postsecondary institutions reported more than 12 million separate distance-learning course enrollments. Two-thirds of all postsecondary institutions offered distance learning courses, and there were more than 11,000 individual programs of study that could be completed entirely online. The contrasts with K–12 education are stark; there were only about 1 million distance-learning enrollments in K–12 in 2007.

Cybereducation for postsecondary students is a national rather than a local marketplace. A student can take a distance learning course from the University of Arizona, and the course credit can apply to graduation requirements at a large number of colleges and universities, without geographical restrictions. Further, if the student has qualified for federal student grants or loans, those are attached to the student, i.e., backpacked. The federal government is indifferent to distance learning versus place-based learning and to geographical boundaries in the provision of financial aid to high-need postsecondary students, whereas in K–12, that aid is funneled through local public-service monopolies that hold captive the students in their geographical catchment area. The federal government also recognizes regional and national accrediting bodies for higher education institutions. By simply shifting its policies on K–12 education to match those it has adopted for postsecondary education, the federal government could provide to parents something nearly every parent wants—the right and opportunity to choose where their child is schooled—and create a powerful engine for innovation and productivity.

Although the promise and potential of parental choice is nowhere more evident than in the realm of technology, the arguments for allowing students ready access to cyberschools extend to interdistrict school choice, charter schools, private schools, and vouchers as well. When combined with the availability of good information on school performance to parents and backpack funding, these options could create a dramatically different landscape for schooling than is currently available in the United States.

Moving Forward

The approach we recommend places the federal government in a central role in providing information and compensatory funding and in promoting a competitive and information-rich marketplace for education services. Mechanisms we espouse, such as student-based funding, open enrollment systems, charter schools, and virtual education, are having some success in breaking open the current system, but they require very special circumstances at the state and local level. We understand that our proposals, if adopted, would represent a fundamental shift in the federal government’s role in K–12 education. An attempt to reauthorize ESEA, IDEA, and Head Start to conform to our recommendations may well fail, in part because what we propose will appeal more to some states than to others. There is nothing wrong with such differences. Indeed, the federalism we espouse is built on the advantage that is conferred to citizens by having government policies and services determined as close to home as possible. There is a legislative way forward consistent with our proposal and federalism, one with a rich legislative history and experience of success at the federal level:

Let states opt out of the statutory and regulatory requirements of ESEA, IDEA, Head Start, and other relevant federal laws in exchange for creating a marketplace of informed choice and competition. Some states will find throwing off the federal yoke in exchange for providing maximum education choice for their citizens politically attractive and viable. Those states can serve as the laboratory for the proposals we have put forward. If these initiatives fail to advance student achievement, social equity, and education productivity, and if they lose the support of a state’s electorate, they will be abandoned, and the state will return to the federal fold. If, instead, some states experience the success we think is likely, other states would find the risk of coming onboard manageable and, we think, face escalating demand from their citizens.

The education system clearly has vast consequences for this nation’s economy, society, and world leadership. The federal government has a crucial role to play in protecting and promoting precisely those national interests that lower levels of government cannot. We believe the most promising approach is to move decisionmaking closer to the consumers of K–12 public education by unleashing pent-up demand and empowering parents to choose schools for their children.

Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst is a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education and director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.

The full report of the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education is available at www.choiceandfederalism.org.

Can Khan Move the Bell Curve to the Right?

June Kronholz — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:53:26 +0000

It was goal-setting day in Rich Julian’s 5th-grade class at Covington Elementary School in Los Altos, California, when I visited last fall, and Julian was asking each of his 29 students to list three math goals for the week.

To become proficient at dividing a one-place number into a three-place number, a girl with blue-painted fingernails wrote in her math journal.

To become proficient in multiplying decimals, wrote a dark-haired boy. To become proficient at subtracting one four-place number from another. To become proficient in arithmetic word problems. To complete an exercise in the properties of numbers, like (4 + 9) + 5 = ? + (9 + 5).

No two youngsters seemed to have quite the same math goals because, of course, no two youngsters are quite alike when it comes to learning. That’s why Los Altos is betting the future on an online math program from Khan Academy, and why scores of other schools and districts are clamoring to include Khan Academy in their math curriculum.

For the next 45 minutes, Julian met individually with his 5th graders to refine their goals. (In November, Julian left Los Altos to become assistant principal in the Milpitas Unified School District.) Everyone else logged onto the free Khan Academy web site and called up the “module,” or math concept, that fit their goals. Some watched short video lectures embedded in the module; others worked their way through sets of practice problems. I noticed that one youngster had completed 23 modules five weeks into the school year, one had finished 30, and another was working on his 45th.

As youngsters completed one lesson, an online “knowledge map” helped them plot their next step: finish the module on adding decimals, for example, and the map suggests moving next to place values, or to rounding whole numbers, or to any of four other options.

Julian, meanwhile, tracked everyone’s progress on a computer dashboard that offers him mounds of data and alerts him when someone needs his attention. He showed me, for example, the data for a child who had been working that day on multiplying decimals. The child had watched the Khan video before answering the 1st practice problem correctly, needed a “hint” from the program on the 3rd question, got the 7th wrong after struggling with it for 350 seconds—the problem was 69.0 x 0.524—and got the 18th correct in under a minute.

But just as powerful are the data kids have on themselves. The Covington youngsters regularly pulled up an array of charts that showed them which math concepts they had mastered and which they were working on, needed to review, or were stumbling over.

The classroom buzzed with activity, and amazingly, all the buzz was about math.

Salman Khan (on left) and the team at the Khan Academy.

Khan’s Rise

By now, more than 1 million people have watched the online video in which Salman Khan—a charming MIT math whiz, Harvard Business School graduate, and former Boston hedge-fund analyst—explains how he began tutoring his New Orleans cousins in math by posting short lessons for them on YouTube. Other people began watching the lessons and sending Khan adulatory notes (“First time I smiled doing a derivative,” wrote one) or thanking him for explaining fractions to an autistic son.

Khan quit the hedge fund, moved to Silicon Valley, and in 2009, with funding from a constellation of technology stars (Bill Gates’s children were using the videos), launched the nonprofit Khan Academy. A year later, Mark Goines, a member of the Los Altos school board and a legendary Silicon Valley investor, introduced Khan to the district’s new superintendent. Los Altos already ranked among the best-performing districts in the state, but it had set itself a goal of improving individual achievement, and “capturing data at a granular level” on each student was proving difficult, Goines told me.

A few weeks later, in November 2010, Los Altos agreed to pilot Khan Academy with two classes of 5th graders and two classes of 7th graders and provide Khan with feedback to refine the web site and tools. By summer 2011, some 250 school districts, charter schools, and independent schools were asking to be part of the pilot—Khan chose only a dozen—and have Khan staff work with them to integrate the videos, data dashboard, and other tools into their curriculum.

Salman Khan’s short videos remain the centerpiece of Khan Academy (there already are 2,576 of them and counting). In each one, Khan’s voice describes a discrete math concept, such as solving a quadratic by factoring or interpreting inequalities, while only his hand-scribbled formulas appear on-screen. Khan’s idea was that youngsters would watch the videos at home and work on problems in class, essentially “flipping” the classroom (see “The Flipped Classroom,” What Next, Winter 2012). But teachers told me that youngsters also are using the videos as a just-in-time solution when they’re stumped on a problem in class, or to move ahead when they feel ready.

The data that the web site churns out and the site’s gaming features seem to be the real learning motivators. Youngsters become “proficient” in a concept by answering a “streak” of 10 consecutive computer-generated questions: miss one and the computer sends you back to the start. Youngsters earn “energy points” for correct answers, and badges for accomplishments as diverse as working speedily (that’s a meteorite badge) or becoming proficient in the Pythagorean theorem (that’s a moon badge).

Ted Mitchell, president of the NewSchools Venture Fund and a Khan Academy board member, told me that Khan developers “were blown away by how important” the games and badges seem to be in giving kids a sense of accomplishment and progress. Even older kids, for whom badges are ho-hum, “are instantly motivated” when they complete a streak, and the program acknowledges their accomplishment, says Brian Greenberg, who until recently was chief academic officer of Envision Schools. “What’s brilliant about Khan Academy is the instant feedback,” Greenberg told me.

Envision runs four charters in Northern California, including one that piloted Khan Academy with a small program for remedial-algebra students last summer.

Los Altos has extended the Khan Academy program to all of its 5th and 6th grade classes, and to its 7th graders who were achieving at grade level and below.

The Teaching Curve

From Covington Elementary, I dropped in on Courtney Cadwell’s 7th-grade pre-algebra class at Egan Junior High. She, like Julian, piloted Khan Academy last year. Based on that first-year success, Los Altos extended the program to all of its 5th- and 6th-grade classes, and to its 7th graders who were achieving at grade level and below.

Cadwell, a 17-year teacher who was wearing University of Texas orange for her alma mater, calls Khan just “one resource we use.” The previous night, she had assigned worksheet homework; she began the class with a textbook lesson. Math projects ringed the classroom, a reminder that Khan Academy doesn’t include project-based lessons. That night’s homework included a reading on the origin of zero: Cadwell, among others I spoke with, said Khan’s weakness is that it “is not great at helping kids conceptualize math.”

Khan’s strength became clear a few minutes later when the students opened their laptops. Cadwell strolled the room with an iPad in hand, tracking the youngsters as they moved through problems and modules, and intervening with a quick one-on-one when the data identified a student who was stumped. “I’m getting data in real time about each student instead of assuming the entire class needs intervention,” she explained afterward. Khan “lets me use my class time more wisely.”

It also means that teachers have to figure out new ways to work. “Teachers have to be willing to escape from the role of standing in front of the class” and flexible enough to group kids based on need, said Julian, who was a math coach in New York for 20 years and retains his big-city bustle.

As I watched Julian, Cadwell, and later Ruth Negash at Oakland’s Envision Academy of Arts and Technology, they seemed to be always on the move—meeting individually with children, tutoring small groups, and occasionally addressing the whole class. “I actually work harder” with Khan Academy, Julian said. “I’m up and around more, meeting with kids more.” That gives time back to students and, as Cadwell said, makes them “take ownership of their learning” by setting their own goals.

It also means a new level of classroom collaboration: youngsters can look at each other’s data and identify “coaches” among their classmates. Julian urged his 5th graders to ask the Khan program for a hint, watch a video, or ask a coach for help before coming to him. “Show him how to do it, don’t walk around the class giving answers,” he admonished would-be coaches. Pretty soon, a girl in a pink T-shirt turned to a girl in purple for coaching, and the two worked meticulously at solving 1.94 x 5.52.

The Khan Academy provides data in real time about each student, resulting in more efficient class time management for teachers.

Making It Work in Oakland

Los Altos is an affluent, tech-savvy community; I next wanted to see how Khan Academy could work in an inner-city classroom. So two days later, I visited Envision Academy, a downtown Oakland charter school, and Ruth Negash, an intense 4th-year teacher with wild, curly hair and two education degrees from San Francisco State University.

In 2011, Negash taught two summer-school classes of 9th, 10th, and 11th graders who had failed Algebra I. One randomly assigned class used Khan Academy; the other was a traditional math class. The results were promising enough that Negash now is using Khan in all of her 9th-grade algebra classes.

On the day I visited, Negash started both of her classes with a minilecture on linear equations, and then had her students solve for x in 7x + 4 = 18. The classes quickly became fidgety, first as Negash explained the problem, and then as youngsters finished at different speeds. Negash had to urge them to “respect the community of learning.”

But that changed a few minutes later when the youngsters opened their computers—I had noticed the same change in Cadwell’s class—and worked on Khan Academy for the next 75 minutes. I heard an occasional groan of exasperation. “They threw a trick question at me and sent me back to the beginning,” one boy moaned when his streak was broken. But the energy now was directed toward everyone’s screen.

Although everyone in Negash’s classes had taken, and presumably passed, algebra in 8th grade, their math competence ranged from marginal to impressive. In both periods, three or four youngsters claimed a table in the hallway, where they worked silently at lessons on quadrilaterals and complementary and supplementary angles, typical geometry exercises. But other students struggled with addition and subtraction, and one quarter don’t know their multiplication tables, Negash told me. (To keep those youngsters from falling even further behind, she gives them a reference sheet with the multiplication tables on it.) Negash told both classes to work on the Khan module on solving for a variable—a continuation of her minilecture—but Khan’s online prompts were urging most youngsters to first review lessons on lower-level skills.

Some of these youngsters simply “feel safer” doing arithmetic and will move on when they’ve experienced some math “success,” Negash predicted. Other educators had similar takes: Khan “takes away a lot of the fear about math” by letting kids backfill their gaps and then move ahead at their own pace, said Sandra McGonagle, the principal of Santa Rita Elementary in Los Altos, which also is using Khan Academy in its 5th and 6th grades.

“You don’t have to worry about getting something wrong in front of the whole class,” one of Julian’s 5th graders, the girl with blue nail polish, told me.

But in Negash’s classes, the wide range of math abilities is clearly a challenge. Negash sat with one low-performing student for much of the first-period class and with three others in the second period, hoping to encourage some of that “success.” Meanwhile, other students were calling for her help. Two boys were stumped by “adjacent” in a word problem; language issues crop up “every day,” Negash said.

When Negash finally had a moment to consult her Khan dashboard at the end of second-period class, she saw that one youngster had spent 62 minutes solidly working on math, but another had spent only 14 minutes. “It’s hard to figure out a different plan for 25 kids every day,” she sighed.

Gia Truong, superintendent of Envision Schools, said Khan Academy developers had urged her to let Negash’s students “start where they were” in math and move forward. But that’s creating a conflict when some kids are so far behind, she told me: “If you do that, you might never get to the algebra standards” that California students must pass in order to graduate.

“You’re in the new paradigm, but the grading standards are in the old paradigm,” she added.

Getting to Results

Test results at both Los Altos and Envision—the only two pilots to have any results so far—suggest that Khan Academy is working. Los Altos says that among the 7th graders who used the program in 2010–11—all remedial students—41 percent scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the California Standards Test compared to 23 percent the year before. Among 5th graders, 96 percent using Khan were proficient or advanced compared to 91 percent in the rest of the district.

At Envision’s summer-school program, the youngsters in the Khan Academy class spent only half their time on algebra—the rest of their time was on lower-level math skills—and yet still slightly outscored the traditional class, which spent all of its time on algebra.

Both districts are quick to say that it’s far too early to claim success: there were only 115 youngsters in the Los Altos pilot and just 20 at Envision. “It’s enough to say this is promising; it’s not enough to say this is the future,” former Envision Schools officer Brian Greenberg said.

Most observers of the Khan experiment agree that the measure of success must be student achievement. Otherwise, “I’m not very sympathetic,” said Michael Horn of Innosight Institute. As teaching is increasingly differentiated, however, schools may need a different kind of assessment. California’s year-end test can tell which 5th graders meet the state’s math standards; it can’t tell if some of those 5th graders have progressed to trigonometry or pre-calculus, as two Los Altos kids did last year.

But several experts also suggested measuring Khan’s impact by also looking at changes in the distribution of test scores. Khan Academy isn’t likely to close the learning gap because some kids, freed from the teach-to-the-middle plod of the usual classroom, gallop ahead. But Khan would be a success if low-performing kids move ahead too and “shift the bell curve to the right,” said the NewSchool Venture Fund’s Ted Mitchell.

Some other Khan watchers gave a surprisingly strong endorsement to such measures as student engagement and self-confidence, and to soft skills like goal setting and teamwork. “I don’t look at it as just based on the data,” said Mark Goines, the Los Altos school board member whose high-tech background (he helped develop and run TurboTax for Intuit, Inc.) suggests a fine reading of the data. “The kids seem to be happy about learning. That makes me excited,” he said.

What about increasing class size, I asked: Should Khan’s success be measured in part on its ability to increase teacher productivity? In elementary schools, where students generally spend the day with one teacher, increasing class size because of Khan would mean bigger classes in every other subject, too. And Goines, who said he has viewed “hundreds” of online programs, cautioned that there aren’t any comparable products in other subjects, especially in writing.

A fear among advocates of online learning is that slow learners will be abandoned in front of a computer, and a large classroom increases those chances. “It would then become a babysitting tool,” said McGonagle, Santa Rita’s principal.

At Envision Academy in Oakland, teachers say Khan takes away a lot of the fear about math by letting kids backfill their gaps and move forward at their own pace.

Blending Khan

Finally, I asked for “takeaways” from the Khan Academy experience. Greenberg told me that it’s more important that teachers be “nimble” and “entrepreneurial” than that they be tech wizards. All three teachers said they felt comfortable with technology, but that, more importantly, they were risk-takers. Even before she began piloting Khan Academy, Cadwell asked her PTA to buy classroom laptops for the youngsters in her remedial math class. “I figured if I could get them onto some practice sites, I’d figure things out from there,” she said.

Santa Rita’s McGonagle said it was “crucial” to have pilot teachers like Cadwell who can act as avatars for the rest of the district as it expands its blended learning. Cadwell is mentoring other Los Altos teachers this year. They “don’t need training as much as they need time” with the program, she told me (the data are fairly easy to use, but she and Julian asked Khan’s engineers for so much of it that both say they don’t always use it all).

The schools, meanwhile, are holding rollout meetings for parents and are urging parents to join the web site, where they can see the same data as the teachers, including whether little Bobby is really working on math up in his bedroom as he says he is. “It’s not just training the teachers; it’s training the community,” Goines said.

That training shouldn’t end with just learning to manipulate the data, though. It also means learning how teachers can use their time differently, how to work with youngsters who have different abilities, and how to blend Khan into the curriculum, not substitute for it, everyone told me. Cadwell and Negash said that they find gaps in the Khan curriculum, and that it isn’t completely aligned with either California or core-curriculum standards, although Khan is adding lessons to fill the holes.

“You can’t just put a kid down in front of a computer,” Goines said, although the kids I saw in Julian’s, Cadwell’s, and Negash’s classes sure seemed to enjoy it.

June Kronholz is an Education Next contributing editor.

Top 20 Blog Entries of 2011!

Education Next — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:28:04 +0000

We’ve already released the list of the most-read articles on the Education Next website in 2011. Today we bring you the 20 most-read blog entries from 2011. Happy reading!

20. Florida’s Class Size Amendment: Did It Help Students Learn?
by Paul E. Peterson

Paul Peterson summarizes a study of the impact of a class size reduction amendment in Florida. The study found no detectable benefit from mandated class size reduction–either for students in general or for any student subgroup, racial, ethnic, or level of disadvantage. Telling schools they must reduce class size—which is very expensive–yields no benefit, the study concludes.

19. The Case for Paying Most Teachers the Same
by Michael Petrilli

In professions like law and medicine, new hires get paid significantly less at the start, then pay rises rapidly–as soon as employees boost their effectiveness and productivity from on-the-job experience. In education, on the other hand, pay rises slowly, even though teachers’ effectiveness plateaus after as little as two (and no more than five) years on the job. So maybe we should pay young teachers more, and older teachers less, than we do now, argues Mike Petrilli. In other words, we should make their pay more alike.

18. Jeb Bush, Melinda Gates, Sal Khan and the Coming Digital Learning Battle
by Paul E. Peterson

Paul Peterson warns that we can expect a strenuous, highly politicized debate over the way in which digital learning should be provided: “blended” learning that takes place within public school classrooms under the tutelage of a highly qualified teacher vs. “online” learning in which students are offered a choice of providers that include not only the blended classroom but also those who offer products exclusively online. “School districts and teacher unions can be expected to fight publicly funded online learning that offers students a choice of taking courses outside their local district school.”

17. The Education School Masters Degree Factory
by Paul E. Peterson

Paul Peterson describes a study finding that teachers in Florida with an M. A. degree were no more effective, on average, than teachers who lacked such a degree. He notes “One of the most straightforward ways school districts can obtain cost savings without harming students is to eliminate extra pay for teachers who earn a master’s degree.”

16. Is the Charter School Movement Stuck in a Rut?
by Chester E. Finn Jr.

“As the U.S. charter fleet sails past the 5,000-school and two-decade markers, there is reason to worry that it’s getting complacent, unimaginative, and self-interested,” wrote Chester Finn. “This wouldn’t be the first “reform movement” in the history of education to turn into an ideologically rigid, pull-up-the-gangplank-now-that-we’re-aboard sort of vested interest. But it would still be a great pity.”

15. Ed Next: Poll Top Books of the Decade
by Education Next

To mark Education Next’s 10^th anniversary, we asked readers to help us identify the best books of the past decade. We selected 41 books as contenders and asked readers to vote for the top three. In January 2011, we announced the results: Diane Ravitch’s Death and Life of the Great American School System came in first, E.D. Hirsch’s The Knowledge Deficit came in second, and Linda Darling-Hammond’s The Flat World and Education came in third.

14. The Enormous Economic Returns to a Good Teacher
by Eric Hanushek

Eric Hanushek explains a new report that calculates the value of a good (and a bad) teacher by tracing the economic ramifications of differences in student achievement. “A teacher at the 85^th percentile … with a class of 20 students generates over $400,000 in economic benefits, compared to an average teacher, for each year that she gets such achievement gains.”

13. No Matter How Hard You Try, You Cannot Deny US Math Performance is Terrible
by Paul E. Peterson

Paul Peterson defends a study he authored with Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessman that found that the United States ranked 31st in the world at bringing 15 year olds up to an advanced level of math achievement.

12. Khan Academy Not Overhyped, Just Missing a Key Ingredient – Excellent Live Teachers
by Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel

Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel note that most of the hype about the Khan Academy is ignoring its potential to enable the best in-person teachers to reach more students with personalized instruction. “This dual power of technology –both to extend reach of super-instructors boundlessly (no more low-value homework and large-group time) AND to allow reorganization of great on-site teacher time – is worth hyping.”

11. Steve Jobs on Education
by Jay P. Greene

After Steve Jobs died in October, Jay Greene reviewed selected remarks from Jobs on education, including his criticism of teachers unions and his support for vouchers.

10. With a Math Proficiency Rate of 32 Percent, U.S. Ranks Number 32
by Paul E. Peterson

Paul Peterson reports on the results of a new study examining the performance of U.S. students in mathematics compared to students in other countries. That information is obtained by comparing student performance on NAEP math and reading tests with the performance of students from across the world on similar examinations. Only thirty-two percent of U.S. students in the class of 2011 were proficient in mathematics when they were in 8^th grade, placing the United States in 32nd place among the 65 nations of the world that participated in PISA.

9. Nobody Deserves Tenure
by Checker E. Finn Jr.

Chester Finn traces the history of tenure and explains why it makes no sense for K-12 teachers to have it. “it didn’t come down from Mount Sinai—and there are plenty of other ways to safeguard public employees from wrongful dismissal besides guaranteeing them lifetime jobs.”

8. Teacher Accountability: The Next Front in the School Reform Wars
by Michael Petrilli

Mike Petrilli argues that school reformers should focus on teacher tenure reform rather than choice and accountability “After twenty years it’s become clear that choice and accountability are necessary but not sufficient to create the conditions for high-performing systems. They were too indirect; now it’s time to tackle teacher tenure and evaluations head-on. And that means fighting the unions in committee rooms in state capitals.”

7. The Best Books of the Past Decade According to Ed Next Readers
by Paul E. Peterson

In January 2011, after we announced the results of our “Best Books of the Decade” poll, Paul Peterson reflected on the results. Readers had been invited to vote for the three best education policy books of the past decade from a list of 41 books. Over 4000 votes were cast. Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System won the poll by a wide margin, pulling in 22 % of the total.

6. E.D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy and American Democracy
by Marci Kanstoroom

Marci Kanstoroom commented on the announcement that Core Knowledge would align its curriculum with the Common Core standards, and considered the claim by E.D. Hirsch that the standards have the potential to revolutionize reading instruction by embracing the idea that language mastery requires knowledge of history, science, music and fine arts. In a new book, Hirsch explicitly connected the idea of cultural literacy with the civic role of schools.

5. Why Digital Learning will Liberate Teachers
by Michael B. Horn

Michael Horn detailed the many different ways the growth of digital learning will benefit teachers. “The bottom line? Digital learning should liberate teachers’ lives by making the opportunities for success far more frequent, and the opportunities for teachers to pursue what they like and their passions about the teaching profession far more possible.”

4. Is Anybody Up for Defending the Common Core Math Standards?
by Frederick Hess

After trying without success to find an author for an Ed Next article defending the Common Core math standards, Rick Hess took his assignment to the blog, wondering why nobody involved with the standards was willing to make the case for their rigor and quality. “The notion that Common Core proponents needn’t make their case is an affront to democratic values,” he wrote.

3. Are Wisconsin Schools Better than Those in Texas?
by Paul E. Peterson

While debates raged last spring about the prospect of deep spending cuts (and limitations on collective bargaining rights) in Wisconsin, Paul Peterson took aim at a column by Paul Krugman in the New York Times that argued that low-spending Texas has rotten schools. Peterson responded to Krugman by pointing to data showing that if you look at the test scores of each ethnic group separately, Texas’ schools are doing better than Wisconsin’s.

2. Compared to Other Countries, Does the United States Really Do That Badly in Math?
by Eric Hanushek and Paul Peterson

Paul Peterson and Eric Hanushek investigated why U.S. students scored in the bottom half of countries in math on PISA but in the top 10 in math on TIMSS. They found that many industrialized countries that participated in PISA did not participate in TIMSS, which also includes many countries from the developing world.

1. Eighth-Grade Students Learn More Through Direct Instruction
by Paul E. Peterson

Paul Peterson described a study that found that students learned more math and science when their teachers spent more time on lecture-style instruction and less time working on problems.

The Accountability Plateau

Mark Schneider — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:26:01 +0000

Many educators and elected officials, including more than a few members of Congress, regard “No Child Left Behind,” the well-known moniker of George W. Bush’s 2001 education act, as a discredited “brand.” Indeed, the very acronym NCLB is about to be tossed into the dustbin of history in favor of its progenitor, ESEA (the Elementary and Secondary Education Act), or perhaps some new title yet to be devised on Capitol Hill. There are many reasons why NCLB has been discredited, including, to quote Kevin Carey, the “apocalyptic language out there, that standards and tests have ruined American public education, driven the best teachers out of the classroom, etc., etc.”

Yet, as the data presented below demonstrate, NCLB—and the accountability movement it embodied, codified, and symbolized—contributed to a major change in the performance level of American students in math. The data also suggest, however, that the accountability movement has likely reached a point of diminishing (or perhaps even no) returns. While moving on from NCLB is probably essential to produce further growth in student performance, “consequential accountability” was an important and meaningful education reform and ought not be dismissed as a failed initiative.

Debates over the effects and effectiveness of NCLB almost always revolve around national and state scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Not surprisingly, the release in November 2011 of the newest NAEP Mathematics and Reading Report Cards set off a new round of discussion about the impact of NCLB and accountability more generally. Given the ongoing fights surrounding the overdue reauthorization of ESEA/NCLB, the debate over the effects of accountability is more important now than ever.

Remember that NCLB’s system of consequential accountability (in which schools face cascading penalties for failure, e.g., replacement of the school’s principal, reconstitution, closure, etc.) was built upon the experience of many states that had already developed such systems before 2001. There is considerable agreement that states adopting consequential accountability before NCLB experienced more rapid growth in their test scores relative to non-adopting states. However, as Hanushek and Raymond note, as NCLB took hold, all states became “effectively consequential accountability states.” Perhaps not surprisingly, after NCLB, states that were new to the accountability regime experienced faster growth on NAEP assessments than states that had introduced their own accountability regimes before 2001.

The Case of Texas

Texas was one of the first states in the nation to adopt strict and consequential accountability. The Texas experience was fundamental to the framing of NCLB, as George W. Bush took the lessons and practices of Texas along with him when he moved from Austin to Washington. Thus, looking at the growth in NAEP scores in Texas relative to changes in the nation as a whole allows us to tease out some lessons about the effects of accountability on student performance and to speculate about the effectiveness of accountability past, present, and future.

As we look at these data, we should remember that, while NAEP is rightfully viewed as the “gold standard” of assessments, it is not the ideal instrument for detailed statements of cause and effect. We should further keep in mind one of the prime maxims of statistics: Correlation is not causation.

The Remarkable Growth in NAEP Math Scores

It is well known that, as measured by NAEP, American students have improved substantially in math (more in fourth grade than in eighth) and little in reading over the last two decades. Separate and apart from overall averages, there has been continuing concern for the level of skills among racial/ethnic minorities as well as concern for the effects of accountability on low- versus high-performing students (specifically, whether or not NCLB placed so much attention on low-performing students that high-performing students were neglected and suffered as a result). Looking at trends in Texas versus the nation presents some insights into these issues.

Fourth-Grade Mathematics

Consider Figure 1, which graphs the average scale scores on NAEP’s math assessment for fourth-grade students in Texas and in the United States as a whole. The growth in the performance of these students is nothing short of remarkable. Using the very rough rule of thumb that a 10-point change in NAEP scores equals about one year of learning, in 2011 our fourth graders are about two years ahead of where they were in 1992. But, as the figure shows, Texas and the nation marked their peaks of achievement at two distinct points in time.

In 1992, students in Texas were performing at the same level as the students in the nation. In the 1993-94 school year, Texas introduced its system of consequential accountability and, by the time of the next NAEP assessment in 1996, Texas fourth-graders had surpassed their peers nationwide. Between 1992 and 2000, math scores across the nation began to creep up; during the same period, a growing number of states began to adopt accountability systems.

By 2003, NCLB had turned every state into a consequential accountability state, and the rate of increase nationwide in math scores between 2000 and 2007 was remarkable. While Texas students continued to outperform the nation as a whole through 2007, the sharp uptick in national performance after 2000 narrowed the Texas lead substantially. Indeed, the last two assessments, in 2009 and 2011, show no significant difference between fourth graders in Texas and fourth graders nationwide.

We return to these overall patterns later, but first we turn to the performance of three groups of students who served as particular focal points of NCLB and the accountability movement more generally: blacks (Figure 2), Hispanics (Figure 3), and low-performing students (Figure 4), defined here by the cut score identifying those students performing at NAEP’s 10th percentile.

At the beginning of the series in 1992, black and Hispanic fourth-grade students in Texas scored slightly higher than their nationwide peers, while those low-performing students at the 10th percentile in Texas achieved at the same level as those at the 10th percentile nationally.

Between 1992 and 2000, the scores of Texas students in all three groups increased faster than those of their peers nationwide, with the size of the gap between student in Texas and the nation widening to well over 10 points for each group. Between 2000 and 2003, nationwide, the gains for students in each group increased dramatically but then slowed substantially. Gains among Texas fourth graders were sustained over a longer period of time, but also show evidence of little growth since 2005, with Hispanic and the lowest-performing students actually scoring lower in the latest assessments than in 2007.

The growth in fourth-grade math achievement represents one of the most significant success stories in contemporary American education. Again, the reader is reminded that, while correlation is not causation, the introduction of consequential accountability in Texas and then across the nation coincided with impressive spikes in the performance of students in fourth-grade math, and in particular among the students of most concern to NCLB and the accountability movement more generally.

Eighth-Grade Mathematics

NAEP test results for eighth-grade math represent a somewhat weaker reflection of this striking pattern (Figure 5). The first NAEP eighth-grade math assessment was in 1990, at which time Texas eighth graders lagged the nation by 5 points. That gap disappeared by 2000. By 2005, as the strong fourth-grade performers moved into the eighth grade and as the Texas system of consequential accountability continued to gain traction, Texas eighth graders moved past their national peers, producing a gap of 6 points. Whether eighth-grade test scores can continue to grow, given the flattening scores at the fourth grade, is something that remains to be seen.

Among black and Hispanic eighth graders, Texas students started at about the same place as their national peers in 1990. Over time, however, they experienced steady growth in performance, producing a widening gap with the nation. Indeed, the size of the gap for black students (in favor of Texas) has increased from 6 or 7 points before 2000 to 10 points in the last three assessments (Figure 6). The size of the gaps in favor of Hispanic students in Texas has been somewhat more variable, and was not statistically significant before 2000 (Figure 7). But this gap has grown to over 10 points in the last three assessments. Similarly, the cut score defining the lowest 10th percentile has risen more rapidly in Texas than in the nation as a whole (Figure 8), becoming statistically significant in 2000 and almost doubling in size from 2000 (7 points) to the latest assessment in 2011 (13 points).

High-Performing Students

A frequent criticism of the accountability movement and NCLB was that the focus on racial and ethnic minorities and on the lowest-performing students led to a neglect of the nation’s highest-performing youngsters.

Here we define high-performing students as those performing at NAEP’s 90th percentile. Fourth-grade math scores for these students both in Texas and in the nation display sharp increases since 1992 (Figure 9). The cut score for the top performers nationwide stood at 259 in 1992 and steadily rose to 276 in 2011, a gain of 17 points. The highest-performing fourth graders in Texas saw a correspondingly large jump in cut scores from 256 in 1992 to 273 in 2005. (Interestingly, half of that gain occurred between the assessments immediately preceding and following implementation of the state’s accountability system in 1993-94). Since 2005, however, there has been no statistically significant change in cut score for those Texas youngsters, although the national cut score for high performers has continued to rise—producing a statistically significant difference (to the disadvantage of Texas) in the two most recent administrations of NAEP.

Eighth-grade math scores among the highest performers also improved substantially over the period, gaining 14 points nationally and 17 points in Texas (Figure 10). The sharpest gains for these high-performing eighth graders in Texas were between 2000 and 2005, building on the improvement made in math by Texas fourth graders four years earlier. Gains continued thereafter at somewhat slower rates, likely reflecting the slower growth in fourth-grade math skills.

The growth in NAEP scores of the highest-performing students in Texas and the nation essentially mirrors the gains made by student groups that were focal to the policy goals of NCLB. Whatever changes more directly focused on specific target populations apparently spilled over to affect the performance of high performers as well. And just as we saw evidence of diminishing effectiveness in recent years for average, minority, and low-performing students, there is evidence that the spillover effects of accountability on high-performing students are also wearing thin. The recent absence of growth in Texas fourth-grade math skills among these high-performing students may portend the end of a remarkable period of growth among the highest performers in the second-largest state in the union.

The Disappointing Case of Reading Scores

The improvements in NAEP math scores were an unquestionable success for America’s fourth and eighth graders and even more so for students in Texas. However, neither the nation as a whole nor Texas has done nearly as well improving students’ reading skills. Figure 11 shows no significant difference between the reading scores of fourth-grade students in Texas and in the nation as a whole, except in 2003, and minimal improvement across the board. And Texas’s eighth graders have significantly lagged the nation since 2003: by 2 points in 2007 and by 4 to 5 points in every other assessment between 2003 and 2011 (Figure 12).

Accountability and NCLB Were a Success, But…

In 1972, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge proposed a theory of evolutionary change that emphasized what they termed “punctuated equilibrium.” Their core insight was that complex systems will exist in long periods of stasis. Rather than coming in small incremental steps, change is often characterized by abrupt radical transformations caused by events external to the existing system. Perhaps the most dramatic example is the relatively sudden disappearance of dinosaurs associated with a meteor crashing into the Earth and changing the climate. As a result, the dinosaurs’ long reign was replaced by a new equilibrium dominated by mammals.

In 1993, political scientists Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones introduced this theory to the study of public policy, and it has since become a common lens through which to view change in social systems. Baumgartner and Jones argued that policy generally changes only incrementally, until some event, such as change in the party control of government or sizable shifts in public opinion, lead to large policy alterations. In their approach, large changes in external conditions (what Baumgartner and Jones term an “exogenous shock”) are often needed to produce change in complex social and political systems.

The pattern of test scores in Texas and the nation suggest that consequential accountability—adopted early by Texas, then by more states, and finally by the nation as a whole—was a shock to the U.S. school system that altered the ecosystem and led to a different outcome than had existed before. Over a relatively short period, math performance in fourth and eighth grade abruptly shifted to higher levels of performance. For example, between 2000 and 2005—the five years spanning the introduction of accountability via NCLB—the average math scale score nationwide at the fourth grade rose by 12 points, roughly a year of learning. In the same period, the average scale score for black fourth graders rose by 18 points, for Hispanic students by 17 points, and the cut score defining the 10th percentile of performance increased by 16 points. The corresponding changes among eighth-grade math scores are small only in comparison: 6 points nationwide, 11 points for black students, 10 points for Hispanic students, and 8 points for those students at the 10th percentile.

To be sure, an important lingering issue is the absence of growth in reading scores in Texas and in the nation as a whole. Many have argued that the foundation for reading, compared to math, is far more dependent on what happens early in children’s lives—before they enroll in school—and that improving reading skills is therefore much harder to accomplish. Whatever the explanation, clearly the absence of growth reflects a failure of the accountability “meteor” to affect reading levels in a fundamental way.

There is once final pattern to note: As would be expected when viewed through the punctuated- equilibrium lens, once the disruption of consequential accountability has wrung all changes out of the system, a new stasis should take hold. Indeed, Texas, an early adopter, led the nation to higher scores and seems to be ahead of the nation in reaching a new plateau where changes are minimal compared to what came in response to the introduction of an accountability system. The nation, which lagged Texas in adopting accountability, now seems to be entering a period of little change in test scores.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, accountability was an exogenous shock that produced radical gains in math if not in reading. But we now need a new shock to prevent a prolonged period of stasis and stagnation. Scanning the heavens for the next meteor, the most likely candidates to come crashing into the school ecosystem are the Common Core and the better measurement of teacher performance. If the United States is lucky, one or both of these shocks will produce yet another major uptick in math scores. If we are really lucky, these shocks will produce upticks in reading and other subject areas as well.

Mark Schneider, a former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, is a vice president at American Institutes for Research and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This article was commissioned and also published by the Fordham Institute.

Academic Value of Non-Academics

June Kronholz — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:24:11 +0000

Faced with a $30 million shortfall in its $295 million budget for the 2011–12 school year, the Adams 12 school district in north Denver laid off custodians, furloughed teachers, trimmed programs, reduced benefits—and then took its budget scalpel to student activities.

The district dropped middle-school sports, cut back on travel for its high-school teams, and pared $500,000 from the $2 million budget that supports afterschool activities like the Math Olympiad and spelling bee at Centennial Elementary, the technology and drama clubs at Rocky Top Middle School, and the anime (Japanese animation) and Knowledge Bowl clubs at Mountain Range High.

Christopher Gdowski, superintendent of the 42,000-student district, talks hopefully of volunteers stepping in to fill some of the gaps. The YMCA has approached him about taking over some of the sports teams, even offering to buy the used school uniforms and the licensing rights to the school mascots. But some activities may have trouble finding sponsors, he concedes, and teachers union contracts may preclude others from turning to the community for advisors.

“We’re hoping for the best, but we’re fearing the worst,” Gdowski told me.

With school districts struggling to keep their noses above choppy budget waters and voters howling about taxes, should schools really be funding ping-pong and trading-card clubs? Swim teams, swing dancing, moot court, powder-puff football? Latino unions, gay-straight alliances, the Future Business Leaders of America, the French Honors Society, the jazz band, the knitting club? The barbell club at Adams 12’s Niver Creek Middle School?

As it turns out, maybe they should. There’s not a straight line between the crochet club and the Ivy League. But a growing body of research says there is a link between afterschool activities and graduating from high school, going to college, and becoming a responsible citizen.

“Honestly, the place that best prepared me for college was the hardwood court of men’s varsity basketball” in high school, Andrew Snow, a University of Michigan senior and pre-law major, e-mailed me recently. “That court taught me hard work, sacrifice, teamwork, humility…and leadership,” he added, plus, “how to deal with people in social situations” and “responsibility off the court [because] if you made a bad decision, someone would see it.”

Artists for Humanities serves 250 teens annually in an intensive arts micro-enterprise program.

Cause or Effect?

The U.S. Department of Education last compiled data on extracurricular activities a decade ago, when it reported that more than half the country’s high-school sophomores participated in sports, that one-fifth were in a school-sponsored music group, and that cheerleading and drill teams, hobby, academic, and vocational clubs each involved about 10 percent of kids.

At affluent suburban schools, the choice of activities can be dizzying. Walt Whitman High School in Montgomery County, Maryland, a Washington, D.C., suburb, offered 89 clubs (equestrian, Persian, unicycle…), 26 sports, seven choral ensembles, seven bands or orchestras, a newspaper, a literary magazine, and a yearbook last year.

Whitman’s feeder school, Thomas W. Pyle Middle School, offered even more: 100 activities, including a stock market club, cooking, a math team, and a magic club.

Whitman says that 96 percent of its students go to college; its SAT scores in math and critical reading are 250 points above the national average. That isn’t because it has an equestrian team and a Shakespeare club, of course. The education department data show that kids from families in the top third by income and education are half again as likely to take part in sports and almost twice as likely to participate in music as kids from the bottom third. Almost 80 percent of the adults in Whitman’s zip code are college graduates, and the median household income is three times the U.S. average.

The data also show that kids with the highest test scores are the most active in afterschool activities. Two-thirds of kids in the top quarter of test takers played sports, for example, compared to less than half in the lowest quarter.

So, is there a link? Did kids who joined afterschool activities become good students, or did good students join afterschool activities?

As with a lot of social science research, the findings about extracurriculars aren’t always consistent or conclusive: You can’t randomly assign kids to soccer, after all. But some researchers insist there is a cause-effect relationship between activities and academic success, not just the other way around.

Margo Gardner, a research scientist at Columbia University’s National Center for Children and Families (NSCF), is among them—and certainly not alone. Using data from the 1988 National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), and controlling for poverty, race, gender, test scores, and parental involvement, Gardner has calculated that the odds of attending college were 97 percent higher for youngsters who took part in school-sponsored activities for two years than for those who didn’t do any school activities.

The odds of completing college were 179 percent higher, and the odds of voting eight years after high school, a proxy for civic engagement, were 31 percent higher.

Gardner repeated the analysis using propensity-score matching, that is, comparing kids whose profiles suggested they had a similar propensity either to join or sit out afterschool activities. Even within those groups of similar kids, those who participated in activities had better school success rates than those who didn’t.

The National Center for Education Statistics, in its own analysis of the longitudinal or NELS data, found that high-school seniors who were involved in school activities were less likely to cut class and play hooky than kids who weren’t involved. Three times as many had a GPA of 3.0 or higher; twice as many scored in the top quarter on math and reading tests. And 68 percent expected to get a college degree, compared to 48 percent of kids who weren’t involved in school activities.

Other researchers have approached the question differently, but come up with complementary results. Angela Duckworth, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, looked at college activities as a predictor of success. She rated the résumés of recent graduates who were applying for their first teaching jobs. She gave the highest scores to those people who had been in a college activity for several years, any college activity, and who had attained a level of leadership or achievement (say, MVP on the softball team).

Those with the highest “grit” scores, as she calls them—with the most persistence—turned out to be the best teachers, based on the academic gains of their students. As an added bonus, the “grittiest” scorers also were more likely to stay in their jobs rather than quit midyear.

Duckworth attributes the difference to perseverance rather than talent: There wasn’t any significant difference in teacher effectiveness based on the SAT scores and college GPAs of the job applicants, she calculated. This isn’t just about whether teachers are new, Duckworth told me: People who are persistent and passionate about something, whether cross-country or baton twirling or spelling bees, will carry over that enthusiasm to other parts of their lives.

Similarly, Betsey Stevenson, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of business and currently the chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, has found a link between high-school sports and girls’ success. Stevenson compared the college-going and labor-force rates between girls who attended high school before the 1972 passage of Title IX and those who attended after. Title IX, an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, required high schools and colleges to offer girls and boys the same opportunities to play sports.

Again controlling for age, race, and their state of residence, Stevenson calculated that for every 10-percentage-point rise in the number of girls playing high-school sports in any state there was a 1-percentage-point increase in those going to college and a 1- to 2-point rise in those with jobs. Title IX led to a 30-percentage-point rise in girls’ sports participation, she adds.

The National Center for Education Statistics found that high-school seniors who were involved in school activities were less likely to cut class and play hooky than kids who weren't involved. Three times as many had a GPA of 3.0 or higher.

Engaging Students

Temple University psychologist Laurence Steinberg, whose book, You and Your Adolescent: The Essential Guide for Ages 10–25, discusses afterschool activities. He suggested two more reasons for what he believes is a causal link between activities and academic success.

Kids who are involved in clubs and sports spend an extra couple of hours a week with an adult, usually a role model like a drama director or a football coach. “They don’t want to disappoint the coach,” Whitman’s principal, Alan S. Goodman, told me. All he has to do to straighten out a misbehaving athlete is to threaten to talk to the coach, he said: “‘Oh no, don’t talk to the coach,’ they tell me.”

Extracurriculars also make school more palatable for a whole lot of kids who otherwise find it bleak or unsatisfying, Steinberg said. Grades improve not because of what kids are learning in the video club, but because the video club is making them enjoy school more, so they show up more often, find a circle of like-minded friends, and become more engaged in school.

Christopher Gdowski, Adams 12’s superintendent, echoed Steinberg when I asked him what he meant by “fearing the worst” if some afterschool activities are canceled. His district polled thousands of taxpayers as part of its budget process: A huge majority opposed eliminating all activities, but most agreed on trimming the number of activities each school could offer.

Gdowski said he worries that for “some meaningful number of kids,” those activities are what brings them to school. “That’s the hook,” he said, and budget cuts could leave that hook unbaited.

Penny-wise?

After years of steady increases in education spending, and with the expiry of federal stimulus funds, school districts are facing some unaccustomed belt-tightening this year. K–12 spending rose 39 percent between the 1989–90 and the 2007–2008 school years, according to the U.S. Census bureau, and hit $605 billion in 2009, the latest year for which it has reported numbers.

But the National Business Officers Association has calculated that spending is expected to be off $2.5 billion this year from a year earlier. Florida’s 2012 budget cut K–12 spending by 8 percent, or about $540 a student. Arizona cut $183 million from K–12; New York cut more than $1 billion, and Colorado cut $250 million, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The Center on Education Policy surveyed districts in the spring and found that 46 percent expect funding decreases of 5 percent or more in the 2011–12 school year (the poll asked districts about their “total funds available” for the year, excluding federal stimulus monies).

Staff salaries and benefits are taking much of the hit. But as bus routes, textbook purchases, and even cleaning supplies come under budget scrutiny, it’s no surprise that extracurriculars are in for some pain, too.

Diane M. Place, superintendent of the 1,700-student Towanda, Pennsylvania, school district, told me she received hate mail and “horrendous calls” when she recommended a $30-a-household tax increase to close a $2.2 million gap in her $24 million budget. Instead, she cut the instruction budget by 9 percent and then went after extracurriculars. She eliminated the rifle and junior robotics clubs, JV soccer, majorettes and one cheerleading squad, and halved the funding for the forensics team and Future Business Leaders.

The 1,000-student Salida, Colorado, school district, facing at least a $500,000 budget gap, moved to a four-day week, and then announced plans to cut Key Club, Math Counts, jazz, and weight lifting. Coos Bay, Oregon, planned to let go a Knowledge Bowl coach in the middle school and a forensics coach in high school after the district chopped $44,000 from its activities fund. Cincinnati is thinking of shifting all of its extracurriculars onto a community group, a move it predicted will save $250,000 a year, largely in teacher coaching stipends.

Extracurriculars teach a lot of the skills you need as an adult: time management, leadership. self-discipline, and persistence.

Or Pound-Foolish?

There’s no ready estimate of how much districts spend for extracurriculars: Districts account differently for teachers’ afterschool pay (it can be lumped in with merit pay, says Stephen Frank of Education Resource Strategies), whether they include team buses in the extracurricular budget, how much they depend on parents and booster clubs for field maintenance and stage-set construction, if and how much they charge students to participate, whether they use federal Title I funds for afterschool enrichment, and so on.

Marguerite Roza, who studies school finance at the University of Washington, calculates that districts spend about the same to suit up a youngster to play a sport as to enroll her in a semester of, say, history. A difference is that there are three seasons for sports, but two semesters for history.

Districts increasingly are depending on kids and their parents to fund extracurriculars. State laws, not national policy, determine which school expenses must be taxpayer-funded and which can be charged to students as user fees. California recently settled a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against dozens of Golden State schools that levied fees for classroom materials, lab fees, and afterschool activities.

But elsewhere, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association counts 33 states where at least some school districts charge athletes anywhere from $25 to $1,500. The band fee at Medina Senior High in Ohio is $200. Arlington, Massachusetts, public schools charge youngsters $405 to join the cheerleading squad and $480 to wrestle. Lakeville, Minnesota, charges $190 to join the debate team and $110 for the chess club.

Many of the best student-athletes, musicians, actors—even cheerleaders and debaters—already are paying lots more than that for private lessons. And some of the most talented spurn their school’s programs in favor of club soccer teams and community orchestras, arguments that budget cutters sometimes cite for trimming extracurriculars.

But Steinberg counters that no one suggests eliminating math classes for mediocre students, or depending on private tutors for calculus. “You could extend that argument out to its illogical extreme,” he said.

At Whitman High, where kids pay a $40 district-wide activities fee, Goodman told me he would rather increase class size than eliminate activities. “You can cope with an extra kid in your class, but at 2:10” when school lets out and intramural basketball is canceled, “what do they do?”

Police statistics offer one answer: Juvenile crime peaks between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. Education department data offer another: 31 percent of high-school seniors watched three or more hours of television every weekday in 2004, the last time the department ran the numbers, up from 9 percent in 1992.

Students write songs in an after-school program run by ZUMIX. The program offers young people the opportunity to travel thoughout New England, performing their original songs and engaging with other musicians.

Lessons That Last

Tony Wagner, codirector of the Change Leadership Group at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told me he did a focus group a decade ago with college students who graduated from a leading public high school in New England. He asked them what “important things” they remembered about high school, three to five years after leaving.

“They described all their experiences in extracurricular activities and sports. This went on for an hour,” he said. But about what the remembered from their academics, “they said, ‘you basically start over.’”

The takeaway, Wagner said, is that extracurriculars “teach a lot of the skills you need as an adult: time management, leadership, self-discipline, and persistence for doing work that isn’t extrinsically motivated.” That dovetails with Wagner’s academic work, which defines the “skills of the future” as including adaptability, leading by influence, and initiative.

“Kids who have a significant involvement in an extracurricular activity have a capacity for focus, self-discipline, and time management that I see lacking in kids who just went through school focused on their GPA,” he told me. Like Gardner and Duckworth, he doesn’t single out football players over the engineering team, or vice versa. The kind of activities “seems not to matter; what matters is the level of engagement,” he said.

I tested Wagner’s conclusion using an updated version of the focus group: I posted a question on the Facebook pages of my college-going sons. I asked their friends what they learned in high school that best prepared them for college, and received answers that were carbon copies of Wagner’s.

No one dumped on high school—“It’s not that I didn’t have fine teachers,” Andrew Snow e-mailed me—but no one credited AP chemistry with preparing them for college, either. In fact, no one mentioned classes at all. Instead, they wrote that extracurriculars introduced them to new ideas and interests, taught them to study more efficiently, developed their social skills, and exposed them to caring adults. “Coach was a maker of honorable men,” wrote Snow.

Justine Mrosak, a first-year medical student at the University of Minnesota, wrote that high school taught her “how to balance my academics with other passions.” Basketball and choir took time, she wrote. “But I didn’t want to give up doing the things that I loved just to get good grades, so I really learned how to schedule my time, prioritize my activities, and make my studying [as] efficient as possible.”

Steven Zuckerman, a pre-law major at the University of Michigan, wrote that “the most valuable thing” he learned was “to challenge my inhibitions by trying new things.” That meant playing sports “I had never tried before,” joining clubs “about things that I never thought would interest me,” and, inevitably, meeting “people with whom I never saw myself connecting.” That curiosity has followed him into college, where he has worked on political campaigns, he says.

I’d rise to the defense of Algebra I any day, and I assume any social scientist would, too. But, leadership, adaptability, social skills? Try a couple years on the school newspaper to learn that.

June Kronholz, a contributing editor, spent four years on her high-school newspaper and 30 years at the Wall Street Journal.

When the Best is Mediocre

Jay P. Greene — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 05:01:27 +0000

View the Global Report Card
View the Methodological Appendix
Video: Jay Greene discusses the study
Podcast: Marty West interviews Jay Greene about the Global Report Card

American education has problems, almost everyone is willing to concede, but many think those problems are mostly concentrated in our large urban school districts. In the elite suburbs, where wealthy and politically influential people tend to live, the schools are assumed to be world-class.

Unfortunately, what everyone knows is wrong. Even the most elite suburban school districts often produce results that are mediocre when compared with those of our international peers. Our best school districts may look excellent alongside large urban districts, the comparison state accountability systems encourage, but that measure provides false comfort. America’s elite suburban students are increasingly competing with students outside the United States for economic opportunities, and a meaningful assessment of student achievement requires a global, not a local, comparison.

We developed the Global Report Card (GRC) to facilitate such a comparison. The GRC enables users to compare academic achievement in math and reading between 2004 and 2007 for virtually every public school district in the United States with the average achievement in a set of 25 other countries with developed economies that might be considered our economic peers and sometime competitors. The main results are reported as percentiles of a distribution, which indicates how the average student in a district performs relative to students throughout the advanced industrialized world. A percentile of 60 means that the average student in a district is achieving better than 59.9 percent of the students in our global comparison group. (Readers can find all of the results of the Global Report Card at http://globalreportcard.org. The web site contains a full description of the method by which we calculated the results. For a summary, see the methodology sidebar.)

For the purposes of this article, we focus on the 2007 math results, although the GRC contains information for both math and reading between 2004 and 2007. We focus on 2007 because it is the most recent data set, and we focus on math because it is the subject that provides the best comparison across countries and is most closely correlated with economic growth. Readers should feel free to consult the GRC web site to find reading results as well as results for other years.

Methodology

The Global Report Card (GRC) builds on state accountabil- ity test results for the 13,636 school districts included in the American Institutes for Research (AIR) data set. The AIR data set is remarkably comprehensive inasmuch as the total number of school districts in the United States is estimated to be in the neighborhood of 14,000 districts. Given that AIR is a reputable research organization, we assume the data to be accurate.

Using the AIR data, we compute a student-weighted average across all grades of student performance on state accountability tests (under federal law, districts must test in grades 3-8, and once in high school). We place that aver- age achievement in each district on a normal distribution of achievement relative to other districts in each state.

Then, using results from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), we locate the center of each state’s distribution of achievement in math and reading relative to the average performance in the United States. The districts within states with averages that trail the U.S. average are shifted down by the amount that their state lags the national average, and the opposite is done for districts in states with averages that exceed the national one.

An international test of math and reading performance administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Programme for International Stu- dent Assessment (PISA), allows us to shift every district up or down relative to the results from the set of countries with developed economies. The results are expressed as a per- centile, indicating where the average student in each district would be ranked in academic performance among the set of global peers. A percentile ranking of 60 means that the aver- age student in a district performed better than 59.9 percent of students in the global comparison group.

To be included in this comparison group, countries had to have a 2007 per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of at least $24,000 and a population of at least 2 million, not be a member of OPEC, and have test results from PISA. Twenty-five countries met these criteria (see Table 1). Twenty-three countries had per-capita GDPs that signifi- cantly trailed the $45,597 of the United States. Some, such as Slovenia ($27,868) and Greece ($29,483), were roughly half as wealthy as the U.S. Only Norway ($53,968) and Singapore ($48,490) have higher per-capita wealth than the U.S. Overall, the countries with which we compare U.S. students are our major economic competitors. The perfor- mance of the comparison group was computed as the aver- age of those 25 countries.

Although our estimates are the best available and provide good approximations of relative student performance across districts, states and countries, they are not exact. We are comparing the performance of students who took different tests, in different grades, and sometimes in different years. We have to assume that the results on all tests are normally distributed and that achievement can be compared by shift- ing those entire distributions up or down in sync with the over- or underperformance of each district relative to U.S. and global averages. But since test performance correlates highly across tests and standardized achievement levels of groups of students change only slightly from one grade to the next and one year to the next, the assumptions we make are not particularly restrictive. Any particular school district may have dramatically improved—or slid dramatically backward— over a short period of time, but those instances are likely to be exceptional, as overall U. S. performance has changed only slightly in recent years.

The Example of Beverly Hills

It is critically important to compare exclusive suburban districts against the performance of students in other developed countries, as these districts are generally thought to be high-performing. The most wealthy and politically powerful families have often sought refuge from the ills of our education system by moving to suburban school districts. Problems exist in large urban districts and in low-income rural areas, elites often concede, but they have convinced themselves that at least their own children are receiving an excellent education in their affluent suburban districts.

Unfortunately, student achievement in many affluent suburban districts is worse than parents may think, especially when compared with student achievement in other developed countries. Take for example Beverly Hills, California. The city has a median family income of $102,611 as of 2000, which places it among the top 100 wealthiest places in the United States with at least 1,000 households. The Beverly Hills population is 85.1 percent white, 7.1 percent Asian, and only 1.8 percent black and 4.6 percent Hispanic. The city is virtually synonymous with luxury. A long-running television show featured the wealth and advantages of Beverly Hills high-school students (as well as their overly dramatic personal lives). If Beverly Hills is not the refuge from the ills of the education system that elite families are seeking, it’s not clear what would be.

But when we look at the Global Report Card results for the Beverly Hills Unified School District, we don’t see top-notch performance. The math achievement of the average student in Beverly Hills is at the 53rd percentile relative to our international comparison group. That is, one of our most elite districts produces students with math achievement that is no better than that of the typical student in the average developed country. If Beverly Hills were relocated to Canada, it would be at the 46th percentile in math achievement, a below-average district. If the city were in Singapore, the average student in Beverly Hills would only be at the 34th percentile in math performance.

Of course, people don’t think of Beverly Hills as a school district with mediocre student achievement. This is partly because people assume that affluent suburbs must be high achieving and partly because state accountability results inflate achievement by comparing affluent suburban school districts with large urban ones. According to California’s state accountability results, the average student in Beverly Hills is at the 76th percentile in math achievement relative to other students in the state. But outperforming students in Los Angeles, which is only at the 20th percentile in math relative to a global comparison group, should provide little comfort to Beverly Hills parents.

Los Angeles Unified is not the main source of competitors for Beverly Hills students, so the state accountability system encourages the wrong comparison. If Beverly Hills graduates are to have the kinds of jobs and lifestyles that their parents hope for them, they will have to compete with students from Canada, Singapore, and everywhere else. Beverly Hills students have to be toward the top of achievement globally if they expect to get top jobs and earn top incomes.

Results from Affluent Suburbs Nationwide

We can repeat the story of Beverly Hills all across the country. Affluent suburban districts may be outperforming their large urban neighbors, but they fail to achieve near the top of international comparisons (see Figure 1). White Plains, New York, in suburban Westchester County, is only at the 39th percentile in math relative to our global comparison group. Grosse Point, Michigan, outside of Detroit, is at the 56th percentile. Evanston, Illinois, the home of Northwestern University outside of Chicago, is at the 48th percentile in math. The average student in Montgomery County, Maryland, where many of the national government leaders send their children to school, is at the 50th percentile in math relative to students in other developed countries. The average student in Fairfax, Virginia, another suburban refuge for government leaders, is at the 49th percentile. Shaker Heights, Ohio, outside of Cleveland, is at the 50th percentile in math. The average student in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, is at the 66th percentile. Ladue, Missouri, a wealthy suburb of St. Louis, is at the 62nd percentile. And the average student in Plano, Texas, near Dallas, is at the 64th percentile in math relative to our global comparison group.

All of these communities are among the wealthiest in the United States. All are overwhelmingly white in their population. All of them are thought of as refuges from the dysfunction of our public school system. But the sad reality is that in none of them is the average student in the upper third of math achievement relative to students in other developed countries. Most of them are barely keeping pace with the average student in other developed countries, despite the fact that the comparison is to all students in the other countries, some of which have a per-capita gross domestic product that is almost half that of the United States. In short, many of what we imagine as our best school districts are mediocre compared with the education systems serving students in other developed countries.

Pockets of Excellence

While many affluent suburban districts have lower achievement than we might expect, some districts are producing very high achievement even when compared with that of students in other developed countries. For example, the average student in the Pelham school district in Massachusetts is at the 95th percentile in math. That means that if we were to relocate Pelham to another developed country in our comparison group, the average student in Pelham would outperform 95 percent of the students in math. That’s very impressive.

Of course, Pelham is a small district that is home to Amherst College, among other institutions of higher learning, and serves a rather select group of students. But not all college-town school districts are equally high achieving. As we have already seen, Evanston, Illinois, is at the 48th percentile in math in a global comparison. Palo Alto, California, the home of Stanford University, is at the 64th percentile. And the average student in Ann Arbor, Michigan, home to the University of Michigan, is at the 58th percentile in math relative to students in other developed countries. So, the 95th percentile math achievement in Pelham is outstanding, even for college towns.

Spring Lake, New Jersey, has a similarly impressive record of having the average student at the 91st percentile in math. It is a very small and affluent community on the New Jersey shore that has somehow escaped the influence of Snooki and The Situation. Waconda, Kansas, a small rural community, also is at the 91st percentile. Highland Park, Texas, an affluent community near Dallas, is at the 88th percentile.

Interestingly, of the top 20 U.S. public-school districts in math achievement, 7 are charter schools (some states treat charter schools as separate public-school districts). And most of the 13 traditional districts remaining are in rural communities rather than in a large suburban “refuge” from urban education ills.

Pools of Failure

In total, only 820 of the 13,636 public-school districts for which we have 2007 math results had average student achievement that would be among the top third of student performance in other developed countries. That is, 94 percent of all U.S. school districts have average math achievement below the 67th percentile. There aren’t that many truly excellent districts out there.

Of the 13,636 districts, 9,339, or 68 percent, have average student math achievement that is below the 50th percentile compared with that of the average student in other developed countries. Most of our large school districts are well below the 50th percentile. This is especially alarming, because these lower-performing large districts comprise a much greater share of the total student population than do the relatively small higher-performing districts.

The average student in the Washington, D.C., school district is at the 11th percentile in math relative to students in other developed countries. In Detroit, the average student is at the 12th percentile. In Milwaukee, the average student is at the 16th percentile. Cleveland is at the 18th percentile. The average student in Baltimore is at the 19th percentile in math relative to students in other developed countries. In Los Angeles, the average student is at the 20th percentile. The average student in Chicago is at the 21st percentile in math. Atlanta is at the 23rd percentile. The average student in New York City is at the 32nd percentile in math. And in Miami-Dade County, the average student is at the 33rd percentile in math.

Not 1 of the largest 20 school districts is above the 50th percentile in math relative to other developed countries. Those districts contain almost 5.2 million students or more than 10 percent of the country’s schoolchildren. The rare and small pockets of excellence in charter schools and rural communities are overwhelmed by large pools of failure.

Previous Research

The Global Report Card is not the first analysis to compare the performance of U.S. students to international peers. Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann (see “Teaching Math to the Talented,” features, Winter 2011) used a very similar method to compare the performance of students in each state to students in other countries and arrived at similarly gloomy conclusions. Using state NAEP results for 8th-grade students and PISA results for 15-year-olds internationally, the researchers focused on the percentage of students performing at an advanced level in math. In almost every state, they found that we had far fewer advanced students than most of the countries taking PISA. They also narrowed the comparison to white students in the U.S. and to students whose parents had a college education to show that even advantaged students in the U.S. failed to achieve at an advanced level in math relative to their international peers. More recently, Hanushek et al. updated their analysis to examine the percentage of students in each state and across countries performing at the proficient level in math and reading. The results were similarly disappointing.

The main difference between the GRC and the Hanushek et al. analyses is that in our study we push the comparison down to the district level. By focusing on white students and children of college-educated parents, Hanushek et al. clearly mean to convey that even students in elite suburban districts have mediocre achievement. Our contribution with the GRC is to name the districts so that people do not indulge the fantasy that their suburb’s record is somehow different from the disappointing performance of others with advantaged students in their state.

There are other important differences between the GRC and the Hanushek et al. analyses. We incorporate test results for U.S. students in all available grades (typically grades 3 through 8 and grade 10) rather than focusing on the grade closest to the 15-year-olds in the PISA sample. We could have focused only on 8th-grade results, as Hanushek et al. did, but in doing so we would have greatly reduced the number of test results on which we were doing the calculations for school districts. We preferred to gain precision in estimating the achievement in each district by increasing our sample size rather than restricting the sample to 8th graders in order to gain comparability in the age of the students under review.

The GRC analysis also differs from those of Hanushek et al. in that the latter focus on students performing at the advanced or proficient level, while we focused on the average student performance in both math and reading. Hanushek et al. concentrated on advanced or proficient performance because they were trying to compare our best students with the best abroad to show that even our best are mediocre. We did the same by highlighting the results for elite suburban school districts. Focusing on the average also avoids any dispute about how “advanced” or “proficient” are defined across different tests.

Gary Phillips at the American Institutes for Research has also conducted a series of analyses comparing state achievement on NAEP to international performance on a different international test, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Phillips arrives at somewhat less gloomy conclusions about U.S. performance, but that is because the countries included in TIMSS differ from those covered by PISA. Hanushek et al. rightly note that PISA provides a much more appropriate comparison for the U.S.: “Put starkly, if one drops from a survey countries such as Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, and New Zealand, and includes instead such countries as Botswana, Ghana, Iran, and Lebanon, the average international performance will drop, and the United States will look better relative to the countries with which it is being compared.”

This has sparked a debate among researchers about whether TIMSS or PISA provides a better set of countries against which we should compare the U.S. The Global Report Card circumvents this dispute by developing its own set of countries against which we compare U.S. students. The comparisons provided by TIMSS and PISA depend on which countries decide to take each test each time it is administered. And PISA scales its scores against the results for members of the OECD, which excludes countries like Singapore while including countries like Mexico. Our comparison group depends on PISA results, but it is also based on objective criteria, like per-capita GDP, to identify a set of developed economies that can be reasonably compared with that of the U.S. Our comparison group is a significant improvement on the self-selection of countries that choose to take a test as well as an improvement upon arbitrary membership in an organization like the OECD.

No Refuge

The elites, the wealthy families that have a disproportionate influence on politics, clearly recognize the dysfunction of large urban school districts and have sought refuge in affluent suburban districts for their own children. But the reality is that there are relatively few pockets of excellence to which these families can flee.

In four states, there is not a single traditional district with average student achievement above the 50th percentile in math. In 17 states, there is not a single traditional district with average achievement in the upper third relative to our global comparison group. And apart from charter school districts, in over half of the states, there are no more than three traditional districts in which the average achievement would be in the upper third.

The elites in those states have almost nowhere to find an excellent public education for their children. But state accountability systems and the desire to rationalize the lack of quality options have encouraged the elites to compare their affluent suburban districts to the large urban ones in their state. These inappropriate comparisons have falsely reassured them that their own school districts are doing well.

This false reassurance has also perhaps undermined the desire among the elites to engage in dramatic education reform. As long as the elites hold onto the belief that their own school districts are excellent, they have little desire to push for the kind of significant systemic reforms that might improve their districts as well as the large urban districts. They may wish the urban districts well and hope matters improve, but their taste for bold reform is limited by a false contentment with their own situation.

But the elites should not take comfort from the stronger performance of affluent suburban districts relative to large urban districts. As the Global Report Card reveals, even our best public-school districts are mediocre when compared with the achievement of students in a set of countries with developed economies.

Of course, the Global Report Card does not isolate the extent to which schools add or detract from student performance. Factors from student backgrounds, including their parents, communities, and individual characteristics, have a strong influence on achievement. But the GRC does tell us about the end result for student achievement of all of these factors, schools included. And that end result, even in our best districts, is generally disappointing.

Jay P. Greene is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute. Josh B. McGee is vice president for public accountability initiatives at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

A Different Role for Teachers Unions

Marc Tucker — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:14:34 +0000

PHOTO: Ms Marianne Heikkikä teaches physics in Tikkurila High School in Vantaa, Finland

American teachers unions are increasingly the target of measures, authored by friends and foes alike, intended to limit their power, or even eviscerate them. Looking at this scene, one would never guess that the countries that are among the top 10 in student performance have some of the strongest teachers unions in the world. Are those unions in some way different from American teachers unions? Do unions elsewhere behave differently from American teachers unions when challenged to do what is necessary to improve student performance? To explore these questions, I compare teachers and their unions in Ontario, Canada and Finland with their U.S. counterparts.

In the United States, the modern labor union grew out of bitter strife between workers and owners in the early years of the 20th century. The Wagner Act, passed in 1935, guaranteed workers the right to organize and strike. Modern labor relations date from the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which modified the Wagner Act mainly by defining the rights of employers in the framework it had provided. These laws applied only to workers in the private sector.

The Wagner and Taft-Hartley Acts reflected the mass-production systems that the United States embraced more fully than any other industrial nation. In this arrangement, management figured out how the work was going to get done; workers were regarded as interchangeable; and skilled craftsmanship was minimized. The “skill” was in the machine, not the person operating it. And because the work was largely unskilled, pay was low.

The Wagner and Taft-Hartley Acts gave workers the right to organize to bargain for wages and working conditions. They also obligated the unions to defend their members against management when conflicts arose. The assumption was that the relationship between the union and management would be adversarial; the laws provided the rules under which that adversarial relationship would be conducted. Courts later ruled that the unions and management could not collaborate.

In northern Europe at that time, the mass-production system was not so widely embraced, the era of the craftsman did not abate, and work was less routinized and rule-bound than in the United States.

After World War II, management and owners in many Western European countries wanted to deny communism any opportunity to gain ground among workers, and so they gave labor a seat at the table. Thus three “social partners”—government, labor, and management—would frame social policy together, as equals. In many countries, the law also provided for work councils made up of workers elected by their peers at the firm level to adjust the national agreement to local conditions.

Indeed, in countries with labor parties in Europe today, it is not unusual for the labor party, when in power, to put a brake on wage growth in order to forestall inflation, or to resist calls for more benefits when productivity growth does not justify increased benefits.

In many European countries, by law, workers sit on the boards of directors of major firms. When that happens, workers sometimes offer to hold wages steady or even reduce them if management agrees to invest the savings in capital or in research and development. Workers understand that if the firm cannot make the investments required to be more competitive, it may resort to layoffs.

Senior European executives are often puzzled when their American counterparts talk about a desire to greatly weaken or even eliminate trade unions. The Europeans, while often eager to acquire more power vis-à-vis their unions, do not generally talk about eliminating them. They view the unions as an instrument for giving a voice to a key sector of the society. They generally believe that if labor were not provided a voice through the union, it might eventually become a direct threat to democratic capitalism.

The Case of American Teachers

Prior to the 1960s, the National Education Association (NEA) was an alliance of educators, not a teachers union. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), founded in 1916, had always been a union, but it was much smaller, and not particularly militant. But, during the ’60s, teachers’ compensation declined significantly relative to that of other occupations requiring a similar level of education. In the racial battles of the era, teachers were sometimes made the target of public anger in a way that was unprecedented and seemed quite threatening. As a result, the AFT became appealing to many teachers to whom it had not been before. The NEA shed those members who were not classroom teachers and traded its identity as a professional organization for a new one as a trade union.

The newly energized teachers unions appealed to the AFL-CIO for help in getting state legislatures to pass laws that put teachers on much the same footing as those in unions representing workers in the private sector. The AFL-CIO was stronger then than it is now, and the teachers could put more feet on the ground in legislative political campaigns than any other single constituency. This was particularly true in the northern part of the country, where organized labor was strongest at the state level.

In the beginning, the lawyers that management hired were happy to negotiate contracts that closely followed common practice in the industrial sector. Some of these provisions simply made a teacher’s life a little easier, like lunchtime free of student responsibilities. But others had major consequences for the quality of teachers and for instruction. Among the most important of these provisions were those defining the hours of work, using seniority to determine who could transfer to jobs within the system as they opened up, and the order in which people would be laid off when staff size was reduced.

Many now think of these seniority-based rules as the result of collective bargaining. But such practices began in other industries in the 1920s—before there was any national legislation mandating collective bargaining—and were part and parcel of the mass-production workplace. Management wanted rules that were easy to administer, and, in a world in which all workers were treated as interchangeable, such a system worked well for managers in most industries.

In the case of the schools, management’s attorneys, like management’s attorneys everywhere, saw these demands as reasonable, because they were easy to administer and cost the district no money. But the organizational costs were substantial. Although the unions knew this, the school boards’ attorneys apparently did not. Thus, school boards and management gave away control over who could be hired in a school, who could fill leadership positions, how much time was available for professional development, and much, much more.

Few citizens were aware of the significance of the concessions that school boards made to unions over the years. Both school boards and the unions greatly feared teacher strikes, knowing that there were few things that could anger parents as much as not being able to put their children in school when they had to go off to work in the morning. While the teachers unions could seek higher compensation at the negotiating table, they quickly discovered that they would lose public support if the school board sought the authority to pay for raises by floating new bonds, for example. So the unions and the boards often settled their differences by negotiating changes in “working conditions,” thereby avoiding teacher strikes.

When times were tough, it was often easier for both management and labor to negotiate increased benefits, particularly retirement benefits, than increased cash compensation, because, again, the public focused on current costs rather than on obligations that would not have to be paid for many years. The unions typically negotiated benefits that would be most attractive to their longest-serving members. Over time, the compensation package got more and more expensive but less and less attractive to talented young people making decisions about which occupation to pursue.

Over the course of several decades, teachers unions in the United States progressively constrained management’s ability to select staff, promote staff, deploy staff, discipline staff, train staff, and let staff go when they were not doing the job. In the context of American-style labor relations, and the politics of American schooling, this was probably inevitable. The adversarial model of labor relations embodied in the national labor laws initially applied only to the private sector, but when President Kennedy, in an executive order, allowed members of the federal workforce to organize, state legislators adopted the private-sector model for public employees. Public-sector unions were told by their attorneys that their members could sue if they did not defend the teachers in court against school district management seeking to deprive them of their jobs. So the union lawyers routinely made it as difficult as possible to fire teachers, even those widely regarded as incompetent. Given the adversarial nature of the relationship, there was never any real possibility of teachers accepting joint responsibility for student performance outcomes, as was the case with unions in northern Europe, where the relationship has never been hostile. In the United States, student performance was the responsibility of management, not labor.

Today, American teachers want to be viewed as professionals, but their experience tells them they need their membership in the union and the clout that they have in the state legislature, even in states that do not allow them to organize. Without the unions, they might lose ground economically and be at the mercy of management that often does not treat them as professionals.

The Collaborative Model

These dynamics set the stage for the current confrontation in the United States between the unions and the teachers on one side and, increasingly, school district management, legislatures, governors, and the public on the other.

The unions are perceived to be standing in the way of badly needed reforms, protecting incompetent teachers, and putting up barricades to prevent the erosion of pension benefits the public can no longer afford. But as the unions come under increasing assault, teachers see themselves being blamed for system failures that should be attributed to others, including school boards, parents who are not supporting their children’s learning, and politicians who preside over a society in which an ever-greater number of students come to school unprepared to learn. It is hardly surprising that teachers and their unions are circling the wagons to salvage as much as possible of what they have gained since the 1960s.

It does not have to be this way.

Finland is famously a world leader in student performance. It also has some of the strongest unions in the world, and that includes its teachers unions. More than any other advanced industrial nation, Finland’s education strategy is to give teaching the highest status and make it the most desirable job in the country. The winning combination is top-quality recruits, first-rate training, and teachers with the kind of autonomy—read trust—typically accorded to other professionals but rarely to teachers. There are no top-down accountability systems in Finland, with their implied distrust of teachers, of the sort that dominate the discussion in the United States. It is hard to say which came first, the trust in the teachers or their quality, but they clearly go hand in hand. Finland’s teachers and their unions have not engaged in confrontational politics; the unions have been at the reform table for years as essential social partners.

In Ontario, Canada, one of the great PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) success stories, the current provincial administration took over from one that had instituted a province-wide curriculum and matching assessments, along with a tough accountability system. But the Conservative government that put these policies in place had gone to war with the teachers and their unions, cutting funding, reducing professional development by half, and taking out television ads demonizing teachers. The result was a highly polarized environment, with teachers resorting to strikes and lockouts to defend what they could of their prerogatives, and no improvement in student performance.

The administration that took office in 2003 reversed course. Premier Dalton McGuinty took the view that he was not going to get the kind of student performance he was looking for if he did not have the trust and confidence of the teachers, and he would never gain their trust by continuing the war that the previous administration had begun. He and his top aides spent a lot of time to talking with teachers in classrooms and school lunchrooms. They brought teachers and their unions to the table for discussions of education reform strategy and won their trust by listening hard to what the teachers had to say and then providing the needed support. The reform strategy that they adopted assumed that teachers wanted to do the right thing but lacked the capacity to do it. So the McGuinty government focused on building that capacity. By trading trust for manifest distrust, the McGuinty government laid the base for the collaborative relationship with teachers and their unions that it saw as the prerequisite for improving student performance.

American Translation

What can one reasonably conclude from this comparative description of the development of unions in the United States and northern Europe and the approaches taken to reform in Canada and Finland?

My conclusion is that the current impulse to curtail the influence of the teachers unions may return some powers to management that over the years have gravitated to the unions. But that victory is likely to come at the price of deeply alienating many teachers from the larger cause of education reform.

Teachers know that if they lose their unions during a fiscal crisis, they will have no protection at all as long as state and local officials face enormous pressure to cut teaching jobs, compensation, and benefits. A determined, widespread effort to weaken or destroy the institution teachers are counting on to protect them economically will force them into retirement or to hunker down and wait in brooding resentment for a change in the political weather.

As we have seen, this is precisely what happened when they came under a similar attack in Ontario, Canada. That is hardly a formula for successful education reform.

The alternative is the one taken by Ontario’s premier McGuinty: convince the teachers that they have the trust of government and enlist their unions in seeking to improve student performance. As the Ontario case shows, this does not mean that government has to give the unions whatever they want. McGuinty certainly did not do that: He made it clear where his bottom lines were. He insisted on a strong curriculum, competitive standards, and new assessments that matched them. And he was not about to break the bank.

But he invited the teachers and their unions to the table. He listened to them with respect. Where they told him that they needed support to improve outcomes for students, he supplied it wherever he could. The mutual trust that grew out of this relationship persuaded the teachers and unions to make concessions that they would never have willingly made under savage attack.

Reforming the Contract

Management will have to revisit the provisions of the contracts that school boards have negotiated over the years. Concessions will be necessary on unfunded retirement plans and on the use of seniority to govern many aspects of school-district operations. The more-or-less-unexamined move to apply the structures of the Wagner Act and the Taft-Hartley Act to the public sector needs to be reassessed. State labor legislation that mimics national labor law in its insistence on a confrontational stance between management and labor should be rewritten.

Getting to where these issues can be productively addressed requires first a relationship of trust between government and labor. Each side says that experience has taught them not to trust the other party, and so each states that trust depends on the other side making the first concessions. Someone has to go first.

Some will argue that the possibilities represented by the European model are simply not available in the United States. But our politics are not so different from those of Canada. The idea of American exceptionalism—the notion that the United States is so different from the rest of the world that lessons learned elsewhere do not apply here—had a certain allure when we were far ahead of our competitors. But it is very dangerous for a country that is falling further and further behind.

Marc Tucker is president of the National Center on Education and the Economy and editor of Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems (Harvard Education Press, November 2011).

The International Experience

Carlos Xabel Lastra-Anadón — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 12:05:41 +0000

Photos: Additional images from the Education Next – PEPG conference “Learning from the International Experience” can be found here.

Undoubtedly, the United States has much to learn from education systems in other countries. Once the world’s education leader, the U.S. has seen the percentage of its high-school students who are proficient trail that of 31 other countries in math and 16 countries in reading, according to a recent study by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) (see “Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” features, Fall 2011). Whereas only 32 percent of U.S. 8th graders are proficient in math, 50 percent of Canadian students and nearly 60 percent of Korean and Finnish students perform at that level. It may be misleading to point out that 75 percent of Shanghai’s students are proficient, as that Chinese province is the nation’s most advanced, but in Massachusetts, the highest-achieving of the states, only 51 percent of the students are proficient in math.

Given these performance disparities, it is only natural to think that there is something to be learned from practices elsewhere. Yet it is not easy to figure out what institutions and practices will translate into a different cultural milieu or how to do it. In the larger world of governmental constitutions, efforts to insert U.S. arrangements into distant political cultures have failed more often than not. Much the same could happen in reverse if the United States attempted to fix its schools simply by copying something that seems to work elsewhere.

It is tempting to undertake an in-depth study of those places that are performing at the highest levels—China’s Shanghai province, Korea, Finland, Singapore, Japan, the Netherlands, and Canada, for example. But a proper comparison requires that one contrast what successful countries do with the mistakes made by the less successful ones. International comparisons should look at information from all countries and adjust for factors that affect student performance, even though such rigorous studies typically face their own challenges, including collecting the requisite data. Moreover, countries are different across so many dimensions (from the political system to the cultural prestige of the teaching profession) that it is typically difficult to attribute differences between countries to any specific factors.

For these reasons, learning from international experience can be a bit like reading tea leaves: People are tempted to see in the patterns whatever they think they should see. But for all the hazards associated with drawing on international experience, the greatest risk lies in ignoring such information altogether. Steadfastly insisting that the United States is unique and that nothing is to be learned from other lands might appeal to those on the campaign trail. But it is a perilous course of action for those who wish to understand—and improve—the state of American education. If nothing else, reflection on international experience encourages one to think more carefully about practices and proposals at home. It is not so much specific answers that come from conversing with educators from around the world, as it is gaining some intellectual humility. Such conversations provide opportunities to learn the multiple ways in which common questions are posed and answered, and to consider how policies that have proved successful elsewhere might be adapted to the unique context of U.S. education.

That, perhaps, is the signal contribution of the August 2011 conference on “Learning from the International Experience,” sponsored by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. Many who attended said the conference had sparked conversations well beyond the usual boundaries on thinking about U.S. education policy, whether the issue was teacher reforms, school choice, the development of common standards and school accountability, or the promise of learning online.

Need to Take Action

Anthony Miller and Susan Patrick

The conference opened with an urgent call from U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education Anthony Miller that action be taken. He highlighted two aspects of Harvard’s PEPG study in his remarks. First, by showing the dismal performance of students from families in which a parent has a college education, “the findings…debunk the myth that the mediocre performance of U.S. students on international tests is due simply to the presence of large numbers of disadvantaged students.” Indeed, the study shows that the percent proficient among U.S. students whose parents are college-educated or who are white is significantly less than the percent proficient among all students in countries such as Korea, Singapore, and Finland. Second, by breaking out results for every state, it shows that “the U.S. education system is comprised of 50 state systems, and therefore we must look at our performance on a state-by-state basis.”

Hoover Institution scholar Eric Hanushek built on Miller’s remarks by reporting that, according to work he did with University of Munich economist Ludger Woessmann, the United States could boost its annual GDP growth rate by more than 1 percentage point annually by raising student math performance to levels currently attained in countries such as Canada and Korea. That kind of increase in economic productivity could, over the long run, boost the U.S. economy by trillions of dollars. According to Hanushek, “the impact of the current recession on the economy is dwarfed” by the magnitude of the loss in wealth that has at its root subpar U.S. education performance.

Hanushek was careful to state that the goal was not to strengthen U.S. performance at the expense of other nations: The creation of well-educated citizens does not constitute a “a zero-sum game that countries or states are playing against each other,” but one in which every country and state can become more productive, and create more wealth for one another by boosting and sharing their talents. The United States can welcome the higher Canadian, Finnish, Korean, and Chinese performances even as those accomplishments make a compelling case for “changing the direction the United States is going.”

Further developing the case for reform, University of Arkansas scholars Jay P. Greene and Josh P. McGee (see “When the Best Is Mediocre,” features, page 34) provided conference participants with a glimpse of their new report, which identifies the international standing of nearly every school district in the United States. “People tend to think their own districts are OK,” even when the United States as a whole appears to be doing badly, Greene said. “But they really are not.” Even in expensive suburbs, student performance does not look very good from an international perspective, they said. “There is no refuge for ‘elite’ families in this country.” Greene and McGee reported that in 17 states they were unable to find a single district that performed at levels comparable to those reached by students in the world’s leading countries.

Teachers and Teaching

Mona Mourshed

Offering hope that urgent action can be taken, Mona Mourshed told the conference that she and her colleagues at McKinsey & Company have shown that “systems can achieve significant gains in as short a time as six years.” Mediocre systems can become much better, and “those that are good can become great.” In her view, there are “clusters of interventions” that are appropriate for each stage of system development, and for each one, the key driver of change is teachers. The most important factor for every system’s journey of transformation, she said, is to develop teachers’ capabilities to their full potential. And others agreed. As New Jersey’s chief education officer Christopher Cerf put it, “The single greatest in-school variable driving [learning] outcomes is the quality of the teacher.”

But how can we ensure high-quality instruction? According to Mourshed, much depends on the stage a school system has reached. If a system is mediocre and has only low-performing teachers, then it can make the most progress through strong administrative actions that identify clear expectations for teachers and are fairly prescriptive. This may involve scripted teaching materials, monitoring of the time teachers devote to each task, and regular visits by master teachers or school inspectors. But, as the performance of the system rises and the teaching force reaches a higher level of quality, it can move “from good to great” by giving those teachers both greater autonomy and support. Among other things, great school systems decentralize pedagogical methods to schools and teachers, and put in place incentives for frontline educators to share innovative practices across schools. “Teacher teams” collaborate to push the quality and customization of classroom materials even further, and the educators rotate throughout the system, spreading peer learning and enriching mentorship opportunities.

Fernando Reimers of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education said that most teachers are trained in academic programs that have low prestige and are far removed from the activities of the classroom. Students in these programs are asked to think about sociological, psychological, and policy issues rather than to discuss what it takes to teach a particular lesson effectively. In this regard, schools of education are unlike other professional schools. He gave the example of business schools, which are increasingly asked to link instruction directly to the work future managers will be expected to do. Reimers urged that education-training programs combine mastery of the subject matter, needed especially today in math and science, with the ability to adapt teaching to different learners, to use technology effectively, and to enable project-based learning and teamwork.

In making these points, Reimers built on the presentation on Finnish training programs given by Jari Lavonen of the University of Helsinki. Advanced training at an education school in Finland is “more popular than medical school,” Lavonen told conference participants. Those admitted are a select group, and acceptance virtually guarantees a well-compensated and prestigious career. Rigorous training programs expect future teachers to demonstrate content knowledge in both a major and a minor subject, research competence, and classroom effectiveness. He admitted that the pedagogical research component was often contested by students (“we are teachers, not researchers”), but, he says, alumni later tell him that it was one of the most valuable parts of their educational experience. In his view, it is this component that enables them to tackle complex classrooms situations effectively later on. But, Lavonen cautioned, the system works in Finland only because the political situation was stable enough that the country was able to take “consistent decisions over the course of 40 years.”

Gwang-Jo Kim

Gwang-Jo Kim, former education vice-minister in Korea and current head of UNESCO in Thailand, also stressed the quality of those entering the teaching profession. Koreans are known for their “high regard for teachers and for the teaching profession.” Primary-school teacher-training programs receive many more applicants than there are spaces. There are multiple routes to certification as a secondary-school teacher, but the chances of getting a job are as low as 5 percent, as positions are avidly sought. Similarly, in Singapore, applicants to teacher-training programs are carefully selected, with a large proportion coming from the top 30 percent of the college population.

Kim said the Korean and Singapore success stories could not be understood apart from deep-seated cultural factors. The demand for teacher excellence comes from parents, who want their children to do well on national examinations that determine future education and occupational opportunities. As a result, teachers are under a lot of pressure. With unionization of the teaching profession in Korea, Kim wonders whether the current model can be sustained.

Building on these insights, White House education adviser Roberto Rodríguez reported that the Obama administration is developing models of teacher mentorship and induction that will support new recruits into the profession and renew teacher-preparation programs. “We don’t have a system that recruits talent. There is not a high bar for ed schools,” Rodríguez said. In addition, he emphasized the current lack of high-quality professional development for teachers and adequate mentorship for new teachers. Rodríguez confirmed the administration’s intention to create differentiated tracks for master teachers, administrators, and specialist teachers, in which teacher compensation is tied to progress on those tracks. Currently, he stated, “we lose too many good teachers to administration.” Underlining a point made by Deputy Secretary Miller, Rodríguez reminded the conference that, to be effective, change must come not only from the federal government but from “high levels of energy at the state and local level.”

Agreeing that state action is vital, New Jersey’s Christopher Cerf told conference participants that successful education systems do the same thing high-quality businesses strive to do: recruit from the very best, maximize the productivity of employees, evaluate responsibly and helpfully, deploy its workforce where it can be most helpful, and have a clear talent-retention strategy. But in the United States, he said, “We do all of these things badly in education. We recruit from whatever the ed schools give us, there is no productivity angle and no pay for results. We have taken the view that doing teacher evaluations is so hard that we should do nothing at all, and our retention strategy amounts to saying to high-performing teachers, ‘please stay.’” To change that system and lift the quality of the teaching force to international levels won’t be easy, cautioned Gerard Robinson, Florida’s chief education officer. “It is all about brute political force; the rest is a rounding error.”

Jason Glass, director of the Department of Education for the state of Iowa, reminded the audience that “we cannot take the challenges one at a time if they refuse to stay in line.” Glass said his priority is to alter the “one-minute interviews” used to make decisions on teacher hiring in too many school districts. He also seeks to improve the mentorship that teachers receive in their first year of teaching, which he says is virtually nonexistent in parts of his state. He plans to introduce more sophisticated systems that will identify—and retrain or remove—the state’s least-capable teachers. In reforming Iowa’s public school system, he intends to get beyond the prevalent false dichotomies, such as “cash for test scores versus step-and-lane compensation” and “due process versus random firing.” Performance measures able to identify the least capable teachers can and should be found. He concluded with a hopeful warning: “Watch out for Iowa over the next few years.”

Choice and Autonomy

Shengchang Tang

Hindering the conversation on school choice was the fact that the mechanisms for choice in the United States do not resemble the choice mechanisms elsewhere. In the United States, private schools receive little government aid (except for transportation, lunch programs, and, in a few places, school vouchers), whereas in most other countries governments fund private schools at levels close to those for state-run schools. Charter schools are privately operated schools that are funded by the government, but they may not teach religion, while government-funded private schools in most other countries may do so.

Avis Glaze, former superintendent of the Ontario education system, correctly observed that Canada does not have charter schools, but others mentioned that the large number of religious schools that are both government-funded and subject to state regulation give Canadians even more choice than exists in the United States.

The conversation was also shaped by the recent release of a study by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the same agency that collected the international data on which the PEPG report was based. According to the PISA study, international experience suggests that nothing is to be gained from expanding the private sector in education. Students in private schools do no better than students in public schools, once differences in family background characteristics are taken into account.

That finding, said Martin West, assistant professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, is both misleading and, paradoxically, exactly what one should expect. When undertaking an international analysis of school choice, he argued, one should not compare the effectiveness of the public and private sectors but should instead look at the extent to which competition between the two sectors affects the achievement of all the students in the country, regardless of whether they go to public or private school. In countries such as high-achieving Netherlands, a large percentage of students attend private schools, with government paying the tuition. In countries such as low-performing Spain, only a few students attend private school. Other countries fall in between these two extremes. Using a sophisticated statistical technique, West showed that all students in a country learned more when the private sector was larger. Specifically, the study by West and his colleague found that an increase in the share of private school enrollment of 10 percentage points was associated with better than a quarter of a year’s worth of learning in math, though somewhat less in reading. Moreover, this increase in performance takes place within school systems that spend 6 percent less overall.

A degree of choice can be introduced in the state sector if decisionmaking is shifted to the school level, as has been done in Ontario, Glaze said. The U.S. Department of Education should provide support and oversight to local decisions and push specific “nonnegotiable” programs, such as the literacy program Ontario implemented in the 2000s. Paul Pastorek, Louisiana’s former chief education officer, agreed that the Ontario experiment had been successful but said the United States needed a different approach. The story of school reform has too often been one of a strong district or state leader driving reform until the end of her tenure, with stagnation afterward. Only the powers of competition embedded within a system can lead to sustained improvements. “The problem is that we don’t know how to leverage competitive forces in the multibillion-dollar business that is education in this country,” said Pastorek. “Our education system is a communist system; we don’t have anything that relates what we pay for resources to the economic value they generate.”

The introduction of competition in New Orleans, where 85 percent of the schools are now charter schools, said Pastorek, provided a foundation for continued reform and improvement. But choice works only if choice systems are equitable, schools are held accountable by the state or school district, and parents are given readily understandable information about school quality. In the view of many, a great system would be one in which through the power of competitive forces, as Pastorek described, states create a system that “self-corrects, self-challenges, and self-innovates” to achieve better results for children.

State Standards and Accountability

Avis Glaze

Common standards and tests that evaluate performance against those standards are to be found in most of the countries that are performing better than the United States, whether they be in Europe or Asia. Shengchang Tang, principal of the Shanghai High School (the leading high school in China), said that the standards and examinations in the Shanghai province are a powerful tool that parents use to exert pressure on their children as well as on teachers and principals. (These particular standards and exams do not extend to the whole of China, which is deemed too large to have a single set of exams.) In his view, that pressure focuses attention in schools and fuels the drivers of the successful Shanghai education system, including higher investments, a high-caliber teaching force, and a strategy tailored to the specific situation faced by each school.

Tang questioned whether common standards would be effective in the very different U.S. context. Specifically, he was skeptical that such standards would catalyze more effective parent pressure on U.S. schools, given parents’ comparatively low expectations of their children and their schools. In contrast, in a recent poll in Shanghai, 85 percent of parents declared that they expected their children to be in the top 15 percent of their age cohort. Standardized exams, in Tang’s view, serve as a necessary tool to measure reality against these high expectations. For Angus MacBeath, former school commissioner in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, however, setting high standards in his home province allowed him to “tell the ugly truth,” and it was the necessary first step toward Alberta’s journey of educational improvement. Common standards allow parents, educators, and policymakers to be clear about current achievement levels so they can act on that knowledge.

This is perhaps the reason the Obama administration has lent its support to the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which has been embraced as a reform solution by 44 states and the District of Columbia. Still, many wondered with James Stergios of the Pioneer Institute in Boston whether one can set standards capable of driving high performance nationwide in a country that has great regional disparities in student achievement and a decentralized governmental system (where schools are “radically local,” as one panelist put it). Declaring himself “a massive opponent of common standards,” Stergios argued that the excellence achieved by Massachusetts so far could not be sustained if nationwide standards were substituted for state ones.

Gerard Robinson began his comments by acknowledging that he was chief education officer in Virginia while that state was opposed to common standards and is now chief in Florida, which is committed to common standards. He offered two reasons for embracing common standards: 1) students must compete with those in other states and, indeed, with students all over the world, and 2) companies need common standards in order to compare job applicants. “The difficult part is not to have consensus on having common standards,” he observed, “but on how to work on the political process to achieve them.”

In the end, the standards issue seemed to turn on the questions raised by Shanghai’s Shengchang Tang. Could the United States create common standards that were high enough to spur high achievement? While “having high state standards makes a big difference to underprivileged people,” as Christopher Cerf put it, common standards might be set too low and so, contrary to what the PEPG report showed, may not serve to raise standards of achievement when U.S. students are compared to their peers in high-achieving countries. He reminded the group that the same political context exists today as existed when No Child Left Behind was crafted. As prescribed in that legislation, every child was supposed to be proficient, but to comply with federal expectations many states “dumbed down” their definition of student proficiency.

Digital Learning

Paul Pastorek and Tony Bennett

In her opening remarks for the panel on digital learning, New Mexico’s chief education officer Hanna Skandera stressed that the new technologies provided new opportunities to address together all the reforms under discussion. Digital learning that exploits online courses and broadband capabilities can expand choice for students, ensure transparency and accountability for courses offered online, and create opportunities for many more students to come into contact with the very best teachers. Further, it can serve as a catalyst for higher standards and can do all this without driving up the cost of education.

Shantanu Prakash, of Educomp Solutions, informed the audience about the business he started and now heads in India. Educomp serves more than 12 million students in India alone and operates in a number of other developing countries where traditional schools have limited resources and set low standards for instruction. Educomp targets schools with products it says are not only inexpensive but user-friendly and easily combined with traditional classroom instruction. “The whiteboard can be used with millions of modules that are very good, that will support any teacher,” he noted. Prakesh expects the demand for his products to grow rapidly, as “the pressure of parents will make the introduction of digital materials into the learning of children in a meaningful way inevitable.” It is an obvious means for parents with high expectations all over India to ensure that their children receive high-quality instruction, in a context of scarce resources and low teaching standards.

Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the International Association for K–12 Online Learning (iNACOL), agreed: “Education is no longer a cottage and local industry,” but one in which true competition can thrive, improving standards and driving productivity gains. Digital learning can give students greater choice, even down to the specific instructor for a particular course. Digital learning is a growing reality in many other countries. Citing numerous references, Patrick told of its widespread adoption across the world. In Singapore, for example, all schools blend online learning with classroom instruction, and the country’s schools of education have made online instructional techniques an integral part of the curriculum. South Korea is once again a leader, and virtual education has become a rapidly growing industry, partly to reduce the cost to parents of the “cram schools” that families expect their adolescent children to attend.

Also participating in the conference was Julie Young, president and CEO of the Florida Virtual School (FLVS), the leading example of digital learning in the United States. Since its beginnings in 1996, FLVS has grown steadily and currently has nearly 200,000 course enrollments. The reasons for its success, according to Young, include student access to teachers seven days a week and beyond the regular school day, choice in assignments, and a constantly improving curriculum and instruction that is transparent to administrators, parents, and outsiders.

The main barrier to the spread of digital learning in the United States, iNACOL’s Patrick noted, are “policies that were created 30 to 40 years ago for a different world. Digital teachers cannot easily be qualified in multiple states, funding follows student and sometimes physical attendance, and there are no common standards across states that would reduce the costs of development.” Only when those policies are upgraded purposefully to accommodate and encourage a different kind of classroom environment will digital learning become an integral part of the American education system.

Tea Leaves or Tea?

Jari Lavonen

So what did the conference brew? No one can make the case that the conference provided secret bullets for school reform in the United States, and most every conference participant would agree that the particulars of the United States make it difficult to introduce wholesale many of the practices that have been successful abroad. Popular culture shows little appreciation for the educated citizen; a decentralized government arrangement with multiple veto points precludes rapid innovation; and education politics is marked by antipathy between teachers unions and school reformers. But a nuanced assessment of the conversation allows for at least preliminary conclusions that go beyond a simple call for urgent action:

• Teacher selection, teacher training, teacher evaluation, and teacher retention in the United States can be done much better than it is being done today. While no country has exactly the right model for the United States, none of the successful systems leave good teaching simply to chance the way the United States does.

• School choice plays a bigger—and perhaps more successful—role in the world’s educational experience than is usually recognized. It should not be seen as a threat but rather as an incentive for improvement for the public education system.

• Standards and testing systems that hold students accountable for their performance are part and parcel of most, if not all, of the world’s top education systems. If the United States has a heterogeneity that precludes the adoption of a uniform examination system as those found in Korea, Singapore, and in many parts of Canada, that provides no reason not to set clearer, and higher, expectations for students than is commonly the case.

• Digital learning has yet to prove itself fully and to develop into an integrated paradigm-shifting approach, but early stories of success are promising, provided digital learning respects the principles of transparency, accountability, and choice for students.

More than reaching any specific conclusion, the conference was most successful in inspiring participants with a renewed understanding of and dedication to their common commitment to a better system of education. The commitment is now informed by the experience of other countries with similar challenges that have managed, through sustained and consistent policies (as the Finnish representative, Jari Lavonen, insisted) to find solutions.

Carlos X. Lastra-Anadón is a research fellow at the Program on Education Policy and Governance. Paul E. Peterson is director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Studying Teacher Moves

Michael Goldstein — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 11:01:49 +0000

In July 2011, Bill Gates told the Wall Street Journal, “I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts…. I’m enough of a scientist to want to say, ‘What is it about a great teacher?’”

As a “practitioner” of sorts, I’ve wondered the same thing for 15 years. The K–12 school sector generates little empirical research of any sort. And of this small amount, most is targeted to policymakers and superintendents, and concerns such matters as the effects of class size reduction, charter school attendance, or a merit-pay program for teachers. Why is there virtually no empirical education research meant to be consumed by the nation’s 3 million teachers, answering their questions?

Those 3 million teachers generate about 2 billion hour-long classes per year. We do not know empirically which “teacher moves,” actions that are decided by individual teachers in their classrooms, are most effective at getting students to learn. Why doesn’t this kind of research get done?

Mr. Gates has part of the answer. Money. For 2011, the Microsoft R&D budget is $9.6 billion, out of total revenue in the $60 billion range. The U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) represents only a fraction of total education research, but its budget gives some perspective: IES spends about $200 million on research compared to more than $600 billion of total K–12 spending. So, 15 percent to upgrade Microsoft, 0.03 percent to upgrade our nation’s schools. And while Microsoft’s research is targeted to the bottom line ($8.6 billion is on cloud computing, the profit center of the future), IES spends almost nothing examining the most important aspect of schools: the decisions and actions that individual teachers control or make.

One IES project is the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), established in 2002 to provide “a central and trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education.” The WWC web site lists topic areas like beginning reading, adolescent literacy, high school math, and the like. For each topic, WWC researchers summarize and evaluate the rigor of published studies of products and interventions. One might find on the WWC site evidence on the relative effectiveness of middle-school math curricula or of strategies to encourage girls in science, for example.

But there is almost nothing examining the thousands of moves teachers must decide on and execute every school day. Should I ask for raised hands, or cold-call? Should I give a warning or a detention? Do I require this student to attend my afterschool help session, or make it optional? Should I spend 10 minutes grading each five-paragraph essay, 20 minutes, or just not pay attention to time and work on each until it “feels” done?

And the WWC’s few reviews of research on teacher moves aren’t particularly helpful. A 63-page brief on the best teaching techniques identifies precisely two with “strong evidence”: giving lots of quizzes and asking deep questions. An 87-page guide on reducing misbehavior has five areas of general advice that “research supports,” but no concrete moves for teachers to implement. It reads, “[Teachers should] consider parents, school personnel, and behavioral experts as allies who can provide new insights, strategies, and support.” What does not exist are experiments with results like this: “A randomized trial found that a home visit prior to the beginning of a school year, combined with phone calls to parents within 5 hours of an infraction, results in a 15 percent drop in the same misbehavior on the next day.” If that existed, perhaps teachers would be more amenable to proposals like home visits.

By contrast, a fair number of medical journals get delivered to my house. They’re for my wife, an oncologist. They’re practical. In each issue, she learns something along these lines: “When a patient has this type of breast cancer, I currently do X. This study suggests I should do Y.” There is a bit on medical policy, but most of the information is meant for individual doctors in their day-to-day work.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t conduct research on education policy. My own work has certainly benefited from it. For example, the quasi-experimental study by economists Tom Kane and Josh Angrist on Boston charter schools, which compared the winners and losers of charter admission lotteries, helped change the Massachusetts law that had blocked the creation of new charters. The change enabled me to help launch a new charter school, MATCH Community Day. My point is simply that relative to education policy research, there is very, very little rigorous research on teacher moves. Why? Gates knows it’s more than a lack of raw cash; it’s also about someone taking responsibility for this work. “Who thinks of it [empirical research on teachers] as their business?” he asked. “The 50 states don’t think of it that way, and schools of education are not about [this type of] research.”

I agree, but I contend there are a number of other barriers. The first is a lack of demand.

The Demand Side

Why aren’t teachers clamoring for published research? One reason is that researchers generally examine the wrong dependent variable. Researchers care about next August (when test scores come in, because they can show achievement gains). Teachers care about that, too, but they care more about solving today’s problems (see sidebar, page 26).

A second issue is that researchers don’t worry about teacher time. Education researchers often put forward strategies that make teachers’ lives harder, not easier. Have you ever tried to “differentiate instruction”? When policy experts give a lecture or speak publicly, do they create five different iterations for their varied audience? Probably not.

The return on investment for teacher time and the opportunity cost of spending it one way rather than another is rarely taken into account. In what other, valuable ways could teachers be spending the time taken up with building “differentiation” into a lesson plan? They could phone parents, tutor kids after school, grade papers, or analyze data. Much research implies that teachers should spend more time doing X while not indicating where they should spend less time.

Teachers don’t trust research, and understandably so. There’s a lot of shoddy research that supports fads. Experienced teachers remember that “this year’s method” directly contradicts the approach from three years ago. So they’d rather go it alone. Newer teachers pick up on the skepticism about research from the veterans.

Unlike medical research, teacher research rarely examines possible side effects, and whether they are short-term aggravations or can be expected to persist. Imagine that a teacher reads an article arguing that students benefit from being asked “higher-order questions.” She begins doing that. Some students, surprised at this new rigor, are frustrated. Some students throw up their hands and give up. Misbehavior ensues.

Student frustration is probably a fairly predictable short-term side effect of asking higher-order questions. If she isn’t being properly warned, a teacher might quickly abandon this technique.

For all these reasons, the 3 million teachers aren’t forming picket lines to demand research.

Do We Know What Works?

Neither policy camp, reformers nor traditionalists, care much about research into teacher moves, either. Some traditionalists see teaching as an art, one that cannot be subjugated to quantitative analysis (“every teacher is different”). Others aren’t averse to research; they simply don’t see it as a priority. They’d prefer that limited resources be used to fight poverty, not to improve students’ day-to-day classroom experiences.

Meanwhile, some reformers argue “we already know what works,” and we just need to scale it.

As part of the “reformer” community, I find this troubling. From charter opponents like Diane Ravitch to supporters like education secretary Arne Duncan, there’s agreement that “some charter schools work.” Furthermore, there’s strong evidence that the charters that succeed tend to be “No Excuses” schools. So do we know what works?

I’m the founder of one of those charter schools; our high-school students have the highest value-added gains of all 340 public high schools in Massachusetts. I’m also the founder of a small teacher residency program that supplies teachers to schools like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program). Many of us would agree to a very different proposition: We know teacher moves “that work” to some extent, enough to create very large achievement gains, but we don’t know teacher moves well enough to get our college graduation rate near where we’d like it to be. Nor do we know how to help teachers do these moves more efficiently, so that their jobs are sustainable.

Without a massive uptick in our knowledge of teacher moves, we’ll continue on the current reform path. That path is a limited replication of No Excuses schools that rely on a very unusual labor pool (young, often work 60+ hours per week, often from top universities); the creation of many more charters that, on average, aren’t different in performance from district schools; districts adopting “lite” versions of No Excuses models while pruning small numbers of very low performing teachers; and some amount of shift to online learning. Peering into that future, I don’t see how we’ll generate a breakthrough.

What Do Teachers Want to Know?

If we’re going to get researchers to dance with the teachers, it makes sense to focus on topics that teachers care about. Here are the things I think “well-intentioned teachers” care most about:

1. How to be more efficient. Many teachers want to work less without being neglectful. Or they’d like to free up time to invest in new priorities.

2. How to manage the classroom so kids behave better, thus lowering the “misbehavior tax” on learning. If a middle school teacher can “reset” the class only 3 times per period, instead of 5, that’s probably 1,440 fewer times per year that he has to deal with misbehavior. (By “reset,” I mean when a teacher says something like, “Guys, come on. I need your eyes on me. I need you to settle down. Joey, that means you. I’m going to wait until I have everyone’s eyes.”)

3. How to motivate and generate student effort, especially, how to “flip” kids who arrive having not worked hard in previous classes or years. This includes both getting kids to exert effort during class and getting them to work hard at home.

4. How to get kids to remember material that they seemingly once knew. Cognitive science has moved the ball forward here; now we need applied experiments with teachers.

5. How to best explain particular ideas and concepts. Each year, tens of thousands of math teachers try to get kids to understand the notion that division by zero does not exist.

Bridging the Divide

The final barrier to research on teacher moves is the divide between practitioners and researchers. My analogy is a 5th-grade dance. Boys stand on one side. Girls stand on the other. There is very little actual dancing. In this case, teachers are off to one side, and quantitatively oriented researchers are on the other.

After a while, the boys go into the hallway and talk about video games. Similarly, quantitative researchers find the transaction costs of setting up experiments are too high and give up on doing research about teacher actions. They take their problem-solving marbles and find other data sets to crunch.

Girls see that the boys aren’t around anymore. So they dance with each other. Teachers and school leaders, if they like to learn, do so through observation of and conversation regarding perceived “best practices.” There aren’t many practitioners who care about rigorous empirical research.

With all these barriers, is there much hope? There’s not going to be a pot of gold in this funding environment. If research on teacher moves matters, we need to be more creative about catalyzing the low-hanging fruit. That would mean identifying practitioners who are unusually interested in randomized research, and connecting them with doctoral students who are unusually interested in teachers and teaching.

What does it look like when practitioners and researchers dance together? Here is one example.

In July 2010, I asked Harvard economist Roland Fryer for some help. My research question was fairly simple: Do teacher phone calls to parents “work”?

In our school, teachers proactively phone parents. Typically, the parents have not been heavily involved in their children’s previous schools. We believe that phone calls to parents help teachers generate improved decorum, effort, and ultimately learning from students. (Sometimes the calls to parents are supplemented with teacher calls to students) These parent relationships seem to be linked to very high parent-satisfaction ratings, and in turn we have thought those were related to our high test-score growth. Truth be told, however, we just don’t know whether this is a productive use of teachers’ time.

Fryer enlisted two doctoral students, Shaun Dougherty and Matt Kraft, from the Quantitative Policy Analysis in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. These two did an amazing job, operating skillfully within our school to do the randomized study. From their findings:

“On average, teacher-family communication increased homework completion rates by 6 percentage points and decreased instances in which teachers had to redirect students’ attention to the task at hand by 32%.”

This collaboration worked for several reasons. First, we have a teacher residency embedded in our charter school, so I had 24 student teachers who could be fairly easily randomized during the summer school session. Second, a professor I trusted chose the graduate students who would conduct the research. These guys were, in my view, dispassionate. I’ve tried to work before with grad students who have strong preexisting beliefs about what they’ll find (typically with a “progressive” lens), and it was difficult to gain real knowledge. (Researchers often feel the same way about practitioners, that we’re searching for marketing, not truth). Also, Fryer paid them a stipend; in my experience, graduate students working for free, and only for credit of some sort, don’t always follow through.

The cost of the two graduate students was not the only expense. In our experiment, at any given time, there were 16 classrooms in action. The researchers needed to hire 16 observers to carefully code student behavior for a few weeks. The total bill was around $10,000. Kraft and Dougherty found a Harvard grant of $1,000. The rest I needed to pay.

Once we’d designed the experiment, I needed to explain it to my team: the principals of our high school and middle school, and the student teachers who were involved. These are people I know well, and they generally trust me. Still, this buy-in phase required expending both time and “relationship capital,” a resource that gets spent down and must be built back up over time. Using student teachers was also of benefit. It would have been tough to randomize our regular teachers. Their belief in the efficacy of parent communication is so strong I suspect many would have doubted the value of changing their normal routines.

There were other costs to the experiment. The head of our teacher-prep program spent many hours handling the experiment’s complex logistics, including a permission slip for parent consent. He could have spent those hours coaching these student teachers, which is the main task I was paying him to do.

All of these issues reflect transaction costs: finding the right people and then doing the right study well takes time, effort, and money.

Researching Teacher Moves

Think of the Human Genome Project. When the project started, scientists didn’t know how many genes there were; now they believe the number is 20,000 to 25,000.

We don’t know how many teacher moves there are. The number is certainly high but not infinite, maybe 200, 2,000, nobody knows. Presumably, there are some unusually high-yield teacher moves across all contexts, some moves that are high yield but only in specific situations or contexts, and other less powerful moves. There is undoubtedly lots of interaction effect among many moves. Mapping all of this might be called the Teaching Move Genome Project, and at the beginning it would be a scary undertaking.

Absent this work, what do we have? Perceived best practices, often buttressed by observation or nonrandomized studies. In his best-selling book Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov describes 49 teaching moves he has observed in the nation’s top charter schools. At the University of Michigan, Deborah Ball and her colleagues are close to unveiling a list of 88 math teacher moves. Lee Canter’s Assertive Discipline and Jon Saphier’s Skillful Teacher discuss scores of moves, like the “10-2” rule (have kids summarize for 2 minutes in small groups after 10 minutes of teacher-led instruction), much of it supported by nonrandomized research. On the basis of its observations of effective teachers, Teach For America (TFA) promotes 6 teacher behaviors and 28 component parts, like “plan purposefully” or “set big goals”; none are specific moves.

What would a series of randomized trials look like? Let’s apply it to Lemov’s 49. Imagine a group of trials that would ask the questions, Do all of the moves work? Are any particularly successful? How does the degree of teacher buy-in interact with effectiveness? What are the “costs” of these moves?

An example from Lemov is “Right Is Right.” The idea is that when a kid gives an answer that is mostly right, the teacher should hold out until it’s 100 percent correct. Lemov describes various tactics the teacher can use to elicit the 100 percent right answer from the student (or first from another student, before having the original student repeat or extend the correct answer).

The obvious cost of implementing this move is time. These back-and-forths add up to lost minutes each period when other topics are not being discussed. A less skillful teacher might be drawn into a protracted discussion, when her next best alternative (simply announce the 100 percent right answer, and move on) might work better. We just don’t know.

Back in 2003, education researchers David Cohen, Stephen Raudenbush, and Deborah Ball argued that “one could make accurate causal inference about instructional effects only by reconceiving and then redesigning instruction as a regime, or system, and comparing it with different systems.” That suggests “a narrower role for survey research than has recently been the case in education, and a larger role for experimental and quasi-experimental research. But if such studies offer a better grip on causality, they are more difficult to design, instrument, and carry out, and more costly.”

Still, we need a better grip on causality. So who would undertake this cost?

A Proposal

Once again borrowing some terminology from medicine, I propose a typology of trials, delineating phases in a continuum.

Phase 1 trials would be small, nongeneralizable empirical studies of teacher moves. These could be randomized, single-subject, or regression discontinuity, but the dependent variable would not be year-end test scores. Instead, we’d look for next-day or next-week outcomes: measurable effects on student behavior, effort, or short-term learning.

Who would decide what moves to test? Some would be proposed by established authors and thinkers in the teaching field. Some would come from the nation’s 3 million schoolteachers, possibly with crowd sourcing to identify the most-promising ideas. Some would come from academic researchers, particularly those from other fields, like psychology, who may offer unusual insights. But for the next level, testing competing ideas, I’d suggest we draw heavily on teacher opinion, particularly a group of teachers selected for their stated willingness to try new methods (if they are supported by research).

Phase 2 trials would test promising teacher practice from Phase 1 on a larger, more varied teacher pool to see if the next-day outcomes held up, probably across different types of schools. Again, the dependent variable is short-term student response.

Phase 3 trials would be randomized trials in which teachers combine multiple moves that emerge from Phase 2. In the end, our bottom line is student learning, and Phase 3 trials are combinations of moves that are measured to see if they bolster year-end student learning gains.

Medical researchers have found that treating some illnesses requires a drug “cocktail,” that is, no one medicine by itself works as well as the combination of several. The same approach might work in education: it could be that individual teacher moves by themselves cannot create measurable year-end achievement gains in students, but combining many together can.

My proposal is that each of the nation’s 1,200-plus schools of education and teacher prep programs conduct one randomized trial on a teacher move each year: Phase 1, Phase 2, or Phase 3. They’d do that by recruiting alumni into a network of experienced teachers willing to participate. The advantage is that once you pay the one-time transaction costs of finding these teachers, the ongoing expenditures related to persuading them to participate, and securing permission from families and principals, decline.

Once that network existed, it would function like a laboratory. Various Phase 1 experiments could be run through it, with small numbers of teachers at first, so that many experiments could be run concurrently. Larger numbers of teachers would be included in more promising Phase 2 validation experiments. Of course, there would be selection bias in terms of which teachers are willing to be participate in this sort of work, and other imperfections. But in the end, experiments could build on proven results from previous ones. Multiple ed schools would combine their networks for Phase 3 trials.

By itself, no single experiment would be that important. Instead, it would be like cancer research: thousands of people each trying to answer small questions in a very rigorous way…which would add up to promising treatments.

The goal is an affordable system for conducting teacher research that teachers would actually consume, that would address both the implementation challenges and the high transaction costs for researchers and practitioners in creating such research. Until that exists, I’ll see you at the 5th-grade dance.

Michael Goldstein is the founder of MATCH Charter School and MATCH Teacher Residency, in Boston.

NOT Your Mother’s PTA

Bruno V. Manno — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 11:03:38 +0000

Photos: Additional images from Education Reform Now, Parent Revolution, and Stand For Children

The organization that claims to represent the voice and interests of K–12 students and their parents is the Parent Teacher Association, widely known as the PTA. The organization aims to provide “parents and families with a powerful voice to speak on behalf of every child while providing the best tools for parents to help their children be successful students.” Founded in 1897 as the National Congress of Mothers, the PTA declared that it was “up to the mothers of the country to eliminate threats that endangered children.” Today, its goal is a “quality education and nurturing environment for every child.”

The PTA has worked to advance social changes that improved the lives of young people, including championing the creation of child labor laws, reorganizing the juvenile justice system, and improving a variety of children’s services. But today, its orientation to K–12 issues is most aptly described by education analyst Charlene Haar as an “echo…of the teachers unions.”

Moreover, it has fallen on hard times. For example, many PTAs have withdrawn from the national organization, forming local Parent Teacher Organizations that no longer send dues to the national PTA. Membership in the national organization declined from more than 12 million in 1965 to around 5 million in 2010.

Truth be told, few in today’s K–12 education reform movement look to the PTA to fight for dramatic change or engage in direct conflict with the public education establishment. Education historian William Cutler explains in Parents and Schools that “educators and most school board members prefer to think of the parent-teacher association as an extension of the educational establishment, ‘an auxiliary to the public school,’ as the Los Angeles County Board of Education put it in 1908.”

Among today’s advocates for young people are nonprofit insurgent groups that challenge the education establishment by organizing, educating, and mobilizing parents in a variety of roles and in different ways, empowering them to engage in K–12 reform efforts. This organizing generates collective, durable power that advances the interests of K–12 education consumers—especially parents—rather than education producers.

Some organizations direct their activities only to district and/or charter school issues, such as improving teacher quality and effectiveness, developing new public charter schools, or closing and transforming failing district schools to create new high-quality schools of choice. Other organizations focus on the private school sector and issues such as using taxpayer-funded scholarships, or vouchers, or tuition tax credits to enable children to attend private schools. Still other organizations undertake cross-sector approaches like educating and mobilizing parents so that they are empowered to choose a quality school for their child, whether it be district, charter, or private.

In short, these advocacy groups empower parents to make their voices and choices a primary catalyst of school reform.

This piece limits its focus to three organizations that use parent mobilization and advocacy to catalyze district sector and charter sector reform: Parent Revolution, Education Reform Now, and Stand for Children. I do not consider others engaged in private school parent mobilization and empowerment or those using other approaches to educate or mobilize parents, e.g., GreatSchools.org, which provides information to parents on school quality and rankings.

These three organizations are similar in many ways, but differences in their legal structures affect the scope of their parent mobilization and advocacy strategies, activities, and tactics. The piece closes by presenting a framework for thinking more generally—one might say strategically—about different operating models for parent advocacy and organizing and by raising some key questions about the future of these efforts.

Parent Revolution

When the California Parent Empowerment Act—known for its parent trigger provision—became law in 2010, the Los Angeles–based nonprofit Parent Revolution had achieved one of its key legislative goals. The act allows at least 51 percent of all parents whose children attend a failing California school to petition the local school board to undertake one of several reform options. Among the options are closing a school and reopening it as a charter school; bringing in new staff and then exercising some control over staffing and budgeting; keeping school staff but firing the principal; and closing the school and sending students to a better school. The president of the California Federation of Teachers, according to the Wall Street Journal, called the parent trigger a “lynch mob provision.”

Parent Revolution supports parents in transforming their children's schools through community organizing.

Parent Revolution’s executive director is Ben Austin, former Los Angeles deputy mayor to Richard Riordan, senior advisor to Rob Reiner and First 5 California (the state’s comprehensive early-childhood initiative), aide to President Bill Clinton, and member of the California State Board of Education. Austin believes the parent trigger law “creates an entirely… new way of thinking about education reform. [It gives] parents the power to advocate for children.” These “new tools” no longer doom “parents to accept[ing] systemic failures for generations.” Parent Revolution is incorporated as a 501(c)(3). It has a small staff of around a dozen individuals, a mix of grassroots organizers and political activists.

Founded in January 2009, its mission is to “transform public education rooted in what’s good for kids—not grownups—by empowering parents to transform their own children’s low performing schools through community organizing.” Parent Revolution’s motivating belief is that power must be in the hands of the only people who do not have an inherent conflict of interest in education: parents. Other stakeholders have a natural and primary self-interest to pursue.

Parent Revolution organized the first campaign to “pull” the parent trigger in a Los Angeles–area district, using its staff to work with a field team of parents under the banner of McKinley Parents for Change. These parents knocked on the doors of other parents living in the Compton school district, inviting them to sign a petition to convert McKinley Elementary School to a charter school.

McKinley is a K–5 school serving nearly 500 students, 60 percent Hispanic and 40 percent African American. It is in the bottom 10 percent of schools statewide, having made adequate yearly progress only once since 2003 under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. It scored 1 out of 10 on the California “similar schools” ranking, meaning that the school is worse than almost all similar California schools.

Although the group had signatures from 275 of 442 parents, 62 percent of those with children in the school, the Compton school board voted 5–1 against the McKinley charter proposal, citing a variety of technicalities. The matter sparked a lawsuit and precipitated the involvement of the California State Board of Education, which wrestled for months with the law’s implementation. Eventually, the board reached a consensus on many issues, including how to draw up petitions and verify signatures, satisfying groups as diverse as Parent Revolution and the California Teachers Association. As of July 2011, McKinley remains a low-performing district-run school.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles County education officials gave its approval for Celerity Educational Group (the nonprofit charter-management organization whose petition to reopen McKinley as a charter school the Compton board denied) to open a new K–12 charter-school campus for 220 children. The new school is housed at Compton’s Church of the Redeemer, whose pastor, Kerry Allison, sees education reform as the civil rights movement of this century. One of Pastor Allison’s colleagues—Pastor K. W. Tulloss of Weller Street Baptist Church in Los Angeles—is the board chair of Parent Revolution.

Despite widespread community support, especially from African American and Latino parents, Parent Revolution has harsh detractors. Journalist Robert Skeels called it “a poverty pimp and privatization pusher collecting a check from plutocrat foundations.” But Los Angeles schools superintendent John Deasy described the trigger to a group of young people as a sad commentary on the state of K–12 schools: “It is a big shame on us [school administrators]. If we’re not going to do it [improve schools], they [parents] have to do it.”

Mississippi, Connecticut, and Ohio now have some form of a parent trigger law. Officials in at least a dozen states are interested in a version of a parent trigger, including Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel.

The controversy surrounding enactment of the Connecticut law may prefigure the battle ahead for trigger advocates. An internal document prepared off the record for American Federation of Teachers union activists and accidentally posted online explains how union lobbying in Connecticut worked to undermine a full version of the trigger. Plan A was “Kill Mode” and Plan B was “Engage the Opposition.” Since the union could not kill the bill, they worked to dilute it. The new law eliminates parent petition drives, creating instead school governance councils with parent, teacher, and community representation that provide advice only and have no governing authority to trigger a takeover. In the words of the Wall Street Journal, “Engagement meant pressuring legislators vulnerable to union muscle. That’s most of them—and the AFT’s muscle worked.”

When the California Parent Empowerment Act—known for its parent trigger provision—became law in 2010, the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Parent Revolution had achieved one of its key legislative goals.

Education Reform Now

In January 2010, the New York State legislature rejected legislation that would have lifted the cap of 200 charter schools allowed in the state. The action was part of several being considered by the legislature as it tried to improve the state’s chances of receiving $700 million in federal funds under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition (RttT). Opposed to lifting the cap was the United Federation of Teachers, the New York City union affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers. In a blunt assessment of the union’s role in dooming New York’s initial RttT application, the New York Daily News headlined, “They damned the kids: Teachers’ union and its lackeys sank bid for federal funds.”

A second round of RttT competition with a June 1, 2010, deadline provided an opportunity to target the legislature with a campaign to lift the cap. The strategy was straightforward but would be difficult to execute. One individual involved with the campaign explained, “Until the charter movement began to develop its own political operation and build a counterweight to the teachers’ union, it could never be successful in Albany, regardless of the results the schools produced.”

While many charter support and advocacy organizations in New York City and state had diverse agendas and perspectives, one campaign would need to unite them all, with one organization leading and executing the campaign. After much discussion, all the parties agreed that Education Reform Now (ERN) would be that lead organization, working with the New York Charter School Association, the New York City Charter School Center, and several charter management organizations.

In New York, many charter supporters and advocacy organizations with diverse agendas united under the banner of Education Reform Now, headed by school reformer, Joe Williams.

ERN is a national organization founded in 2006, with state affiliates in California, Colorado, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin. It has a national board overseeing state affiliates, a strong donor base, both 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) structures, and a political action committee (PAC) called Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), with a separate board but shared staff with its related organizations. ERN’s mission is to orchestrate “a powerful chorus of voices within the education policy debate advancing a true agenda of reform [that includes]…every child having…a quality public education.”

The individual coordinating the overall effort was Joe Williams, executive director of DFER. The New York Times recounts an incident involving Williams when Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew M. Cuomo was seeking donors from “certain members of the hedge fund crowd…what he heard was this: Talk to Joe. That would be Joe Williams, executive director of a political action committee that advances…a favorite cause of many of the wealthy founders of New York hedge funds: charter schools.”

The plan to raise the cap had four components: paid media, free media, field and grassroots organizing, and a strong lobbying effort in Albany. Joe Williams hired as campaign director Bradley Tusk, who managed Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 2009 reelection campaign.

A key aspect of the grassroots campaign involved organizing the parents of the 40,000 children in charter schools as well as the 40,000 on charter school waiting lists. ERN built a field operation similar to a political campaign. It hired a staff that developed a canvassing and phone system and set up e-mail and fax capabilities along with an issue visibility program. The field plan included daily targets for parent visits, parent recruitment, parent activities, education events, lobbying, and an advertising and social media campaign.

Charter-school financial supporters were willing to fund the campaign and ask friends for additional support. An article in the New York Times reported, “Hedge fund executives are thus emerging as perhaps the first significant political counterweight to the powerful teachers unions…. They have been contributing generously to…a multimillion dollar war chest to lobby…for a bill to raise [the cap].”

Boykin Curry, a partner in Eagle Capital Management and founder of two New York charter schools, commented on the change in mind-set among his colleagues, “A lot of hedge fund and finance people in New York had decided that politics was too dirty and focused on their philanthropy. I think there’s an awakening now that we can be a force in Albany, but we’ve got to play a tougher game than before.”

Passing the bill entailed working first in the state senate with Senate Democratic conference leader John Sampson. After the bill to raise the cap to 460 schools from 200 passed by a margin of 45–15, attention focused on the state assembly. Speaker Sheldon Silver, an ally of the teachers union, vehemently opposed the bill. The ERN strategy was to frame the issue as an effort by teachers unions to keep New York from winning RttT rather than targeting specific members in a negative way.

ERN hired a staff that developed a canvassing and phone system and set up e-mail and fax capabilities along with an issue visibility program.

Over the course of the campaign, the phone and canvass program reached legislators in multiple ways: nearly 9,000 postcards were sent, more than 16,000 voice mails were left, and 23 face-to-face visits were logged. A concerted editorial-board campaign targeted major newspapers along with media buys to educate the public and state legislators, focusing almost exclusively on New York City and Albany. High-profile supporters were recruited, including former president Bill Clinton, candidate and now governor Andrew Cuomo, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and U.S. secretary of education Arne Duncan.

The bill finally passed the assembly 91–43 and was signed by Governor David Paterson on May 28, in time for the RttT application deadline of June 1. On August 24, U.S. secretary of education Arne Duncan announced that New York was among the 10 finalists to win the competition, receiving $700 million in funding. Secretary Duncan credited the legislature’s lifting the cap with helping to secure the award.

In 2010, ERN reported spending $6.6 million in lobbying expenses in New York State, split almost evenly between its (c)(3) and (c)(4), with another $41 million in (c)(3) expenditures directed to organizing and polling expenses, which the state does not consider lobbying. During that same time period, the New York State United Teachers reported $4.9 million in lobbying expenses. For the first time, ERN outspent the teachers union in lobbying expenses, which along with other activities helped win the fight to raise the New York charter cap.

Stand for Children

June 1, 1996—Stand for Children Day—marked what its organizers claim is the largest rally for children in U.S. history, in Washington, D.C., at the Lincoln Memorial, with around 300,000 participants. Stand for Children now has national offices in Portland, Oregon, and Waltham, Massachusetts, and state affiliates in Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington.

Stand’s CEO is Jonah Edelman, who along with Eliza Leighton cofounded the organization after Edelman studied different community-organizing and -advocacy organizations, moving to Oregon to test and further develop the Stand approach. (Leighton eventually left Stand to complete a law degree at Yale and works as director of strategic initiatives for Casa de Maryland, a Latino advocacy and assistance organization.)

Stand for Children organized a blue umbrella rally for a rainy day fund in 2010. The organization trains "everyday people" to become leaders who unite to improve programming for children, especially in the K-12 arena.

Edelman considers himself a second-generation civil rights leader “who grew up with these incredible parents who had been public servants all their lives.” Marian Wright Edelman, his mother, was the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar and is president and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund. His father, Peter Edelman, clerked for former Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg, was a close aide to Robert F. Kennedy, and served as a senior official in the Clinton administration until resigning over differences with the administration on the 1996 welfare reforms.

Stand is legally incorporated nationally as a 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4), with each organization having its own board and each state affiliate also having its own PAC. Affiliates are under the legal umbrella of the national organization and its respective boards, though each has advisory and other groups that provide counsel on specific issues.

Its (c)(3) is called Stand for Children Leadership Center and trains “everyday people” to become leaders who unite to win improvements in children’s programs, especially in the K–12 arena. The center’s web site contains resources on how to turn out individuals for meetings, plan effective community forums, choose a winning issue, educate decisionmakers, engage in lobbying to elicit a commitment from a legislator, and so forth. Its (c)(4) is a membership organization called Stand for Children, which uses grassroots action to convince elected officials (and voters) of the merits of specific legislation or policy.

Stand’s 2010 and 2011 work in Illinois on teacher effectiveness illustrates how the three distinct legal entities inform, educate, and advocate for specific legislative proposals. The (c)(3) organized and trained community members, educating them, policymakers, and the general public on school reform and teacher effectiveness issues. The (c)(4) targeted mainly legislators, although efforts were also made to convince voters to get their representatives to support the legislation. The PAC raised $3.5 million in 2010 and judiciously spent about $600,000 in support of state lawmakers running for office who would help forge the bipartisan consensus that led to the passage of the legislation. Stand leveraged its resources and activities through a partnership with Advance Illinois, a statewide 501(c)(3) K–12 education-reform advocacy organization. Other state and local organizations also joined the partnership.

Edelman characterizes Stand’s strategy by saying, “We go in…for the long term.” In Illinois, Chicago teachers union president Karen Lewis called the work of Stand—especially its PAC funds—as “pretty much union busting.” Chicago Democratic state senator Kwame Raoul commented that Stand’s cadre of lobbyists and cash “were making a clear statement that ‘If you were not willing to stand with the children, they would find somebody who would.’”

In 2011, Time magazine named Edelman one of the nation’s 11 most influential education activists, “poised to shake things up,” commenting further that with “formidable political fundraising prowess, Stand for Children is delivering results and changing how politicians think about grass roots education reform.”

Dimensions of K–12 Advocacy

Unlike the PTA, Parent Revolution, Education Reform Now, and Stand for Children are insurgent organizations that exist to challenge the conventional power arrangements of the K–12 public education system, organizing parents at the grassroots level to advance a school reform agenda. Thus far, all three organizations have been successful in raising funds to support their efforts. As 501(c)(3) entities, these organizations derive a significant portion of their revenue from foundations and individual donors. In addition, Stand has a fee-for-service arrangement for training state affiliates, which are responsible for raising their own operating funds. Both Stand and ERN raise their (c)(4) and PAC money from individual donors, who do not receive a tax deduction for contributions. Stand projects its 2011 budget will be around $22 million, nearly double its 2010 budget. Though the long-term financial outlook for the three organizations is difficult to predict, there are no immediate threats to their revenue sources.

While differences in the organizations’ legal structures have implications for their strategies, activities, and programs, three key elements create a framework for understanding their diverse operating models: a value proposition; civic mobilization; and coordinated action.

Value proposition: This includes a mission statement and core beliefs, as these inform the organization’s desired impact. It also describes the sector focus of the organization’s work, what types of parents it will mobilize, and a geographic focus. Finally, it provides a way to measure progress over time so the organization and its stakeholders can determine whether the intended results are being achieved.

An important issue in developing the value proposition is who defines it. Does a strong board of directors or advisors drive the process, with an executive focused on execution? Is it created from the bottom up, with a board affirming the consensus of the group? Or is there some combined approach?

Civic mobilization: This effort is a “call to action” whereby the organization seeks to build a cohesive group of parents who support the value proposition and fight to achieve and defend it. The objective is a tightly knit and inclusive network of like-minded activists who challenge the K–12 status quo.

Mobilization includes building relationships with other allies and partner organizations that broaden support for the coalition’s civic base. The advocacy organization engages in many outreach, education, and training activities to prepare its members and civic partners for coordinated action.

Coordinated action: The organization undertakes on-the-ground activity that pushes against resistance to change. It thereby alters present power relationships and changes existing policies and practices.

At the tactical level, activities include demonstrations, letter and e-mail campaigns, testifying at hearings convened by policymakers, public awareness campaigns, and other forms of public education and lobbying. These tactics are limited by the legal structure of the organization, for example, whether it is a 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4), or PAC.

Integrating these three elements creates each organization’s unique operating model: its programs, activities, capabilities, relationships, finances, goals, and metrics. Those who run these organizations must align, manage, and execute within this context.

Insurgent organizations like the ones described here seem to hold significant promise for mobilizing parents to advance an agenda that goes far beyond today’s PTA, whose critics, in the words of William Cutler, describe it “as a company union—part of the problem, not the solution. [It gives]…the illusion of parental influence, while discouraging the formation of community groups that might be more aggressive about the need for change.”

Ironically, the advocacy and organizing approach of these organizations mirrors the early work of the PTA, which was part of a nascent progressive political reform movement that changed the world of child welfare and children’s education programs. Are these groups heirs to that tradition?

Stand for Children exists to challenge the conventional power arrangements of the K-12 public education system, organizing parents at the grassroots level to advance a school reform agenda.

And there are other questions to be answered.

• How will opponents reorient their organizing prowess and financial resources to strike back against reform-oriented parent mobilization efforts?

• Will K–12 education philanthropy continue to support reform-oriented advocacy organizations or move to support some new reform du jour?

• Will the national organizations with state affiliates begin to step on each other’s toes or work directly at cross-purposes, and will competition for philanthropic resources constrain their effectiveness and impact?

• Will tensions and conflicts emerge between those groups focused more on micro issues, like cultivating savvy consumers of choice, and those focused on macro issues, like legislation and electoral politics?

• Will organizations working in the charter and district sectors become openly hostile to those working in the private school sector, with its emphasis on vouchers and tax credits?

• Or will a “grand agreement” unite them under a banner of parent empowerment that places family educational choice at the core of K–12 reform, regardless of what educational option a parent chooses for a child—district, charter, or private?

Only time will tell.

Bruno V. Manno is senior advisor for K–12 education reform at the Walton Family Foundation and former U.S. assistant secretary of education for policy.

Parent Revolution, Education Reform Now, and Stand for Children Leadership Center are 501(c)(3) grantees of the Walton Family Foundation; the opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.

Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?

Paul E. Peterson — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 04:01:04 +0000

An unabridged version of this paper is available here.

On August 17, 2011 Paul Peterson discussed the findings of this study in a free online webinar. An archived recording of this webinar can be found here.

At a time of persistent unemployment, especially among the less skilled, many wonder whether our schools are adequately preparing students for the 21st-century global economy. Despite high unemployment rates, firms are experiencing shortages of educated workers, outsourcing professional-level work to workers abroad, and competing for the limited number of employment visas set aside for highly skilled immigrants. As President Barack Obama said in his 2011 State of the Union address, “We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.”

The challenge is particularly great in math, science, and engineering. According to Internet entrepreneur Vinton Cerf, “America simply is not producing enough of our own innovators, and the cause is twofold—a deteriorating K–12 education system and a national culture that does not emphasize the importance of education and the value of engineering and science.” To address the issue, the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Education Coalition was formed in 2006 to “raise awareness in Congress, the Administration, and other organizations about the critical role that STEM education plays in enabling the U.S. to remain the economic and technological leader of the global marketplace.” Tales of shortages of educated talent appear regularly in the media. According to a CBS News report, 22 percent of American businesses say they are ready to hire if they can find people with the right skills. As one factory owner put it, “It’s hard to fill these jobs because they require people who are good at math, good with their hands, and willing to work on a factory floor.” According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report, of the 30 occupations projected to grow the most rapidly over the next decade, nearly half are professional jobs that require at least a college degree. On the basis of these projections, McKinsey’s Global Institute estimates that over the next few years there will be a gap of nearly 2 million workers with the necessary analytical and technical skills.

In this paper we view the proficiency of U.S. students from a global perspective. Although we provide information on performances in both reading and mathematics, our emphasis is on student proficiency in mathematics, the subject many feel to be of greatest concern.

Student Proficiency on NAEP

At one time it was left to teachers and administrators to decide exactly what level of math proficiency should be expected of students. But, increasingly, states, and the federal government itself, have established proficiency levels that students are asked to reach. A national proficiency standard was set by the board that governs the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is administered by the U.S. Department of Education and generally known as the nation’s report card.

In 2007, just 32 percent of 8th graders in public and private schools in the United States performed at or above the NAEP proficiency standard in mathematics, and 31 percent performed at or above that level in reading. When more than two-thirds of students fail to reach a proficiency bar, it raises serious questions. Are U.S. schools failing to teach their students adequately? Or has NAEP set its proficiency bar at a level beyond the normal reach of a student in 8th grade?

One way of tackling such questions is to take an international perspective. Are other countries able to lift a higher percentage—or even a majority—of their students to or above the NAEP proficiency bar? Another approach is to look at differences among states. What percentage of students in each state is performing at a proficient level? How does each state compare to students in other countries?

In this article, we report results from our second study of student achievement in global perspective conducted for Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG). In our 2010 PEPG report, we compared the percentage of U.S. public and private school students in the high-school graduating Class of 2009 who were performing at the advanced level in mathematics with rates of similar performance among their peers around the world (see “Teaching Math to the Talented,” features, Winter 2011). The current study continues this work by reporting proficiency rates in both mathematics and reading for the most recent cohort for which data are available, the high-school graduating Class of 2011.

Comparing U.S. Students with Peers in Other Countries

If the NAEP exams are the nation’s report card, the world’s report card is assembled by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which administers the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) to representative samples of 15-year-old students in 65 of the world’s school systems (which, to simplify the presentation, we shall refer to as countries; Hong Kong, Macao, and Shanghai are not independent nations but are nonetheless included in PISA reports). Since its launch in 2000, the PISA test has emerged as the yardstick by which countries measure changes in their performance over time and the level of their performance relative to that of other countries.

Since the United States participates in the PISA examinations, it is possible to make direct comparisons between the average performance of U.S. students and that of their peers elsewhere. But to compare the percentages of students deemed proficient in math or reading, one must ascertain the PISA equivalent of the NAEP standard of proficiency. To obtain that information, we perform a crosswalk between NAEP and PISA. The crosswalk is made possible by the fact that representative (but separate) samples of the high-school graduating Class of 2011 took the NAEP and PISA math and reading examinations. NAEP tests were taken in 2007 when the Class of 2011 was in 8th grade and PISA tested 15-year-olds in 2009, most of whom are members of the Class of 2011. Given that NAEP identified 32 percent of U.S. 8th-grade students as proficient in math, the PISA equivalent is estimated by calculating the minimum score reached by the top-performing 32 percent of U.S. students participating in the 2009 PISA test. (See methodological sidebar for further details.)

Methodological Approach

In the United States, in 2007, the share of 8th-grade students identified as proficient on the NAEP math examination was 32.192 percent. The minimum math score on the PISA examination obtained in 2009 by the highest-performing 32.192 percent of all U.S. students was estimated to be 530.7. To cover a broad content area while ensuring that testing time does not become excessive, the tests employ matrix sampling. No student takes the entire test, and scores are aggregated across students. Results are thus estimates of performance obtained by averaging five plausible values, as PISA and NAEP administrators recommend.

Comparable numbers for the other categories are as follows:

Reading proficiency: 31.223 percent of U.S. students are proficient on the NAEP, which corresponds to 550.4 on PISA.

Advanced math: 6.998 percent of U.S. students scored at the advanced level on the NAEP, which corresponds to 623.2 on PISA.

Advanced reading: 2.767 percent of U.S. students scored at the advanced level on the NAEP, which corresponds to 678.1 on PISA.

What It Means to Be Proficient

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which administers NAEP, the determination of proficiency in any given subject at a particular grade level “was the result of a comprehensive national process [which took into account]…what hundreds of educators, curriculum experts, policymakers, and members of the general public thought the assessment should test. After the completion of the framework, the NAEP [subject] Committee worked with measurement specialists to create the assessment questions and scoring criteria.” In other words, NAEP’s concept of proficiency is not based on any objective criterion, but reflects a consensus on what should be known by students who have reached a certain educational stage. NAEP says that 8th graders, if proficient, “understand the connections between fractions, percents, decimals, and other mathematical topics such as algebra and functions.”

PISA does not set a proficiency standard. Instead, it sets different levels of performance, ranging from one (the lowest) to six (the highest). A student who is at the proficiency level in math set by NAEP performs moderately above proficiency level three on the PISA. (See sidebar for a statement of the 8th-grade proficiency standard and sample questions from PISA and NAEP that proficient students are expected to pass.)

Crossing the Proficiency Bar

Given that definition of math proficiency, U.S. students in the Class of 2011, with a 32 percent proficiency rate, came in 32nd among the nations that participated in PISA. Performance levels among the countries ranked 23rd to 31st are not significantly different from that of the U.S. in a statistical sense, yet 22 countries do significantly outperform the United States in the share of students reaching the proficiency level in math. Six countries plus Shanghai and Hong Kong had majorities of students performing at least at the proficiency level, while the United States had less than one-third. For example, 58 percent of Korean students and 56 percent of Finnish students performed at or above a proficient level. Other countries in which a majority—or near majority—of students performed at or above the proficiency level included Switzerland, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands. Many other nations also had math proficiency rates well above that of the United States, including Germany (45 percent), Australia (44 percent), and France (39 percent). Figure 1 presents a detailed listing of the scores of all participating countries as well as the performance of the individual states within the United States.

Shanghai topped the list with a 75 percent math proficiency rate, well over twice the 32 percent rate of the United States. However, Shanghai students are from a prosperous metropolitan area within China, so their performance is more appropriately compared to Massachusetts and Minnesota, which are similarly favored and are the top performers among the U.S. states. When this comparison is made, Shanghai still performs at a distinctly higher level. Only a little more than half (51 percent) of Massachusetts students are proficient in math, while Minnesota, the runner-up state, has a math proficiency rate of just 43 percent.

Only four additional states—Vermont, North Dakota, New Jersey, and Kansas—have a math proficiency rate above 40 percent. Some of the country’s largest and richest states score below the average for the United States as a whole, including New York (30 percent), Missouri (30 percent), Michigan (29 percent), Florida (27 percent), and California (24 percent).

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Proficiency in Reading

According to NAEP, students proficient in reading “should be able to make and support inferences about a text, connect parts of a text, and analyze text features.” According to PISA, students at level four, a level of performance set very close to the NAEP proficiency level, should be “capable of difficult reading tasks, such as locating embedded information, construing meaning from nuances of languages critically evaluating a text.” (See sidebar for more specific definitions and sample questions.)

Click image to enlarge

The U.S. proficiency rate in reading, at 31 percent, compares reasonably well to those of most European countries other than Finland. It takes 17th place among the nations of the world, and only the top 10 countries on PISA outperform the United States by a statistically significant amount. In Korea, 47 percent of the students are proficient in reading. Other countries that outrank the United States include Finland (46 percent), Singapore, New Zealand, and Japan (42 percent), Canada (41 percent), Australia (38 percent), and Belgium (37 percent).

Within the United States, Massachusetts is again the leader, with 43 percent of 8th-grade students performing at the NAEP proficiency level in reading. Shanghai students perform at a higher level, however, with 56 percent of its young people proficient in reading. Within the United States, Vermont is a close second to its neighbor to the south, with 42 percent proficiency. New Jersey and Montana come next, both with 39 percent of the students identified as proficient in reading. The District of Columbia, the nation’s worst, are at the level achieved in Turkey and Bulgaria, while the one-eighth of our students living in California are similar to those in Slovakia and Spain. (See Figure 2 for the international ranking of all states.)

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Ethnic Groups

The percentage proficient in the United States varies considerably among students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. While 42 percent of white students were identified as proficient in math, only 11 percent of African American students, 15 percent of Hispanic students, and 16 percent of Native Americans were so identified. Fifty percent of students with an ethnic background from Asia and the Pacific Islands, however, were proficient in math, placing them at a level comparable to students in Belgium, Canada, and Japan.

In reading, 40 percent of white students and 41 percent of those from Asia and the Pacific Islands were identified as proficient. Only 13 percent of African American students, 5 percent of Hispanic students, and 18 percent of Native American students were so identified.

Given the disparate performances among students from various cultural backgrounds, it may be worth inquiring as to whether differences between the United States and other countries are due to the presence of a substantial minority population within the United States. To examine that question, we compare U.S. white students to all students in other countries. We do this not because we think this is the right comparison, but simply to consider the oft-expressed claim that education problems in the United States are confined to certain segments within the minority community.

While the 42 percent math efficiency rate for U.S. white students is considerably higher than that of African American and Hispanic students, they are still surpassed by all students in 16 other countries. White students in the United States trail well behind all students in Korea, Japan, Finland, Germany, Belgium, and Canada.

White students in Massachusetts outperform their peers in other states; 58 percent are at or above the math proficiency level. Maryland, New Jersey, and Texas are the other states in which a majority of white students is proficient in math. Given recent school-related political conflicts in Wisconsin, it is of interest that only 42 percent of that state’s white students are proficient in math, a rate no better than the nation as a whole. (Results for all states are presented in the unabridged version of the paper.)

In reading, the picture looks better. As we mentioned above, only 40 percent of white students are proficient, but that proficiency rate would place the United States at 9th in the world. Its proficiency rate does not differ significantly (in a statistical sense) from that for all students in Canada, Japan, and New Zealand, but white students trail in reading by a significant margin all students in Shanghai, Korea, Finland, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In no state is a majority of white students proficient, although Massachusetts comes close with a 49 percent rate. The four states with the next highest levels of reading proficiency among white students are New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, and Colorado.

Are the Proficiency Standards the Same for Math as for Reading?

Has NAEP set a lower proficiency standard in math than in reading? If so, is the math standard too low or the reading bar too high?

At first glance it would seem that the standard is set at pretty much the same level. After all, 32 percent of U.S. students are deemed proficient in math and 31 percent are deemed proficient in reading.

But that coincidence is quite misleading. When compared to peers abroad, the U.S. Class of 2011 performed respectably in reading, trailing only 10 other nations by a statistically significant amount. Admittedly, the U.S. trails Korea by 16 percentage points, but it’s only 10 percentage points behind Canada. Meanwhile, U.S. performance in math significantly trails that of 22 countries. Korean performance is 26 percentage points higher than that of the United States, while Canadian performance is 18 percentage points higher. Judged by international standards, U.S. 8th graders are clearly doing worse in math than in reading, despite the fact that NAEP reports similar percentages proficient in the two subjects.

A direct comparison of NAEP’s proficiency standard with PISA’s proficiency levels three and four also indicates that a lower NAEP bar has been set in math than in reading. To meet NAEP’s standards currently, one needs to perform near the fourth level on PISA’s reading exam, but only modestly above the third level on its math exam.

Clearly, the experts set an 8th-grade math proficiency standard at a level lower than the one set in reading. Perhaps this is an indication that American society as a whole, including the experts who design NAEP standards, set lower expectations for students in math than in reading. If so, it is a sign that low performance in mathematics within the United States may be deeply rooted in the nation’s culture. Those who are setting the common core standards under discussion might well take note of this.

Of course, it could be argued that the math proficiency standard is correct but the reading standard has been set too high. In no country in the world does a majority of the students reach the NAEP proficiency bar set in 8th-grade reading.

What Does It Mean?

Many have concluded that the productivity of the U.S. economy could be greatly enhanced if a higher percentage of U.S. students were proficient in mathematics. As Michael Brown, Nobel Prize winner in medicine, has declared, “If America is to maintain our high standard of living, we must continue to innovate…. Math and science are the engines of innovation. With these engines we can lead the world.”

But others have argued that the overall past success of the U.S. economy suggests that high-school math performance is not that critical for sustained growth in economic productivity. After all, U.S. students trailed their peers in the very first international survey undertaken nearly 50 years ago. That is the wrong message to take away however. Other factors contributed to the relatively high rate of growth in economic productivity during the last half of the 20th century, including the openness of the country’s markets, respect for property rights, low levels of political corruption, and limited intrusion of government into the operations of the marketplace. The United States, moreover, has always benefited from the in-migration of talent from abroad.

Furthermore, the United States has historically had far higher levels of educational attainment than other countries, with many more students graduating from high school, continuing on to college, and earning an advanced degree. It appears that in the past the country made up for low quality in elementary and high school by educating students for longer periods of time.

As we proceed into the 21st century, none of these factors remains as favorable to the United States. While other countries are lifting restrictions on market operations, the opposite has been occurring within the United States. The U.S. has also placed sharp limits on the numbers of talented workers that can be legally admitted into the country. Our higher education system, though still perceived to be the best in the world, is recruiting an ever-increasing proportion of its faculty and students from outside the country. Meanwhile, educational attainment rates among U.S. citizens now trail the industrial-world average.

Even if some of these trends can be reversed, that hardly gainsays the desirability of enhancing the mathematical skills of the U.S. student population, especially at a time when the nation’s growth in productivity is badly trailing growth rates in China, India, Brazil, and many smaller Asian countries. Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann have shown elsewhere that student performance on international tests such as those we consider here is closely related to long-term economic growth (see “Education and Economic Growth,” research, Spring 2008). Assuming past economic patterns continue, the country could enjoy a remarkable increment in its annual GDP growth per capita by enhancing the math proficiency of U.S. students. Increasing the percentage of proficient students to the levels attained in Canada and Korea would increase the annual U.S. growth rate by 0.9 percentage points and 1.3 percentage points, respectively. Since current average annual growth rates hover between 2 and 3 percentage points, that increment would lift growth rates by between 30 and 50 percent.

When translated into dollar terms, these magnitudes become staggering. If one calculates these percentage increases as national income projections over an 80-year period (providing for a 20-year delay before any school reform is completed and the newly proficient students begin their working careers), a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests gains of nothing less than $75 trillion over the period. That averages out to around a trillion dollars a year. Even if you tweak these numbers a bit in one direction or another to account for various uncertainties, you reach the same bottom line: Those who say that student math performance does not matter are clearly wrong.

Given the integration of the world economy, a global perspective is needed for assessing the performance of U.S. schools, districts, and states. High-school graduates in each and every state compete for jobs with graduates from all over the world. Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering and president emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has warned, “America faces many challenges…but the enemy I fear most is complacency. We are about to be hit by the full force of global competition. If we continue to ignore the obvious task at hand while others beat us at our own game, our children and grandchildren will pay the price. We must now establish a sense of urgency.”

Paul E. Peterson is the director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Ludger Woessmann is professor of economics at the University of Munich. Eric A. Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Carlos X. Lastra-Anadón is a research fellow at the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. An unabridged version of this paper is available here.

Getting At-Risk Teens to Graduation

June Kronholz — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 04:01:49 +0000

Photos: Additional images of Performance Learning Centers (PLCs) in Hampton and Richmond, Virginia.

Eighteen-year-old Tyriq Jones was fairly blunt about the mess he had gotten himself into before transferring to the Hampton, Virginia, online school where I approached him one chilly day this spring. “I got in trouble. I was playing around. I got backed up” in high school, he said. He had failed three classes in his junior year and, faced with the prospect of repeating a year, probably would have dropped out instead, he told me. “I didn’t want that kind of pressure.”

People who deal with at-risk teenagers say dropping out is not an event; it’s a process. Youngsters miss school and get “backed up” in class, so they miss more school because they’re bewildered or embarrassed, and fall further behind. Seeing few ways to recover, “they just silently drop out,” said Richard Firth, who showed me around the Hampton school and two others in Richmond that are using online learning to derail the cycle.

In the three years the 75-seat Hampton Performance Learning Center has been open, it claims to have graduated 91 students. There’s a waiting list for admission, so the school opened a second shift, which also is near capacity. Sherri Pritchard, the school’s social-studies “learning facilitator”—there are no teachers and no principal here—said 95 percent of her online students pass Virginia’s end-of-course history test, which would put them well ahead of both the Hampton school district’s and state’s pass rates.

And Tyriq: He has only a C average after a year at the Hampton PLC, he said, but he graduated in June—on time—and plans to enlist in the Army, his goal all along.

The New Alternative

Online K–12 education made its appearance in the mid-1990s, largely as a resource for bright students who had no access to accelerated classes. It moved next into core high-school courses where districts found themselves with teacher shortages—math, science, foreign languages—and has been growing bumptiously, and in a dozen directions, ever since.

The International Association for K–12 Online Learning, which goes by the acronym iNACOL, estimates that 82 percent of school districts now offer at least one online course. Thirty-two states have virtual schools where online offerings range from one class to an entire high-school curriculum, according to an annual report on online learning published by the Evergreen Education Group, a Colorado consultancy. At the Florida Virtual School alone, students collectively took 220,000 classes online in 2009–10 (see “Florida’s Online Option,” features, Summer 2009). Twenty-six states have at least one full-time online school, and perhaps 225,000 youngsters were full-time online students this year, says John Watson, editor of the Evergreen report.

During a recent visit to the Richmond PLCs, Congressman Eric Cantor chats with Dr. Donna Scott.

Two of the fastest-growing trends in online education converge in the Performance Learning Center project, which is why I called Communities in Schools, a nonprofit dropout-prevention program that devised the model in Georgia in 2002.

The PLCs call themselves an alternative to traditional schools and distance themselves from the credit-recovery factories that many districts have opened to boost their graduation rates ahead of state and federal sanctions. (Indeed, a few PLC students enroll for the chance to accelerate.) But the schools do offer struggling kids like Tyriq a chance to make up courses they failed in traditional teacher-student classrooms, which puts them at the nexus of a national debate. States are raising their graduation standards, but returning kids to the classroom for a second attempt at algebra often is counterproductive—Why should we suppose they’ll understand equations any better the second time around?—and gobbles up teacher time.

The second trend is the “blended” approach, combining online learning with a teacher-led classroom (see “Future Schools,” features, Summer 2011). Most instruction is online in the PLC model, but a teacher-coach is there to answer questions, direct projects, and keep kids on track.

Communities in Schools linked those two trends with the small-school idea and has expanded the project to seven states and 33 schools. PLCs have only four or five classrooms, four or five teachers, and fewer than 100 students. Teachers are district employees who are paid the district scale and apply for their jobs. Kids remain part of their home schools, which has raised graduation statistics for those schools and generated buy-in from their administrators.

PLCs generally receive the same per-pupil funding as traditional schools. Their biggest expense, after salaries, goes to licensing fees for the online curriculum, which Richard Firth, the Virginia PLC director, put at about $35,000 a year per school. Start-up costs for computers, teacher training, and to carve new schools out of old facilities can be a showstopper for financially pressed school districts. Richmond, which is building its first new high school in 40 years, plans to include some multipurpose rooms that could be used for a future PLC.

Richard Firth, director of the Virginia PLCs, says dropping out of school for at-risk teenagers is not an “event” but a “process.”

The only outside funding comes from Communities in Schools, which pays the salary of a services coordinator, who links youngsters with housing, day-care, medical, and other service providers and helps them plan what they do after graduation. The services coordinator at the Richmond career-center PLC keeps a closet of baby clothes in her office for students whose own children can attend Head Start or day care downstairs.

Almost disarmingly, the PLCs reach out to youngsters that schools typically find the most troublesome. Sherman Curl, the academic coordinator—i.e., principal—at the Adult Career Development Center PLC in Richmond, handed me a brochure describing the students for whom the PLC is a good fit. Kids with “poor attendance,” “excessive tardiness,” “academic failure,” “apathy,” “social issues,” low motivation, and such “challenges to success” as pregnancy and poverty, it read.

In a summary of its 2009–10 academic year, Virginia’s Communities in Schools reported that one-third of the students at its four PLCs were at least two years behind in academic credits when they arrived. They were a year or two older than their conventional-school peers and, in the previous year, averaged six suspensions and 24 absences each at their former schools. Several youngsters told me they’d fallen in with the wrong crowd at their old schools, or they felt bullied and isolated. “I started messing up,” a chatty 18-year-old named Chelsie Saunders told me at the Hampton PLC, which is housed in a modern teen center, complete with pool tables, a basketball court, a coffee bar, and an airy television lounge with leather sofas.

“These are kids who never made it in a comprehensive school,” said Wes Hamner, the academic coordinator at the Richmond Technical Center PLC, which occupies one floor of a sprawling trades-training campus in Richmond’s industrial district.

For all that, the three PLCs I visited were remarkably quiet and orderly: There wasn’t much chatter about what kids were learning, but there wasn’t any catcalling, hallway scuffling, or acting out in class, either. Hamner pointed out that there’s no security at his school and that the lockers don’t even have locks. Teachers sat in the back or in a corner of the classrooms, while students sat at computers, wearing headsets.

Teacher Pat Sessions monitors student work via a “dashboard” on her computer.

Teaching to the Student

At Hampton, I asked Pritchard, the social-studies facilitator, how she knew what her students were doing, so she opened a dashboard on her computer. It showed that on computer 3, a student was working on a U.S. history unit, or “module,” on civil rights. The teenager on computer 6 was working on a module on imperialism for the same course, and the student on computer 7 was doing a review and practice test on the executive branch of the U.S. government.

Most PLCs, including those in Virginia, use NovaNET, an online curriculum that is marketed by Pearson Education Inc. The program tests a student at the end of each lesson, module, and course, and lets those who pass their tests with at least an 80 percent move on. For those who don’t pass, the computer singles out the content they seemed not to understand, reteaches it, and retests.

Administrators and teachers at the Richmond Adult Career Development Center PLC: Sherman Curl (front right), Rani Gharseese (front left), Elizabeth Muse (center), Pat Sessions (back left), Ingrid Thomas (back center), Stephania Muterspaugh (back right)

Kids like the immediate feedback, Katherine Fox, the academic coordinator at Hampton, told me: “It’s difficult for them to wait for success. Kids want to move on.” A mop-haired boy named Michael told me that he used to obsess over test questions at his conventional school and couldn’t force himself to move ahead. The NovaNET practice tests and make-up tests relieved him of that anxiety, he said, as he pulled certificates from his backpack to show that he had completed two business classes, oceanography, and biology. “No one gets left behind here,” he said.

Back on Pritchard’s dashboard, meanwhile, I could see that the student on computer 1 was using an open-source educational website called SAS Curriculum Pathways to research voting rights for the government class, while the student on computer 2 was researching Appomattox on SAS for history class. Most Hampton PLC computers can access only NovaNET; the few that can access SAS can’t go any further than research sites to which SAS provides a link.

At the career center PLC in Richmond, which is housed on the top floor of a 1920s-era school built for the city’s elite black students, science facilitator Patricia Sessions showed me more. A “pacing sheet,” a sort of minimum speed limit set by the state education department, suggested that teachers should expect to devote three weeks to a unit on biochemical processes, part of the biology curriculum. But when Sessions opened the computer file of a student named Trish, it showed that Trish had finished the unit in a week. She’d spent 26 minutes on an online lesson about atoms and molecules, and got a 90 on the test. She’d spent an hour on the properties-of-water lesson and another hour on acids and bases, and got 80 on both.

Teachers told me that most NovaNET courses are comparable to textbook-based courses in length and content—a comeback to critics who talk of watered-down curricula at alternative schools—but that many students move through them more quickly, and often finish high school a semester early. “I’m constantly working rather than waiting,” explained a tattooed girl named Shaina at the Richmond Tech school.

Pritchard told me that she started the school year with students grouped largely by subject—say, geography in one period, government in another. But as the year went on, and students progressed at different speeds, classes became more diverse. In any class period now, she could have youngsters working on either semester of any of four subjects.

Wes Hamner is the academic coordinator at the Richmond Technical Center PLC.

As students finish courses, they can move to another classroom to work on courses they may find slower going. If they earn enough credits to graduate before the school year is over, the services coordinator steers them to mentorships, trade training, or jobs. Sessions, who was playing Mendelssohn in her otherwise-silent classroom as her students worked, said she started the year with 20 kids in her afternoon class and was down to 8 by late March.

All that movement precludes lectures or class discussions. Teachers told me that anywhere from 60 to 90 percent of the work in their classrooms is done online, with work sheets, projects, one-on-one meetings, and, for seniors, a research report and presentation accounting for the rest. The walls of Pritchard’s classroom were ringed with poster-board projects on the Zhou Dynasty, the Battle of Fort Fisher, and the roles of the secretary of defense and the U.S. Department of Education, among others. It wasn’t AP material, perhaps, but it showed persistence and attention to detail that are not always common in city schools. Last year, the whole school read the same book, Facing the Lion, and used it as a springboard for cross-disciplinary studies.

The students I talked with said they didn’t miss discussions or were self-aware enough to know that lectures didn’t fit their learning style. “I wouldn’t be listening anyway,” Tyriq told me; “I’m not a person to talk,” said another 18-year-old named Dashawn. Instead, kids said they liked the anonymity and independence of working online. “I like being in my own bubble,” Chelsie Saunders told me in Hampton: “I don’t like waiting on people” on some lessons and “I don’t worry about people getting frustrated with me” for working slowly on others.

Teacher Stephenia Muterspaugh prepares Shakeva Seward, Thomas Griffis, and Brittany Goodman for their Standards of Learning tests at the Richmond Adult Career Development Center PLC .

A Promising Start

The PLCs take youngsters who have at least attempted 9th grade, plus a few overage 8th graders. But most kids arrive in 10th or 11th grade when they realize they’re not on track to graduate. For admission, they must score at an 8th-grade level on standardized reading and math tests (the Richmond Tech PLC raised that to 9th grade because it had so many applicants), pass an interview, and sign an achievement contract that also commits them to attend a daily meeting called Morning Motivation. Each gets a learning plan that plots an individual path to graduation and then to a trade program, a job, or college.

Yvonne Brandon, superintendent of Richmond City Schools, expressed enthusiasm for online learning when we spoke. “We have to transform our ideas of what learning looks like,” she said. But PLC staffers told me that the districts sometimes struggle to understand them. Grade levels, quarterly grades, GPAs, and the academic calendar are fuzzy at a move-at-your-own-pace school: Youngsters told me how many credits they had, not whether they were juniors or seniors.

Sherri Pritchard is Hampton PLC’s social studies “learning facilitator.”

Students graduate when they earn the state-mandated 22 credits, but they can’t receive diplomas until spring. Firth, the Virginia PLC director, said he recently learned that some of those graduates-without-diplomas were being counted as absent by the district because, well, they weren’t in school. “We’re so outside the box and education is so inside the box,” Hamner sighed.

The data on online education are still pretty equivocal. There are no data on what kind of student performs best in an online class, although everyone I talked with assumed it probably was the independent achiever, because that kind of student performs well in any setting. There are few quality measures, although Michael Horn, executive director for education at the Innosight Institute, a Mountain View, California, think tank, points out that we don’t know how to measure quality in face-to-face classes, either.

Barbara Means of SRI International, a research institute in Menlo Park, California, told me that much of the ambiguity is because state data systems aren’t set up to compare online learners to in-class learners. They don’t record which students taking the state’s standardized math tests completed them at the end of an online course, for example, and which took them after a face-to-face class. Most states don’t keep student-level data, so researchers also can’t compare similar students at a full-time virtual school and those in a full-time conventional one.

Means reviewed 12 years of literature on online learning and said that from the limited data they presented she concluded that “there wasn’t much difference” in the educational outcomes of kids who studied online and those who studied in a classroom. That suggests that schools should consider some other reason if they’re thinking of shifting curriculum or students online, she said: Perhaps it’s cheaper or there are social benefits, like making school more flexible for working students or for those with infants.

Means also surveyed the literature comparing outcomes at traditional schools to outcomes at schools that blended face-to-face and online teaching. Youngsters in the blended environments, with a teacher and technology, did “significantly better,” she said. But that may be because blended schools offered youngsters more learning time, more content, or perhaps both, rather than because of the different approach to teaching.

Katherine Fox, academic coordinator at the Hampton PLC, hands Tyriq Jones his diploma.

Credit-recovery and online programs have been accused of low standards and a weak-tea curriculum, anything to get kids into the graduation statistics, critics contend. But the PLCs insist on the rigor of their program because it’s based on a general-education curriculum, not a credit-recovery curriculum. PLC students take the same state tests as their traditional-school peers. And computer testing on NovaNET and other online curricula prevents social promotion or the intervention of soft-hearted administrators. “We legally graduate kids; I don’t do them any favors,” said Wes Hamner at Richmond Tech PLC.

In a report on the 2009–10 school year, the project says that, nationally, its students improved their scores in all four core subjects compared to their performance in their home school the year before—by from 6 to 11 percentage points—and that 96 percent of the students classified as seniors at the beginning of the school year graduated. For a project that works with potential dropouts, that’s hugely impressive, but there has been little outside research on the PLCs that would confirm that.

The results at the Virginia PLCs are equally ambiguous. In 2009–10, the 432 youngsters who attended the four schools arrived with D averages in math, English, science, and social studies, and, except for math—which was still stuck in the basement—raised them to a C. But the averages include the 30 percent of kids who dropped out, switched to a GED program, or left for some other reason, probably lowering the grades.

After experiencing little success in a traditional high school, Tyriq Hasan Jones graduated in June 2011 from the Hampton PLC.

The PLCs also reported that 96 percent of their students passed Virginia’s end-of-course algebra exams, 97 percent passed reading, 90 percent passed biology, and 100 percent passed writing. That would put the PLCs ahead of state averages in all four subjects. (The results say a lot about Virginia’s learning standards: Is it really possible that only 6 percent of the state’s 400,000 high schoolers failed reading and 6 percent failed Algebra I last year?) The scores of PLC students are included in the results of their home schools, which makes them difficult to verify. The PLCs also don’t accept English-language learners, kids with discipline problems or most disabilities, or those with elementary-level reading and math abilities, as other public schools must, which muddies the comparison.

Still, more than one-third of the youngsters who started at the Virginia PLCs in fall 2009 graduated in 2010, including 68 students who headed to two- or four-year colleges, the Virginia project reported.

When I spoke with Chelsie Saunders in Hampton in early spring, she laid out a career path that included community college, university, and then a career in teaching or nursing. “Honestly, if it wasn’t for here, I wouldn’t graduate,” she told me. When I checked back in June, she had.

June Kronholz is a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and education reporter, and currently a contributing editor at Education Next.

The Public Weighs In on School Reform

William Howell — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 04:04:30 +0000

Complete survey results available here.

Education Next readers took this survey as well. See how their responses compared.

Public education has rarely been far from the national headlines over the past year. Efforts to limit teachers’ collective-bargaining rights led to mass protests in several states. The enactment of voucher programs renewed the debate over the role of private school choice in American education. Meanwhile, the first significant budget cuts in recent memory forced public school districts to tighten their belts in unprecedented ways. The Obama administration has encouraged a nationwide effort to develop common school standards. And let’s not forget Waiting for “Superman,” the high-profile documentary whose poignant portrayal of the charter-school admissions process, coupled with a critique of union power in public schools, was expected to have a significant impact on national opinion.

But how have Americans actually responded to these developments? Have they grown more supportive of the current direction of school reform, or are there instead signs of a backlash? And how do the views of teachers compare to those of the public at large?

These are among the questions we explore in this, the fifth-annual Education Next–PEPG Survey, which interviewed a nationally representative sample of some 2,600 American citizens during April and May of 2011 (see sidebar for survey methodology). In addition to the views of the public as a whole, we pay special attention in this year’s survey to two potentially influential types of participants in school politics: the affluent and teachers. To our knowledge, this is the first survey of a nationally representative sample of affluent Americans, defined as college graduates who are in the top income decile in their state. This is the third year we have surveyed a nationally representative sample of teachers, defined as full-time teachers currently working in public schools. Both the affluent and teachers pay more attention to public education and participate more actively in school politics than the general public, making their views worthy of close scrutiny (see sidebar).

Teachers and the Affluent: Paying Attention, Participating, and Holding Opinions

A highly decentralized, democratic system of education affords all sorts of opportunities for average citizens to weigh in on public schools. Through votes, school board meetings, petition drives, and direct advocacy, all citizens, at least in principle, can influence public education.

Principle and practice, however, often part ways. That all citizens can influence public education is not to say that all citizens do so. Generations of political science research confirm that higher-income and, especially, better-educated citizens are orders of magnitude more likely to participate in politics. And recent evidence demonstrates that teachers are far more likely to vote in school board elections than is the general public.

In our own survey, 37 percent of the American public claims to pay either “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of attention to issues involving education, while 54 percent of the affluent and an overwhelming 84 percent of teachers do so.

Public opinion surveys routinely overstate the levels of turnout in elections. Hence, it is difficult to know what to make of the absolute numbers of any particular group that reports voting. By comparing across groups, though, we can generate reasonable estimates of the relative tendency of people to vote. When we do, we find further evidence of the high rates of political participation among both the affluent and teachers. Compared to the American public at large, members of the affluent group are 16 percentage points more likely to report having voted. Teachers are fully 18 percentage points more likely to report having done so.

These two groups also are more likely to pronounce a clear view about the quality of schools and the value of different education reforms. The percentage that selects the “don’t know” or “neither support nor oppose” categories is almost always larger for the general public than for either the affluent or teachers.

Our findings reveal more stability than change in public opinion over the five years since the Education Next–PEPG survey began, suggesting that the momentous policy developments of the past year were not caused by—nor have they yet produced—broad changes in popular views. The one exception to that generalization is a significant turnaround in support for school vouchers, which until this year had been in decline.

The views of the affluent resemble those of the general public, except that the affluent are more likely to hold strong opinions and even larger percentages support the positions taken by a plurality of the general public. However, the well-to-do are more skeptical of online learning. They also hold the public schools in their own community in comparatively high regard, perhaps because they have better access to good public schools.

Teacher opinion often diverges from that of both the affluent and the general public. Teachers are much more likely to give schools high marks; on many issues, a majority of teachers takes the side opposite to that of the larger public, revealing tensions between what Americans overall think is best and what employees within the education industry prefer.

Teacher Rights and Policies

Wisconsin’s curtailment of the collective bargaining rights of teachers and other public employees was undoubtedly the top education news story of early 2011. In protest, teachers called in sick in droves, union members crowded the state capitol, and Democratic senators refused to attend legislative sessions. President Obama supported the protests, while Republican leaders lent their support to the embattled Wisconsin governor. Similar issues involving union rights and teacher prerogatives percolated in other states as well, including Indiana, Tennessee, Ohio, and even Massachusetts.

What was the public response? Are the opinions of teachers and the public converging or diverging? The short answer: Public opinion on issues involving teacher rights and prerogatives has remained essentially unchanged, but teachers’ opinions are diverging on key issues.

Teachers Unions. When asked whether teachers unions have a generally positive or negative effect on the nation’s public schools, 33 percent of the public gives a negative response, virtually unchanged from the 31 percent and 33 percent who perceived a negative impact in 2009 and 2010, respectively (see Figure 1). The share perceiving a positive union impact on schools hardly budged, changing only from 28 percent in 2009 to 29 percent in 2011. A sizable plurality of 38 percent continues to hold a neutral position, suggesting that the debate over the role of teachers unions is hardly over. The views about teachers unions held by the affluent are more negative, with no less than 56 percent saying unions have a negative impact on their schools.

Among teachers themselves, opinion is moving in precisely the opposite direction from that of the public at large. Only 17 percent now say that unions have a negative impact on the nation’s schools, down from 25 percent in 2010. Fifty-eight percent think they have a positive impact, up from 51 percent the previous year.

Teacher Tenure. Opposition to teacher tenure edged upward, but not to a significant degree. Between 2009 and 2010, those opposed to tenure shifted slightly from 45 percent to 47 percent, and in 2011 that percentage again ticked upward to 49 percent. Moreover, tenure supporters slipped from 25 percent in prior years to 20 percent in 2011. Unless the trend continues in future years, not much should be made of these small shifts. Among the affluent, opposition to tenure was much greater—no less than 67 percent. Meanwhile, teachers like tenure more than ever. Fifty-three percent now say they support tenure, up from 48 percent a year ago.

If tenure is to be given at all, the public thinks it should be based on demonstrated success in raising student performance on state tests. Those who say tenure should be based on student academic progress increased from 49 percent to 55 percent between 2010 and 2011. The well-to-do also like the idea, with 61 percent giving it their support. Teachers, however, were far less enthusiastic about the idea, only 30 percent giving it a favorable nod.

Merit Pay. The issue of merit pay made national news in 2010 when then Florida governor Charlie Crist vetoed a controversial bill requiring that teachers statewide be paid based on their classroom performance. Although Crist’s veto brought him favor with the state’s teachers unions, his successor signed similar legislation in 2011. Meanwhile, states and districts around the nation continue to experiment with new models of teacher compensation.

The public tends to favor merit pay, and recent developments have not altered that fact in one direction or another. A near majority (47 percent) of the American public favors paying teachers, in part, based on the academic progress of their students on state tests, about the same percentage as in 2007. Only 27 percent of the public opposes the idea, with the balance undecided. Affluent respondents were only modestly more likely (52 percent) to favor merit pay. The idea remains anathema to teachers, however, with only 18 percent in favor, and 72 percent opposed (see Figure 2). Despite the Obama administration’s continued efforts to build support for merit pay among teachers, the vast majority remains unconvinced.

Teacher Compensation. If teachers and the public disagree on many things, the public nonetheless wants to pay teachers well. Fifty-five percent of the public thinks salaries should increase, virtually the same percentage that voiced that opinion two years ago. Support for higher teacher salaries among the affluent is slightly higher (59 percent). Those who do not favor increases think salaries should remain at current levels. Only 7 percent of the public as a whole thinks teacher salaries should be cut. Needless to say, salary increases for teachers is hardly an issue among teachers themselves. Eighty-two percent of them give the proposal their wholehearted support (see Figure 3).

Support drops, however, when those surveyed are told how much the average teacher in their state is currently paid. It falls to 43 percent, although a majority (52 percent) of the well-to-do still favors a salary increase. Learning the actual salary levels had little impact on the thinking of teachers themselves, over three-quarters (76 percent) of whom continue to back the idea.

When Americans are asked to choose between increasing teacher salaries and reducing class sizes, they regularly select the latter option. Even when they are told that “reducing average class sizes by three students would cost roughly the same amount as increasing teacher salaries by $10,000,” 44 percent of Americans select class-size reduction, whereas 28 percent select increasing teacher salaries. The affluent have similar views. By contrast, roughly equal numbers of teachers would choose salary increases as would choose class-size reduction.

Of course, teacher remuneration goes well beyond salaries. On average, teachers enjoy considerably larger pension benefits and health-care packages than do comparable professionals in the private sector, a point of contention in recent policy debates. In April 2011, for example, Ohio enacted legislation requiring all public employees, including teachers, to contribute at least 15 percent of the cost of their health-care benefits. Yet the battle over the issue is far from over: The Ohio Education Association recently collected a one-time assessment of $54 from each of the state’s teachers, raising $5 million to advocate for the law’s repeal.

It is of interest, then, that the American public tends to look favorably on a proposal that would require teachers “to pay from their salaries 20 percent of the cost of their health care and pension benefits, with the government covering the remainder.” By a nearly two-to-one margin, the American public favors this policy. The margin of support is even larger among the affluent, a majority of whom back this requirement. Teachers overwhelmingly reject this cost-cutting measure, with opponents outnumbering supporters more than two to one.

Teacher Certification. In most states, teachers must take approximately 30 hours of instruction at a school of education before they may be certified as a teacher. A substantial body of research demonstrates that such instruction does not translate into higher student performance. And the American public seems to have caught on. A plurality of Americans supports (42 percent, while 31 percent oppose) allowing principals to “hire college graduates who they believe will be effective in the classroom even if they do not have formal teaching credentials.” As for the affluent, no less than 61 percent support the relaxation of teacher hiring requirements. Existing teachers, by contrast, steadfastly oppose the practice, perhaps because virtually all of them underwent the formal credentialing process. Fully 60 percent of teachers object to the idea of principals being allowed to hire college graduates who do not have formal teaching credentials, and only 28 percent support it.

All in all, the Wisconsin controversy seems to have contributed to a divergence of opinion between teachers and the general public. The biggest changes in opinion took place within the teaching profession, which moved further away from the views of the public at large. The public, and especially the affluent, nonetheless want to pay teachers more.

School Choice

A strong case can be made that 2010 and 2011 were among the very best years school choice has yet enjoyed. The number of students in charter schools grew to 1.7 million, and several states raised caps on the number of charter schools that will be permitted to open in the future. Indiana, Ohio, Florida, Arizona, and New Mexico all passed voucher legislation of one kind or another, and Congress restored the federal school-voucher program it had previously shut down in Washington, D.C. What has been the public’s response?

Vouchers. Opinion on vouchers varies, depending on how the question is posed. We therefore randomly assigned respondents to two groups, one of which was asked a question that might be termed “voucher-friendly” in that it emphasizes giving a choice to parents. The other half was asked a question that might be termed “voucher-unfriendly” in that it emphasizes students going to private school at public expense. Not surprisingly, members of the public are more likely to say they like vouchers (47 percent) if asked the first question than if asked the second (39 percent). (See Figure 4 for the wording of the questions and the pattern of responses to each.)

There is little scientific basis for deciding which of these questions is the “right” one to ask. Instead of focusing on the number obtained by either question, therefore, it often is more informative to look at differences between groups and changes that take place over time.

Viewed in these ways, three facts stand out. First, support for vouchers increased by 8 percentage points between 2010 and 2011. This was the largest shift of public opinion over the course of the past year. If the public debate altered anything, it was regarding this specific topic. That the change in opinion is registered by responses to both questions leads one to conclude that the survey identified a genuine political development. Second, the affluent express more opposition to vouchers than the general public. The level of opposition is 12 percentage points higher in response to one version of the question and 4 percentage points higher on the other. Third, teachers are the least enthusiastic about vouchers. Although their opinions, like those of the general public, shifted in a favorable direction in 2011, teachers are still as much as 25 percentage points more opposed to vouchers than is the public as a whole.

Tax Credits. Public opinion on other school-choice issues remains stable. When it comes to tax credits for education expenses for families attending either public or private schools, a majority is in favor, and opposition is less than 20 percent. Almost the same can be said for the more common approach of offering tax credits for individual or corporate donations to scholarship programs. On both items, though, little change is detected from previous years. Nor do either the affluent or teachers think much differently.

Charter Schools. When asked about charters, 43 percent of the American public comes out in support, hardly different from the percentage that did so in 2010 (see Figure 5). The most common response, though, continues to be “neither support nor oppose.” When one segment of respondents was asked to choose between “support,” “oppose,” and “don’t know,” a similar proportion selected ”don’t know” as had selected “neither support nor oppose,” again suggesting that Americans either do not understand what charter schools are or have not made up their minds about them (see “Educating the Public,” features, Summer 2009). These findings are all the more remarkable given that charter schools are now two decades in the making, and in just the last year they have received substantial media attention, been the subject of a major documentary, and enjoyed the endorsement of leaders of both political parties, including key members of the Obama administration.

The affluent are especially likely to favor charter schools, with 64 percent offering their endorsement. Interestingly, the biggest jump in support for charters seems to have taken place among teachers. Those favoring the idea increased from 39 percent to 45 percent over the past year, while opposition remained unchanged.

Single-Sex Schools. Once pervasive in American education, gender-specific public schools were until quite recently a vanishing species. The notion of educating boys and girls separately, however, received a boost in 2006 with the publication of new federal regulations clarifying the legal status of single-sex schools and classrooms. The National Association for Single Sex Public Education reports that 524 public schools now offer students opportunities for single-sex education, including 103 in which students have all of their educational activities in a gender-specific setting.

Thirty-four percent of Americans support proposals that would give “parents the option of sending their child to an all-boys or all-girls school,” while only 23 percent are opposed. Opinion has not changed since the same question was last posed back in 2009. Interestingly, the well-to-do are even more favorably disposed to the idea, with no less than 47 percent giving it their support. Teachers, too, like the idea. Given the widespread support for providing families a single-sex option, it is surprising no politician has made this issue an election platform component.

Grading Public Schools

Last year we reported that the public’s evaluations of the nation’s public schools had reached an all-time low. Only 18 percent of the public was willing to give the schools an A or a B, while 27 percent said they deserved no better than a D or an F. Those evaluations were decidedly lower than the grades given by those asked by the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll earlier in the decade, and even lower than the percentage reported by Education Next in 2007 (when only 22 percent gave their schools top marks).

Happily, in 2011, evaluations of public schools have ticked upward ever so modestly, with 22 percent again willing to give their schools an A or B, though 25 percent of those evaluations are still handing out either a D or F. The affluent are by far the toughest graders, with only 15 percent of them giving the nation’s schools the highest marks. Teachers, by contrast, are much more generous in their evaluations, with 37 percent saying that the nation’s schools deserve an A or B (see Figure 6).

The portrait of public satisfaction changes dramatically, however, if one inquires about Americans’ local public schools. No less than 46 percent of those surveyed give their community schools an A or a B, a slightly higher percentage than in 2007 (43 percent). The affluent, as critical as they are of the nation’s schools, are more content with their local schools than the public at large: 54 percent say their local schools deserve one of the two high grades. Teachers especially like their own community’s schools, with 64 percent of them giving out an A or a B.

Spending on Public Schools

For the United States economy, the past three years have been hard times: The country has yet to recover fully from the recession that began in 2008. Unemployment hovers around 9 percent, salary increases are hard to come by, and public treasuries are steeped in debt. The stimulus package of 2009 provided a short-term revenue fix for school districts, but those dollars, at best, barely offset sharp declines from local tax revenues. In the spring of 2011, when this survey was administered, no one thought it would be easy for school districts to balance their budgets. Under the circumstances, it would not be surprising if the public concluded that cutbacks in school expenditures were appropriate.

Not so. When the public was asked whether government funding for public schools in their district should increase, decrease, or stay the same, 59 percent selected the first option, only slightly less than the 63 percent that gave that opinion in 2010, and dramatically more than in 2009 (46 percent). Affluent respondents were less willing to spend more for their district schools, but even among them a clear majority (52 percent) preferred an increase in expenditures.

A segment of those surveyed were asked the same question except that they were first told the level of per-pupil expenditure in their community, which averaged $12,300 for the respondents in our sample. For every subgroup considered, this single piece of information dampened public enthusiasm for increased spending. Support for more spending fell from 59 percent to 46 percent of those surveyed. Among the well-to-do, the level of support dropped dramatically, from 52 percent to 36 percent. Among teachers, support for expenditure increases fell even more sharply—from 71 percent to 53 percent (see Figure 7).

When asked about the possibility of raising taxes to fund public schools, support for greater spending dropped further still. Only 28 percent of Americans believe that local taxes to support public schools should be increased, while over half believe that they should stay the same, and 16 percent believe that they should decrease. The views of the affluent do not differ notably from the public as a whole and even among teachers only 42 percent support higher taxes.

Digital Learning

Online education has become a growth industry, as a rapidly increasing number of high school and college students are taking some of their courses over the Internet. Some, including Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christiansen, have gone so far as to predict that half of all high school courses will be taken online within a decade.

A year ago such projections seemed plausible, as public support for learning over the Internet jumped 10 points, to a total 52 percent, from where it had been the previous year. But if online learning is going to sweep the country, that percentage needs to continue to climb, and in 2011, support slipped modestly to 47 percent. Twenty-six percent of Americans now say they are opposed, up 3 percentage points over 2010 (see Figure 8).

Contrary to the standard image of the educated well-to-do as the first to adopt new technologies, the affluent were somewhat less supportive of the idea than the public as a whole. In fact, the affluent were evenly divided, with opposition as high as 43 percent. Nearly half (49 percent) of teachers also expressed approval, although that percentage was down by 6 percent from 2010.

In short, there are signs that support for online learning is reaching a political plateau, and important segments of the population—teachers and the affluent—are resistant to the idea. Yet, when respondents were asked about their own children, high levels of support for online education are observed across the American public. A majority of Americans overall, and roughly two in three teachers, expresses a willingness to have one of their children take “some academic courses” in high school over the Internet.

School and Student Accountability

Nine years after the enactment of No Child Left Behind, the public’s appetite for standardized tests appears undiminished. More than two in three Americans believe that the federal government should “continue to require that all students be tested in math and reading each year in grades 3–8 and once in high school,” whereas less than 10 percent actually oppose this requirement. Roughly three in four affluent respondents support the regular administration of tests, as do similar shares of African Americans and Hispanics. Only among teachers does there appear a nontrivial segment of the population that opposes existing testing practices. Even so, majorities of teachers support annual testing of lower-school students and a single test for high school students.

Breaking from existing law, however, Americans support the creation of a single national test in both reading and math. Under No Child Left Behind, each state develops its own test and benchmarks for determining student proficiency. Solid pluralities of both the general public and all subgroups, however, believe that there should be one test and one standard for all students across the country. Roughly one in five, by contrast, supports different tests and standards in different states. A paltry number of respondents think that all state and federal tests should be abolished.

Just as Americans support tying teacher pay to student performance on standardized tests, so too do they want students’ eligibility to be promoted from one grade to the next and to graduate from high school to depend on demonstrated success on tests. Fully 70 percent of Americans support a requirement that students pass an exam before being eligible to move on to the next grade. Another 72 percent support a requirement that students pass an exam before being allowed to receive a high school diploma. Support for student accountability, moreover, runs deep across all the subgroups we analyze, including teachers. Sixty percent of teachers support the idea of tying grade promotion to test performance, while 66 percent support high school graduation exams, even as these same teachers overwhelming oppose the idea of linking their own remuneration to student test scores.

That Americans want students to be tested, however, does not mean that they are convinced that current testing provides accurate information about school quality. Indeed, only 7 percent of Americans claim that their state’s standardized test provides “excellent” information about the schools in their state, and only 34 percent claim that it provides “good” information. Forty-seven percent, however, believe that the test provides either “fair” or “poor” information. With just one exception, all of the subgroups follow national trends on this question. As their responses to other questions about testing might indicate, teachers hold standardized tests in the lowest regard. Only one in four teachers claims that the state’s standardized tests offer excellent or good information about the quality of schools, compared to the 69 percent who believe that the information is either fair or poor.

Conflicts with Teachers Likely to Persist

We have discussed only a few highlights from this year’s survey. The reader can glean much more information by taking a careful look at the survey questions and responses, available on the Education Next web site. Here we draw only three broad conclusions:

On many questions of education policy, opinion has not changed materially over the past year, despite the headline news coming from Wisconsin and elsewhere. We are not the first to have documented stability in the policy positions taken by members of the American public. Only when external events require a rethinking of their position are they inclined to alter their views. For that reason, we find it to be of some significance that over the course of the past year the public has become much more supportive of school vouchers.

On most questions of public policy, differences between the affluent and the public at large are on the margins. In no case did we find the well-to-do favoring a policy that the general public opposed. Instead, those with ample resources tend to be even more supportive of the positions that were taken by a plurality of the public. Our data do not allow us to discern whether the affluent are leading or following public opinion more generally, but the findings do suggest a general synchronization of viewpoints. Still, it is the case the affluent are more skeptical of online learning and more satisfied with their local schools than is the general public.

Finally, we find that a majority of teachers often takes positions contrary to those of a plurality of both the public and the affluent on key issues such as teachers unions, the rights and prerogatives of teachers, and school vouchers. Plainly, the battles over school reform are far from over.

William G. Howell is professor of American politics at the University of Chicago. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and deputy director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. Paul E. Peterson is the director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Survey Methodology

The findings from the Education Next–PEPG survey reported in this essay are based on a nationally representative stratified sample of approximately 550 adults (age 18 years and older) and representative oversamples of roughly 350 members of the following subgroups: the affluent (as defined below), public school teachers, parents of school-aged children, residents of zip codes in which a charter school was located during the 2009–10 school year, African Americans, and Hispanics. Respondents could elect to complete the survey in English or Spanish.

In order to isolate the views of the affluent, we identified Americans with at least a B.A. or its equivalent whose household income placed them within the top 10 percent of the income distribution within their state. This sample of 412 respondents was 45 percent male, 58 percent with an advanced degree beyond the B.A., 28 percent parents of school-aged children, 84 percent married, and 85 percent white, 2 percent African American, 4 percent Hispanic, and 8 percent other or multiple race/ethnicity.

In general, survey responses based on larger numbers of observations are more precise, that is, less prone to sampling variance, than those made across groups with fewer numbers of observations. As a consequence, answers attributed to the national population are more precisely estimated than are those attributed to subgroups. With some 2,600 total respondents, the margin of error for responses given by the full sample in the Education Next–PEPG survey is roughly 2 percentage points for questions on which opinion is evenly split. The specific number of respondents varies from question to question due to survey nonresponse and to the fact that, in some cases, we randomly divided the sample into multiple groups in order to examine the effect of variations in the way questions are posed. In these cases, the figures and online tables present separately the results for the different experimental conditions. As an informal rule, we do not treat differences of less than 5 percentage points as worthy of commentary.

Percentages reported in the figures and online tables do not always add precisely to 100 as a result of rounding to the nearest percentage point.

The 2011 Education Next–PEPG Survey of Public Opinion was conducted by the polling firm Knowledge Networks (KN) between April 15 and May 4, 2011. KN maintains a nationally representative panel of adults, obtained via list-assisted random digit–dialing sampling techniques, who agree to participate in a limited number of online surveys. Detailed information about the maintenance of the KN panel, the protocols used to administer surveys, and the comparability of online and telephone surveys is available online at www.knowledgenetworks.com/quality/.

The 2012 Republican Candidates (So Far)

Allison Sherry — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 04:01:48 +0000

Podcast: Paul Peterson and Chester Finn discuss education policy and the Republican candidates (and probable candidates) for president.

Readers Poll: Vote for the presidential candidate you think would be best for K-12 education.

Two months before his 2008 election, Barack Obama addressed a roomful of Ohio public school teachers, praising their long hours and talking about his daughters’ starting 2nd and 5th grade. It was a typical Democratic education speech, with vows of support for early childhood education, for building up programs that help students from “the day they’re born until the day they graduate from college.”

Then Obama departed from the usual feel-good talking points. He touted competition, charter schools, and school choice. “I believe in public schools, but I also believe in fostering competition within the public schools,” he said. “And that’s why, as president, I’ll double the funding for responsible charter schools.”

That wasn’t an applause line, for sure, but it did serve another purpose: to position the candidate as a different kind of Democrat, one willing to embrace ideas from across the aisle and push back against his own teachers union base. It also put Republicans on notice: Obama wouldn’t be bashful about encroaching on their territory on education.

Two and a half years later, Republicans are still trying to figure out how to respond to Obama, a Democratic president with education reform bona fides. To date, the most prominent leaders of the GOP have either been mute on the topic of education or heaped praise on the president. Indiana governor Mitch Daniels lauded the Obama administration and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a speech he made in April 2011: “We need to prepare our young people with the highest possible preparation wherever they come from, wherever they are headed,” he said. “[Duncan] is the nation’s champion, along with the president he serves, of that ideal.”

As the winter primaries get closer, don’t expect much more of that.

The One That Got Away

Republicans began this election season in search of a candidate and a message. The May withdrawal of Mitch Daniels from the Republican primary race left the GOP without one of its most visible education leaders. The Midwestern governor had become a darling among education reformers for making school choice and quality teaching his top priorities.

In his final State of the State speech in Indianapolis, Daniels said that if he did nothing else in 2011, he wanted to “hitch his legacy” to education reform. Watching from the audience that day were students on waiting lists to get into various charter schools. He urged state lawmakers to create a voucher program that would allow kids to use public dollars for private school tuition. He talked for 30 minutes about improving teacher quality. And by the end of the legislative session, he got just about everything he wanted in a school reform plan: expansion of charter schools, private school vouchers, and college scholarships for students who graduate high school early.

But after flirting with a presidential run, Daniels bowed out, leaving to those still in the running the task of building a GOP education platform.

The Race Is On

After a slow start, the Republican field is finally starting to take shape. Former governors Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty have announced their election bids, and former GOP house speaker Newt Gingrich is also running. As of June 2011, Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum had entered the race. Republicans await announcements from Sarah Palin and Texas governor Rick Perry.

In staking out platforms in the coming months for what will likely be a feisty GOP primary, Republicans face two quandaries regarding education policy: They need to distinguish their positions from Obama’s centrist education reforms, and they need to win over the Republican base, fueled by some Tea Party energy, that will push for the U.S. Department of Education to be dismantled altogether.

Former education secretary Margaret Spellings says gaining ground may not be easy, but it has been done before: by George W. Bush, her former boss.

“I commend President Obama for adopting the GOP playbook and building on the groundwork that we’ve laid,” said Spellings, currently a consultant in Washington, D.C. “It’s time for us to develop some new material that pushes even further.”

If Republicans want an advantage, Spellings argues, they need to push choice and the hold-schools-accountable platform because “that’s safe territory for Republicans of all stripes,” she said. “Unite Republicans by talking about the kind of public policy that ties very closely to accountability.”

One likely Republican target is school spending. Days after entering office, President Obama signed into law the sweeping stimulus bill, which included a $100 billion bailout of the K–12 system. A year later, the smaller “edujobs” bill pumped another $10 billion into the schools. While this money was ostensibly linked to reform via the Race to the Top, there’s very little to show for this huge influx of federal funds. Most studies show that it merely saved teachers’ jobs, or kicked layoffs down the road a year or two. In lots of places where layoffs were not on the table, it allowed school districts to give teachers raises, at a time when America suffered through the worst unemployment crisis in a generation.

By pointing at the fat in the education system, GOP candidates could argue, as Governor Pawlenty did in 2007, that American schools are “costing us a lot of money and it’s costing them their future.”

Expect to see the candidates applaud governors in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Ohio, who took on collective bargaining rights and insisted that money is best used to reward good teaching for the children’s sake.

“We have built a system…that cares more about the feelings of adults than the future of children,” said New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie, widely expected to run for president in 2016, at the American Enterprise Institute earlier this year. “Tell me, where else is there a profession with no reward for excellence and no penalty for failure?”

In a 2011 speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Romney berated Obama for failed economic policies, saying afterward that he’s “seen the failure of liberal answers before…liberal education policies fail our children today because they put pensions and privileges for the union bosses above our kids.”

Defining the Federal Role

A candidate like Romney or Pawlenty is still going to have to explain to the Republican base why they’re not going to shutter the U.S. Department of Education. During the 2010 midterm elections, Tea Party Senate and House candidates across the country promised on the campaign trail that they would shut down the U.S. Department of Education and hand control over to state governments. Many of them are now members of Congress.

A related issue is where to land on the “Common Core” standards, a set of expectations in reading and math developed by the nation’s governors and state superintendents, but viewed by many conservatives as a federal plot to take over the schools.

“Post-Obamacare, post–Dodd-Frank, in the Tea Party world, Republicans aren’t interested anymore in a robust federal role in education,” said a senior GOP Capitol Hill staffer, who could not be named because he is not authorized to talk to the media. “Bush liked it and talked about it, fine. Now that he’s not there hitting us over the head with it, we’ll move to empower and trust state and local officials to make decisions.”

The Candidates

No matter who else enters the race, it is unlikely a newcomer will have a ready-made education platform. Romney, Bachmann, Pawlenty, Perry, and Gingrich have all, in their careers, been outspoken on key issues of education policy. It’s worth considering what each of these (potential) candidates might do, were he or she to become the nation’s 45th president.

MITT ROMNEY, like many Republican leaders in the 1990s, called for abolishing the U.S. Department of Education.

Once he became governor of Massachusetts, Romney plotted out a more sophisticated education platform. He pushed school choice when a Democratic-controlled state legislature was moving away from it, and extolled the virtues of No Child Left Behind.

“I’ve taken a position where, once upon a time, I said I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education…. That’s very popular with the base,” Romney said at a 2007 Republican debate in South Carolina. “As I’ve been a governor and seen the impact that the federal government can have holding down the interest of the teachers unions and instead putting the interests of the kids and the parents and the teachers first, I see that the Department of Education can actually make a difference.”

As governor, Romney proposed education reform measures that lifted the state cap on charter schools and gave principals more power to get rid of ineffective teachers.

In his book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, he darkly warns about American students’ low achievement in reading and writing. He writes that money does not play a pivotal role in education quality and achievement, perhaps a harbinger that Romney’s education-reform platform wouldn’t include new money, as Obama’s plan did.

“The average amount spent per pupil, adjusted for inflation, rose by 73 percent between 1980 and 2005, and the average class size was reduced by 18 percent,” he wrote. “But during that same period, the educational performance of our children has hardly budged. Why not?”

In Massachusetts, Romney defended statewide graduation requirement tests, which started during his first year as governor in 2003. When one mayor declared he would dole out diplomas even to students who didn’t pass the tests, Romney threatened to withhold state dollars.

He also defended English immersion after visiting a Boston school where many students enrolled in bilingual classes had actually been born in the United States.

If Romney talks education in the next year, he will blend the importance of accountability and of governing with a stick if needed. He is widely credited for raising test scores. In his third year as governor, 4th and 8th graders scored first in the country in math and English (see Figure 1).

It was in education that MICHELE BACHMANN got her political sea legs. Disappointed in the school work brought home by her foster kids attending public school, the now Minnesota congresswoman decided to get involved because the school system didn’t have an “academic foundation,” according to Bloomberg News.

She started a charter school in the early 1990s, but abruptly resigned from its board—along with other board members—after the school district accused the charter of teaching religion in its classrooms.

In 1999, Bachmann ran for Stillwater school board with a platform to dump Minnesota’s “Profile of Learning,” the state’s graduation standards. It is the only race the three-term congresswoman has ever lost.

Under a Bachmann presidency, expect the U.S. Department of Education to be all but shuttered. In 2004, she authored legislation that would remove Minnesota from the requirements of No Child Left Behind. (It didn’t pass.) In a 2009 letter to constituents posted on her website, Bachmann wrote, “I entered politics because I want to give my children the incredible educational experience I received from public schools as a student. No Child Left Behind must be repealed and control of our education returned to the local level.”

As his eight years as Minnesota’s governor wore on, TIM PAWLENTY’s push against the teachers union grew stronger and more publicly divisive.

Shortly after his election in 2002, in an impromptu speech to business leaders, Pawlenty called for tying teacher pay to performance and bringing up the state’s standards. He also urged state lawmakers to authorize the use of a transparent growth model to see how well schools are really doing to improve student achievement. Yet, maybe because teachers union officials were in the audience, Pawlenty carefully parsed tenure, saying, “Seniority can remain a big factor, maybe even the main factor, in setting pay scales,” according to news reports.

The speech underscored Pawlenty’s sometimes mixed message to unions throughout his tenure: I’ll try to work with you. That is until you don’t work with me.

In 2005, Pawlenty passed a Minnesota-wide teacher pay-for-performance plan called “Q Comp,” which rewards teachers based on evaluations. Though passed by the state legislature, the plan gave school districts and charter schools the choice of whether to participate and allows a district to collectively bargain a pay agreement that looks at professional development, teacher evaluation, and an alternative salary schedule.

When federal Race to the Top dollars became available, Pawlenty launched a statewide charter school initiative and moved to hone math and science instruction in schools. Still, Minnesota lost out, most notably because the application lacked support from the teachers union. Like all states, Minnesota had an opportunity to go for the second round of grants, but Pawlenty drew a line in the sand, saying he would only apply again if the union, and Democrats in the state legislature, agreed to more reforms.

At the time, Pawlenty also dialed up the rhetoric. The timing may have been personally fortuitous: He had declared he wasn’t seeking another gubernatorial term in Minnesota and was flirting with a presidential run. It was good press: He was out there staking pitch-perfect positions on education reform.

“If they [the teachers unions] don’t buy in and aren’t partners in change, it’s not going to work,” Pawlenty said at a United Negro College Fund event in February of 2010. “We have to constructively and gently, or maybe not so gently, nudge them toward change.”

Texas Governor RICK PERRY, if he runs, is likely to use his own state’s successes to argue that the federal government should dramatically downsize in education.

While Perry has been outspoken against the Common Core, he and his education commissioner have pulled the quality of Texas tests up to a level respected among education reformers. Test scores among kids of all racial and ethnic backgrounds are higher in Texas than in Wisconsin, for example, which has fewer students qualifying for free- and reduced-price lunch.

Though Perry will probably make this point on the campaign trail, he’s not likely to promise to take over the nation’s schools. On the contrary, he’ll likely pick up on his recent call to repeal No Child Left Behind and let states take charge of their education systems. In his book released last year, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, Perry argues that Washington has taken power away from states. At a speech in November in Washington, Perry took aim at two of former President Bush’s signature accomplishments, No Child Left Behind and the Medicare drug benefit program, saying they were examples of areas in which Washington need not be.

“Those are both big government but more importantly, they were Washington-centric,” he told the Dallas Morning News. “One size does not fit all, unless you’re talking tube socks.”

Since the start of his career teaching college in Georgia, former GOP House Speaker NEWT GINGRICH has cast education among the nation’s most important domestic policy problems.

His views have developed through the years: In 1983, when the hallmark “A Nation at Risk” was released, Gingrich, a member of Congress at the time, traveled the country holding town hall meetings. He criticized American schools as “no more than holding pens for our children.” In the 1990s, he called for the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education and opposed direct government loans to students.

In 2001, he authored a report that called the failure of math and science education among the greatest threats to national security, “greater than any conceivable war,” he said.

Then in 2008 and 2009, his political ambitions on hiatus, Gingrich joined some odd bedfellows, among them civil rights activist Al Sharpton and former Democratic Colorado governor and Los Angeles schools chancellor Roy Romer, in a yearlong initiative to push education reform nationwide.

“I’m prepared to work side by side with every American who is committing to putting children first,” he said in 2009 in a White House press conference, before praising President Obama for “showing courage” in pushing unions against charter school caps. “Not talking about it for 26 more years…. We could literally have the finest learning in the world if we were to systematically apply the things that work.”

He continued, “I think we need to move forward from No Child Left Behind towards getting every American ahead.”

But how we move toward providing each child with an appropriate education is the question. The Republican candidates all stress accountability and favor school choice, though they prefer leaving the federal government out of education policy decisions. Most of them emphasize reforms to enhance teacher quality, and they question the influence of teachers unions. They support high standards, if delegated to the states to devise and enforce. What they all have in common is a belief that education needs deep reform that goes beyond anything Democrats have proposed.

Allison Sherry is Washington, D.C., bureau chief for the Denver Post.

Unlocking the Secrets of High-Performing Charters

James A. Peyser — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 04:01:19 +0000

Charter schools are approaching the ripe old age of 20. Although more work remains if we are to fully understand this complex education reform “movement,” a growing body of data and research is being compiled about its strengths, weaknesses, and impact. An important subset of the charter school sector is just now receiving a similar level of scrutiny. Charter management organizations (CMOs) are integrated networks of charter schools that came on the scene around the turn of the century, a little less than 10 years after the first charter school opened its doors. According to a recent study by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, by 2008 CMOs accounted for more than 10 percent of the charter school market and had been the beneficiaries of at least $500 million in private philanthropy. At this scale, CMOs warrant a close look to improve our understanding of what they are, how they operate and perform, and whether they offer an adequate return on public and private investment.

NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit grant-making organization, has been for more than a decade one of the leading private funders of CMOs serving low-income urban neighborhoods. Along the way, we have amassed data and direct experience that provide a window into this world. Our analysis suggests that most of the CMOs in our “portfolio” are outperforming the local districts, especially for low-income students. Nevertheless, there is significant variation across our sample. The highest-performing CMOs in the NewSchools portfolio tend to be those that have embraced a “no excuses” approach to teaching and learning. These CMOs have created organizational and school cultures based on explicit expectations for both academic achievement and behavior, with meaningful consequences when those high expectations are not met.

Creating a New Market

In 1999, NewSchools Venture Fund made its first grant to University Public Schools, an emerging charter school network founded by Don Shalvey and Reed Hastings in California that would soon be renamed Aspire Public Schools. Supported by follow-on investments from NewSchools and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Aspire became the nation’s first nonprofit charter management organization. Since then, NewSchools has helped launch and grow many more CMOs, mostly in California, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Working alongside NewSchools have been national funders like the Walton Family Foundation, the Fisher Fund, the Robertson Foundation, the Dell Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Charter School Growth Fund (see “The $500 Million Question,” forum, Winter 2011). These and a variety of locally based investors, notably the Robin Hood Foundation in New York and the Renaissance Schools Fund in Chicago, have channeled hundreds of millions of dollars into developing an entirely new sector of public education.

What’s a CMO?

Unlike EMOs (education management organizations), their somewhat older cousins, CMOs are not-for-profit. Their nonprofit status has at least three advantages: access to philanthropic capital, greater mission alignment, and diminished political resistance. And, unlike more loosely organized school networks, CMOs manage their schools directly, either under contract to a school board of trustees or under a fully integrated governance structure (in states where single charter school boards can operate multiple schools or campuses). Under such arrangements, a CMO has effective authority to hire and fire a school’s leadership team and to establish most of the educational and operational systems in each of its schools.

Most CMOs are organized much like a typical school district, at least on paper. There are centralized functions, including executive leadership and several operations teams, which provide certain administrative, financial, and educational support services to each school in the network. The schools are generally distinct units (often with separate legal status and their own boards of directors), but they operate under the overall control of the central office.

By the most recent national accounting in 2008, there were more than 80 CMOs, operating almost 500 schools. The most well-known charter school network in the country is the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), but the KIPP Foundation is not a CMO. The 99 KIPP schools around the country are legally and operationally distinct from the foundation and, up until recently, each KIPP school stood on its own as an individual charter school. Over the past few years, several high-performing KIPP schools have begun to grow their own small clusters of schools, often managed in a way that qualifies them to be called CMOs.

My focus in this article is on the CMOs in the NewSchools portfolio, which often operate 10 to 20 schools or more, serve thousands of children, and are materially different from their smaller counterparts, especially in terms of finances and management. Beginning in the school year 2003–04, we began to collect data on our CMOs: their central offices, student performance, staffing, growth, and finances. The combination of quantitative data and a decade of firsthand observations of CMOs in action forms the basis for this analysis.

Although the data presented below represent a unique look inside some of the more well-established CMOs in the country, it is important to keep in mind their limitations. First, the NewSchools portfolio includes 18 CMOs, just a slice of the total market. Second, this sample was not randomly selected. Indeed, the NewSchools investment model is based on high standards and thorough diligence for each venture we support. Third, the achievement data that we have collected do not track individual student growth over time, but instead are based on annual snapshots of grade-level and school-level performance. Finally, the data are mostly self-reported by the CMOs, and although we have scrubbed the submissions, there may still be errors and inconsistencies.

It should also be noted that NewSchools is not an unbiased observer. We believe strongly in the potential of charter schools and CMOs to transform educational outcomes in historically underserved communities and on that basis have invested millions of dollars and thousands of hours. Nevertheless, we are committed to transparency and to letting the facts speak for themselves.

The Portfolio

If the NewSchools CMO portfolio were a single school district, it would rank in size among the top 50 in the country, comparable to that of Fresno or Fort Worth. These CMOs operate exclusively in urban neighborhoods, serving predominantly low-income, high-need students (see Figure 1). The demographics of the CMO schools are roughly similar to nearby district-run schools.

On average, each CMO operates about a dozen schools, with future growth projected to reach just over 20 schools each. Our CMOs have been adding an average of 1.6 schools per year, although the pace of new school openings in any CMO is often uneven from year to year. The average annual CMO enrollment growth rate has been just over 45 percent. Many schools open with one or two grades and grow upward, adding one grade per year, to keep pace with the original cohort of students. Average school size at full enrollment is 442 students. Half of our 18 CMOs serve (or will serve) students in grades K through 12, three serve middle and high school, three are networks of elementary schools (including K–8 schools), and three operate only high schools.

Closing the Achievement Gap

The first question in any discussion about CMO schools is, how good are they? Measuring school or student performance is fraught with problems, especially if the goal is to make comparisons across classrooms, schools, districts, or states. We do not propose to solve these problems here. Specifically, our analytical approach is to use statewide assessments to compare student performance in our CMOs’ schools to that of students in the local district and state. Although we are able to track school and grade-level performance over time, our data set does not capture individual student results. Consequently, we are unable to measure directly the value our schools are adding to their students’ learning growth, relative to other schools. Given the similar demographics between schools in our portfolio and those in their local districts, however, we believe it is possible to make reasonable, albeit imperfect, comparisons between these two samples.

Looking at each of the CMOs in the NewSchools portfolio individually, we find that half are producing breakthrough results, with average proficiency rates that are at least 15 percentage points higher than their local districts. About 20 percent are outperforming the districts by a modest amount (proficiency rates that are between 5 and 15 percent higher than the districts). Another 20 percent are performing about the same as the local district, and the remaining CMOs are underperforming their districts. Performance among schools within a CMO can also vary. When comparing school-to-district gaps within a CMO, the typical standard deviation is almost 10 percentage points. This level of variation seems to hold for large and small CMOs alike.

Viewed as a group, schools managed by our CMOs achieve rates of proficiency on state assessments in reading and math that average about 9 percentage points higher than those of schools in their local districts (see Figure 2). The gap widens to almost 12 percentage points when we compare only low-income students. Limiting the sample to schools open five years or more, the gap widens to more than 14 percentage points. Across the portfolio, CMO schools perform somewhat better in math than in reading, when benchmarked against their local peers on state assessments. On average, the math-reading proficiency gap is about 4 percentage points. Not surprisingly, the performance of these CMO schools relative to their non-low-income peers statewide is not as impressive.

Although the NewSchools data set does not include state test results for individual students, it does include grade-level performance for most schools, which makes it possible to track improvement of cohorts of students from one year to the next. Looking at these data across all the elementary and middle schools that had test results for at least one grade in 2007, one finds a fairly consistent pattern of improvement. Annual math gains between 2007 and 2010 were almost 6 percentage points, while reading gains averaged more than 8 points per year.

Critics often suggest that superior performance in the charter sector is a result of high levels of attrition, caused by implicit or explicit efforts on the part of school staff to “counsel out” the students who are hardest to educate. Excluding students who move away, our data show average attrition rates of about 12 percent, compared to many schools in high-poverty urban neighborhoods that have annual attrition rates of close to one-third. Interestingly, the highest performers in our portfolio have below-average attrition rates of approximately 9 percent, while the lowest performers have above-average attrition rates of close to 20 percent. Apparently, the dynamic is what one would hope for: Parents at higher-performing schools are more likely to stay put, while those at lower-performing schools are voting with their feet.

A recent study commissioned by America’s Promise Alliance found that the average four-year graduation rate nationally is approximately 75 percent. Graduation rates among minority students are typically less than 65 percent, and among large urban school systems, graduation rates fall below 55 percent. Across the NewSchools CMO portfolio, comparable graduation rates average 65 percent. According to a 2010 U.S. Labor Department study, just over 70 percent of the graduating class of 2009 enrolled in college the following fall. Statistics for low-income students show the college-going rate for high school graduates at 57 percent. Eighty-four percent of graduating seniors from our CMOs enrolled in college, almost 60 percent in four-year colleges.

Finances and Staffing

The second question about CMOs is inevitably, how much do they cost? To answer this question, one has to examine financial data at both the school and central-office levels. Even though most CMO schools operate at breakeven on public revenue, many require significant private financial support before they can survive on public revenue alone. Philanthropy plays a key role in financing CMO start-up and growth.

The underlying economic model of all CMOs is based on predictable public revenue streams, tied to school enrollment. Average per-pupil public revenues (from all sources, including federal Charter School Program start-up grants) across the NewSchools portfolio were more than $11,500 in 2010, ranging from about $9,000 to $16,000, depending on the states and cities where schools are located. Public revenue for charter schools is typically 10 to 20 percent below per-pupil funding levels at neighboring district-run schools. In addition, charter schools are generally required to spend a significant portion of their budgets on rent or facilities-related debt service, an extra cost that is generally not included in most charter-school funding formulas. Taken together, these two factors can reduce charter school resources available for educational programs by 25 to 35 percent, relative to comparable district-run schools.

With a few exceptions, the vast majority of charter schools operated by NewSchools CMOs are self-sufficient on public revenues (excluding major capital costs). These schools typically incur deficits prior to their first year of operation (although these deficits are sometimes carried on the books of the CMO central office), as they begin to hire staff, upgrade facilities, and purchase equipment and supplies, all before the first students arrive and before any public tuition payments are made. About half of new schools run at breakeven during their first year of operation, although school-level deficits are common in the first three years of operation for those schools that begin with only one or two grade levels. About 40 percent of schools in the NewSchools portfolio incur cumulative deficits through their first three years of operation. These early deficits are often partially offset by start-up grants from the federal Charter School Program and the Walton Family Foundation, which together typically amount to more than $500,000 per school, spread out over several years.

The largest component of a typical school operating budget within our CMO portfolio is instructional personnel, which comprises just under half of all school spending (see Figure 3). School administration and other noninstructional activities account for about 17 percent of expenditures on average, with facilities expenses close behind at 15 percent. Nonpersonnel instructional expenses are just under 10 percent of a typical budget, with the remainder going toward building reserves and CMO management fees.

Operational spending per pupil during the 2010 school year was approximately $10,200, with average school surpluses of just under $500,000. Typically, these surpluses are used to build operating reserves of about 5 percent of a school’s yearly budget, to insure against normal cash-flow needs, temporary revenue interruptions, or fluctuations in annual per-pupil funding levels. Additional reserves are occasionally required as part of debt covenants, especially regarding bonds or loans for school buildings. Many schools have larger reserves to lay a financial foundation for a future purchase or renovation of a permanent facility.

The net philanthropic need for all schools managed by CMOs in the NewSchools portfolio is effectively zero, but since the schools that operate with surpluses generally do not cross-subsidize those with deficits (sometimes even within the same CMO), the actual school-level philanthropic need across the 71 schools in the portfolio with operating deficits was more than $25 million in the 2010 school year, or just under $360,000 per school.

The average central-office budget in 2010 was about $5.3 million, or more than $1,500 per pupil. More than 60 percent of central-office costs were for personnel. On average, central offices employed about 45 staff, which is 14 percent of total CMO staff, including school-level personnel. Staffing in the average CMO home office is dominated by personnel providing educational services (including assessment, curriculum, and professional development) and operations (including finance and facilities). Over the past five years, the relative sizes of these two categories have been moving in the opposite direction: The education staff has been growing (from 21 percent to 34 percent), while the operations staff has been shrinking (from 33 percent to 25 percent).The ratio of central-office staff to total CMO staff tends to decline over time, averaging about 30 percent in year one and falling to 12 percent by year seven. The average number of central-office staff per school fluctuates from year to year within most CMOs, but does not seem to consistently trend up or down over time. Across the NewSchools portfolio, central offices tend to have about 4.5 staff per school, although some of the larger CMOs are beginning to see this ratio drop.

As Figure 3 shows, CMO management fees are typically about 7 percent of a school’s budget, although it is not uncommon for fees to reach 10 percent or higher, depending on the breadth of services provided by the central office. On average, these fees covered more than 55 percent of central-office costs in the 2009-10 school year.

During its first year of operation, a CMO central office earns relatively little of its revenue on management fees from preexisting schools. If the central office is established before the first school opens, annual fee revenue begins at zero. On average, fee revenue rises steadily as a percentage of total central-office costs, as the number of schools and students grows, exceeding 60 percent by year seven (see Figure 4).

Over the first seven years of operation, a typical CMO central office in the NewSchools portfolio incurred a cumulative operating deficit of more than $7.3 million, which translates into $800,000 to $900,000 per school, or up to $2,000 per seat at full enrollment. The distribution of deficits around this mean, however, is wide, ranging from under $300,000 per school to $2 million or more. Although it is difficult to allocate these costs precisely to specific activities, a significant portion of central-office expenditures is associated with growing the network of schools and building capacity for supporting new schools that are just beginning to come online.

Putting school-level and central-office economics together, CMOs in NewSchools’ portfolio have run cumulative deficits through the 2010 school year of more than $250 million, which amounts to about $3,150 per student at full enrollment for the schools that are currently up and running. Some school-level deficits are offset by surpluses at other schools within the same CMO network; other annual deficits at both the school and central-office levels are funded out of reserves built up through surpluses in prior years. As a result of these factors, the net philanthropic need to date has probably been closer to $200 million, which translates into an average per-seat need of about $2,600, or more than $1 million per school. In some cases, this figure has exceeded $4,000 per seat and in others it has been under $500 per seat. (These figures appear consistent with an unpublished analysis conducted by the Charter School Growth Fund on the CMOs it has supported.) To keep this in perspective, the 25 to 35 percent inequity in per-pupil funding for charter schools mentioned above amounted to approximately $275 million in lost revenue for our CMOs in the 2009-10 school year, an amount that swamps their annual philanthropic need, even if the public funding gap is greatly exaggerated.

Patterns and Connections

The final question about CMOs is, what makes the highest performers better than the rest? The data do not point consistently to the causes for this variation, but there are some differential patterns in spending, staffing, and school design that suggest possible sources. Based on direct observations by the New-Schools team over the years, the effectiveness of management and execution may be equally important, although it is not so easily quantified.

The five highest-performing CMOs in NewSchools’ portfolio operate 85 schools and serve more than 28,000 students. Their low-income students have proficiency rates that are more than 25 percentage points higher than those in their local districts. Comparing these CMOs with the bottom five performers in the NewSchools portfolio, we find similarities: school sizes are virtually the same; central-office spending as a share of total CMO spending is about the same, as is instructional spending as a percentage of total spending. Nevertheless, there are quantifiable differences: School-level spending per pupil is higher, central-office staff comprises a higher percentage of total CMO staff, and the share of central-office staff devoted to human resources is greater.

The 20 percent spending gap between the lowest and highest performers is clearly a significant factor, although at least one of the CMOs in the top five spends less per pupil than the portfolio average. Our high-performing organizations spend some of the extra money hiring more teachers. Although the average number of students per teacher among the top five performers is only slightly lower than among the bottom five (15.1 vs. 16.6), the average masks larger differences. Three of the top five performers have student-teacher ratios below 14, while three of the bottom five performers have ratios above 18.

Another important factor is the investment that the most successful CMOs are making in building the capacity of their central offices, especially the focus on recruiting and developing talent, as well as building instructional support systems that are grounded in the use of performance data. Based on our observations and feedback from school personnel, these deep levels of central-office investment appear to be adding significant value to student performance.

The rate and pattern of growth also appear to have some connection to performance differences. Although the high-performing CMOs have added new schools at a faster overall rate than the low performers (1.7 per year vs. 1.3), their average enrollment growth is slower (37 percent vs. 49 percent). At the same time, the pattern of growth among the high performers has been more consistent over time, while the low performers tended to grow faster early in their development.

Of at least equal importance are less easily quantifiable differences in school design. Specifically, the most successful organizations strive to create enthusiasm for learning and an expectation of college success for all, with a commitment to hard work and persistence in the face of initial failures or setbacks. They have adopted standards-based curricula, with an intensive focus on literacy and numeracy as the first foundation for academic achievement, which typically manifests itself in extra time for reading and math each day and a relatively heavy reliance on direct instruction and differentiated grouping, especially in the early grades. And they are increasingly focused on developing and deploying comprehensive student assessment and coaching systems to ensure more effective and consistent classroom practice, not just from year to year but during the course of each school year.

Although several factors appear to distinguish the highest from the lowest performers, there is no obvious or simple pattern. With respect to almost every variable that we have examined, there is a wide distribution of data from one CMO to another, even among organizations with comparable performance, operating in the same markets, serving similar grade levels. Although the data can give us some hints about where the answers lie, some of the differences in CMO performance are most likely tied to the quality of management and effectiveness of execution, factors that are difficult to measure. It has been said that high-performing schools are the result of a hundred 1-percent solutions. Not only is there no silver bullet, but there is not even a secret sauce. The key to success is an unflagging attention to detail and an uncompromising commitment to excellence in all things, from the classroom, to the hallway, to the principal’s office. As difficult as it is to do all of this while growing a new organization, it is even harder to sustain it over time, especially as the original founding teams give way to a new generation of leaders. Some CMOs are already beginning to take and pass this test, but it will remain one of their greatest enduring challenges.

James A. Peyser is managing partner for city funds at NewSchools Venture Fund and a former chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education.

Future Schools

Jonathan Schorr — Thu, 12 May 2011 14:55:26 +0000

Additional photographs of the hybrid schools are available here.

The way the 1st graders hurtle toward their computer workstations, you’d think they were headed out to recess.

It’s an unseasonably warm winter morning in San Jose, California, and the two dozen students at Rocketship Mateo Sheedy Elementary School get situated quickly in the computer lab, donning headphones and peering into monitors displaying their names. The kindergartners follow a moment later, until 43 seats are filled. The effect is of a miniature, and improbably enthusiastic, call center.

This lab—and the larger plan for the school surrounding it—has probably done more than any other single place to create enthusiasm for “hybrid schools.” Such schools combine “face-to-face” education in a specific place (what used to be called “school”) with online instruction. (Rocketship uses the term “hybrid,” rather than the increasingly prevalent term “blended learning,” because the computers are not actually “blended” with face-to-face instruction in the same classroom.) It’s a sign of how young the hybrid and blended field is that this school at the epicenter hails all the way back to 2007. Rocketship Education, a small but burgeoning network of charter schools that serves an overwhelmingly low-income immigrant community in San Jose, has made a name through its, forgive the phrase, high-flying student performance. Two of its three schools are old enough to have test scores. They rank among the 15 top-performing high-poverty schools statewide, and the site that opened in 2009 was the number-one first-year school in the state in the high-poverty category. But what positions Rocketship on the cutting edge of school reform is its vision for how technology will integrate with, and change, the structure of the school. (Disclosure: Our firm, NewSchools Venture Fund, is a significant investor in the work of Rocketship and of several other organizations mentioned in this article.)

The scene in the computer lab represents the first steps toward realizing the Rocketship vision. In the lab, the 1st graders log in by selecting from a group of images that acts as a personal password, and then race through a short assessment that covers math and reading problems. Faced with the prompt “Put all the striped balls in one basket and all the polka-dotted balls in the other basket,” a student named Jazmine uses her mouse to move the objects to their places. Then it’s on to the core activity of her 90 minutes in the lab: a lesson on counting and grouping using software from DreamBox. The scenarios are slightly surreal—more objects to move, in this case mostly fruit, and the reward for getting it right involves an animated monkey bringing yet more fruit to a stash on her island—but she and most other students take on the task assiduously. It may be a lesson, but that’s not how Jazmine sees it. “This game is really easy,” she says. A bit later, she’ll read a book from a box targeted at her exact reading level, and make a return visit to the computer to take a short quiz about what she read.

Despite the kids’ engagement in the online lesson, no one is claiming that time in front of the computer is directly responsible for the extraordinary performance of Rocketship students. Rather, the online work is essential to the long-term vision for the school’s instructional model—and for Rocketship’s growth trajectory. Crucially, the lab requires an adult who has experience with children, but no teaching credential (nor, indeed, bachelor’s degree) is required. For this class, it’s a young mother named Coral De Dios, who dispenses help and order as the moment requires. Her ability to monitor the 43 kids here means that the school requires less staff, ultimately saving hundreds of thousands of dollars each year that can be plowed back into resources for the school, including staff salaries. In cash-strapped California, that’s no small matter.

But the larger impact of the technology is still ahead, in the ways it will integrate with, and alter, classroom practice. Rocketship is building a model in which kids learn much of their basic skills via adaptive technology like the DreamBox software, leaving classroom teachers free to focus on critical-thinking instruction and extra help where kids are struggling. Likewise, teachers will be able to “prescribe” online attention to specific skills. Part of the model involves providing teachers with a steady stream of data that will help them adjust instruction to kids’ specific needs, and to guide afterschool tutors. Today, those linkages between the computer lab and the classroom remain incomplete, in part because the data from various online systems aren’t sufficiently standardized; the many data points from different systems could be overwhelming to teachers.

Rocketship has probably done more than any other single place to create the market for “hybrid schools.”Rocketship’s data guru, Charlie Bufalino, says that to date, vendors haven’t invested sufficiently in the R&D and technical fixes that would make a standardized stream of data possible and take menial tasks like attendance out of teachers’ hands. As more schools like Rocketship build hybrid and blended systems, however, and as more entrepreneurs develop the missing-piece systems, the tipping point may be reached, fueling rapid growth of this new approach to schooling.

Rocketship’s data guru, Charlie Bufalino, says that to date, vendors haven’t invested sufficiently in the R&D and technical fixes that would make a standardized stream of data possible and take menial tasks like attendance out of teachers’ hands. As more schools like Rocketship build hybrid and blended systems, however, and as more entrepreneurs develop the missing-piece systems, the tipping point may be reached, fueling rapid growth of this new approach to schooling.

Rocketship and the other school models we describe here offer a vision for what deeply integrated technology can mean for children’s education, for the way schools are structured, and for the promise of greater efficiency amid a lengthy economic downturn. This is much more than simply taking a class online. Already, millions of children take one or more online courses, ranging from credit recovery to Advanced Placement. And there’s a wide range of ways that the school facility and online learning—“bricks and clicks”—mix. (Michael B. Horn and Heather Staker offer an excellent guide to the landscape in their recent paper, “The Rise of K–12 Blended Learning.”) Our interest is specifically in schools and platforms that use technology intensively and thoughtfully to tailor instruction to individual students’ needs, and provide robust, frequent data on their performance. Most of our examples are high-performing charter schools, which have become a particular hotbed for the type of hybrid and blended models we are describing. Their designs call for bringing new productivity to the way schools deploy staff and dollars. They all share an ambition to prepare their students for success not just on tests, but in college.

A visitor needs only to walk into School of One’s classroom space to see what customized education looks like.

School of One

Much of the enthusiasm for the potential of blended learning comes from what is currently a math program. School of One, operating inside three New York City public middle schools, is an exciting experiment interweaving a wide range of online learning possibilities with classroom instruction. Indeed, a visitor needs only to walk into School of One’s classroom space at Intermediate School 228 in Brooklyn to see what customized education looks like. The classroom is an open space that runs the length of the building wing, but is subdivided by bookshelves into workspaces where small groups of students work with the teacher or individually with laptops. The first sight that greets the eye is an airport-style video display, listing not cities and flights, but students’ names and how they will receive their instruction during that period. For those who are starting on the computer, a press of a button will take them to a lesson provided by 1 of more than 50 content providers. Each lesson runs about half an hour, and students may switch from one content provider to another on the same skill. Others work in small groups with a teacher, who will typically oversee two or three groups of students, the content and groupings informed by data from the student’s work online.

“You understand way better,” says Edwin, a 12-year-old 7th grader clad in basketball-ready dark blue T-shirt, shorts, and athletic shoes. Thanks to the unusual structure of math classes at School of One, he says, teachers work with only 9 or 10 students at one time, while at other schools, “the teacher doesn’t have time to go over things with every student.” He adds, “It’s a really good program for kids who have trouble with math.”

Behind the flashy images on the laptop screens, the real power behind School of One is in its brawny “back end” systems, which enable the creation of real-time, hourly reports of students’ progress and shortfalls. Teachers review these reports daily, both individually and in a collaborative planning period when they discuss the progress of individual students as well as student groups. Teachers can review the information before school, after school, during their prep period, or even while they are overseeing instruction (so they can identify the students in a group who, according to previous assessment data, may be struggling to learn a skill). “We get data every single day to help us understand what’s working and what’s not,” says founder Joel Rose. When a student struggles on Tuesday, she can be assigned to a small group for help from a teacher on Wednesday, and with enough data and enough flexibility, it will even be possible to assign her to a teacher who is particularly good at teaching that lesson. It’s a model that seems certain to make us question assumptions about how we organize classrooms and schools.

Like the teachers, students can see a map of their accomplishments. That map is tied to state standards and will later align with the Common Core standards. As at Rocketship, aligning lessons to these standards is no small matter; School of One had veteran math teachers codify the precursors and dependencies for each skill. They sourced more than 25,000 lessons for middle-school math, from which they chose the top 5,000. Many lessons were not included because they did not closely align to their map. School of One has enough faith in the power of its standards and assessments that it will soon offer students the option to press a “prove it” button that allows them to demonstrate mastery at an upcoming task and, if successful, skip it. The button stands as a testament to a core notion of the blended idea: learning that proceeds at a pace the student is ready for, rather than one set by the needs of an entire class.

Technology is everywhere as one strolls through DSST’s Stapleton campus in northeast Denver, just barely within sight of peaks of the Rocky Mountains.

DSST Public Schools

The constant, real-time stream of student assessment data is a crucial element of the most promising tech-enabled schools, including some high flyers that don’t fit neatly under the blended label. One of the most interesting is charter school network DSST Public Schools, named for its flagship, the Denver School of Science and Technology. DSST enrolls a mostly-minority, 47 percent low-income student population and has achieved national renown for its extraordinary results, including the second-highest longitudinal growth rate in student test scores statewide. Among graduates, 100 percent have been accepted to four-year colleges, where an astonishing 1 percent require remedial courses, in comparison to 56 percent for the Denver district. Technology is everywhere as one strolls through DSST’s Stapleton campus in northeast Denver, just barely within sight of peaks of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. In a 6th-grade social studies class recently, students used collaborative user-made web sites called wikis to access and respond to in-class and homework assignments. The teacher projected a map of Asia and posted prompts on the wiki for students to respond to as they learned about the geography of the region.

DSST has achieved national renown for its extraordinary results, including the second-highest longitudinal growth rate in student test scores statewide.

DSST’s assessment system provides real-time, instant feedback to teachers and students on students’ progress, measured through quick assessments that students take on netbooks. Teachers at DSST have been developing these informal assessments and in the 2010–11 school year are working with a consultant to review the validity of the assessment items and gather feedback that will in turn make teachers better item writers. The data enable teachers to differentiate instruction and connect instructional strategies with student results. As at School of One, both teachers and students at DSST can track mastery on a particular standard. Teachers can quickly adjust groups and/or identify topics for re-teaching. Through these assessments and classroom observations, teachers identify students in need of extra support, who are then assigned to afterschool tutoring the same day. Teachers use the information to plan lessons, deciding whether to spend more class time on a certain area or focus on individual tutoring based on class scores. DSST is also using data to analyze teacher performance. “The technology enables us to collect good data on our school performance, which is used to drive and motivate student achievement,” says founder and CEO Bill Kurtz. “We believe that education innovation will be driven by common data.”

Carpe Diem Collegiate High School

Elsewhere in the charter universe, schools are incorporating hybrid and blended structures into already successful school organizations, which increasingly seek efficiency, even as they expand and work to maintain excellent student achievement. The impact has been dramatic, for example, at Carpe Diem Collegiate High School of Yuma, Arizona. Carpe Diem represents what will likely be a crucial chapter in the story of blended schools: a turn to a blended model because of financial or facilities challenges. The charter school, which serves 250 mostly low-income students in 6th through 12th grades, faced a crisis after losing its lease on a church building. Its founders radically transformed it from a traditional structure to one heavily dependent on online instruction, and in 2006 completed a facility tailored to the new model. In the reinvented school, small groups take classes directly from teachers, while most students take online classes in a learning center that features 300 low-sided cubicles in one brightly painted room. Student cubicles have a desktop computer and monitor; many have been personalized and decorated with artwork. The learning center is staffed by the principal, two instructional assistants, and a course manager, who also talks with students about their progress.

Students begin their day by logging onto a software system called e2020 and accessing the calendar, selecting a subject area, and looking at their lists of assignments for the week. On any given day, based on the data, teachers may gather an entire grade or a subset of students, sometimes in groups as small as one or two. Some students work through all subjects each day, while others focus on math for the week on one day, science for the week on another day. Carpe Diem has been a state leader in student growth for the past two years.

Hallways at High Tech High are lined by prizewinning robotics projects.

High Tech High

Yet, even in schools that have been aggressive in incorporating technology, there is such a thing as too much in adopting blended approaches. Such is the case at High Tech High, whose campus near the San Diego airport is perhaps the most eye-poppingly technology-rich in the country. Rooms within the warehouse-sized buildings are delineated with glass walls 15 feet high, leaving the remaining space under the 25-foot ceilings for a chaotic crisscross of air ducts, structural supports, and wires. Mixed-media art hangs from every wall, door, and metal roof beam, and gee-whiz technology is everywhere. Students use the same computer-aided design systems that they would find in a professional design firm as they model real-life, design-forward chairs. The hallways are lined by prize-winning robotics projects. And outside, students further their studies of air pressure by racing hovercraft they have designed using large circles of plywood with plastic-bag cushion edges and leaf-blower engines.

High Tech High has taken gentle steps into blended territory through its use of ALEKS, which bills itself as “a Web-based, artificially intelligent assessment and learning system.” ALEKS, which runs on computers on the periphery of a 9th-grade classroom, provides teachers with detailed diagnostics, helping them to focus on the areas where students are struggling, and lets students take lessons at their own pace. A student logs on to ALEKS and begins by taking an adaptive assessment, each question chosen on the basis of previous answers. With this information, ALEKS develops a snapshot of a student’s knowledge in a given content area, recognizing which topics he has mastered and which he has not. This information is represented for both the student and teacher by a multicolored pie chart, which is constantly being updated as the student masters new topics. Once a student has mastered a specific topic, new ones become available for the student to choose from. “It doesn’t slow you down,” says Danie, a 15-year-old boy with a dark mop of hair that he regularly brushes off his forehead. Danie, wearing untied high-tops and faded black jeans, confesses matter-of-factly that he is repeating the 9th grade. “Students learn at different speeds,” he says with marked confidence. He hastens to add that the technology augments, rather than replaces, the teacher. “Nothing,” he says, “can replace human interaction.” Danie’s teacher, Jane Armstrong, agrees, saying ALEKS gives her more flexibility in grouping students. Today, Armstrong has divided the class in two. Half of the students are using ALEKS while Armstrong is working with the other half in small groups. “This setting allows me to get to know all of my students,” she says. “If I’m just lecturing them, I don’t get to know what they’ve mastered.”

California’s budget situation today is nothing short of disastrous. Yet High Tech High recently rejected a much more aggressive move into the blended field, a “flex” plan that would have brought students to campus only once a week, with the other four days spent online, typically from home. The plan would have created enormous cost savings by allowing five different cohorts of students to use one building each week. Yet teachers, students, and parents rejected the idea of giving up the daily campus experience, and teachers were not enthusiastic about doing a large proportion of their teaching online. “We’re not drinking the Kool-Aid,” said founder and CEO Larry Rosenstock.

High Tech High is perhaps the most eye-poppingly technology-rich charter school in the country. Mixed-media art hangs from every wall, door, and metal roof beam, and gee-whiz technology is everywhere.

On the Verge

Indeed, it seems likely that, just as happened with charter management organizations, rapid growth will take place only when the pioneers can demonstrate proof points of excellence in student performance. “In order for there to be larger market traction, the overall industry has to see more results,” says Anthony Kim of Education Elements, a nascent firm that designs the technical back end for blended schools. “We’re at the very early adopter stage right now.”

Blended schooling is dawning at a time when, as recent public opinion polls show, people are open to online learning. According to the 2010 EdNext-PEPG Survey (“Meeting of the Minds,” features, Winter 2011), support for online coursework jumped 8 to 10 percent in a single year. Yet as much as anything, the blended effort is being driven by a new fiscal reality. In a widely regarded speech at the American Enterprise Institute called “The New Normal: Doing More with Less,” education secretary Arne Duncan noted that a loss of housing valuation meant that education funds are down sharply and aren’t coming back anytime soon. In the spirit of never wasting a crisis, he said he hoped the difficult financial straits would help bring an end to “the factory model of education” and an increase in productivity in schools. He said, “Our schools must prepare all students for college and careers—and do far more to personalize instruction and employ the smart use of technology.”

Is the blended school the model he’s looking for? Tom Vander Ark, a former head of education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and now a partner in a private equity fund focused on education innovation, thinks so. In the past, technology actually made schooling more expensive, as computers were layered onto an existing model without adding any efficiency. Technology-driven productivity, he says, stands to change that. “We can make learning far more productive,” says Vander Ark. “It’s the first chance in history to change the curve.”

Jonathan Schorr and Deborah McGriff are partners at NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit venture philanthropy firm that supports entrepreneurial innovation to improve public education for low-income children.

Creating a Corps of Change Agents

Monica Higgins — Wed, 11 May 2011 04:02:16 +0000

Question: What do former D.C. Public Schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, KIPP Academy cofounders Mike Feinberg and David Levin, and Colorado state senator (and author of that state’s nationally noted teacher-quality legislation) Mike Johnston have in common? Answer: They’re all alumni of Teach For America.

While much of the debate around Teach For America (TFA) in recent years has focused on the effectiveness of its nontraditional recruits in the classroom, the real story is the degree to which TFA has succeeded in producing dynamic, impassioned, and entrepreneurial education leaders. From its inception as Wendy Kopp’s senior thesis project at Princeton more than two decades ago, TFA has sought to bring more teaching talent to some of the nation’s most disadvantaged communities and create a corps of change agents like Rhee, Feinberg, Levin, and Johnston. How well has TFA fared on that second score? Here, in a new line of research, we seek to answer that question.

Since its founding in 1989, TFA has placed more than 24,000 high-achieving college graduates in some of America’s neediest schools. This has produced an alumni network populated by impassioned former educators. TFA aims, proclaims the web site, to turn these alumni into “lifelong leaders for fundamental change, regardless of their professional sector.” Its efforts include keeping close connections with alumni and providing a variety of opportunities to volunteer at schools, join education-oriented political campaigns, advocate, and connect with a wide-reaching education network.

To date, the vast majority of research on TFA has focused on the classroom effectiveness of corps members and how long they remain in classrooms. Very little is known about TFA corps members who leave teaching but stay involved in education reform more broadly. In a recent study of TFA alumni, Doug McAdam and Cynthia Brandt (2009) argue that corps members are more likely to remain in education, whether in administration, educational policy work, or charter school management, than those who opt not to enter TFA or drop out of the program. This suggests that TFA has a lasting influence on corps members’ careers, but does not address the question of whether these individuals become the kind of change agents envisioned in TFA’s mission of eliminating “educational inequity by enlisting our nation’s most promising future leaders.”

We pursue that question here, as part of a larger analysis of organizations that successfully “spawn” education entrepreneurs. Examining the work histories of founders and top management team (TMT) members at nationally prominent entrepreneurial education organizations, we find that TFA appears more frequently in the professional backgrounds of these proven entrepreneurial leaders than does any other source in our sample. We don’t know whether it is the TFA experience, the criteria by which TFA selects its corps members, or institutional relationships that account for this. However, the research does find that TFA is producing a large number of entrepreneurial leaders. How and why this is so, and what might be learned from TFA’s success, are questions that deserve careful scrutiny.

Entrepreneurs Needed

The education sector has long struggled to attract and retain high-quality professionals. At the same time, stubborn achievement gaps, increased competition among school providers, and a heightened focus on performance have created an appetite for creative problem solving and scalable, transformational initiatives. In a world of online learning, school turnarounds, Race to the Top, and the Investing in Innovation Fund, there is room for leaders who are able to lever change by creating and expanding organizations of all kinds. Turning these opportunities into results requires people able to create and lead new, high-quality ventures.

With the proliferation of teacher residency and principal leadership programs, education has seen many efforts to recruit, develop, and retain quality teachers and administrators in recent years. However, there are fewer organizations aimed at developing leaders to direct reform initiatives outside the classroom or the schoolhouse. TFA is one among a small cadre of organizations that currently includes New Leaders for New Schools, Education Pioneers, and Teach Plus. TFA is particularly notable for its efforts on this score, as it engages former corps members through “Alumni Summits” and initiatives to advance alumni in positions of leadership as nonprofit board members, public officials, and leaders at the school and classroom level. It also supports alumni through partnerships with graduate schools and employers to help them transition to the next steps in their careers.

Recently, TFA started a new program, the Social Entrepreneurship Initiative, which explicitly promotes innovation and entrepreneurship in the education sector. The program facilitates connections between alumni interested in starting education ventures with established social entrepreneurs. The initiative supports TFA alumni who are applying for fellowships such as Echoing Green and the Mind Trust, provides tools for developing fundraising plans and grant proposals, and publishes a newsletter that includes information about funding opportunities and management strategies.

Today, there is a sizable network of TFA alumni who have become education entrepreneurs. We have already mentioned KIPP Academy cofounders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, who started a single charter school in 1994 that has evolved into one of the most well-known charter organizations in the U.S., with 99 schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia. TFA alum Chris Barbic founded YES Prep Public Schools, which has grown to serve 4,200 students at eight campuses throughout Houston. Sarah Usdin began New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO) in 2006, after Hurricane Katrina devastated public schooling in that city. Before heading up the D.C. school system, Michelle Rhee established The New Teacher Project. Accounts sometimes suggest that these individuals are intriguing outliers. Our research suggests that they are evidence of TFA’s success at recruiting and creating change agents.

Research Methods

The methods used in this study mirror those applied in research on entrepreneurial spawning in other sectors, such as biotechnology. We first identified a group of entrepreneurial organizations within the education sector and traced their founders’ and TMT members’ work histories. We then identified organizations that appeared multiple times as previous employers across the sample and, hence, could be considered “spawners” of entrepreneurial leaders.

To create our list of entrepreneurial education organizations, we limited our search to nonprofit and for-profit organizations that were founded after 1989, TFA’s inaugural year; that focused on domestic, K–12 public education reform; and that could be considered nationally prominent. We drew on three distinct sources to identify organizations for our sample. The first was an electronic survey of 14 widely recognized experts in public school innovation. We asked participants, “From your perspective, what are the top 15 U.S. entrepreneurial education organizations that have emerged in the sector since 1989?” All 14 participants responded, and we identified 16 organizations that more than one respondent identified as a top organization. Next, we identified organizations supported by a donor clearinghouse of venture philanthropies and foundations whose mission is to support social entrepreneurship in K–12 public education across the nation. Finally, we conducted publication searches in popular and academic media using Lexis Nexus and Google Scholar. The searches were conducted in November 2009 and used the following search terms: Education, Entrepreneur*, Organization, and K–12.

These methods yielded a comprehensive list of 49 organizations; many are charter management organizations, some recruit and/or train human capital, and others offer supplemental resources to the public education sector, such as software technologies for data management and assessment or afterschool programs (see sidebar).

We then constructed a database of the work histories of the 49 organizations’ leadership members, comprising 71 founders and cofounders and 320 TMT members. We make the distinction between founders and other management team members in the event that there are noteworthy differences between those who start organizations and those hired to manage daily functioning, growth, and stability. Often, the organizations in our sample publicly listed the founders and members of the management team, along with their work and educational histories. When these data were ambiguous or not publicly available, we called the organizations to request the information.

We term the organizations that appear in founders’ and TMT members’ work histories “originating organizations.” To ascertain which originating organizations were the most prolific spawners of entrepreneurs, we identified those that had at one time employed a founding member of at least 2 of the 49 entrepreneurial organizations in our sample.

Entrepreneurship and TFA

Of all the originating organizations that appeared in work histories, TFA appeared the most frequently. Let’s look first at the 71 founders or cofounders of the 49 entrepreneurial organizations. TFA appeared in the work history of at least one founder of seven of these organizations, or about 15 percent. The next most-represented originating organizations—the San Francisco Public Schools, Newark Public Schools, Chicago Public Schools, AmeriCorps, the White House Fellows program, McKinsey & Company, and the United States Department of Education—each appeared in the work history of a founder of two (or about 4 percent) of these organizations. In other words, the drop-off from TFA to these other large and/or esteemed organizations is stark indeed.

To get a sense of whether TFA’s outsized success is simply the result of its size or TFA is indeed punching “above its weight,” it’s worth noting the comparative size of these various ventures. TFA is today an organization with almost 10,000 employees, including 8,200 current corps members. But TFA’s size a decade ago was only about one-quarter of what it is today, meaning that the alumni pipeline is much thinner than its current size suggests. TFA estimates that it has produced more than 20,000 alumni. TFA is clearly smaller than organizations like the Chicago Public Schools, with around 41,000 employees, and McKinsey, with some 17,000 employees. TFA is dwarfed by the approximately 75,000 current AmeriCorps members and some 500,000 alumni (some AmeriCorps volunteers are also TFA corps members), but is far larger than the White House Fellows program, with 13 current fellows and some 600 alumni. In short, TFA has fared impressively for its relative size.

While many founders have participated in TFA, there is little evidence of their having had other work or internship experiences in common. One reason for this homogeneity may be that approximately 23 percent of the founders had only one job prior to starting their own venture. A lack of experience created fewer opportunities to build professional networks, making the large number of TFA alumni among founders all the more salient.

TFA stands out in the work histories of the TMT members at the 49 organizations on our list as well (see Figure 1). Fourteen of the 49 entrepreneurial organizations had at least one TMT member who was once a TFA corps member or employee, and 10 of these organizations had at least one member who had been a TFA corps member and worked for TFA national. Compare this to the next three highest-ranked originating organizations: 10 entrepreneurial organizations had at least one TMT member who had been employed by the New York City Public Schools, nine entrepreneurial organizations employed KIPP alumni, and the work histories of seven entrepreneurial organizations’ TMT members included Andersen Consulting.

A Look at the Spawners

Only two of the originating organizations that spawned at least two founders, the White House Fellows program and McKinsey & Company, operate outside the public education sector. McKinsey, a management consulting firm, is the only private institution on the list. When it came to spawning TMT members, McKinsey was joined by its consulting brethren Andersen and Deloitte. For TMT members, consulting was a common professional experience with about 10 percent of all TMT members having this practice in their backgrounds.

It is interesting to consider why experience in the consulting industry is not unusual in the career histories of TMT members. Members of top management teams, including chief finance officers, chief operating officers, and even those leading growth and marketing divisions, face complex challenges. Consultants are commonly hired to solve problems in these functional units in both the private and public sectors. Perhaps their skills translate well in the entrepreneurial world. Former consultants may be particularly adept at addressing tough management issues in entrepreneurial organizations in the education sector, where challenges arise both internally and externally, due to the complicated political and financial dynamics of meeting public education needs in the U.S. There may be certain functional roles on TMTs for which having a consulting background prepares leaders particularly well.

Additionally, consulting firms such as McKinsey are increasingly offering their services in the education sector. For example, McKinsey’s Social Sector Office supports an education practice that focuses on systems strategy and transformation, talent and performance management, administration and operations, and institutional strategy and innovations. Teams in McKinsey’s education practice regularly publish reports on the education sector, including a recent analysis of the economic impact of the achievement gap and strategies for attracting top undergraduates to and retaining them in the teaching profession. Such work may be exposing their employees to the overwhelming need in the education sector for solutions to challenging problems. That exposure, coupled with entrepreneurial aspects of the organizational culture, employee selection criteria, or institutional relationships may create an environment similar to TFA. Again, we cannot be sure at this stage what factors may be at play, but it is certainly an intriguing finding.

Another leading spawner of team members is KIPP. Nine organizations in the sample had at least one TMT member who had worked for KIPP’s national office or in a KIPP school. Given that KIPP was started by two TFA alumni, maintains close ties with TFA, and recruits many of its teachers from the TFA ranks, it is no surprise that five organizations in the sample had TMT members who had previously worked both for TFA and for KIPP.

Several school districts were also among the organizations that showed up most often in TMT members’ work histories. New York City appeared most often. Other districts were Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles.

Looking across all the spawning organizations, one returns to the question of why, given the many sources feeding into the education talent pipeline, TFA seems so prolific. It seems clear that explanatory factors include the criteria by which TFA recruits, the organization’s strong and purposive culture, the skills that corps members develop, and the opportunities provided to alumni. Just to take one example, by providing talented young college grads with classroom experience, TFA confers upon them a degree of credibility that opens doors that might open less readily for others. Sorting out the relevant import of these elements is far beyond the scope of our current effort, but it is an exercise well worth pursuing for those reformers eager to identify, emulate, and amplify TFA’s successes.

TFA’s Influence

Is there cause to suspect that there are any systematic differences between those education entrepreneurs who are TFA alumni and those who are not? Given their classroom experience, for instance, are TFA alumni more likely to wind up in instructional or curricular roles than are TMT members who are not TFA alumni?

To investigate this possibility, we looked at the 30 TFA alumni who are TMT members at organizations in our sample and identified the specific nature of their jobs. As seen in Figure 2, less than one-third of these TFA alumni are in administrative positions like operations or finance. Most are involved in human resources, such as hiring and training teachers or other support staff; academic affairs, such as developing curriculum for instructional programs or schools; or working to develop new schools or expand existing ones. This first cut suggests that entrepreneurial TFA alumni disproportionately take on roles more closely related to instruction and staffing. As mentioned earlier, it is not uncommon for TMT members in operations and finance to have consulting experience in their professional backgrounds.

Looking Ahead

The findings presented here on the leadership pipeline signal many avenues for productive future inquiry. First, TFA specifically sets out to recruit individuals with leadership potential. As TFA explains, it seeks college graduates who have demonstrated “past leadership and achievement…perseverance and sustained focus in the face of challenges, strong critical thinking skills…[an ability to generate] relevant solutions to problems, superior organizational ability…and superior interpersonal skills to motivate and lead others.” The TFA selection process consists of an online application, a phone interview, and a final interview, which includes multiple individual and group activities, plus a personal interview. Sorting out the impact of TFA acculturation and training from its success as a talent identifier will require additional research that examines the alumni’s career expectations and decisions over time, with an eye to their experiences during and after their corps engagement with TFA.

Second, we found that certain of TFA’s geographic regions appeared more likely to generate entrepreneurial behavior. TFA corps members with work experience in New York City and San Francisco seemed especially likely to become top managers in entrepreneurial organizations in education. Perhaps there is something distinctive about the TFA experience in these locales. Maybe, and more likely, there was something about the place at that particular time that worked in concert with the TFA experience to produce entrepreneurial leaders in a particularly effective way.

In the 1990s, when many of the entrepreneurial organizations in our list were being founded, San Francisco, and the Silicon Valley more generally, was a hotbed of entrepreneurial behavior, which included unprecedented levels of capital funding for those wanting to start their own ventures. At the same time, New York City, with its similar culture of entrepreneurialism and capital funding activity, was going through a period of political and educational reform that would lead to the era of mayoral control. This period of fl ux created opportunities for new organizations and programs to enter the education market. The combination of an entrepreneurial culture, access to funding, and openings within the education market may have made these cities particularly conducive to TFA’s mission of creating entrepreneurial leaders; indeed, the two cities were among the first to bring TFA teachers into their schools. Therefore, it may be useful to think about the TFA experience more expansively and with an eye to its place within a larger context of reform and opportunity.

Third, working for TFA at the national level appears to be a more common experience for those who end up working for an entrepreneurial organization, rather than founding one; TFA members who were founders of organizations were more likely to have been TFA corps members. This suggests that different TFA experiences may equip alumni for different roles. It raises a variety of important questions, most notably, what it is about the TFA experience that imparts to individuals the skills and desire to tackle certain challenges.

Certain kinds of organizations, such as TFA and KIPP, and professions like consulting may be especially conducive to producing educational entrepreneurs. It is worth asking whether there are particular jobs, roles, or work environments that contribute to the cultivation of entrepreneurial behavior.

Finally, our research suggests the value of rethinking how TFA and its alumni have been studied in education and also how we think about retention. Rather than assume that it is good or bad when TFA members leave classrooms or school systems, we focused on the role that TFA alumni may play in launching entrepreneurial ventures. While TFA members may not be retained as teachers, the findings suggest they may still have an impact in education, perhaps an outsized impact.

Another intriguing question is how to weigh the impact of a single Mike Feinberg, Mike Johnston, or Michelle Rhee. Is their impact equal to that of having 100 teachers stay another year? Of 1,000 teachers staying another five years? Is it worth having thousands frequently depart classrooms if it increases the likelihood that a single game-changing entrepreneur—a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates—will emerge? Conventional debates about retention and TFA teacher effects may start to seem trivial when we compare the potentially enormous impact of a few such individuals.

Monica Higgins is professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of Career Imprints: Creating Leaders Across an Industry. Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and author or editor of several books, including Education Unbound and Educational Entrepreneurship. Jennie Weiner and Wendy Robison are doctoral students in Education Policy, Leadership, and Instructional Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

High Schoolers in College

June Kronholz — Tue, 10 May 2011 04:01:11 +0000

Michael Jokl enrolled in an algebra class at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis when he was a 14-year-old 8th-grade home schooler. Four years later, he has earned 43 college credits under a dual-enrollment program that lets him simultaneously satisfy the state’s requirements for a high school diploma. He holds a 3.9 grade-point average at the university, which is known as IUPUI; he has completed an entire freshman-year college curriculum and has taken all the math he’ll need toward an engineering degree.

Now he’s “applying to the Ivies” to complete his undergraduate degree, he says.

A century ago, often under pressure from labor unions, states passed seat-time and mandatory-attendance laws that compelled youngsters to stay in school, and out of the competition for jobs. The laws haven’t changed much today, but kids have, and by their midteens, many of them—bored with high school or academically beyond it—are ready for the next step.

The states’ almost uniform response has been dual-enrollment programs. Kids remain in high school but are able to take college courses at the same time. Almost every state has some sort of dual-enrollment policy, and 12 states require their school districts and public postsecondary schools to work out dual-enrollment partnerships, according to the Education Commission of the States (ECS). The U.S. Department of Education reported in 2005 that 98 percent of community colleges and 77 percent of public four-year colleges were taking part in dual-enrollment programs.

Universities and private colleges have long accepted gifted students and ambitious high schoolers under all sorts of arrangements. Among other reasons, colleges have viewed dual enrollment as a way to recruit and retain the brightest young students in the area. But in 1985, starting in Minnesota, states began looking at dual enrollment as a way to prepare even average students for college and to move nonacademic-minded kids into career and technical education. Some 5,300 high schoolers attended classes at 65 public, private, technical, community, and extension campuses under Minnesota’s Post-Secondary Enrollment Options Program in 2008–09, it reported on its web site.

Today, as legislators see it, dual enrollment offers something for everyone: academic enrichment for kids who have maxed out the honors and accelerated classes their schools offer; a glimpse of college rigor for high school laggards; and a leg up on a career for those who enroll in trade programs. Not incidentally, dual enrollment promises to speed youngsters through college and into the workforce, cutting college costs for parents and taxpayers alike.

But in their rush to get high schoolers into college, legislators are setting some up for disappointment. With state education budgets perpetually strapped, many states haven’t provided money to pay the college tuition. That leaves youngsters and their parents to pick up the bill, or high schools and colleges to swallow the cost.

Under federal law, youngsters who don’t have a high school diploma can’t apply for student loans, grants, and scholarships. Michael Jokl is paying his own tuition—$1,100 per calculus course—by mentoring fellow math students, grading papers for a math professor, and, on weekends, babysitting. He has a 25-mile one-way commute, is on campus daily from 9 AM to 3 PM, and then goes home to finish work on his home-school curriculum.

The Ivies, he says, may in some ways be easier than high school.

The Talented Tenth

Standardized test scores suggest that the country’s brightest youngsters are stuck in an academic rut: The 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that reading and math scores for the brightest 10 percent of 12th graders have barely budged in the past five years. Still, there’s evidence that many kids are eager for a challenge, and more than up to it (see “Challenging the Gifted,” features, Spring 2011). Sixteen percent of last year’s SAT takers had crammed more than four years of math into high school and 10 percent took more than four years of natural science.

About 240,000 youngsters in grades 4 through 8 take part in university-sponsored talent searches each year. As early as 7th grade, students may take a college-entrance exam in hopes of gaining access to college-level enrichment programs. Of the 67,000 7th graders who took the exams at Duke University’s Talent Identification Program last year, 50 earned the highest possible score on one or more sections of the SAT or ACT. More than 4,200 kids who were in 8th grade or lower took the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) exams in 2010; 22 percent of them scored a five, the highest possible score.

When academic challenges are available, “students are taking advantage of them,” says Martha Putallaz, executive director of Duke’s talent program, which has added new summer programs to meet the demand, and still has a waiting list of more than 1,000 kids.

There are probably several reasons for all of this, including the competition for college admission and scholarships. But Dr. Putallaz and others also blame federal and state policies that pressure schools to concentrate their resources on getting children to minimal math and reading competencies. That means high school is often a fairly dismal place for faster learners.

One day last December, I visited Mooresville High School, a half-hour’s drive west of Indianapolis and firmly in farm country, to meet Maggie Page, who has a 4.0 grade-point average and will be the school’s 2011 valedictorian. Debra Page, Maggie’s mother and Mooresville High’s guidance counselor, sat with us. Mooresville seemed to me to offer lots of options for ambitious learners, including AP courses in seven subjects. Teachers from Ivy Tech, the statewide community college, teach psychology, sociology, and math in the evening. Mooresville High faculty who have been certified by Indiana University at Bloomington to teach the IU curriculum offer four history and English courses. Ivy Tech has certified Mooresville teachers in two English classes.

Still, eager to get started on a nursing degree, Maggie took three courses through SPAN (IUPUI’s Special Programs for Academic Nurturing) beginning in 10th grade and earned a 4.0 on those, too. As we talked, Maggie, who is 18, rolled her eyes at the suffusive busy work and rules of high school, and at the minimal challenge of many classes. “I’m only learning in a few of my classes,” she said.

Debra Page agreed with her daughter about the lack of challenge for the school’s brightest students. “We do them a disservice,” she said.

A Special Program

IUPUI started its dual-enrollment program in 1984 when the director of the university’s honors programs opened liberal arts classes to gifted and talented kids. Since then, the university—which is a health-sciences partnership between Indiana and Purdue—has opened all of its undergraduate schools to the most able youngsters and claims to be the only Indiana university that does.

SPAN enrolls about 200 youngsters each semester and 300 in total each year. Most are high school seniors, but this year there also are two 13-year-olds and a 9-year-old who’s taking second-year physics. Most are boys: “Girls want to stay at high school with their friends,” says Dr. Johnny Russell, SPAN’s executive director. Half are home schoolers; the other half come from 61 area private and public schools, mostly in the suburbs. Kids typically take only a course or two per year, but three youngsters have earned more than 80 academic credits, or enough to make them second-semester juniors when they eventually enroll as undergraduates.

Growing up in central Indiana, Russell says he was “one of those kids they didn’t know what to do with,” too precocious for his tiny school district to accommodate, but kept in high school by state laws that typically require kids to sit through 40 or so courses to graduate. Accountability measures and stretched school budgets are only making things tougher for the brightest kids, he adds. School curricula “shoot for the middle,” and school resources increasingly are spent getting struggling students just to average. “The upper 2 percent, they’re falling by the wayside,” he says. They’re bored, they dread school, they’re often discipline problems, “their academics begin to stagnate and stall.”

Russell talks about “the glimmer of hope” that youngsters experience when they come to SPAN, and “the excitement, the zeal” they feel when they get to do college work. The youngsters I spoke with didn’t put it quite that colorfully, but they did speak of the satisfaction of knowing they were learning and were doing what they called “productive” work.

SPAN requires the youngest students to show some evidence of giftedness: IQ or SAT scores, participation in talent-search programs, recommendations from teachers or IUPUI professors. But even then, Russell turns down some who aren’t socially ready for college. “This is not a proving ground,” he told me. “If they fail here, it will haunt them.”

Entrance criteria are grades, not college-entrance exam scores, for older kids: Russell’s standard is “As, some Bs, no Cs.” Home schoolers take the ACT to qualify. And everyone must maintain a 3.3 IUPUI grade average to stay in SPAN.

Russell places no more than two SPAN youngsters in any IUPUI class: “If there are three of them, they huddle together,” he says. He gets concurrence from the professor before assigning a particularly young child to a class, but faculty otherwise aren’t told when they’re teaching, say, an 11th grader.

One afternoon, I visited Crispus Attucks Medical Magnet High School near downtown Indianapolis to meet Robert Hawthorne, who will graduate from the public school this spring with a 4.3 GPA and 45 IUPUI credits, including credits in engineering physics, Calculus I and II, multidimensional math, and guitar. Hawthorne, who is 17, had exchanged his khakis and polo shirt, the school uniform, for jeans and a T-shirt to attend his IUPUI class. “To blend in,” he explained. Now, back in high school, he had changed back to khakis. “This goes on all day long,” sighed Morris Weyand, who oversees the SPAN students at Crispus Attucks.

The Big Picture

Dual-enrollment policies and participation patterns vary widely across states, and programs designed explicitly for advanced students are a small fraction of the total. Most dual enrollment courses are taught in high school classrooms by high school teachers who have received some training and certification by their university or community-college partner and follow its curriculum. Others are online or are televised into high school classrooms.

Pennsylvania, which appropriated $10 million in 2008–09 for dual enrollment, lists modest goals for its program in an online description: giving high schoolers exposure to college-level work, helping minorities, and providing troubled students with “a fresh start on learning.” Pennsylvania counted 17,930 participants in 2008–09, a leap of 24 percent from the year before. Florida, in an online report, says that 37,000 of its high schoolers were in dual-enrollment classes last academic year. For the most part, these kids aren’t studying differential equations and congregating in ivy-covered halls. Florida requires only a B average for its students to enroll in college-credit courses and a C for career-certification classes.

Florida’s dual-enrollment legislation, passed in 2006, expansively assured high schoolers they could attend classes at career centers, community colleges, or state universities, but then added language instructing school boards to offer dual-enrollment courses on high school campuses “whenever possible.” Only Georgia and Wisconsin require that dual-enrollment courses be held on college campuses, and no state requires that college professors do the teaching, according to ECS.

Course credits aren’t always transferable. Only 15 states require their public universities to accept dual-enrollment transfer credits; even then, the requirement doesn’t carry across state lines. IUPUI’s Dr. Russell says that his SPAN students have been able to transfer all of the credits they earned at IUPUI to other colleges, although students told me that they don’t apply to some Ivy League schools that they know won’t accept their credits.

Credit transfer is less assured when credits come from dual-enrollment classes taught at high schools or community colleges, as the quality of these courses is not always easy to determine.

Who Pays?

The stickiest issue is who pays for the classes. A few states split their per-pupil funding between the high school and college. A Michigan college that enrolls a high schooler for two courses, for example, gets $2,279 of the youngster’s $6,875 foundation allowance; the high school keeps the rest, Michigan advises schools, using an online calculator to do the math. Other states lay the cost on the school district, college, or state board of education. In 22 states, it’s up to kids or their parents to pay for college courses.

Washington State calculated that its Running Start dual-enrollment program—in which colleges are reimbursed for tuition by school districts—saved parents $17.4 million in tuition in 2001 and taxpayers $34.7 million, presumably because youngsters were able to cut the time they spent in college by a semester or two if they didn’t have to take Composition 101 and Introduction to American History twice.

Indiana allows colleges to waive dual-enrollment tuition, but otherwise is mute on funding. An IUPUI class averages $1,000 per semester, plus the costs of the commute. IUPUI pays $250,000 a year in tuition for SPAN students from Crispus Attucks, who account for 41 of the program’s 300 youngsters this year. A few other Indianapolis schools scrape together grant money for tuition and even books and transport for their SPAN students. But in inner-city schools, “principals tell me not to dangle SPAN in front of their kids if we can’t provide funding,” Russell said.

Courses taught at high schools cost far less than those taught on campus, but the expense is still considerable. At Mooresville High, a course taught by an Indiana University–certified high-school teacher costs students $248, says Debra Page, the guidance counselor. A class taught by an Ivy Tech–certified high-school teacher requires kids to buy about $200 in books. A night class taught by Ivy Tech faculty costs $300.

The dual-enrollment credits carry extra weight when it comes to calculating a student’s GPA, and that has set off a debate about equity in Mooresville, a town of 11,000 people with a median family income of $48,000. “People say you’re buying your class rank,” Page explains.

Room for Improvement

Even a targeted and successful program like SPAN has its challenges. For kids in their sociable teen years, attending classes on a college campus can be isolating. SPAN youngsters told me they never cross paths with one another. Dual-enrollment students often can’t join campus clubs, buy sports passes, or use the gyms.

Michael Jokl, whose four brothers and sisters also attended IUPUI through SPAN (they’re now at Brown University, Purdue, Butler University, and the Florida Atlantic University Honors College), said he can’t apply even for math-department academic awards until he has a high school diploma. He also is disqualified from an overseas-study scholarship that’s available to other IUPUI students who, like him, mentor other students.

As a recruiting tool, SPAN has given IUPUI little to show for its investment, which Russell fears may be dampening the university’s enthusiasm: Only about 10 percent of SPAN students enroll as undergrads at IUPUI. Sharee Wilson, assistant dean of academic affairs, says the university can’t match the scholarship offers of private colleges that want such eager learners.

For their part, high schools aren’t always eager to see their brightest students opt out of AP classes for a dual-enrollment program. School ratings—and therefore, teacher bonuses—depend in part on how many AP classes they offer, how many kids enroll, and how well they score on the AP exam. Moreover, school district policies sometimes don’t allow youngsters to leave campus during the day.

Robert Faulkens, who until January was principal at Crispus Attucks, railed to me about institutional barriers that prevent youngsters from moving on when they’re academically ready. “We shouldn’t be putting up barriers,” he said. “We should be accelerating these kids to achieve their potential.”

It’s our goal for low achievers, after all. Why not high achievers, too?

June Kronholz is a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and education reporter, and currently a contributing editor at Education Next.

Update: Michael Jokl received acceptance letters from Brown and Stanford, and will be attending Stanford this fall.

Valuing Teachers

Eric A. Hanushek — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 04:02:45 +0000

Podcast: Rick Hanushek talks with Ed Next’s Paul Peterson

Opinion: In an Ed Week commentary, Eric Hanushek discusses some policy implications of his findings about the impact of good and bad teachers.

For some time, we have recognized that the academic achievement of schoolchildren in this country threatens, to borrow President Barack Obama’s words, “the U.S.’s role as an engine of scientific discovery” and ultimately its success in the global economy. The low achievement of American students, as reflected in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) (see “Teaching Math to the Talented,” features, Winter 2011), will prevent them from accessing good, high-paying jobs. And, as demonstrated in another article in Education Next (see “Education and Economic Growth,” research, Spring 2008), lower achievement means slower growth in the economy. From studying the historical relationship, we can estimate that closing just half of the performance gap with Finland, one of the top international performers in terms of student achievement, could add more than $50 trillion to our gross domestic product between 2010 and 2090. By way of comparison, the drop in economic output over the course of the last recession is believed to be less than $3 trillion. Thus the achievement gap between the U.S. and the world’s top-performing countries can be said to be causing the equivalent of a permanent recession.

According to the president in this year’s State of the Union address, this is “our generation’s Sputnik moment,” the time when we realize the urgent need to step up the performance of our education system. Only today, unlike in the 1950s, we have a clear idea of what it takes to improve achievement. The quality of the teachers in our schools is paramount: no other measured aspect of schools is nearly as important in determining student achievement. The initiatives we have emphasized in policy discussions—class-size reduction, curriculum revamping, reorganization of school schedule, investment in technology—all fall far short of the impact that good teachers can have in the classroom. Moreover, many of these interventions can be very costly.

Indeed, the magnitude of variation in the quality of teachers, even within each school, is startling. Teachers who work in a given school, and therefore teach students with similar demographic characteristics, can be responsible for increases in math and reading levels that range from a low of one-half year to a high of one and a half years of learning each academic year.

But while most parents are able to distinguish a good teacher from a bad one, few have any idea what difference it makes in the lives of their children. And researchers do not help, tending to talk in terms of standard deviations of achievement and effect sizes, phrases that simply have no meaning outside of the rarefied world of research. Here, I translate the researchers’ shorthand into concepts that might be more readily understood: the impact of teachers on the earnings of individuals and on the future of the economy as a whole.

Measuring Teachers’ Impact

Many of us have had at some point in our lives a wonderful teacher, one whose value, in retrospect, seems inestimable. We do not pretend here to know how to calculate the life-transforming effects that such teachers can have with particular students. But we can calculate more prosaic economic values related to effective teaching, by drawing on a research literature that provides surprisingly precise estimates of the impact of student achievement levels on their lifetime earnings and by combining this with estimated impacts of more-effective teachers on student achievement.

Let’s start with the researcher’s point of view. With a normal distribution of performance (the classic bell curve), a standard deviation is simply a more precise measure of how spread out the distribution is. Somebody who is one standard deviation above average would be at the 84th percentile of the distribution. If we then turn to the labor market, a student with achievement (as measured by test performance in high school) that is one standard deviation above average can later in life expect to take in 10 to 15 percent higher earnings per year.

That estimate may be deemed conservative for two reasons. First, it does not account for increases in years of education that may result from having a higher level of performance early on. Also, the estimate is based on information from people’s wages and salaries early in their careers, before they have reached their full earnings potential. Other calculations that take into account earnings throughout entire careers estimate 20 percent increases over the course of a lifetime.

Does 10 to 15 percent amount to much? For the average American entering the labor force, the value of lifetime earnings for full-time work is currently $1.16 million. Thus, an increase in the level of achievement in high school of a standard deviation yields an average increase of between $110,000 and $230,000 in lifetime earnings.

How do increases in teacher effectiveness relate to this? Obviously, teacher quality is not the only factor that affects student achievement. The student’s own motivations and support from family and peers play crucial roles as well. But researchers have worked hard to isolate the impact of teachers from these other influences. Rigorous studies consistently show that the impact of a more-effective teacher is substantial A high-performing teacher, one at the 84th percentile of all teachers, when compared with just an average teacher, produces students whose level of achievement is at least 0.2 standard deviations higher by the end of the school year. In fact, the impact of having such a teacher could plausibly be as large as 0.3 standard deviations.

Those impacts attenuate somewhat over time, however. The literature, though less than definitive, suggests that perhaps 70 percent of the gains achieved that year are retained in the long run by the student. The persistence of achievement gains is important, because the more sustained that these increases are, the greater the positive impact teachers will have on the lifetime skills and therefore the earnings of students. Put together, this evidence suggests that a teacher in the top 16 percent of effectiveness will have a positive impact (as compared to an average teacher) on longer-term student achievement that is 70 percent of the immediate gain, which as noted is at least 0.2 standard deviations. That lower bound of the estimated effect is what we will use as we calculate the economic worth of a teacher by combining a teacher’s impact on achievement with the associated labor market returns.

Let’s start with some conservative estimates of the impact on an individual student. Take a good but not great teacher, one at the 69th percentile of all teachers rather than at the 50th percentile (that is, a teacher who is half a standard deviation above the average). She produces an increase of $10,600 on each student’s lifetime earnings. Even a modestly better than average teacher (60th percentile) raises individual earnings by $5,300, compared to what would otherwise be expected.

While those numbers are not trivial, they burgeon dramatically once we recognize that every student in the class can expect such increases in earnings. Consider, for example, a teacher with a class of 20 students. Under such circumstances, the teacher at the 60th percentile will—each year—raise students’ aggregate earnings by a total of $106,000. The impact of one at the 69th percentile (as compared to the average) is $212,000, and one at the 84th percentile will shift earnings up by more than $400,000.

But there is also symmetry to these calculations. A very low performing teacher (at the 16th percentile of effectiveness) will have a negative impact of $400,000 compared to an average teacher.

Moreover, the economic value of an effective teacher grows with larger classes, as do the economic losses of an ineffective teacher. Figure 1 illustrates the aggregate impact on students’ lifetime earnings for higher- and lower-performing teachers. As we will discuss below, these results are all very large compared with, for instance, the $52,000 annual salary U.S. teachers were paid on average in 2008.

An Alternate Thought Experiment

We can also approach this valuation calculation from the perspective of the impact of teacher effectiveness on the U.S. economy as a whole, rather than just on the future earnings of students. As noted above, student achievement, which provides a direct measure of later quality of the labor force, is strongly related to economic growth. Improving achievement leads to a better prepared workforce and to greater growth, and this growth translates into higher levels of national income.

Starting again with the estimates of the difference in effectiveness of teachers, it is possible to calculate the long-term economic impact of policies that would focus attention on the lowest-quality teachers from U.S. classrooms. Let us propose the following thought experiment: What would happen if the very lowest performing teachers could be replaced by just average teachers? Based on the estimates of variation in teacher quality identified above, Figure 2 shows the overall achievement impact through a cycle of K–12 instruction. Assuming the upper-bound estimate of teachers’ impact, U.S achievement could reach that in Canada and Finland if we replaced with average teachers the least effective 5 to 7 percent of teachers, respectively. Assuming the lower-bound estimate of teachers’ impact, U.S achievement could reach that in Canada and Finland if we replaced with average teachers the least effective 8 to 12 percent of teachers, respectively.

Here the estimated value almost loses any meaning. Closing the achievement gap with Finland would, according to historical experience, have astounding benefits, increasing the annual growth rate of the United States by 1 percent of GDP. Accumulated over the lifetime of somebody born today, this improvement in achievement would amount to nothing less than an increase in total U.S. economic output of $112 trillion in present value. (That was not a typo—$112 trillion, not billion.)

Admittedly, these estimates are subject to some uncertainty. So if you think those that are given here are too high, even though they are based on the best of contemporary research, then just cut them in half. You will still have effects on growth of one-half of 1 percent per year, which produces impacts of $56 trillion over the lifetime of today’s child. In other words, to make the very large effects disappear, you have to make either the very strong assumption that student learning has little effect on the U.S. economy or the equally strong assumption that teachers have little impact on students.

What Would It Take?

The majority of our teachers are hardworking and effective. The previous estimates point clearly to the key imperative of eliminating the drag of the bottom teachers. Here we can offer several alternatives.

One approach might be better recruitment so that ineffective or poor teachers do not make it into our schools. Or, relatedly, we could improve the training in schools of education so that the average teaching recruit is better than the typical recruit of today. Unfortunately, we have relatively few successful experiences with either approach as compared to considerable wishful thinking, particularly among school personnel.

An alternative might be to change a poor teacher into an average teacher. This approach is in fact today’s dominant strategy. Schools hope that through mentoring of incoming teachers, professional development, or completion of further graduate schooling, ineffective teachers can be transformed into acceptable (average) teachers. Again, however, the existing evidence is not very reassuring. While such efforts undoubtedly help some teachers, there is no substantial evidence that certification, in-service training, master’s degrees, or mentoring programs systematically make a difference in whether teachers are in fact effective at driving student achievement.

The final option is a clearer evaluation and retention strategy for teachers. Today, obtaining an entry job into teaching is virtually tantamount to an indefinite contract that stays in force regardless of actual effectiveness in the classroom. Yet the calculations above show the enormous value to individuals and society of “deselecting” the least effective teachers.

Is such a policy change feasible? If we contemplate asking 5 to 10 percent of teachers to find a job at which they are more effective so they can be replaced by teachers of average productivity, states and school districts would have to change their employment practices. They would need recruitment, pay, and retention policies that allow for the identification and compensation of teachers on the basis of their effectiveness with students. At a minimum, the current dysfunctional teacher-evaluation systems would need to be overhauled so that effectiveness in the classroom is clearly identified. This is not an impossible task. The teachers who are excellent would have to be paid much more, both to compensate for the new riskiness of the profession and to increase the chances of retaining these individuals in teaching. Those who are ineffective would have to be identified and replaced. Both steps would be politically challenging in a heavily unionized environment such as the one in place today.

Salary Politics

The above discussion also highlights the difficulties in recruiting high-quality teachers, due in part to the difficulties of paying them well. Collective bargaining mechanisms do not provide incentives for the best people to enter or remain in the profession and likely hold the average pay down: given the uniform salary structure, increases in salary are bound to be unrelated to increases in effectiveness, making large pay raises raises politically problematic. This is likely one of the main reasons that teacher salaries now lag those in other professions. In the 1940s, the salaries of male teachers were slightly above the average pay for all male college graduates, and female teachers had higher salaries than 70 percent of other female college graduates. Today, despite the collective bargaining process, the salaries of male teachers are at the 30th percentile of the distribution of all college graduates, and women who teach are at the 40th percentile of their college-educated peers.

Teachers’ salaries today are based on credentials and years of experience, factors that are at best weakly related to productivity. In a competitive marketplace, a firm must compensate employees according to their productivity or risk bankruptcy. Yet no school district goes out of business if it retains ineffective teachers and pays them as much as effective ones. Salaries become political footballs, and it is often awkward for politicians to explain why a large pay increase goes equally to ineffective and effective teachers.

The challenge of implementing reform of the teaching profession remains considerable. Most of the benefits of implementing the “thought experiment” explored here would be fully realized only many decades later, while the costs of economic, and especially political, reform must be paid at the beginning. These costs would be steep, as they would likely negatively affect some of the most vocal constituents in education policy: current teachers.

The magnitude of the above valuations of teacher effectiveness, however, suggest that we should be willing to consider more radical reforms than have been commonplace in recent decades. Salaries several times higher than those paid teachers today would be economically justified if teachers were compensated according to their effectiveness. But unless we can replace the current system with one that better links teacher recruitment, compensation, and retention to effectiveness, we should expect both our schools and our economy to underperform relative to their potential. The cost to the nation at a time of intensifying international competition is high indeed.

Eric A. Hanushek is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Assessing New York’s Commissioner of Education

Peter Meyer — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 10:53:34 +0000

News Alert: Black resigning. Press conference at 11.

Dozens of New York City journalists scrambled to get to City Hall, and educators all over the country twittered and tweeted about what had been predictable—and predicted (“Cathie Black will be gone by Easter,” wrote our own Mike Petrilli last December). Meanwhile, some 120 miles to the north, in the 3rd-floor press room of the state Capitol building, veteran radio broadcaster Susan Arbetter was a couple of minutes into her previously scheduled interview with State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch. They were chatting about the “surprise” booting of Black, when Arbetter changed the subject.

“There is a rumor,” she said, “that David Steiner, the commissioner of education for New York State, could also be on his way out. I was wondering if you could illuminate us a bit on that?”

The normally unflappable Tisch, the first woman chancellor in New York history, seemed caught off guard. “You know, I have heard a lot about that,” she replied, as if stalling for time. But instead of saying, `just a rumor,’ as most practiced politicos would have, Tisch blurted, “I believe that the Commissioner is exploring his options—”

With all the klieg lights shining on the Bloomberg press conference, it took some time for the news from Albany to get out, but within the hour the Twitter world exploded again, with news that “outdid Mayor Bloomberg’s announcement,” as Philissa Cramer of Gotham Schools wrote, “at least in the department of rattling surprises.”

Rattling surprise, indeed. The sacking of Cathie Black, who had no education experience, surprised like an accident waiting to happen. David Steiner’s leaving rattled people. His elevation to head the state’s education system in October of 2009 had been hailed as a providential pick. With a philosophy degree from Oxford and a doctorate in political science from Harvard, and following stints at the National Endowment for the Arts and Boston University’s School of Education, he was most recently head of Hunter College’s School of Education. Steiner, then just 51, was the education reform world’s dream because he was an insider. And he charged out of the gate, instituting tougher benchmarks for the state’s 3–8 tests, initiating a major effort to write a statewide curriculum, and leading the charge to win a berth in the Race to the Top winner’s circle.

While rumors circulated—Steiner and Tisch didn’t get along, he was pushed out because he had stood up to Bloomberg over the Black appointment—Steiner himself played the resignation, which is to take effect in August of 2011, as if it were part of the plan. The timing of the announcement was not planned, he admits. He had started looking for other work, and it leaked and the leaks “became a flood.” That Tisch confirmed the rumors the same day as Black’s unceremonious sacking was, says Steiner, “bizarre coincidence.”

New York State department of education building, Albany NY. Inset: New York State’s commissioner of education David Steiner.

Chapter One Is Written

Saying that Tisch had “plucked” him out of academia to “plant a vision,” to find the funding for it, and to launch a radical reformation of the New York education system, Steiner is satisfied that “we’ve done that…. Chapter one is written. The key to chapter two is grinding implementation. And if you know me, you know that is not what I’m suited for.”

Indeed, Steiner’s chapter one is not a bad start. When I first interviewed him last December, he seemed fully engaged in the grinding implementation. Though he admitted that “the economic conditions on the ground are a huge, huge contextual challenge,” I was less interested in those challenges than in how, in a few short months, he had helped turn the Empire State from a poster child for education indolence, overregulation, overspending, and underperformance—an also-ran in Education Next’s poll of expected RttT winners (see educationnext.org/race-to-the-top-round-2-poll)—into an animated system with audacious academic strategies and goals, new (and higher) standards, aggressive timelines for meeting those goals, and, defying the odds, a silver medal and $700 million for finishing second in last summer’s RttT competition.

It is in that story that we can understand the bittersweet feeling of many New York educators that they have lost their leader before they got to the Promised Land.

Merryl Tisch was chosen to head the Board of Regents in 2009, the first woman to hold the post.

The Genius of Race to the Top

Perhaps it was all just a coincidence, but David Steiner was the right man, in the right place, at the right time. He was savvy enough to understand the importance of Race to the Top and able enough to turn the state’s education energies toward it.

The Washington Post said that the program “helped transform the national discussion on education.”

Education policy maven Rick Hess calls RttT “the centerpiece” of the Obama administration’s education strategy, and “arguably…the most visible and celebrated school reform effort in American history.”

Even David Brooks, conservative columnist for the New York Times, offered that the new federal program was helping prod a “quiet revolution” in American schooling.

Revolutionary, maybe. Quiet, no. A search of the Vocus Media Database, which includes hundreds of traditional media, blog, and social media outlets, found 1169 Race to the Top stories. The School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, initiated at the same time and distributing just about the same amount of money, turned up just 37 mentions.

All this hoopla and RttT was only $4.35 billion (SIG was $3.5 billion), a tiny fraction of the $100 billion in education funds passed out in 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), and less than 1 percent of the $600 billion spent on K–12 public education in the United States. Inside the Beltway, RttT was known as “Arne’s Slush Fund.”

Unlike NCLB, however, RttT proffered carrots instead of sticks: money for recession-strapped states that promised to implement education reform strategies, specifically, better teacher-evaluation practices, including using student performance as a metric; better teacher training; improved data gathering; and more school turnaround strategies, including more charter schools.

Despite a daunting array of rules for applying—there were 19 different categories that a panel of judges would score on a 500-point scale—states scrambled to join the race. Twenty-three of the applicants (including some strong union states like California, Michigan, and Ohio) passed laws or revised regulations before submitting their applications. Altogether, for round one (though no one knew if there would be a round two), 40 states and the District of Columbia submitted lengthy applications, in January of 2010, chasing millions.

New York State was one of them.

No Place More in Need

Once the shining star of the American public education system, New York has oflate come to represent all that is wrong with American education.

The new governor, Andrew Cuomo, in his first major postinaugural speech, complained, “We spend more money on education than any state in the nation, and we are number 34 in terms of results.” This is a big deal in a state with the third highest enrollment numbers in the country (2.7 million K–12 students, afterCalifornia, with 6 million, and Texas, with 4.6 million).

New York had other problems as well. At risk of bankruptcy and burdened by huge pension obligations, it was already the 4th “most taxed” state in the union (after Hawaii, Connecticut, and Vermont), according to Forbes; it faced a $10 billion deficit; and, as the New York Times put it, had “a divided and perennially dysfunctional Legislature.”

John King, an African American Brooklyn native, was tapped to be NYSED’s number two. He is rumored to be the Regents’ choice to succeed Steiner.

The Revolution Begins

Into the middle of this bog stepped Merryl H. Tisch, a former 1st-grade teacher with an EdD from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a spouse, James Tisch, who heads Loews Corporation and has sometimes appeared on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America. Tisch, one of 16 members of the Board of Regents since 1996, was chosen to head the Regents as chancellor in 2009. She had an agenda, the New York Times noted, that included “closing the achievement gap among demographic groups, bolstering career and technical education, and giving equal access to disabled students.” Tisch could, said the paper, be effective pushing that agenda because of “her ascent to chief regent” and “her rank in New York’s ruling class…”

“When my refrigerator is broken,” she once told a group of Catholic educators, “I don’t call the service department. I call the head of GE.”

In the Bloomberg mold, Tisch was a rich reformer at the helm of one of the most intransigent education systems in America.

And one of her first tasks was replacing the longtime commissioner of the New York State Education Department (NYSED), Richard Mills, who retired, on schedule, that June. In late July, education reformers throughout New York were pleasantly surprised to learn that the Regents had selected David Steiner to be the new co

mmissioner. (Truth in advertising: He has contributed to this journal.) Over the years, Steiner quietly built a reputation as a reformer’s reformer, willing to challenge the education system’s multiple vested interests—from the inside.

If there was any doubt that Tisch and Steiner weren’t serious about bringing change to New York’s hidebound public school system, that ended when they tapped John King to be NYSED’s number two. An African American Brooklyn native and product of the city’s public schools with his own Ivy League credentials, King cofounded Roxbury Prep, a successful Boston charter school, and was managing director of Uncommon Schools, which operated a network of 24 charter schools in New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey when Tisch called him. The two had met in 2000 when they were both in the doctoral program at Teachers College. And King knew Steiner through Teacher U, a teacher training program Steiner launched as a partnership with three high-performing charter management organizations while he was at Hunter.

By the time Steiner and King arrived in Albany, in the fall of 2009, the race for RttT funds was already on. There is some disagreement about how serious New York took the competition at that point. Joe Williams, head of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), says that “the general consensus from Merryl Tisch and Governor [David] Paterson on down the line was that Chuck Schumer is a powerful Senator—why does New York need to worry? We send our elected officials to Washington to bring home the bacon, so why was this going to be any different?”

Tisch scoffs at that view of things. “Oh, God forbid!” she says. “That is a wild accusation.” She notes that Steiner didn’t arrive until October 1 and King, November 1, with the RttT application due “just a few short weeks after that.”

Both Steiner and King avoid the question of whether New Yorkers assumed Schumer would bring home the bacon.

“When we arrived a lot of work had been done reaching out to stakeholder communities around the state,” King recalls. “What we didn’t have time to do was advance the legislative agenda.”

In fact, New York finished 15th out of 16 finalists in January of 2010. But both Steiner and King were impressed by the fact that that there were only two RttT winners (Delaware [$100 million] and Tennessee [$600 million]), which left $3 billion still in the pot. Says Steiner, “Arne Duncan made the shrewd assumption that putting out a small number of winners at the beginning would motivate and challenge others to raise their level.”

“That sent a very powerful message,” says King. “not just to the states, but to all the stakeholders, about how high the bar was, about ho

w much would be required, and about the stuff that it wasn’t going to be about.”

That stuff being politics. The message was clear: RttT was not a politics-as-usual program.

Richard Iannuzzi (seen here with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan), who heads the New York State United Teachers, agreed to participate in discussions about teacher evaluations.

Round Two: Change the laws

That didn’t mean New York couldn’t—and wouldn’t have to—play politics. The loss galvanized the state’s educators, reformers, and union bosses alike.

“It was very clear to us…that there would be no round two for New York State if we didn’t get legislative action,” says Tisch. John King recalls Tisch having some key conversations “that helped convince everyone that it was possible [to win in round two].”

Steiner called Richard Iannuzzi, head of the powerful New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), and invited NYSUT to begin discussions about “how we could get to an agreement on the teacher evaluations.” The union accepted.

Those discussions became known informally as the Sunday Morning Breakfasts. A team from NYSED, including St

einer and King, met in a conference room at NYSED headquarters, across the street from the capitol in Albany, with a team from NYSUT, led by the union’s number two, Maria Neira. “Lox and bagels,” laughs Steiner. Only it was more than breakfast.

“We had anywhere from 8 to 10 people at each of these sessions,” explains Steiner. “The meetings lasted four to five hours, sometimes longer.”

Most of the sessions, which went on for several months, focused on teacher evaluations, with the big concern being the “firewall” between the evaluations and student performance on state tests, a barrier that the union had always insisted was necessary. Steiner and King proved credible negotiators.

They were helped by a lobbying blitzkrieg led by Joe Williams and former Bloomberg campaign manager Bradley Tusk, who put together, with ample funds from Wall Street, Education Reform Now (ERN), a group with a single purpose: to bring the state legislature into the RttT reform fold.

Williams spread ERN money around on everything from brochures and mailings to door knocking in key legislative districts. “We ran $4 to $5 million worth of television ads,” Williams recalls, “blaming the teachers union for losing the chance to win $700 million in round one and urging the legislature to bring home the money for New York.”

The Williams team crafted a campaign not about teacher evaluations or firewalls or charter schools, but about “whether New York should get $700 million from Obama,” says Williams. “We wanted this to be an up or down vote on progress and the money.”

“The union, in my view, did not want to be blamed for not getting Race to the Top,” recalls Joel Klein, then chancellor of New York City’s public schools, which enrolled almost half the K–12 students in the state. “But I don’t think for a second that they were prepared to agree with lifting the [charter school] cap…. [Iannuzzi’s] big concern was what he called saturation. As long as we sprinkled charters and didn’t really create communities of choice, he was fine.”

As the union lost more charter fights over the years, it tried to draw lines in the sand on issues such as financial accountability, for-profit management of charters, and preventing a concentration of charters in particular neighborhoods or cities, dubbed “saturation.”

But the union didn’t want to talk about charters at the Sunday meetings at NYSED headquarters, preferring inste

ad to deal directly with the legislature, where it had long-standing friendly relations.

Iannuzzi reaffirmed the point when I discussed it with him at NYSUT headquarters last winter. “Our buy-in was built around the evaluation language not around the charter school piece.… The connection between the charter school piece and Race to the Top was just smoke as far as I was concerned.”

On this one, however, NYSUT faced stiff competition from the Williams-led ERN team, which, while telling the public that this was up or down on the money, was telling legislators it was up or down on the nitty-gritty issues of teacher evaluations and charter reform.

As the June 1 deadline for round-two applications approached, the efforts at the Sunday Morning Breakfast meetings and those of Williams intensified.

In the capitol, the union won some accountability and transparency fights—prohibiting for-profit organizations from running charters, making charters adhere to state comptroller audits, and demanding they serve more special education and ELL students—but lost the bigger issues of saturation and the cap, which legislators agreed to raise from 200 to 460.

When I asked Iannuzzi how NYSUT, which used to own the legislature, lost those key parts of the charter fight, he said, “The answer is hedge fund operators…who could write out a check for a million dollars a shot.”

But ERN had also found the key public relations nuance that made the money work: Walking away from $700 million in a recession was not smart. No one would get lost in the weeds on that message.

Which is ironic, as Joel Klein says, since “it is, literally, a drop in the ocean.” New York State spends more than $50 billion a year on K–12 public education; New York City’s school budget is some $22 billion. Seven hundred million, spread out over four years, represented less than one-half of 1 percent of the state’s education spending, and $350 million for Gotham, over four years, is the same droplet. “But if you can use it for the things you care about,” says Klein, “it’s important.”

It was important enough to New York’s legislature that, on Friday, May 28, just a few days shy of the June 1 deadline, the Senate and Assembly voted on Chapters 100, 101, 102, and 103 of the Laws of 2010, to remake the teacher evaluation process—40 percent of the “composite effectiveness score” would be based on student achievement—allow for 260 more charter schools, and appropriate $20.4 million for a new longitudinal data system.

“It was an extraordinary moment,” says Steiner, who had gone to the Assembly Hall at three in the morning with Tisch and King to watch the vote. “I had tears in my eyes.”

“What had been considered impossible months before was now a done deal,” recalls Williams.

Joe Williams and Democrats for Education Reform led a lobbying blitzkrieg to bring the state legislature into the RttT fold.

The Test: Oral Presentation

There were still two more hurdles: making the finals and defending the application at an oral presentation before the panel of judges.

For round two, a total of 35 states and Washington, D.C., had submitted applications, and in late July, at the end of a speech at the National Press Club, Duncan announced the names of 18 finalists, including New York. They had just over a week to prepare their oral presentations.

Tisch had already assembled her dream team: herself, Steiner, Klein, King, and Michael Mulgrew, head of New York City’s powerful teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers. “The important thing,” says Steiner, “was that you had there the chancellor of the Board of Regents, the chancellor of our biggest school district, the head of our biggest local [teachers union], and the two senior people from the department—that’s what you need.”

And they weren’t taking anything for granted. They practiced.

Most of the rehearsals were in a conference room at the Loews Corporation offices in Manhattan. Steiner brought in members of his staff to play the review panel. “They were very tough on us,” he laughs. “And we were tough enough to say, ‘Thank you, do it again next week.’ They got us to think hard about the application, about our narrative, about how we would respond. That was priceless.”

Such sessions were important not just for the substance of the arguments but for the chemistry among team members, so

me of whom—specifically, Klein and Mulgrew—were more accustomed to meeting each other from opposite sides of the table.

Team members all say they came out of the oral presentation feeling good about their chances. And three weeks later their feelings—and hard work—were rewarded with a second-place finish and a promised grant of $700 million. New York earned 464.8 points, just 6 points behind first-place finisher Massachusetts and more than 50 points better than its round-one score.

New York “had set forth a clear and comprehensive statement of its vision,” wrote one reviewer, who noted that the “ambitious agenda” would be helped by “the extensive authority over public education held by The Board of Regents” and “the large network of 37 District Superintendents who oversee Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES).” The state’s “aggressive agenda” would “strain the capacity of any state attempting to do so much for so many students in so many districts,” the reviewer continued, “but the applicant appears to have both the existing capacity and the political and bureaucratic will to re-organize and re-focus.”

The RttT money was important enough to New York’s legislature that just a few days shy of the June 1 deadline, they voted to remake the teacher evaluation process, to allow for more charter schools, and to appropriate $20.4 million for a new longitudinal data system.

The Beginning of the End

When I interviewed Steiner in his Manhattan office in December of 2010, he was perhaps foreshadowing his departure: “I have to say that what we face now, to me, is much more difficult,” he said. Under his direction New York had set some bold goals for 2013:

• Increase National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) grade 4 reading proficient scores by 10 points

• Increase NAEP grade 8 reading proficient scores by 8 points

• Close achievement gap for blacks, Hispanics, ELL, and students with disabilities by 20 percent on the NAEP exams

• Increase the Regents exam pass rate by 13 points

• Increase the graduation rate by 5 points.

It bothered Steiner that the state might not make these goals. And perhaps, he had, by then, sensed the deep difficulty in bringing the ship into port. “Ultimately, of course,” he said at the time, “you need to look at outcomes. There is no hiding from that.” In other words, the race is not over: It has just begun.

This is what rattled New Yorkers when they heard Steiner was leaving. And his protests that “the press will try to make more of this than is there” seem more the gentleman educator talking than the education reformer that he proved to be. (For a full discussion of his tenure, see my interview with Steiner.)

Though he seems to have few enemies, as one New York education insider noted, “Steiner got Race to the Top done, which was good money and raised standards, which is necessary, but I don’t see what he did to help kids meet those standards.”

This is chapter one. And it is the fundamental gamble of RttT, a presumption, really, that all the standards and metrics and variables will lead to better education results. In this respect, RttT is old-fashioned federal funding, with money doled out for proper inputs rather than sure outcomes. Federal ED officials promise that if states don’t make their “process benchmarks, they will not get the money.”

John King says that “in the first couple of years there will be what I characterize as process wins. You’ll see an evaluation system for teachers and principals, with student achievement built in as a meaningful component.… You’ll see the rollout of a statewide data system that will give a lot more useful information to teachers and principals about student performance and a lot more useful data for policymakers.… Three and four years out you’ll see real change in the percentage of kids achieving college-ready standards. You’ll see more students enrolling in college, fewer students in remedial courses, more students staying in college all the way through to graduation.” Indeed, Steiner and King rolled out an ambitious timeline, easily accessed on the state’s web site, to measure their “process wins.”

Steiner could have stayed, but he may be a man who knows his gifts and his abilities as well as his limitations. One of those limitations, in the political world, is his unflinching ability to see past the politics. He’s a “wonderful man,” said one insider, “but he is an academic thrown into a knife fight—usually not a good thing.”

“I suspect the endless political battles wore on him,” says Whitney Tilson, the hedge-funder turned education reformer. “Given the vicious, and I use that word deliberately, tactics often employed by defenders of the status quo, reformers need to have absolutely extraordinary levels of stamina, patience, thick skin, and a willingness to do battle in dirty, muddy trenches every day. I know I couldn’t do it—it drives me nuts just watching it!”

“The part of David Steiner that will be missed,” says Joe Williams, “is the refreshing disrespect he paid to the education bureaucracy.” That may be true or not, but it is true that Steiner had a surprising success turning that bureaucracy around. Finding the person who can steer it through a radically changed landscape will be New York’s next challenge.

Peter Meyer, former news editor at Life Magazine, is currently senior policy fellow with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and contributing editor at Education Next.

Catholic Ethos, Public Education

Peter Meyer — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 12:03:04 +0000

Podcast: Peter Meyer reports from Chicago, where two public schools have been launched by a Roman Catholic religious order.

Additional photographs of the Catalyst Schools are available here.

Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.
—Proverbs 22:6

It wasn’t exactly a marriage made in heaven. In fact, the idea that one of the Catholic Church’s most respected religious orders might run a public school sounded odd, maybe even, as Francis Cardinal George, head of the Archdiocese of Chicago, conjectured, illegal.

But a decade ago several trends in American education, and in the Catholic Church, made a Catholic-operated public school seem increasingly possible: 1) the traditional, parish-based Catholic school system, especially in the inner cities, was crumbling; 2) equally troubled urban public-school systems were failing to educate most of their students; and 3) a burgeoning charter school movement, born in the early 1990s, was beginning to turn heads among educators in both the private and public sectors.

The various currents merged in the Windy City in 2006 and 2007 when the Christian Brothers helped open two charter schools in impoverished neighborhoods on Chicago’s west side, embarking on a unique experiment in public education. Could Catholics run a school without mentioning Jesus, Mary, or Joseph? Without prayer, Mass, the rosary, the sacraments? Without God? And could the high wall between church and state be kept intact?

Back to Their Roots

The Christian Brothers—known in France, where the Catholic order was founded in 1680, as Frères des écoles chrétiennes or Brothers of the Christian Schools—have had some experience in education. The order’s founder, Jean-Baptist de La Salle, is the church’s patron saint of teachers and today the order serves nearly 1 million students in more than 80 countries, including some 20,000, mostly middle-class, students in 90 Catholic middle and high schools and education centers in the United States.

But what caught the eye of Arne Duncan, while he directed Chicago Public Schools (CPS), was the success the brothers were having with an initiative the order had launched in the early 1990s. They had opened San Miguel schools, named after a Christian Brother saint from Ecuador, in American pockets of poverty, including an Indian reservation in Montana, the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, and inner-city Camden, New Jersey. (In 2006 San Miguel merged with the Jesuits’ Nativity Schools; today the NativityMiguel Network operates over 70 schools for the poor in 26 states and the District of Columbia.)

The first Chicago San Miguel school opened in 1995, behind the infamous (now gone) stockyards. The goal was simple enough: bring to poor children, tuition-free, what the brothers were delivering to middle- and upper-class students in their other American schools, including small class sizes and a college-prep academic program.

It worked. Within a few years of opening, San Miguel Back of the Yards School’s low-income students were outperforming their Chicago Public Schools counterparts. The school’s success prompted Lands’ End company founder Gary Comer to donate $1.2 million to open a second school, now known as the Gary Comer Campus, in the blighted Austin neighborhood.

The schools employ a year-round academic calendar, have a 9:1 student-to-teacher ratio, and a core academic curriculum. They put heavy emphasis on reading—80 minutes a day, an average of 165 books read per year—and individualized instruction.

“Our model is not rocket science,” says Mike Anderer-McClelland, a former brother who is now president of the San Miguel organization in Chicago. “It is a lot of reading, writing, and arithmetic.”

The schools also have a Family and Graduate Support Program that not only tracks students through high school but helps them and their parents with tutoring and counseling, long after they leave left San Miguel at the end of 8th grade.

“We graduate 85 percent of our kids from high school in a neighborhood that traditionally graduates less than 40 percent,” says Anderer-McClelland. “Sixteen percent of our kids graduate from four-year colleges, compared to less than 5 percent of public school kids in our neighborhoods; and it’s only 3 percent of CPS Latinos and 4 percent of CPS blacks who graduate from college.”

Brother Ed Siderewicz and former Brother Gordon Hannon discuss the future of the Catalyst Schools.

Getting from No to Yes

A faith-based or church-sponsored charter school had been the subject of some discussion among Catholics in Chicago almost from the moment that Illinois passed a charter school law in 1996. Though the law initially allowed just 20 charters statewide, 15 of the slots were assigned to Chicago.

Coincidentally, the Archdiocese of Chicago, which ran the nation’s largest parochial school system with more than 130,000 students, was in the midst of a demographic and financial crisis. The archdiocese had closed 55 of its schools in the previous 10 years. (See my story, “Can Catholic Schools Be Saved?” features, Spring 2007.) At the time, CPS CEO Paul Vallas and others encouraged the church to consider converting their closed and closing schools to charters. But in 1999 Cardinal George said “No.” It was “a square circle,” he remarked, “not because of archdiocesan protocols but because of the nature of the beast.”

That view was shared by others, including the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA). “Are charter schools another way to keep Catholic schools alive, as some proponents suggest?” the NCEA asked in a 2009 press release. “Absolutely not.”

Catholic leaders could not support schools that were not grounded in religious instruction.

However, in what was perhaps an unintended consequence of the church’s crisis, a former priest became one of the first to open a public charter school in Chicago. John Horan, director of the Archdiocese’s Catholic Youth Organization when he was a priest, opened the public North Lawndale College Prep charter in 1998 as a layperson. “Catholic schools were terrific,” says Horan today, “but there just wasn’t enough financial support to send all of our poor kids to Catholic schools. So we thought, we…have to make public schools work.”

This is what Paul Vallas and Arne Duncan were thinking, too. Vallas had floated the idea of the Christian Brothers running a public school as early as 1997, recalls Ed Siderewicz, a young Christian Brother who helped start the San Miguel Back of the Yards School, “but we shrugged it off as compromising our mission.”

The question would keep coming up.

“The [San Miguel] board really wrestled with this,” recalls Sister Margaret Farley, director of personnel for the archdiocesan schools of Chicago and a founding board member of San Miguel. “We thought we could do a values-based school, but many members of the board were superparanoid about anyone thinking it would be a Catholic school.”

Early on in the discussions, Brother Gordon Hannon, a Chicago native and cofounder of San Miguel Back of the Yards School, researched the question in a paper for a graduate course at DePaul University. He concluded that though the San Miguel model “meets a clear and urgent secular need,” it was an open question whether “a faith-based group of competent, licensed educators” could run a publicly funded school without crossing the church/state line.

Brother Mike Fehrenbach, head of the Christian Brothers’ Midwest District, saw an opening in the “values-based” charter idea (instead of faith- or religious-based) and convinced the San Miguel board that the question was worth exploring. And in July of 2004 they formed a special charter-school planning committee.

Money was a significant consideration.

“We are probably near the limit of our ability to raise the dollars necessary to expand effectively,” wrote Fehrenbach in a one-page memo to the group, referring to the cost of running the two private San Miguel schools. He suggested that a charter school, which was publicly financed, might be a way of bringing education to the poor without having to spend so much time fundraising.

“This sounded like a growth company,” smiled Terry Toth, recalling his initial reaction to the idea. Toth, a lifelong Catholic, was a member of the San Miguel board as well as head of the world’s 12th largest investment bank, Northern Trust. “We would get 85 percent of our costs paid for—versus the need to fundraise 100 percent,” he laughs. “Win-win.” Toth also recognized that it was an opportunity to have an impact on more people. “Obviously, there was a church/state issue. But it was worth trying.”

“We Can Do This”

That is what Arne Duncan said, Ed Siderewicz recalls, when Gary Comer brought him to visit the San Miguel Austin campus in 2004. “You get your team behind it and I’ll make it work.”

“We asked a few questions,” recalls Siderewicz, “but I remember thinking that if our starting point is how to make it work rather than what we have to give up, then we should continue talking.”

And they did continue talking, with more and more detailed attention given to the question of San Miguel’s core mission. God or no God? For his part, Mike Fehrenbach didn’t see the charter undertaking as a challenge to the brothers’ mission, which he believed was “about offering people an opportunity for a future worth living.” They could do this by exemplifying Christian and Catholic values; they didn’t have to preach them. (This was not unknown territory for the Christian Brothers. In many countries they ran secular schools; in Indonesia, in fact, they operated a Muslim school.)

At the end of January 2005, the order’s district council voted to launch the charter school. And a month later, Brother John Johnston, then the order’s Superior General in Rome, weighed in: he saw “no important reasons for saying no” and “important reasons why we should say yes.”

Brother Mike Fehrenbach suggested that a publicly financed charter school might be a better way of bringing education to the poor.

Too Good to Be True

But the Christian Brothers were suddenly given another challenge. In the middle of writing the application for the charter school they wanted to open, Arne Duncan asked them to take over a public school he was closing in the North Lawndale neighborhood. This was part of the “turnaround” strategy that Duncan initiated in Chicago and would bring to his job as secretary of education in the Obama administration: improve some schools by closing them, then reopening under new management.

This was fine except that the brothers had already found the neighborhood for their new charter school: Austin, near the Gary Comer Campus San Miguel School. Austin was clearly needy; it had the highest number of homicides in Chicago in 2003 and nearly 30 percent of families with children under 18 lived in poverty. The neighborhood high school had the second-highest dropout rate in the state of Illinois. And the brothers had good connections in Austin, including with Circle Urban Ministries and the Rock of Our Salvation Church, an active evangelical Baptist congregation that owned a former Catholic school there.

“It was like manna from heaven,” recalls Rev. Abraham Lincoln Washington, pastor of the congregation, remembering Brother Ed Siderewicz’s request to open a charter school in his facility. Circle Rock had been struggling to keep open its 185-student religious school for the poor. “We had a vacant building and they had 300 years of experience educating kids.”

Reverend Washington’s congregation was also a strong one, providing a rich mix of social services, including a food pantry, legal and medical services, transitional housing, and education. “Education is like preventive medicine,” he says. “It’s so important.”

But the perfect union between Christian Brothers and Baptists would have to wait.

“At the last moment, Duncan asked us to take over the Howland School in North Lawndale,” recalls Siderewicz, “before we opened Austin Circle Rock. Naively, we said ‘Okay.’”

Although the neighborhoods are, technically, adjacent, Austin and North Lawndale are among Chicago’s largest neighborhoods and so the Howland School was more than five miles south of Austin Circle Rock—a world away. Especially for the Christian Brothers, who had no presence there.

Worse, North Lawndale was even needier than Austin. At the time of the 2000 U.S. Census, approximately 10,000 adult males from the neighborhood were in prison. Says Father Lawrence Dowling, pastor of St. Agatha Parish, which is just four blocks from the Howland School, “We have the highest incidence of HIV in the state, the highest rate of asthma for kids in the state, and the highest percentage of grandparents raising grandchildren in the nation.”

“As poor a census tract as you can find,” says John Horan, who had established his North Lawndale charter high school in one part of the sprawling Howland building. “Do I know the neighborhood?” he chuckles. “I am completely grey because of it.”

But the Christian Brothers didn’t know the neighborhood, and the neighborhood didn’t know them. Recalls Fehrenbach, “The community was in an uproar over the closing of their school—and then we came in.”

At an initial public meeting, a group calling itself “The Voice of the ExCon” sent dozens of people, who shouted and screamed. “It was a bit scary,” recalled Siderewicz. “But we made it through.”

The Christian Brothers eventually won the group over by giving them a tour of their San Miguel schools, but the initial animosity was a sign of things to come.

At the time of the 2000 census, approximately 10,000 adult males from the North Lawndale neighborhood were in prison.

A Tale of Two Schools

The brothers opened Howland Catalyst Charter School, on schedule, in the fall of 2006 and Austin’s Circle Rock Catalyst in 2007. The Howland plan called for starting with 4th and 5th grades, with two classes of 15 students in each grade; it would add 3rd and 6th grades in year two, 2nd and 7th grades in year three, 1st and 8th grades in year four, and kindergarten in year five, growing to 540 students in grades K through 8 by 2010. The Austin plan was to start with 5th and 6th grades beginning in 2007, add 7th and 8th grades in the second year, then build up from kindergarten to 4th grade in the next two years.

Both plans reflected the brothers’ belief in the importance of middle school, which was the focus of their San Miguel initiative. And true to the San Miguel model, they brought to the Catalyst charters their 9:1 student-to-teacher ratio, a belief in academic excellence, graduate and family support, and the goal of having every child reading at or above grade level before graduation (8th grade). They also brought modern assessment tools, including standardized testing several times a year, teacher-designed testing on a weekly basis, nightly homework that was checked each day by the teacher, and daily testing/assessment in core subject areas.

Despite the model, the polished floors, new banners, and students outfitted in spiffy olive and khaki uniforms, the staff at Howland was quickly overwhelmed by the outsized needs of its student population, which was 100 percent African American and 98 percent eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

“These children live in a world where you can’t appear weak—it can be deadly,” says assistant principal Igbazenda Moses, a Nigerian native and former Christian Brother who came to Chicago in 2002 and joined the Catalyst staff in 2006. “All of this makes the kids very uptight and creates a huge barrier to learning.”

Howland’s was a student population suffering from enormous environmental, economic, and social trauma—a kind of permanent Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

“Three weeks ago we had a child whose dad was shot and killed,” Moses says. “We have two kids like that here now. There is so much violence in their daily lives. They hit you—and they’re used to getting hit back. Self-control is a big issue for these kids.”

Howland’s leaders were caught off guard by the severity of the social and environmental ills, and the effort it would take to address them. As Brother Ed Siderewicz recalls, “We had every problem in the book and more. I had forgotten how hard it was to start a school.”

In 2009, Austin Circle Rock outperformed the other Austin neighborhood schools on the composite Illinois Standards Assessment Test.

God Help Us!

Assistant Principal Moses believes that the inability to teach religion was a significant part of the problem. “Talking about how to be respectful and trustworthy is not the same as talking about a person’s life being grounded in the knowledge of God,” he says. “And that’s what these children and their families need. ‘Character Counts’ just doesn’t do the trick.”

Brother Mike Fehrenbach smiles at this in-house dissent. “We’re doing fine.”

Both Catalyst schools use the popular youth ethics program developed in the early 1990s by the Josephson Institute of Ethics. Character Counts includes “six pillars”: Trustworthiness, Respect, Responsibility, Fairness, Caring, and Citizenship. Banners with those words are hanging throughout the school.

“Yes, we’re doing character education,” says Gordon Hannon, no longer a Christian Brother, but who was brought back in as Catalyst CEO at the end of the 2009 school year to help right the Howland ship. “But we have to go beyond that. To capture the essence of Catholic education, one of our core values is reverence. We must instill a sense of reverence for each other and show how that is different than respect.”

“You can get lost in debates about whether you should have a crucifix on the wall or not,” says John Horan. “It’s more about violence and drugs and poverty than the decorations.”

And leadership.

“I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach,” says Megan Dougherty, who arrived in August 2007, at the beginning of Howland’s second year, and was assigned a 5th-grade classroom. “There was no new teacher training,” she recalls. “And there was a new principal and a brand-new administrative team. The kids were being bad and teachers didn’t feel they had any support.”

Five teachers quit that year; another five didn’t return the next year. Dougherty would have been gone early except that when she came back from Christmas holiday, she realized that “my kids really missed me. I had to stay for them.” But she did eventually leave. “No one was happy with their job,” says Dougherty. “I loved the school. I loved the kids. But I couldn’t stay another year.”

Fourth-grade teacher Tina Corsby calls herself “the last of the Mohicans.” A veteran of CPS, she started at Howland Catalyst when it opened in 2006 and is still there in 2010. “It’s better than a regular public school,” she says. “Here, they really do care about the kids.”

But Corsby and her teacher colleagues were caught in the classic bind: trying to do a good job, they seemed to get no help from the top. “Job one in a school like this is to establish a culture of peace and high academic expectations and do rigorous social supports,” says John Horan. “Stable leadership makes all the difference in the world. You can’t end-run this one. The principal makes it all happen.” Howland has had three principals in three years.

“We’ve struggled from the get-go,” says Catalyst CEO Hannon. “We had everything we had at San Miguel, but we weren’t clear enough or deliberate enough about who we are. We were hesitant. We were not tough enough about the teaching, about embracing reading as the number one priority…. The bottom line is that the leadership wasn’t there.”

“It’s better than a regular public school,” says 4th-grade teacher Tina Corsby. “Here, they really do care about the kids.”

While these lessons were being learned, the San Miguel team opened its second Catalyst charter school, at Austin Circle Rock, in 2007. Perhaps it was just luck that Sala Sims, a seven-year veteran of CPS classrooms, applied for the job of principal. “I knew I wanted to start a school,” she recalls. The Chicago native met Brothers Mike and Ed in early 2007 “and never looked back.”

“She gets it,” says Brother Mike Fehrenbach.

And it showed. After just two years, Austin Circle Rock had an air of order that eluded Howland after three. From the front desk to the back offices and faculty lunchrooms, students and adults at Austin Circle Rock were both more relaxed and more disciplined. And the test scores proved it.

In 2009, Austin Circle Rock students outperformed the other Austin neighborhood schools on the composite (reading, math, and science combined) Illinois Standards Assessment Test (ISAT), with from 68 to 76 percent of students in grades 4 through 8 meeting or exceeding the state standard.

“It’s part of the Resurrection before our very eyes,” says Brother Ed Siderewicz.

Perhaps it was just luck that Sala Sims applied for the job of principal. “I knew I wanted to start a school,” she recalls.

How was Howland doing on its test scores?

“Flat would be generous,” says Hannon. In fact, Howland ISAT scores in 2009, with just 49.8 percent of its students meeting or exceeding the state standard, tied for last place among five public schools in North Lawndale.

How could the “formula for success” have gone so far wrong in Howland?

In many respects, it is as simple as what Donnell Harrison, the safety manager at Austin Circle Rock, calls, “following the model.” Donnell has manned the front desk at Austin since it opened. “At Howland they’re conforming to the community instead of to the model.”

This point has not been lost on Catalyst leaders, especially as they work on turning Howland around.

With Hannon as the new Catalyst CEO came a new principal, Chaun Johnson, and the two have become a veritable tag team. Johnson grew up in the Austin neighborhood, where Circle Rock is located and where his wife Natalie now teaches, and he attended Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School (now closed) in Lawndale. Johnson is articulate, self-assured, and, at over six feet tall, a commanding presence in a room full of teachers and students. (The photograph on page 40 shows him leading the “principal’s choir.”)

“This is a community of potential,” Johnson says. “It would appear that nothing can grow here. I’m here to change that.”

And it would appear, at the beginning of his second year, that he has done that.

Fehrenbach noticed the change “just after Christmas,” he says. “The tone shifted radically. Kids in the classrooms were actually smiling; there was less shouting.”

There is an air of discipline—in the old sense of the word, order—in the school that had not been there the previous two years. All children are now wearing uniforms with shirts tucked in. Test scores have improved markedly. Among Chicago’s 91 charters, Howland showed the fourth-best improvement on ISAT composite test scores in 2010, jumping from a 49.8 percent to a 60.8 percent passing rate.

With Hannon’s help, Johnson began conducting weekly teacher and staff training sessions. They brought in a curriculum instructor, and he brought in trainers for grade-level teacher meetings. The eventual goal, says Hannon, is to send teachers to a Lasallian Leadership Institute. Run by the Christian Brothers and named for the founder of the order, these three-year programs, including a one-week intensive training session during the summer and several weekend sessions, are meant to introduce teachers and administrators to the Lasallian mission and show them how to implement it in their classrooms and schools.

“This is a community of potential,” says Principal Chaun Johnson. “It would appear that nothing can grow here. I’m here to change that.”

Though the church/state question will no doubt live on, for now the leaders of the Catalyst charter experiment are convinced that the essence of their San Miguel schools can work in a public school setting. “We will live the values and virtues of the Christian Brothers without speaking the words,” says Chaun Johnson. “And that will open the doors so that our education plan can work.”

Johnson represents what it is that the Catalyst backers believe is the point of their charter: they bring a Catholic ethos, not the catechism, to children. And they educate them in reading, writing, and ’rithmetic.

While admitting that Howland still has challenges, Catalyst leaders believe they have turned the corner. And they have learned some hard lessons.

First, they did inadequate relationship building in the community. As many of those involved in the early discussions with the city have said, the Christian Brothers were “naive” or “stupid” to have taken on the Howland project before getting to know the neighborhood.

“A second mistake was starting Howland with grades 4 and 5,” says Ed Siderewicz. Taking on older kids, the brothers now know, requires the kind of knowledge of and relationships with a community that they did not have in North Lawndale.

Third, leadership and staff must understand the model. “Reforming the academic leadership team was our biggest challenge,” says Hannon.

And finally, “we worried too much about the church/state issue,” says Terry Toth. “We run a public school. We don’t have crucifixes on the wall. We don’t teach religion. We teach truth and honesty.”

Is there any one ingredient of success in these matters?

Says North Lawndale College Prep charter school’s John Horan, “You have to have a community of full-grown adults who understand the culture piece and the academic expectation piece. The kids will come around.”

“Hard work,” adds Hannon, who has all but lived at Howland for the last year and shows no signs of slowing down.

And Terry Toth remains bullish on Catalyst’s future. “We’re working on a strategic plan,” he says. “We’re trying to button down the academics and get more consistency there. We’ve taken faith-based and made it values-based. We’re even exploring opportunities to add more schools. The Circle Rock campus got more traction because of Rock of Our Salvation Baptist church and there was community support. So, we’ll be looking for similar things as we expand: a pastor, a supportive community, etc. We’ve learned that you can’t just plop a school down in a neighborhood and expect it to work.”

Brother Mike Fehrenbach would agree. “Be good citizens,” he told a Circle Rock graduation class. “We pledge to stand by you. Failure is not an option.”

Peter Meyer, former news editor at Life Magazine, is currently senior policy fellow with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and contributing editor at Education Next.

Additional photographs of the Catalyst Schools are available here.

Blocked, Diluted, and Co-opted

Jay P. Greene — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 05:02:35 +0000

Podcast: Eric Hanushek and Paul Peterson discuss why merit pay experiments in the U.S. tend not to last very long or work very well.

As education policy churns through fad after fad, merit pay is really hot right now. The U. S. Department of Education asked states to include proposals for implementing teacher merit pay—pay based on classroom performance—in their 2010 applications for Race to the Top (RttT) monies, and many applicants promised action on this front. In Washington, D.C., former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee negotiated a strikingly original merit-pay plan, despite strong union opposition. According to the latest Education Next poll, public support for merit pay gained significant ground over the past year and now outdistances opposition by a 2:1 margin.

Replacing the standardized salary schedule, where the only factors that determine teacher salaries are the number of years on the job and academic credentials, seems a worthwhile goal. In theory, pay-for-performance plans both provide a clear monetary incentive to teachers to find the best way to motivate and instruct their students and, over the longer term, attract and retain those more-effective teachers who wish to work in a field that rewards professionals for the quality of their efforts. But enacting high-quality performance pay plans in the United States is easier said than done. Last year, the Florida legislature enacted one of the more stringent proposals any state has ever attempted—only to have the bill vetoed by Governor Charlie Crist as a way of jump-starting his ultimately doomed bid to become Florida’s first independent U.S. senator. That is not the only time a merit pay bill has seemed on the verge of success, only to founder or be undermined by the need to compromise. In general, merit pay plans are more likely to be symbolic than substantive and more likely to be promised than delivered.

Most often, they are not even promised. Even if one counts the most token of performance pay plans, they are to be found in no more than 500 school districts out of some 14,000 districts nationwide, a mere 3.5 percent of the total.

When new merit-pay plans are proposed, teachers unions often block their enactment or water down their provisions. In Cincinnati and Philadelphia, for example, merit pay policies were blocked just before they were about to be implemented. Denver’s Professional Compensation for Teachers (ProComp) plan, widely heralded as the leading national example of performance pay, awards more money for earning another degree than for demonstrated performance in the classroom. In Houston, merit was defined so broadly that it included an overwhelming majority of the teachers. In Florida, Iowa, and Texas, the legislatures have encouraged local districts to enact performance pay plans. But unions have been able to dissuade local districts from participating in the state-authorized programs. Only a handful of Florida districts participate in merit pay, for example, even though state funds cover the cost of the initiative.

A strong, well-designed merit-pay plan requires more than offering a bonus to high-performing teachers while paying the remainder according to the standard schedule. To be truly effective, pay for performance must mean in education what it does in other industries—salary increases for the successful, and salary reductions, even dismissals, for poor performers. State laws governing teacher tenure in most states make implementation of such plans unlikely.

All of this leads us to measured skepticism about the merit of merit pay, unless it is coupled with school choice innovations hefty enough to instigate sustained competition among schools and school sectors. Only then would local districts have the incentive to both lobby states for changes in state laws and to negotiate tough contracts with teacher unions. Only then would they find it important, if merely to retain their student enrollments, to structure their pay systems so as to attract top-notch employees and give them strong incentives to strive for excellent performances.

But we have covered a lot of ground very quickly. Let’s step back and consider carefully the propositions we have set forth.

Does It Work?

High-quality research on this topic within the United States is sparse and results are mixed. Matt Springer and his colleagues at Vanderbilt released a study recently on a well-designed randomized trial of a merit pay experiment in Nashville. The program involved bonuses of up to $15,000, which would presumably be large enough to affect individual incentives. Yet virtually no effect was seen on test scores (outside of 5th-grade math, an effect that disappeared for those same children the next year). That said, the Nashville study did not examine long-term effects on the composition of the teacher workforce.

The Bloomberg administration in New York City made headlines in late 2007 by announcing a pilot merit-pay initiative, the School-Wide Performance Bonus Program. The New York City Department of Education randomly assigned eligible schools to treatment or control groups, which has enabled scholars to conduct rigorous evaluations. Early results with respect to student achievement are not promising overall, although the program appears to have had a positive impact in schools with fewer teachers (see “Does Whole-School Performance Pay Improve Student Learning?” research). The researchers theorize that the group benefit feature of the merit pay program made it unlikely that it would have an impact on teacher behavior in any but the smallest schools.

The international evidence on performance pay is more encouraging, including a recent worldwide look that indicates that students learn more in countries with performance pay plans, all other known factors held constant. Ludger Woessman (see “Merit Pay International,” research) looked at 27 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries and found that students in countries with some form of performance pay for teachers score about 25 percent of a standard deviation higher on the international math test than do their peers in countries without teacher performance pay.

Union Roadblocks

If merit pay seems promising (and certainly not harmful), convincing tests of its performance are difficult to undertake within the United States, simply because merit pay proposals typically end up being blocked, co-opted, or diluted by established interests. Admittedly, it is not easy to identify the various instances where merit pay has been proposed but then blocked from enactment, and therefore we cannot provide an explicit enumeration. In all likelihood, most potential proposals are never articulated, simply because likely sponsors regard the cause as hopeless. When 96.5 percent of all districts rigidly follow a standard salary schedule, it takes an energetic and devoted innovator to brave the odds and try to break from tradition nonetheless.

Still, there are several telling examples of established interests blocking merit pay proposals. Governor Mitt Romney proposed merit pay in Massachusetts back in 2005–06, as part of an education budget that included tens of millions in new spending. That proposal went down to defeat; as the Lowell Sun reported, “the Massachusetts Teachers Association [MTA] and United Teachers of Lowell opposed the idea. Catherine Boudreau, president of the MTA, called teacher bonuses ‘inequitable and divisive.’”

Philadelphia tried to institute a pilot merit-pay program in 2000, but later ditched the initiative, “calling it too expensive, too difficult to administer, and a failure at giving teachers useful feedback” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Then, in 2006, Philadelphia received a $20.5 million grant from the U.S. government to develop a merit pay program. Said the Inquirer, “At the time, the federal grant was announced with much fanfare—the union would be the district’s partner, officials said, ensuring the plan would succeed where others failed. But the deal fell apart.” The local union abandoned the program in the face of a “surprise $180 million budget deficit,” and the district gave the money to charter schools instead.

Another example comes from Cincinnati. That city’s merit-pay plan proposed in 2002 was overwhelmingly voted down by teachers (1892 to 73), even though it did not base bonuses on student test scores. As Education Week noted, the plan “was based on an extensive evaluation system, which determines whether teachers advance in five career categories…. The evaluations entail multiple classroom observations by fellow teachers and administrators and portfolios that include logs of parent contacts, lesson plans, student work, and more.” Education Week quoted a former associate superintendent of the Cincinnati schools, who blamed the proposal’s failure on the fact that it “would have applied to nearly all teachers, rather than allowing veterans the choice of opting into the new system.”

In Alabama, the state’s “Race to the Top” application originally proposed merit pay and a “new salary schedule that would give more money to math, science and special-education teachers,” but that portion of the application was deleted, reported the Press-Register (Mobile), “after Alabama Education Association leader Paul Hubbert wrote state Superintendent Joe Morton a letter…opposing them”

If special interests fail to block a merit pay program, they may still be able to make it temporary. A Little Rock, Arkansas, performance-pay program lasted only three years and was not renewed by the local school board, despite evidence of positive effects on student achievement in math, reading, and language. Similarly, the Alaska School Performance Incentive Program was canceled after three years.

Special interests are also able to repeal merit pay based on putative budgetary constraints. The state of North Carolina suspended incentive awards to high-performing schools in 2008–09 due to budget problems. Winston-Salem/Forsyth County, North Carolina, suspended its bonus program due to budget difficulties as well.

Unions have been similarly successful at preventing local districts from participating in statewide programs, as the experience in Florida, Iowa, and Texas shows. Florida’s “Merit Award Program” provides state money to local school districts. According to the Florida Department of Education, “Each district will determine an amount equal to at least 5% and no more than 10% of that district’s average teacher salary to be awarded to all of the top performing personnel in the district, regardless of years of experience.” Even though this program involves free money from the state for districts to hand out to teachers, the political forces opposing merit pay were able to prevent 88 percent of Florida districts from participating in 2009.

Similarly, Iowa’s statewide Career Ladder and Pay-for-Performance grant program was passed in 2007, but only 3 Iowa districts, out of 360, bothered to apply. Only 20 percent of Texas districts opted into the District Awards for Teacher Excellence program in 2009–10. In other words, as a result of political opposition, the vast majority of school districts, even in conservative Texas, turned down extra money from the state rather than adopt merit pay.

Merit Pay in Name Only

When interest groups succeed in diluting or co-opting a merit pay plan, the plan ends up rewarding teachers mostly or entirely for inputs (e.g., professional development, graduate degrees, national certification) rather than for outputs (test scores, graduation rates, or even supervisor assessments).

One example is Arizona’s Classroom Site Fund (CSF), a mandatory statewide program that involved a couple of new taxes. Districts had to “allocate forty per cent of the monies for teacher compensation increases based on performance and employment related expenses, twenty per cent of the monies for teacher base salary increases and employment related expenses and forty per cent of the monies for maintenance and operation purposes.”

According to a 2010 report from the Arizona Auditor General, out of 222 districts receiving CSF funding, the auditor could identify only 29 “with strong performance pay plans that did a good job of linking teacher performance pay to student achievement.” The report noted that “allowing districts the freedom to determine performance pay goals can help gain district and teacher buy-in,” but that such freedom “has also led to inconsistent performance pay plans and to situations in which teachers receive similar performance pay for significantly different levels of effort and related performance results.”

One example from the auditor’s report deserves to be highlighted:

One district awarded performance pay to eligible employees if freshman students’ algebra test scores increased by at least 10 percent between a pre- and post-test. The actual increase in test scores was almost 90 percent. Since the pre-test is given to freshman students who have never been exposed to algebra and the post-test is given to them after receiving a full year of algebra instruction, it should be expected that scores would increase significantly more than 10 percent.

In other words, algebra teachers were being rewarded merely for getting students to learn 10 percent more about algebra than they knew before studying that subject at all. This is not a high hurdle to clear.

Denver’s ProComp program has been heralded as a political and policy success. Then Senator Barack Obama said, “Cities like Denver have already proven that by working with teachers, this can work, that we can find new ways to increase pay that are developed with teachers, not imposed on them and not just based on an arbitrary test score.” But the Denver ProComp program may be less than meets the eye. For one thing, it exempts teachers hired before January 1, 2006, from having to join, which means that the vast majority of teachers whose pay depends on seniority rather than on merit are able to keep their old pay structure in place. And if older teachers opt to enter the ProComp program, they keep their old base salary; the ProComp program merely offers them a chance for bonuses on top of that old salary.

The ProComp program also rewards the old definition of “merit” more immediately and to a greater extent than it does anything that improves student achievement. The largest monetary award is for earning a graduate degree: a $3,300 permanent salary increase plus a tuition or student loan subsidy of $1,000 per year for up to four years. By comparison, teachers receive a one-time award, not a bump up in base salary, of up to $2,403.26 if their students exceed “district expectations” for student growth.

Moreover, as Paul Teske, a principal evaluator of the ProComp program, noted in the Christian Science Monitor, bad teachers face no penalty under the ProComp or similar merit-pay programs: “I guess your salary stays low, and maybe that sends the message that you should look at another career. But ProComp doesn’t directly address that.”

The federal Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) provides grants to school districts that promise to develop merit pay programs “for raising student achievement and for taking positions in high-need schools.” Currently, the Department of Education’s website lists 33 TIF grantees, including some small districts and a few major city districts. But these programs may also end up being diluted or co-opted.

For example, the TIF program in Charlotte-Mecklenburg (North Carolina) includes substantial bonuses for professional development, working at hard-to-staff schools or in hard-to-staff subjects, and for taking on leadership roles. To the extent the program involves student achievement, it bases awards on “student learning objectives” as “created by individual teachers, with the approval of site-based administrators”; these objectives “will be measured by a combination of existing assessment instruments, and teacher designed tools,” as well as by state standardized tests. The superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools recently announced a plan to bring performance pay to the entire district.

Perhaps it is desirable to have teachers receive more professional development, work in hard-to-staff schools or subjects, and assume leadership roles, but these are inputs, not student outcomes. The bulk of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg TIF program, like many such programs, is MPINO—merit pay in name only.

Some locales have diluted the merit pay concept by making the bonuses to teachers small and setting the bar for receiving the bonuses low, thereby converting merit pay into something approximating an across-the board pay raise.

For example, the Texas Educator Excellence Grant (TEEG) program began in 2006–07 and ended after the 2008–09 year; it was funded at approximately $100 million per year. After analysts at the National Center on Performance Incentives (NCPI) reported no positive effects on student test scores, the Dallas Morning News declared the program a failure. NCPI report coauthor Lori Taylor speculated that “one possible cause of the program’s failure was that bonuses were relatively small and were given to most teachers at each school—about 70 percent—so that the incentive for individual teachers to push for higher scores was ‘relatively weak.’ In addition, campuses that qualified already had to be higher performers, so it was difficult to register much improvement.”

The same thing seems to be happening in Houston, where a merit pay program has existed since January 2007. The district announced financial awards totaling $40.4 million in 2010. The district’s webpage notes, “in all, 15,688 HISD employees received performance pay [in 2010], ranging from $25 to $15,530. That’s 88 percent of eligible HISD employees.”

Minnesota’s oft-heralded “Q Comp” program offers yet another example of a “merit pay” program that ends up as an across-the-board pay raise. As the Minneapolis Star Tribune recently reported, “In 22 school districts whose Q Comp practices were analyzed by the Star Tribune in 2009, more than 99 percent of teachers in the program received merit raises during the preceding school year. Only 27 of the roughly 4,200 teachers eligible did not get a pay raise.”

The New York City School-Wide Performance Bonus Program mentioned above may also have been undermined by its structure. Some 180 schools were eligible in the 2007–08 school year for a collective $14 million in bonuses, or $3,000 per union teacher, if they met test score goals established by the district. In a key factor that enabled the plan to draw union support, committees composed of a principal, a person of the principal’s choosing, and two union representatives were allowed to decide how the bonuses should be distributed at any given school. Researchers identified a number of drawbacks to the program design, including the possibility that bonuses based on school-wide improvements weaken the incentives for individual teachers to increase their efforts.

Making Merit Pay Work

The prospects for merit pay are not promising, despite both theoretical and empirical reasons for expecting that the programs would produce positive results for students. Our findings are consistent with the theory that school districts are not primarily educational institutions where policies are organized around maximizing student achievement. Instead, they are best understood, at least when it comes to compensation policies, as political entities shaped by powerful interest groups, including organized groups of employees.

Viewed in that light, it is unsurprising that public school systems have relatively little interest in authentic merit-pay programs. If some teachers could earn improvements in their wages and working conditions from their own efforts rather than from the efforts of their organized representatives or affiliated politicians, then more-effective teachers would have little reason to support the unions financially or politically. Their interests would be at odds with those of less-effective teachers. In short, the single salary schedule by which almost all public school teachers are paid is essential to the financial and political power of established interests.

One way to diminish the power of established interests and permit the adoption and implementation of merit pay is to expand choice and competition in education. If students choose their school, those schools have incentives to adopt and implement policies and practices that will improve their quality and attract students as well as the resources they generate. If merit pay systems help attract and motivate effective teachers, schools in a more competitive environment will have incentives to adopt those systems. They are more likely to design and maintain merit pay systems in a sensible way, since their revenue depends on it.

Schools that already compete for students appear more open to including merit pay in their personnel policies. According to University of Washington’s Daniel Goldhaber and his colleagues, charter schools are more likely than traditional public schools to use merit pay. Michael Podgursky, professor of economics at the University of Missouri, looked at data from the 1999–2000 Schools and Staffing Survey and found that when school administrators were asked whether they used salaries to reward “excellence,” only 6 percent of traditional public school administrators answered yes, while “the rates for charter (36 percent) and private schools (22 percent) were much higher.” Even those charter and private schools without a formal performance-pay plan are typically able to offer higher salaries to teachers they hope to retain and, as important, to readily dismiss teachers deemed ineffective.

Attaching continued employment and level of compensation to job performance is something that frequently occurs among private enterprises in competitive markets. The difficulty with merit pay in education is that it attempts to simulate a market-based practice in a nonmarket environment. None of the forces that cause organizations to seek effective merit pay systems, or to maintain and alter them effectively over time, exist in public education.

Imposing merit pay on an unwilling education system is like trying to get kids to eat their vegetables when the kids are 25 years old and stronger than their parents. No matter how nutritious green beans may be, powerful adults who don’t want to eat them can usually keep them off their plates and can almost always keep them out of their mouths.

Stuart Buck is a doctoral fellow in education reform at the University of Arkansas. Jay P. Greene is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute.

New Schools in New Orleans

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 05:01:06 +0000

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans public schools bear little resemblance to the disintegrating system that was further undone by the catastrophic flood. Two-thirds of city schools in 2004 were rated “Academically Unacceptable” under Louisiana’s accountability standards; in 2010, about 4 in 10 rate that designation, and the percentage of students attending a low-performing school has fallen by half, from 67 percent to 34 percent. Most striking of all, nearly three-quarters of public school students attend charter schools, proportionally more than in any other U.S. city.

Just weeks after the storm, officials turned the city’s failing schools over to the state-run Recovery School District (RSD) and gave the RSD five years to turn them around. That deadline was reached last December, and a vote by the state school board has extended the RSD’s reform effort, albeit with modifications that promise greater autonomy to schools that meet performance targets and create a process for qualified operators to take over failing schools. The December vote was a victory for charter schools and the RSD, one that boldy advances a school reform model as innovative as it is controversial.

District in Recovery

For decades, the deterioration of the New Orleans public school system had been shocking and seemingly inexorable. Students graduating with honors were sometimes incapable of elementary mathematics and some were barely able to read. One high-school valedictorian failed the graduate exit exam and then failed it some more—five times all told—and this was the school’s top student. Deferred maintenance and contract fraud ensured that the system’s physical infrastructure was as degraded as its instructional capacity. The system was bankrupt and the payroll so padded with no-shows—some of them deceased—that the FBI had set up a satellite branch within the school board’s central office. The hurricane was the coup de grâce. Some 110 of 127 schoolhouses were completely destroyed.

But ruin so extreme bred opportunity.

The RSD had been established in 2003 to manage “recovery” from academic failure, not from Hurricane Katrina, as the name is sometimes taken to imply, but had seized only five New Orleans schools before Katrina. After the storm, the RSD took control of an additional 63 deemed in need of radical intervention. The elected Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) retained authority over the system’s 16 still-viable schools, an administrative domain that shrank further as several of the best schools fled central control for the greater autonomy that comes with charter status. Today, the majority of OPSB schools are charters (see Figure 1). Further erosion of the board’s legitimacy came with the jailing of its former president for bribery.

In a similarly pivotal blow to the old order, with teachers scattered to 50 states and schools shuttered for the 2005 fall term, the OPSB discharged the 7,000 employees who had answered to it prior to Katrina, effectively nullifying the system’s contract with United Teachers of New Orleans. When the collective bargaining agreement formally expired at the end of the 2005–06 school year, it was not renewed.

Freed from union rules and OPSB central-office control, the RSD was able to act on its conviction that improved performance lay in spinning off as many schools as possible and chartering them as independent institutions with open-enrollment admissions policies and citywide catchment areas. Critics on the left accused Louisiana of implementing a version of the “shock doctrine,” whereby disaster is exploited to rescind worker protections and other strands of the social safety net. Critics on the right lamented that the Bush administration and its allies within the parochial school establishment failed to go even further and make private school vouchers a bigger part of the new regime.

Five years later, the city’s bet on charter schools had begun to pay off. The average rate of improvement in the New Orleans public schools stood at three to four times the statewide rate, despite persistent poor performance by several schools. For a change, extraordinarily good things could be said about New Orleans’s traditionally atrocious public school system.

Wake-up Call

Forced to compete for students and rank, the New Orleans schools were jolted from a decades-long coma. The awakening coincided with efforts in reform-minded cities like New York, Long Beach, California, and Washington, D.C. But what was distinctive about New Orleans was that the dynamic tension among schools was built into the system’s new polycentric administrative structure. The old apparatus of central control had not, as in other cities, merely been tweaked in the name of reform; it had been scrapped. Under the old order, the all-powerful school board and central office had seemed to view the district more as an adult jobs program and dispenser of patronage-based contracts than as a source of education for young people. Now, by design, no single apparatus of power—not OPSB, RSD, or the charter schools and charter management organizations that answered to them and to the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE)—could assert hegemony and dominate the others.

That made New Orleans a test not just of cutting-edge instructional practices but of variant administrative models as well. The city became a laboratory for the reinvention of its school system and, as was attested to by the enthusiasm of major foundations and the Obama administration, a crucible for ideas that might well be replicable in other cities.

As reformers hoped, the opportunity attracted a raft of independent school service providers ranging from charter management organizations to firms that aligned curricula with state standards and then developed metrics for measuring individual student achievement on a monthly or even weekly basis. Teach For America and the New Teacher Project saw opportunity and beefed up their presence in New Orleans, as did a homegrown organization called Teach NOLA. The Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools gained prominence as a deft legislative advocate for what was being called the New Orleans reform model. The largest of the independent reform groups, the nonprofit New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO), developed an array of services, subsidies, and other forms of support. To plug the human capital deficit in a city still depopulated by Katrina, NSNO began training prospective school leaders and directors as well as teachers. It also sponsored a small nonprofit to engage and inform parents about student choices in the new landscape. By 2010, NSNO had incubated 10 citywide, open-admission charter schools, the basic integer of local reform, and provided key personnel and services for dozens more.

Katrina spawned a gamut of visionary ideas for the transformation of New Orleans. They ranged from land-use plans to flood protection to the development of neighborhood health-care clinics to economic development and governance proposals. Many died at inception, undone by the impulse to re-create the old order before attempting its improvement. School reform was the exception. A sense of moral obligation combined with hard work and sheer exasperation to make it the most far-reaching achievement of the post-Katrina era. The decent public education long denied New Orleans youth was framed as a civil right at least as fundamental as the access to jobs, public accommodations, and polling places that had been milestones in an earlier generation’s fight to overcome segregation. The numbers show that charter schools were the barricades from which a new struggle was being waged successfully (see Figure 2). Parents, initially skeptical about school reform efforts, or accustomed to thinking of them as concessions aimed largely at luring parochial and private school students back into a low-income, black-majority system, flocked to the new schools, even lining up in pre-dawn hours to assure a child’s admission. Alone among American cities, New Orleans was actually beginning to close the much-discussed “performance gap” among students of different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. A poll in late autumn 2010 by Tulane University’s Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives found that 60 percent of New Orleans residents opposed returning the schools to OPSB. Small wonder then that many politicians had loosened their ties to teachers unions and school system contractors. Change was in the air and the implications were revolutionary.

Sustaining Momentum

Now, the question, as keenly studied by chartering’s foes as by its friends, is this: Can the early success be sustained? The challenges remain numerous and daunting. There is concern that school reform’s bountiful harvest in the half decade since Katrina has been low-hanging fruit and that further gains—even with sharp improvement, the system remains subpar—will be much more difficult. Looking ahead, Neerav Kingsland, a Yale Law graduate and strategist for NSNO, talks about “Charter Issues 2.0,” the problems that arise on the way from being 10 percent of the system to being 80 percent of the system, the next and far more demanding phase of work.

For the nation’s foremost experiment in charter schools to rest even briefly on its laurels would be to risk setbacks, Kingsland and like-minded reformers contend. Loss of momentum would be pounced on by now-disenfranchised partisans of the old regime eager to buttress their claim that the rising test scores are somehow bogus or, in any event, temporary, merely a blip. That argument has been made by Larry Carter, president of the United Teachers of New Orleans. Like other skeptics, Carter seized on a 2010 report from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes that portrayed many charter schools as doing no better, and indeed sometimes worse, than traditional schools nationwide. Carter rushed into print in New Orleans’s daily newspaper, The Times-Picayune, with an editorial saluting the Stanford study as proof of failure, but without mentioning the parts of the report that identified charters in New Orleans as a sharp exception to the national numbers and particularly successful with low-income students. In light of rearguard attacks of this sort, the only way to ensure that the system remains performance-driven, many of reform’s proponents believe, is to push the New Orleans model—predicated on open-admission, citywide charter schools—all the way to scale. That means encouraging the RSD to complete the chartering of its entire portfolio of schools; it also means resisting return of a still-shaky school system to OPSB, with or without a collective bargaining agreement. Above all, sustaining charter-based school reform means taking very seriously the criticisms that have been lodged against it.

The Search for a Governance Model

The 2005 legislation that designated New Orleans a district in crisis and placed more of its failing schools under state control gave the RSD five years to achieve recovery. The timetable guaranteed that school governance would emerge as a focus of debate on Katrina’s fifth anniversary. Eli Broad, whose foundation has committed millions to the reform effort, put the governance question at the top of the agenda as schools reopened for the 2010–11 school year:

The most important areas in which we think the city should focus going forward are putting in place a sustainable governance structure, continuing to develop and support teachers and leaders to become long-term, high-performing employees and continuing to improve the lowest-performing schools.

Last December BESE decided to extend the RSD’s shelf life rather than return the schools to OPSB control. In the run-up to the December decision, public interest swelled and rhetoric heated up. Opponents of the state’s post-Katrina intervention rallied to the cry of “local control,” which usually meant restoring power to the school board or something like it. The argument carried a racial subtext, sometimes explicit, more often coded. The bureaucrats in a white-majority state were cast as having usurped administrative power over a district in which 9 out of 10 students were African American, as were many teachers, politicians, and contractors.

Another theme popular among advocates of local control was the contention that RSD’s school performance gains were somehow illusory or rigged: students with special needs were being turned away from schools and those with disciplinary problems were being expelled to keep performance scores high, critics insinuated. The argument lost some of its political punch when 2009–10 enrollment figures revealed that the schools overseen by the OPSB, not the RSD, have the lowest proportion of special needs and behaviorally challenged students.

State Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek, shortly after Labor Day, pointed the way for BESE’s December decision. The gist of his recommendation was that RSD would retain control of its current portfolio of schools for at least another two school years. At that point, schools that had met or surpassed minimum standards could return to local governance, if—the big if—they chose to do so. Pastorek’s further proviso was that local capacity to administer the schools would be reviewed before such transfers were approved. Many, if not most, eligible schools are expected to resist a return to OPSB control. In a late amendment to his plan calculated to impose greater accountability on the RSD, Pastorek advocated giving OPSB and others a crack at taking over not just successful schools, but also those that are still failing after five years in the RSD portfolio.

The December vote was not a foregone conclusion. Some board members were inclined to override Pastorek’s recommendation and restore the entire city system to OPSB control. But former OPSB and BESE board member Leslie Jacobs, widely regarded as the founder of Louisiana’s school reform movement, correctly predicted that BESE did not have the votes to oppose Pastorek.

Darryl Kilbert, the superintendent hired by OPSB to manage its small portfolio of schools, portrays the current transitional arrangement as an erosion of democracy itself and espouses restoration of “community control.” He tactfully makes clear that community control need not necessarily mean OPSB control, but clearly assumes that it will.

The countervailing observation is that the locus of democratic control has merely shifted, from an elected school board to an elected governor and a partly elected, partly appointed BESE. The mantralike criticism that a diminished OPSB means control is less “local” ignores the fact that the once all-powerful seven-member school board has been augmented by a growing cohort of charter school board members numbering in the hundreds. (The Left counters by deploring the charter schools as “privatized,” notwithstanding that most of them observe an open-enrollment admissions policy and that they, like all public schools in Louisiana, are publicly authorized, funded, and evaluated. By statute, their meetings must also be open to the public, though critics say access is sometimes grudging.)

While its argument for regaining control of the schools rested on the principle of local control, a chastened OPSB also pointed out that it had instituted financial reforms since the system’s bankruptcy prior to Katrina.

But the broader political context was aligned in ways that favored continuing the reform effort, at least for now. Under the New Orleans city charter, the school system is a separate entity that does not answer to the mayor, but the incumbent administration, like the state education bureaucracy in Baton Rouge, was and remains vehemently opposed to cutting it short.

“There will be no turning back,” New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu said to cheers in his inaugural address in May 2010. He was reiterating a slogan that had been embedded in his campaign platform. If reform were to fail, he asserted in a network TV appearance in late September, it would be precisely because politics, perhaps especially racial politics, had eclipsed the commitment to improve the education of children. Landrieu is white and a Democrat, the first white mayor of New Orleans since his father served in that capacity in the 1970s, but he was elected with overwhelming black support. Governor Bobby Jindal, a conservative Republican and a devout Catholic, is even less disposed to resurrect the old regime. Indeed, he is a proponent not only of charter autonomy but of vouchers, which though ardently desired by the parochial system, are so far only a token presence in the New Orleans schools landscape (see “In the Wake of the Storm,” features, Spring 2010).

Paul Vallas, who as superintendent of the RSD since 2007 has lengthened both the school day and the school year, sees technical as well as political reasons why charters are here to stay. “You can’t turn back. Charters are authorized by the state,” Vallas told PBS Newshour during a July 2010 appearance. “The state would have to not renew them. The great thing about this system is, it’s really going to be hard to dismantle what’s been created.”

The influential Jacobs agrees. OPSB couldn’t roll back the clock even if it wanted to, Jacobs contends; the charter school constituencies—the families who use them—won’t let it happen.

And yet Jacobs, like many others, including Eli Broad, sees eventual return to an upgraded form of local control as both inevitable and wise. In the interim, every governmental entity with a management role in local schools, and that would include BESE, must maintain a local presence to facilitate citizen access, she told an independent citizens forum on school governance that met throughout the summer. Longer term, she believes any resolution of the governance question must observe two categorical imperatives: One is that any and all decisions must be based on whether they measurably improve the quality of the education being provided to children. The other is that the management of schools must be cleanly separated from the business of authorizing and evaluating them.

Extrapolating from these core values, Jacobs envisions a school board–like body, perhaps the OPSB itself, eventually recovering the power to authorize charters, reorganize failing schools, set policy consistent with state mandates, and provide systemwide services. Actual management of schools would be left to autonomous charter boards, each of which comprises a school “district” under the current arrangement.

Building Anew

As the December vote was approaching, Jacobs was also grappling with the question of whether central administrative functions should include facilities management, or whether that responsibility should lie with the schools that occupy assigned campuses. The real estate is owned by OPSB and is subject to reconstruction or replacement now that the city has finally settled with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for a post-Katrina allocation of construction funds totaling $1.8 billion—big, big money in a relatively small city like New Orleans (see sidebar).

Up-to-date information and photos can be found at www.rebuildingnolaschools.com

NO’s Master Plan Under Way

It’s the biggest school construction project in Louisiana since the Civil War and one of the largest in the nation’s history: 85 campuses, some overhauled, most being built from the ground up, at a total cost of about $2 billion. Another 89 buildings on 38 campuses are being demolished. By 2016, New Orleans anticipates a student population of about 45,000, compared to about 65,000 before Katrina.

With the system in the throes of convulsive reform, the buildings are master-planned for flexibility. Not only is the population in flux, so are school management styles at a time of increased autonomy and experimentation. A charter school operator may be around for three to five years, but these are buildings that must last for a century, notes Ramsey Green, who, as the Recovery School District’s chief operating officer, is in charge of creating campuses for both RSD and OPSB schools, charters and direct-run alike. (For project news, interactive map, and photographs, visit www.rebuildingnolaschools.com.)

As the work kicked in, Louisiana got its first public building that meets the LEED “silver” standard for “greenness”—as will all 85 schools. The buildings also reflect the city’s vulnerability to storms and flooding: Many are elevated above flood levels. Ground floors are terrazzo so they can be easily scrubbed down and bleached if flooding occurs. The electrical systems originate on the roof and flow down through the buildings so that only the lower extremities need to be replaced in the event of catastrophic flooding.

Of particular interest to progressives in the urban planning world, the buildings embody the potential for multiple uses by the surrounding community. Libraries and gyms and health clinics have separate entrances, allowing community groups to gain access for appointments, meetings, or after-hours exercise without having to traipse through the school itself. Air-conditioning and heating systems are zoned to contain costs when a building is only partially in use.

In a city famous for corruption, procurement and payment are audited exhaustively at several levels within the RSD and at the state and federal level before checks are actually cut by FEMA. Early bids have been running nicely below estimates, thanks to the national recession, Green says.

Momentum has been building rapidly since early 2010, when the city and FEMA ended five years of squabbling and came to terms on the federal commitment. Autumn saw eight groundbreakings, one a week. The excitement is palpable. So is the urgency of the work. Says Green, “We’ve still got 6,000 kids in modular campuses.”

Where those schools should be placed and what they should look like has long stirred debate. Some factions have clamored for a return to “neighborhood schools.” To some, this is code for an antireform agenda, given that citywide open access is one of the hallmarks of the new generation of charter schools since Katrina. That open access is a deliberate and effective assault on racial inequity associated with the segregation era is an irony not lost on reform advocates. In debating the issue, they point out that charters with open-access admission policies are an option already available to neighborhood residents; for admission to most they need only show up on time and enroll. Moreover, reform advocates note, basing admissions on geographical boundaries is an exclusionary practice, all too redolent of the days when low-income students of minority background desperately sought to escape from “slum” or “ghetto” schools and gain access to the generally superior schools in “good” neighborhoods from which they had been barred.

The neighborhood schools movement has found friends among some of the city’s more progressive urban planners. The master plan for reconstruction of the school system after Katrina envisions schools as centers of the adjacent community. At a time when budgets are tight, obesity epidemic, and fuel costs likely to rise, schools at the center of walkable communities are seen as both healthful and thrifty. School-centered communities also further neighborhood cohesiveness, the argument goes. To that end, the Orleans schools master plan calls for bundling several community services within or adjacent to new and reconstructed schools—a library branch, a wellness clinic, a community garden, and a senior center, for example.

The Money Factor

No discussion of school reform in New Orleans is complete without acknowledging that notable gains have occurred at a time of unusually high levels of government financial support, chiefly drawn from special funds set up in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster. Those dollars nearly doubled per-student allocations in New Orleans, lifting the figure above $12,000, even without factoring in support from foundations and individual donors (see Figure 3). That tide of money has now begun to ebb. It was hoped that reversion to more normal funding levels would be mitigated by federal Race to the Top (RttT) money, but Louisiana was not selected in the program’s first two rounds, in part, it was assumed, because upstate districts and teachers unions were not wholehearted in their support for RttT goals.

New Orleans has, however, secured $28.5 million in federal “i3” funds for educational innovation. The award, announced over the summer of 2010, will go to the RSD and to NSNO primarily to lubricate reorganization of failing schools. To test the replicability of the New Orleans model, some of the money will be used to help launch charter schools in Memphis. On the home front, NSNO is committed to implementing i3’s goal of reorganizing the lowest-performing 5 percent of failing schools. The intended uses of the i3 money align with an evolving vision of philanthropy’s role. As Broad put it,

Foundations can continue to play an important role in enabling school districts and states around the country to understand how and why New Orleans has made better relative academic gains in such a short period of time, and to encourage them to adopt similar approaches. We’ve only begun to unlock the lessons this city holds for education reform nationwide.

In early December 2010, notwithstanding a lawsuit threatened by OPSB, BESE accepted Pastorek’s recommendation to extend the current reform paradigm. The vote was preceded by histrionics at times reminiscent of pre-Katrina meetings of the Orleans school board at its most chaotic and dysfunctional. From the speaker’s rostrum, one OPSB member warned that a vote for Pastorek’s plan would be an act of criminal malfeasance that would trigger “civil war,” an indication that regardless of the board’s decision, the political battle was far from over.

Where to Go from Here

Amid changes as exciting as they are fragile, this much seems clear to the reform community: Even briefly settling for today’s improved performance levels is to avail critics of the opportunity to say that school reform has stalled after early gains that were easy and perhaps unsustainable (see Figure 4). It would be to settle for schools that are, not excellent, but merely “good enough.”

Efforts by the old order to claw back power are portrayed as only the most obvious threat to the gains achieved in New Orleans. The more insidious threat, reformers contend, is for schools and the communities of students and parents they serve to get comfortable with a still-inadequate status quo. A stubborn loyalty to the school they know, and indeed may have helped build, can abort the wrenching changes that may be required for a school to become truly excellent.

Reform advocates call it “churn,” the business of aggressively and systematically zeroing in on the least successful schools, ousting failed managers, and reorganizing the schools as open-enrollment, citywide charter schools. Churn is “disruptive,” a term of approbation in the school reform lexicon. But disruption breeds resistance. Even badly failing school administrations sometimes secure the affection of parents and students uncertain that striving for a truly excellent school will necessarily lead to improvement of the mediocre institution with which they have grown comfortable. That psychology is what for a time bedeviled the process of replacing a popular principal at the International High School of New Orleans, a BESE charter, with a controversial but dynamic former superintendent of the New Orleans system. In other school settings the resistance is communitarian or racial. The delicate and sometimes unpleasant politics of churn are the reason many reformers question whether an elected body, such as a traditional school board, has the gumption to handle tasks as potentially unpopular as declaring schools to be failures and handing them over to more capable managers, or shuttering them altogether.

Resolving the issue of governance will be the biggest test ahead for cities engaged in Charter Issues 2.0. At stake is not just the credibility of the reform movement but the prospect, at last, of convincing America that an excellent education is a civil right worth the kind of struggle that so far is exhilarating New Orleans with the possibility of transformational change.

Jed Horne educated two sons in Orleans Parish public schools. He is the author of Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City.

Lessons for Online Learning

Erin Dillon — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 13:00:09 +0000

Advocates for virtual education say that it has the power to transform an archaic K–12 system of schooling. Instead of blackboards, schoolhouses, and a six-hour school day, interactive technology will personalize learning to meet each student’s needs, ensure all students have access to quality teaching, extend learning opportunities to all hours of the day and all days of the week, and innovate and improve over time. Indeed, virtual education has the potential not only to help solve many of the most pressing issues in K–12 education, but to do so in a cost-effective manner. More than 1 million public-education students now take online courses, and as more districts and states initiate and expand online offerings, the numbers continue to grow. But to date, there’s little research or publicly available data on the outcomes from K–12 online learning. And even when data are publicly available, as is the case with virtual charter schools, analysts and education officials have paid scant attention to—and have few tools for analyzing—performance. Until policymakers, educators, and advocates pay as much attention to quality as they do to expansion, virtual education will not be ready for a lead role in education reform.

Virtual education is in a period of rapid growth, as school districts, for-profit providers, and nonprofit start-ups all move into the online learning world. (See sidebars for just a few examples.) But without rigorous oversight, a thousand flowers blooming will also yield a lot of weeds. Real accountability, including the means to identify and end ineffective practices and programs, must be constantly balanced with the time required to refine new, immature technologies and approaches to learning. Both virtual education advocates and education policymakers should learn from nearly two decades of experience with charter schooling, another reform movement predicated on innovation and change within public education. After nearly 20 years of practice, the charter school movement provides important lessons on how to ensure that improved student outcomes remain the top priority.

Focus on Outcomes

At present, virtual education lacks a firm understanding of what high performance looks like. The situation is not unlike that faced by the charter school movement just a few years ago. In 2005, after a decade of rapid growth in the charter school sector, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) was formed to increase the availability of high-quality charter schools. NAPCS soon published “Renewing the Compact,” a statement by its Task Force on Charter School Quality and Accountability. “Renewing the Compact” came on the heels of an August 17, 2004, lead story in the New York Times, which highlighted findings from a simplistic, and controversial, study of charter school achievement sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers, “Charter School Achievement on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).” According to the Times, in “virtually every instance, the charter students did worse than their counterparts in regular public schools.” The NAPCS task force did not mince words about the need for a sharper focus on quality within the charter school movement. The report challenged the charter community to “fully ‘own’ the issue of how well its schools perform” and also challenged charter advocates “to embrace rigorous measures of quality and accountability for our own schools’ success.”

But the wide range of education options within charter schooling makes “owning” quality difficult, and the variety is even greater for virtual education. Virtual public education can be delivered by all types of providers, including charter schools, for-profit companies, universities, state entities, and school districts. Types of online schools and programs range from state-run programs like Florida Virtual School, where each year 100,000 students take one or two courses online as a supplement to traditional schools, to “blended” models, which allow schools to combine online and classroom-based instruction. The most controversial virtual schools are so-called “cyber” charter schools—fully online public schools that students “attend” on a full-time basis. Funded with public dollars but independently run, many of these cyber schools are managed by private, for-profit companies such as K12 and Connections Academy. John Watson, author of the annual “Keeping Pace” report on the status of K–12 virtual learning, notes that virtual education is “several times more complex than charter schooling.”

Such diversity brings challenges. While the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) has published program quality standards, virtual education lacks a commonly accepted set of quality outcome measures. Quality can’t be defined by the design of a school or by inputs alone; instead, it must focus primarily on outcomes. Traditional measures, such as attendance and instructional contact hours, do not fit the virtual model. And while federal and state accountability systems, which focus on school-level accountability, provide data on and oversight of the performance of full-time cyber schools, there’s little data and few mechanisms for evaluating supplemental and blended programs, in which students take only a portion of their schooling online. Moreover, it’s the supplemental and blended courses, increasingly offered by school districts, where growth is likely to be fastest.

Still, complexity can’t be an excuse for inaction. Unless providers rise to this task, outside groups, whether supporters or opponents, will define success and the lack of it for them. Once again, the charter experience is worth noting. Less than two years after publishing “Renewing the Compact,” the NAPCS, in partnership with the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, which was established in 2004 to push for more professionalism and higher standards among authorizers across the country, convened a working panel on charter school quality with the goal of establishing a “common set of basic quality expectations and performance measures” to assess charter school success. Without these measures, the panel noted, “it is no wonder that judgments about the performance of charter schools are so frequently ill-informed.” The result of the working panel was “A Framework for Academic Quality,” which provides a list of indicators, such as student achievement levels and growth measures, to which schools should be held accountable, metrics that can be used to assess school performance.

Take Charge of the Data

Even with outcome measures established, it’s unwise to assume that providers, be they districts, charter schools, or private companies, will collect data and conduct research on their own. States and districts, through their rapidly evolving data systems, must gather information about virtual course enrollments, demographics, and performance, and encourage further research into determining successful programs and practices.

Paul Hill, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington and leader of the National Charter School Research Project, notes that the 2004 Times article caught charter school supporters “flat-footed.” Before the article, Hill says, “the movement was not thinking about what a bad study would look like.” The Times story spurred investments in high-quality research on charter school performance—research that goes beyond snapshot comparisons of average charter-school and average traditional public-school performance to examine variation in performance among charter schools, incorporate measures of growth in student outcomes, and employ appropriate controls for student background.

In comparison, research on K–12 virtual education has been limited. A 2010 meta-analysis of virtual education conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, drawn mostly from studies focused on higher education, concluded that “students in online learning conditions performed modestly better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.” But the report also found an “unexpected…small number of rigorous studies.” Studies that only compare virtual learning with traditional instruction, though, like those that compare charter schools with traditional public schools, mask many of the most interesting questions about virtual education. To be useful, research needs to be specific as to “what works for whom, what implementation practices matter, and why,” says Marianne Bakia, senior education researcher at SRI International and one of the authors of the Department of Education study.

“Keeping Pace” author Watson agrees. He fears that with districts everywhere experimenting with multiple forms of virtual learning, from online credit recovery to blended learning classes, three years from now we’ll still have little to no information as to what actually works in a systemic way. And even if we know that a program is successful, we may not know why.

Watson cautions, however, that reliance on a few time-consuming megastudies would be a mistake. Not only are there a limited number of questions that can be answered in this manner, but perhaps more importantly, the field is moving so quickly that the practices studied may already be outdated before the results are known. Instead, he notes, it’s much more important to develop systems to track quality and collect existing information, such as course participation, grades, and assessment results, in a manner that can help monitor student outcomes and practices at the course level. And better data on the impact of curriculum, instructional materials, and teaching practices would benefit all of education, not just virtual learning. But current data, Bakia says, are extremely scarce: “in most places you can’t even tell if a course is online.”

Paul Hill adds that ongoing data collection and research is especially important for at-risk students and in areas like credit recovery, dropout prevention, and juvenile justice: “Almost every party involved with a poor kid who is about to drop out of school doesn’t want to turn that rock over.” Without outside pressure, programs for these students could be the most vulnerable to quality concerns.

Secure Independent Oversight

Once providers develop quality measures and relevant data exist, one or more independent entities must be charged with deciding which providers can enter the marketplace and holding them accountable for student outcomes. An independent entity, whether it’s an authorizer, district, or state, needs to ensure that competition rewards high quality, not just low cost or easy access.

Markets can offer new choices to parents and students. And unlike place-based charter schools, virtual learning allows these choices to be unbound by geographic constraints. A student in rural Alabama can now look online for better instructional models, make up credits for missed or failed classes, or even access Mandarin Chinese courses.

But policymakers cannot rely solely on parent and student choice to ensure quality. Sixteen-year-olds do not always make the best decisions, and parents have many different motives for choosing a virtual provider. Some may want an accelerated curriculum for a gifted student, others may be looking for more scheduling flexibility, and still others may just be interested in getting course credit quickly, regardless of quality or rigor.

The parallel to the charter experience is striking. “Parent accountability as the only driver of accountability hasn’t always worked out for charter schools, “ notes Todd Ziebarth of the NAPCS, “Parents sometimes keep sending their kids to schools that aren’t academically successful.”

The first system of grading charter laws rewarded states for easy access to charters but put little emphasis on quality control over new and existing schools. Since then, things have changed dramatically. A report released in 2010 by the NAPCS graded states not just on the opportunities for charter schooling to expand in the state, but also on the quality of charter school authorizing supported by the state law.

But current charter-school authorizing methods, which focus on an entire school, are not adequate for supplemental or blended virtual-learning providers. Nor is accreditation (until the NCAA halted the practice, fully accredited BYU Independent Study was known to college sports fans as the place where football player Michael Oher, profiled in the movie The Blind Side, and others went to quickly raise grades to become eligible for college athletics). And even in the case of virtual charter schools, authorizers are just now beginning to understand the unique qualities of virtual schools that change the nature of oversight, including these schools’ capacity to serve tens of thousands of students across wide geographic areas.

Virtual education has the potential to operate in a more nimble and responsive market than charter schools. Without the large up-front costs associated with brick-and-mortar schools and the long lag time for determining school success, the virtual education market may not need as many limits on new entrants. But for the market to yield innovation and high performance, providers need to be rewarded for successful student outcomes, not just enrollments, and an independent agency, whether it’s a charter-like authorizer, the school district, or the state, needs to be responsible for quickly shutting down low performers.

Negotiate a Fair Deal

State policies, such as whether the choice to attend a virtual class (and receive access to the funding for that class) resides with the student or the district, can have a tremendous impact on access to virtual learning. It is essential that state laws be clearly thought through from the beginning, something that never happened in the pell-mell rush to enact charter school legislation. In order to get started in many states, charter supporters had to make compromises. These bad bargains underfunded schools, limited their ability to be autonomous and innovative, and allowed districts to create “charters-in-name-only.” The same pattern is emerging in virtual education, where legislation that purports to spur virtual education, such as that in Massachusetts, creates unnecessary geographic restrictions or enrollment caps, or sets funding levels well below what traditional schools receive.

The large differences in growth among state-run supplemental virtual school programs illustrate the importance of policies related to funding and access. Figure 1 shows that population does not drive the enrollment differences among state-run virtual schools. The states with the most enrollments, Florida and North Carolina, both have funding tied to the state’s public-education funding formula.

Most state-run virtual schools are not included in state funding formulas and are instead funded by an annual legislative appropriation. While start-up appropriations make sense—especially when they help to ease fears of competition for funds with traditional schools—eventually, these static funding sources, which bear no relation to the demand or quality of the virtual school offerings, artificially limit access to and therefore demand for online courses. And since access and funding are scarce, there’s little capacity or incentive to develop new offerings.

The largest of the state-run schools is Florida Virtual School (FLVS). Its funding model, in which funds follow the student, taken together with the state’s strong choice policies (a student’s full-time school may not deny access to courses offered by FLVS), enable the school to grow. There are no barriers to enrollment and funding is not capped at a preset amount, providing FLVS with an incentive to be responsive to demand, rapidly increase course offerings, and even experiment with new game-like learning experiences (see “Florida’s Online Option,” features, summer 2009). In contrast, Kentucky’s state virtual school, despite its more than 10 years in operation, struggles to grow. The school charges course fees, requires students to get district permission prior to enrollment, and is funded on a small annual appropriation rather than based on demand.

Another challenge to the development of fair and workable funding systems for virtual schooling is one that is endemic to public education in general: the inability to accurately measure cost-effectiveness. Since virtual schooling operates on a very different cost model—few facilities costs, higher technology costs, greater scale—states are struggling to determine the proper per-student funding level for both virtual courses and schools. Without a means to determine value—how additional dollars spent affect student outcomes—states default to either the standard per-pupil funding, or increasingly, decide that virtual schools should cost less and choose an arbitrary funding level. More spurious are the attempts to audit providers and pay only for the “true costs” of virtual education, eliminating any incentive for productivity gains. None of these funding methods are sensitive to the quality of student outcomes. They lead districts to favor the lowest-cost provider. And more importantly, they provide few incentives for providers to fund the research and development necessary to perfect new technologies, student support systems, and innovative methods to effectively serve more costly, at-risk student populations.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush and former West Virginia governor Bob Wise are leading a new advocacy effort known as the Digital Learning Council. The council recently published a set of state policy recommendations as part of an initiative to spur further growth not only in virtual learning, but also in the use of digital and multimedia content.

The Digital Learning Council recommends that states eliminate restrictions on student access to virtual education, allow students to choose among multiple learning providers, call for removal of seat-time requirements, and judge schools on results rather than inputs such as class size. Taken together, the recommendations would enable all students to access virtual education and end many of the regulatory restraints that stifle the development of innovative options.

But while the recommendations accurately identify the barriers that constrain virtual education, they are light on details for ensuring that innovation actually leads to more high-quality educational options. They suggest, for example, that states evaluate “the quality of content and courses predominately based on student learning data,” yet provide few details on how to accomplish this difficult task. Likewise, recommendations for “Quality Providers” focus heavily on the removal of barriers to competition, but offer little discussion of how to enact the recommendation for “a strong system of oversight and quality control.” Too often, the recommendations assume that quality will naturally result from regulatory relief.

Overall, as guiding principles, the recommendations make sense. But, as the nation’s charter schooling experience demonstrates, policymakers must confront the difficult issue of quality at the same time as they seek new and innovative approaches to schooling.

Same old thing, but online?

Finally, there is nothing magical that ensures either charter schools or virtual education will be innovative and different. Each provides the opportunity for something new and potentially powerful: charters through a new governance model, virtual learning through a new instructional model.

One big difference between charter schools and virtual education is that by definition, charter schools sit outside of the traditional district system. While many of the first wave of virtual education providers—charter schools, state virtual schools, consortia of schools—incorporated both a different instructional and a different governance model, increasingly, districts are creating and managing their own virtual learning programs. The integration of virtual education into traditional school districts allows for the instructional model change to be incorporated into a system without a change in the district governance model.

The danger is that despite the dramatically different delivery model, virtual education will end up much the same—with no better outcomes than our current system. In an effort to ease concerns about online education from districts, teachers, and parents, providers will be tempted to minimize disruptions to the traditional schoolhouse model, promising that “you won’t need to change a thing.” But simply putting the same curriculum online is unlikely to result in higher-quality learning. And this approach undercuts the potential of online education to do many of the things it promises: to provide a more personalized and responsive education than the traditional lecture format, to allow students to proceed at their own pace, and to give teachers a new way to teach.

Much like the achievements of an older sibling, the charter school movement’s successes and mistakes have a lot to teach virtual schooling about bringing change to public education. Invest in good data and research, avoid bad bargains, and give students choices but don’t rely on markets alone to monitor quality are all important lessons from nearly 20 years of charter schooling. If the virtual education movement heeds these lessons, it has the potential to see even more rapid growth across the country than charter schools and—more importantly— to enhance how students learn.

Erin Dillon is a senior policy analyst and Bill Tucker is managing director at Education Sector.

Challenging the Gifted

June Kronholz — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 05:01:18 +0000

Additional photographs of the Davidson Academy are available here.

Alex Wade’s field is linguistics. In his search for the perfect language—and “annoyed,” he says, with Esperanto—he has created 10 languages and 30 or 40 alphabets, including one language without verbs, just for the challenge. He’s taking courses at the University of Nevada, Reno, in Basque, linguistics, and microbiology (because he also has a talent for science). And there’s this: Alex is 13.

Taylor Wilson’s field is nuclear chemistry. He has developed a process to detect weapons-grade nuclear material and chemical-warfare agents in shipping containers, a project that has interested the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He spent part of the summer at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and is now at work on a process to cut the production cost of radioactive isotopes. “I think it has promise,” he says. Taylor is 16.

What’s a school to do with youngsters like Alex Wade and Taylor Wilson, kids who are intellectually years ahead of their age group, their textbooks, the curriculum, and usually their teachers?

When the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) surveyed states in 2008 about what they provide in the way of gifted education, it found the answer to be “not much.” At least a dozen states don’t let children start kindergarten early, even if they’re already reading The Aeneid. Two states bar a middle schooler from taking high-school classes. At least 30 states allow only those in 11th and 12th grade to also enroll in college classes. And almost no one will waive mandatory-attendance laws for the 15-year-old who has gotten everything she can out of her high school and itches to move on.

“That’s a mistreatment of students,” says Bob Davidson who, with his wife, Jan, founded, developed, and then sold the company that marketed the hugely successful Math Blaster and Reading Blaster computer software. So, in 2006, the Davidsons started a public school—a public school like no other—on the University of Nevada campus.

The Davidson Academy accepts only youngsters with an IQ of 145 or higher. That puts the 123 kids enrolled here, including Alex Wade and Taylor Wilson, in the 99.9th percentile of their age group. Or as Bob Davidson says, “The likely people to make the big discoveries” in the next generation.

Child Left Ahead

Katie Daw, at age 14, resorts to exasperated sighs to describe her schooling before the Davidson Academy. By 2nd grade, her private-school curriculum wasn’t challenging her, but administrators wouldn’t let her join a math class with older kids. In 3rd grade, she tried home schooling, using 5th- and 6th- grade curricula, but she finished a day’s lessons in 90 minutes. She tried another private school that let her skip a grade, but then “the excluding began,” she says. Why? “I asked a lot of questions,” she replies.

None of that story is particularly unusual, experts in gifted education told me. “For a really bright kid, it would be pretty difficult” to find much challenge in a regular classroom, said Nicholas Colangelo, director of the Belin-Blank Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development at the University of Iowa.

Part of the reason is that even the best school districts struggle with youngsters at the outer edges of the learning continuum. Researchers generally divide truly bright kids into four categories: gifted learners score above 130 on IQ tests, the highly gifted score above 145, the exceptionally gifted above 160, and the profoundly gifted above 175.

By those definitions, Miraca Gross, a professor of gifted education at Australia’s University of New South Wales, calculates that a teacher may encounter a gifted child only every few years. The odds of encountering an exceptionally gifted child during an entire 40-year teaching career are about 1 in 80. Teachers aren’t trained to teach that once-in-a-blue-moon student; they’re taught to accommodate the two-thirds of us who have IQs that fall between 85 and 115, or one standard deviation on either side of 100, the norm.

The bigger issue is whether schools even try to accommodate gifted learners, and researchers in gifted education make it clear that they don’t. Americans are awed by geniuses, especially technology giants like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, whose youthful ideas created entire new industries.

But we’re uncomfortable with the idea of singling out a few kids for special treatment. Our discomfort rises if those kids are suburban whites who already have access to the best schools and widest opportunities. We assume they will learn by themselves (although research suggests that they don’t), or that they have parents who can afford tutors and private lessons to keep them engaged. We’re even more uncomfortable with the idea of grouping youngsters by ability, especially because research suggests that the bright kids in a classroom help pull up the slower learners. “We rub our hands about elitism. It’s the single most difficult nut to crack” in gifted education, Tracy Cross, director of William and Mary’s gifted-education center, told me.

Federal education policy plays into the egalitarian sentiment by prodding the states to narrow the achievement gap between their lowest and highest performers. Since 2000, the gap in reading scores between the highest- and lowest-performing 10 percent of 4th graders has narrowed to 90 points from 103 points on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The results are similar in 8th-grade math.

But that has happened largely because the scores for the brightest kids have barely moved. “Our gifted kids are stagnant,” said Ann Robinson, a professor of gifted education at the University of Arkansas. “When you’re trying to get everybody to proficient, [the ablest learners] are not going to be the policy focus.”

What little attention the brightest do receive may be diminished even more in these tough economic times. In the 2008 NAGC survey of state policies, 18 states reported they don’t provide any money for gifted education, and 7 others noted they fund it only if they have money to spare. The federal government funds just one $7 million program in gifted education, and appropriations panels in both the Senate and House voted preliminarily this past summer to eliminate even that. Funding gifted education is thus left largely up to school districts, which are hard hit by falling property taxes and looking to cut budgets without reducing the number of kids who get over the minimum-proficiency bar.

Cross, Colangelo, and Robinson all argue that the U.S. should be fanning the learning gap by teaching every youngster to his potential, rather than narrowing it by ignoring youngsters who have reached state minimums. Not because slower learners shouldn’t be helped, they argue, but because faster learners shouldn’t be kept waiting.

Indeed, Cross told me that as part of a research project he once asked 13,000 kids in seven states to describe in one word their experience as gifted children. The most commonly used word, he says, was “waiting.” Waiting for teachers to move ahead, waiting for classmates to catch up, waiting to learn something new—always waiting.

Meet the Davidsons

Bob Davidson says he had his epiphany after reading a newspaper story about a Maryland child who was assigned to kindergarten, even though he had the reading skills of an 11th grader. “Think of that,” says Davidson, slipping into the voice of an imaginary principal lecturing an imaginary parent, “‘We have this rule and you’re not in a position’” to challenge it.

Davidson, at age 67, is tall, gray-haired, fast-talking, and faster moving (his hobby is driving race cars). He earned degrees in chemical engineering, business, and law, and was executive vice president of an engineering concern before becoming CEO of the software company his wife founded. Jan Davidson, who is 66, has a PhD in American studies and is small, blond, and motherly: On a visit to the academy, she busily hugged students in the few minutes between classes. She came up with the idea for the Blaster programs after realizing, in the 1970s, the potential for computers to individualize instruction, she says.

After selling their company in 1997, the Davidsons said they spent two and a half years reading education research and looking for a way to get involved in school reform. Retired to Lake Tahoe, just outside Reno, they decided that gifted education fit their bill: The gifted population was small enough that they could have an effect (people with an IQ above 145 account for 0.13 percent of the population).

It was a group undoubtedly underserved: The federal government requires schools to provide an appropriate education to children with cognitive, physical, and emotional handicaps, but is largely silent about the needs of kids at the upper end of the educational curve. “And importantly to us, this is a population that could give back to society in their adulthood,” Jan Davidson told me.

The Davidsons first launched a young scholars program to provide tutoring and advocacy help for gifted youngsters trying to fight their way through school bureaucracies (the program now is funding 1,700 scholars). They followed that with a summer program that invites youngsters to attend UNR classes for credit. They wrote a book on gifted education, funded research, and awarded college scholarships.

But parents kept asking for a school, and said they would move wherever the Davidsons built it. In 2005, the couple convinced the Nevada legislature to let them launch a public school for what the legislature called the “profoundly gifted” on the Reno campus. The legislation didn’t exempt the Davidson Academy from state reading and math tests or core-curriculum requirements; it didn’t provide any funding, either.

The Davidsons paid the full cost of the school—for 35 kids the first year, 44 the second—until the legislature met again, two years later, and included the academy in the state funding formula. That amounts to $6,439 per student this year, or about $2,000 less, on average, than at other Nevada public schools, which receive money from federal poverty and special-education programs.

The Davidsons pick up the rest of the $18,918 per-student tab. Among other costs, that includes UNR tuition (about one-quarter of Davidson students take UNR classes) and a stipend for chaperones to walk the younger children to and from their university classrooms. In return for an $11 million donation to a new math and science center that bears the Davidsons’ names, the university turned over part of its former student union to the Davidsons, who spent $4 million refitting it with classrooms.

A 145 IQ score gets you an invitation to apply to the academy, but a grueling all-day assessment gets you in. This year, the school took in 39 new students and turned away 50 others. Many of the youngsters are Nevadans, including those whose parents came looking for jobs in Nevada’s boom days or retired to the Silver State. But about 41 percent of students have moved with their families to Nevada, the epicenter of the nation’s housing and employment bust, just to attend the academy.

That’s one reason for a demographically skewed student body (there’s one African American and one Hispanic). The relocation is out of reach for low-income families, those stuck with unsellable houses, and those who can’t find a job in Reno. The academy plans to start a residential program next year, but out-of-state parents will have to pay tuition, room, and board.

The Academy

When I visited the Davidson Academy, three weeks into the fall semester, teacher Alanna Simmons’s critical-theory class already had tackled Henry Louis Gates, Harold Bloom, Edward Said, and now was cheerfully plowing though a printout of a dense Jean-Paul Sartre essay on literature.

There was general bemusement at Sartre’s reference—famous in philosophy circles—to “horses of butter,” and knowing nods when one student quoted Albert Camus insulting Sartre. At Simmons’s request, the nine students, aged 12 to 17, rushed to the white board to record their favorite Sartre quote, and then excitedly dissected each one. “It smells like didactic rhetoric,” someone piped up at one point.

I noticed Daniel Hickox-Young, who is 17 and the school jock, smiling broadly and later I asked him why. “It’s so cool,” he said of literature theory.

Carmen Garcia, the academy’s director of curriculum, teacher training, and admission, told me this is a fairly typical class. The school uses few textbooks because classes move too quickly—“No textbook is going to fit the bill for more than two weeks,” she said—and because students prefer the variety of perspectives that come from reading original sources. “A history textbook; it’s doomed here,” she added.

Classes are grouped by ability rather than age, and Garcia and the teachers devote the first weeks of the school year to assessing each student in each core subject, moving him or her up or down a subject level to assure the best classroom fit. When an American history and government class broke into groups to discuss Aztec leadership, I noticed that a 12-year-old girl in striped knee socks was grouped with a 16-year-old boy who needed a shave. The 12-year-old was more than holding her own.

Davidson classes are small, typically eight or nine students. But this year’s advanced physics class has just two pupils. When Katie Daw at age 10 proved herself too advanced for Algebra 1, but not quite ready for Algebra 2, Davidson gave her a math tutor for the year.

Teachers told me they seldom lecture. “If we try to lecture, these kids are going to get bored,” said Darren Ripley, who has a 10-year-old in one of his calculus classes, a girl he refers to as “a big mind.” Instead, teachers seem to ride the wave of classroom discussion, now and then dipping in a navigational oar. “Sometimes you have to let go and see what’s working at the moment, then try to reel it back,” said Jessica Juriaan, who teaches British and American literature.

Davidson teachers are paid on the same scale as other Reno teachers—from about $45,000 to $67,000 a year—but aren’t union members, don’t get tenure, and aren’t even public employees. Ripley, who is 40, and Juriaan, who is 29, previously taught in Reno public schools and at UNR. Both are working on PhDs, and bristle with energy. I asked them to describe the difference between the Davidson youngsters and their public-school peers.

Juriaan said she teaches the standard literature curriculum, but that her Davidson classes focus on analysis; in her public-school classes, she spent her time helping students comprehend the plot. When I visited her class, her 11 students, aged 12 to 15, were discussing scapegoating and hysteria (Was the Spanish Inquisition a witch hunt? what about the Crusades? the Trail of Tears?) in anticipation of reading The Crucible.

Ripley, who sports a goatee and treats calculus like wicked fun, talked about “the motivation and level of buy-in” among the Davidson kids. “They know why they’re here. They came for a reason,” he said.

No Easy Answer

What does this all mean for the thousands of other gifted students around the country? Tracy Cross and Nicolas Colangelo both told me they doubt that profoundly gifted students can be accommodated in the typical public-school classroom: Like profoundly challenged children, they may need special classes, teachers, and even schools that adapt to their differences.

Davidson’s communications director, Julie Dudley, said the academy receives so many e-mails asking how to start a gifted school that she has worked up a form-letter reply. Most promoters lose interest when they learn they’ll need legislative exemptions to many state education laws, she said. There’s no seat-time requirement at Davidson, for example: Students typically finish seven years of middle and high school in five years.

I asked Davidson teachers and staffers what lessons public schools could take away from the academy. Their answers struck me a lot like the idea of getting rid of seat-time laws: logical, good for kids, and political showstoppers.

• Allow youngsters to accelerate by subject. Colleen Harsin, the academy’s longtime director, proposed that a school group its core classes—hold all math classes during 2nd period, say; all English during 3rd—so students can move up or down according to their ability.

• Promote dual enrollment so youngsters can take classes in both elementary and middle school, middle and high school, high school and college. That may strain transportation budgets, but students will graduate sooner, offsetting the costs.

• Individualize learning. Davidson students each have a learning plan that’s refined during weekly meetings with their advisors, semester meetings with Garcia, and yearly what’s-next meetings with Harsin. That might strain a school of 2,000, but so do discipline problems caused by bored or out-of-their depth youngsters.

• Group students by ability, not age. “You can’t teach to the middle,” Ripley said. “To say we’re all at an Algebra 2 level just isn’t accurate.”

That’s Bob Davidson’s mantra: Ability grouping “may fly in the face of closing the achievement gap,” but neglecting the country’s brightest kids flies in the face of logic. “Don’t stop them,” he says.

June Kronholz is a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and education reporter, and currently a contributing editor at Education Next.

Diplomatic Mission

Andy Smarick — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 11:47:33 +0000

In his first major education speech as a presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama affirmed his support of teachers unions. “I believe in collective bargaining, and I believe that any time you’re talking about wages, workers have to be at the table,” he said in a July 2007 speech to the National Education Association (NEA).

Less than two years later, in his first major education address as president, delivered to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in March 2009, Obama explicitly backed paying teachers for performance, a reform the unions vehemently oppose. “Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay.”

Behind this seeming contradiction on performance pay is a complex set of political and policy strategies. Obama and his team are caught in the narrow channel between two important Democratic constituencies: establishment organizations that are opposed to performance pay and the increasingly prominent education-reform crowd that generally supports it. And while the administration appreciates the merits of differentiated teacher pay, this is but one of many teacher-quality policies it hopes to change.

The public record reveals how the administration has navigated these shoals, setting a new course for the federal government’s role in the reform of teacher pay. As senator and president, Obama has made known his education-reform commitments and hesitations in speeches to both unions and business groups. The inclinations of his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, are evident from actions he took while serving as head of the Chicago public school system. Finally, the administration’s handling of two prominent federal programs, the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) and the Race to the Top (RTT), offers important clues to the strategic thinking at work.

My analysis of this history has led me to two conclusions. First, though the administration’s apparent tentativeness on performance pay can be partially explained by its deference to organized labor, a larger factor is its interest in creating a new and comprehensive framework for advancing teacher quality. Second, the administration’s strategy for generating change through a combination of incentives, collaboration, and optional reforms did not initially bear much fruit for performance pay, but it may reap benefits over the long term, both for performance pay and for other teacher-quality issues.

Developing a Position

In Senator Obama’s 2007 speech to the NEA, he gave an establishment-friendly interpretation of recent education-reform events. He called No Child Left Behind “one of the emptiest slogans in politics” that amounted to “fill[ing] in a few bubbles on a standardized test.” He vigorously supported an active role for unions in education and said that teacher salaries should be raised across the board.

But he also said that schools should be open to paying more to teachers in tough-to-staff subjects, to those who take on additional work, and to those helping students excel academically.

Politically, this equivocation was savvy: he buttressed his liberal bona fides while nodding toward reform. But it also foreshadowed the challenges his administration would face in trying to run the performance-pay gauntlet by staying in the middle of the road.

In the speech, he attempted to reconcile his support for both sides by arguing that differentiated-pay programs should move forward but that they should be created in collaboration with teachers, not imposed on them, and that such programs should never be based on “some arbitrary test score.”

This raised difficult questions: How do you fairly implement a differentiated-pay plan without empirical measures of student performance, and what if organized labor refuses to accept performance pay at all? The first question would eventually be addressed diplomatically by his education secretary; the second lingers on to this day.

One year later, with the election drawing near, Obama again spoke at the annual meeting of the NEA. He was in no position at this time to reveal how the circle was to be squared. In fact, passages specifically related to compensation were either unusually clumsy or cleverly delusive. He said superb teachers should be rewarded through “better pay across the board.” One spectacularly oblique sentence left muddled whether a teacher should be rewarded for learning new professional skills or raising student achievement and whether that reward should be praise or compensation. He was, however, firm that pay systems should be developed with, not imposed on, teachers.

After entering the White House, President Obama felt less need to dissemble on the subject. In his March 2009 speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, he intimated that his administration would not only support retention bonuses and additional compensation for teaching in hard-to-staff schools and subjects, but also pay increments for those able to measurably influence academic growth. “Good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement.”

Left undecided, however, were the role of the standardized “bubble” tests and the implications of union opposition.

Secretary Duncan refined the administration’s position before the NEA in July 2009. Billed as a “challenge” to the union to “think differently” about job security, evaluations, and more, the speech also revealed that the administration was beginning to think holistically about the policies affecting the teaching profession.

Duncan began by acknowledging the wide distribution of teacher effectiveness. Current practices, the secretary argued, unfortunately treat “all teachers lik e interchangeable widgets.”

To gain a better understanding of variations in teacher quality and then make use of this information, we need improved teacher evaluation systems, Duncan argued. Those currently in place are “deeply flawed.”

Then Duncan opened the door to the use of empirical measures of student achievement in teacher evaluations and therefore, presumably, in teacher pay and other personnel decisions. While acknowledging that today’s “tests are far from perfect” and that “the complex, nuanced work of teaching” can’t be fairly measured by “a simple multiple choice exam,” the secretary defended the use of test scores.

Though they “alone should never drive evaluation, compensation, or tenure decisions…to remove student achievement entirely from evaluation is illogical and indefensible.” Duncan was beginning to sketch a new framework for teacher policies, one that integrated student performance data, teacher evaluations, and a range of personnel decisions, including compensation. In time, this shift would prove to be consequential.

But Duncan also echoed his boss’s deference to labor. “The president and I have both said repeatedly that we are not going to impose reform but rather work with teachers, principals, and unions to find what works.” This hedge would also prove consequential.

A good deal can be learned about both the roots and implications of the Obama administration’s evolving position on performance pay from Arne Duncan’s experience with the federal Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) in Chicago (see sidebar) and the administration’s efforts to fund and reform the program since 2009.

Teacher Incentive Fund in Chicago

Arne Duncan, while head of Chicago Public Schools (CPS), applied for and won a five-year, $27.5 million Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grant to launch a small performance-pay plan. When fully implemented, the city’s initiative was designed to cover 40 schools serving approximately 24,000 students (about 6 percent of the district’s schools and students). CPS based its plan on the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), a national model for performance pay in public schools.

Characteristics of the plan foreshadowed the Obama administration’s later approach to performance pay. First, like TAP, it made performance pay just one of a suite of integrated reforms. Participating schools also developed new career paths and improved classroom observations, evaluations, and professional development.

Second, though each teacher’s performance was assessed through multiple measures, included in the equation were the academic growth of students in the teacher’s classroom and the achievement of the entire school.

Third, no school was forced to take part. Broad school-level buy-in was the price of admission: to participate, schools had to have at least 75 percent of their faculty register their support for the program.

Fourth, the entire program was negotiated with the local union. As Duncan would later describe it, “We sat down with the union and bargained it out.”

Mirroring his future tack as U.S. secretary of education, particularly with regard to the Race to the Top, Duncan, rather than pushing for legislation making performance pay mandatory, used the enticement of additional funding through a federal competitive grant program to line up willing partners and encourage labor to embrace the expanded use of student performance data, new evaluations and compensation systems, and other practices and policies.

The Teacher Incentive Fund

Since 2006, the federal government has funded a small program to support differentiated compensation, the Teacher Incentive Fund. Developed by the Bush administration, TIF provides funding on a competitive basis to states and districts that implement performance-pay programs for teachers and/or principals in high-need schools.

In its first years, TIF had several strikes against it. It was a new program during a period of domestic budget austerity. It sought to advance what was still a politically contentious policy. And it was advocated by an unpopular administration facing a Congress controlled by the opposition party. Accordingly, Congress never fully embraced TIF during the Bush years, and that administration’s annual budget requests (ranging from $100 to $500 million) were never fully funded. Appropriations were generally just under $100 million each year, a relatively small amount for a federal education program.

The Obama administration could have taken the knife to this Bush-era initiative as it has with the school voucher program in Washington, D.C. Instead, it sought to expand TIF by both seeking increased funding and embedding it in a newly proposed, larger program tentatively called the “Teacher and Leader Innovation Fund” (TLIF).

The 2009 federal stimulus package, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), provided TIF with an additional $200 million (on top of its $100 million regular appropriation for that year).

Coming on the heels of the ARRA was the administration’s 2010 budget request, in which the Obama team proposed nearly $487 million for TIF, more than the Bush administration had requested since the program’s inaugural year in 2006. Congress proved receptive, providing $400 million, by far the program’s largest regular annual appropriation.

In its FY2011 request, the first real opportunity for the administration to put its full mark on the federal budget (since the 2010 proposal went to Congress shortly after Obama was sworn into office), the U.S. Department of Education sought to significantly change TIF by including its priorities in the new, broader TLIF program. The $950 million request was approximately double the previous year’s.

According to administration documents, if created, TLIF would support the expansive category of state and district efforts to develop “innovative approaches to human capital systems.” Though differentiated pay would be a core component of the program, TLIF would also support efforts to increase the number of effective teachers, more fairly distribute high-quality teachers among differently resourced schools, improve educator-preparation programs, develop additional professional opportunities for effective teachers, strengthen evaluation systems, remove ineffective teachers from the classroom, improve professional development, and support school turnaround efforts.

So what is to be made of the Obama administration’s initial embrace of TIF and subsequent inclusion of many of its objectives into the TLIF proposal? What does this tell us more broadly about the administration’s views on and intentions for performance pay?

Two different interpretations seem plausible. The first is a political explanation. By supporting TIF, both the Bush-era version and even more so the amended TLIF version, the administration can keep one foot in the reform camp and another in the establishment camp.

Even the original TIF program allows for a wide array of approaches to differentiated pay, some of which opponents find easier to swallow than others, like those that reward all adults in a school rather than just the teachers who measurably increase student performance. TIF also permits grantees to apply program funds to a range of more traditional activities, such as professional development and data collection. This list of less controversial activities would grow under the proposed TLIF initiative. Both programs are optional, so no district or state is required to differentiate pay. Finally, since the program is directed toward high-need districts and schools, most of which have collective bargaining agreements, a state’s or district’s participation in the program ordinarily means that organized labor was involved in crafting the new arrangements. The administration can claim the mantle of reform while standing by its pledge that reform will not be forced on teachers and their unions.

A second interpretation is that the administration is attempting to develop a new, comprehensive federal approach to improving teaching, one that combines student performance data, teacher evaluations, and a host of personnel decisions. The roots of this approach can be seen in Secretary Duncan’s TIF experience in Chicago and in his 2009 NEA speech.

This interpretation is supported by TIF draft regulations released by the education department in early 2010. Among other things, the agency sought to require grantees to measure student growth and use these data in robust teacher evaluations, which would then be aligned with professional development. Language in the administration’s 2011 budget description of the new TLIF implied that TIF was too myopic, treating performance pay as a discrete activity when, instead, policy should reflect the “interconnectedness” of compensation reform and other teacher issues. TLIF, according to the budget document, recognized that it is “important to think of [these issues] in a coherent, integrated way.”

So which interpretation better explains the Obama administration’s approach? Support for both can be found in the administration’s signature program, the Race to the Top.

Race to the Top

Included within the ARRA’s nearly $800 billion in spending was the largest competitive grant program in U.S. Department of Education history, the $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTT).

The official RTT application was a blend of reform and deference to the establishment. The four major ARRA reform categories—data use; standards and assessments; failing schools; and teacher quality—served as its backbone. But the administration added a good bit of muscle. States would earn points for having in place each of the 12 data elements required by the federal America COMPETES Act. They’d be rewarded for having policies authorizing aggressive interventions for failing schools. They’d be significantly penalized for lacking a charter school law. And they’d be barred from even applying if they had “data firewalls” preventing student performance information from being tied to individual teachers.

But states also earned significant points for crafting plans that earned the blessing of their school districts and unions. In a number of cases, those who scored state applications gave extra weight to stakeholder “buy-in” by subtracting points from proposals that lacked the support of these groups.

Though Duncan would later downplay the importance of consensus, when Delaware and Tennessee were announced as the only first-round winners the secretary emphasized that these two states stood apart in their ability to develop strong proposals that also had broad support. In fact, the most hotly debated RTT question in the spring of 2010 was how states would address the tension between reform and union buy-in in their second-round applications.

RTT and Performance Pay

At first glance it is striking, even startling, how small a role performance pay played in round one of Race to the Top. The application has six main sections: one for each of the four ARRA reforms; an introductory section largely dedicated to buy-in issues and previous reform successes; and a final catchall section.

The fourth section (D), “Great Teachers and Leaders,” contains the most points of the six (138 out of 500, or 28 percent). It is broken into five subsections, one of which is titled “Improving teacher and principal effectiveness based on performance.” This comprises four sub-subsections, including “Using evaluations to inform key decisions.” That is broken into four sub-sub-subsections, one of which includes performance pay. Performance pay is one of three elements in this area, along with promotion and retention.

In other words, in the Race to the Top, performance pay is a sub-sub-sub-subsection.

Were a peer reviewer to score by the book, a state without a performance-pay plan would lose just over 2 points out of 500. By comparison, a state without a charter law would lose 32 points.

The most straightforward interpretation is that the administration capitulated to performance-pay opponents. But this analysis seems incomplete, even unfair. Had pleasing the establishment been the administration’s priority, it might simply have kept performance pay out of the application altogether.

In fact, subsection (D)(2) offers compelling evidence for the alternative interpretation. It asks states to measure student growth and to tie these results to individual teachers. It also asks states to develop annual teacher evaluations and include student growth as a component of each teacher’s official assessment. Finally, it asks them to use these evaluations to inform a number of personnel decisions, such as tenure, removal, and compensation.

The Obama administration appears to be offering a new—not to mention tight and rational—framework for improving the teaching profession. However, consistent with the administration’s nonconfrontational method for advancing reform, the new framework is optional. Since RTT is a competitive grant program, no state is forced to participate; states uncomfortable with the framework are free to disregard it.

It is too soon to tell whether this new framework will lead to better student outcomes. But it is not too soon to test the administration’s theory of action for bringing about change. Did the Race to the Top’s use of financial incentives, rewards for collaboration, and optional reforms lead to progress in performance pay and other policies that affect the teaching profession?

State Race to the Top Applications

In the first round, 40 states and the District of Columbia submitted Race to the Top applications. To test the effectiveness of the Obama administration’s approach, I reviewed each application’s (D)(2) section. Figure 1 illustrates how many proposals include an affirmative response to the nine questions embedded in the RTT framework. Will the state…

1. measure student academic growth?

2. conduct annual teacher evaluations?

3. include student growth in teacher evaluations?

4. use teacher evaluations to inform professional development decisions?

5. use teacher evaluations to offer additional professional opportunities?

6. use teacher evaluations to inform compensation decisions (performance pay)?

7. use teacher evaluations to inform tenure decisions?

8. use teacher evaluations when considering promotions?

9. use teacher evaluations to inform termination decisions?

Of the 41 entrants, 39 have systems in place to measure student growth, are building such systems, or have committed to building them. Most states (32) also agreed to conduct annual teacher evaluations. In some cases, this represents a major shift in policy; for example, under current practices, tenured teachers in Hawaii are evaluated only once every five years.

Only about half of the states (21) agreed to include measures of student growth in teacher evaluations. Several committed to having 50 percent or more of each teacher’s evaluation composed of such data. A number of states, however, simply ignored this matter in their applications or only committed to forming a stakeholder committee to discuss it.

Almost all states (34) committed to using evaluations to determine which teachers need which types of professional development. But states were far less likely to commit to using evaluations to make tougher personnel decisions. Only nine were willing to link teacher evaluations to processes for terminating the lowest-performing teachers.

Sixteen states committed to performance-pay plans. But only five states proposed what could be considered strong plans (Arizona, Delaware, Florida, South Carolina, and Washington, D.C.). Notably, Florida required all LEAs (local educational agencies) participating in the state’s application to make student achievement growth the most significant component of compensation, ahead of years of experience and academic degrees.

Two plans could be considered of moderate strength. Minnesota planned to expand its “Q Comp” program, but nearly all details were to be negotiated at the local level between unions and districts, raising questions about the ultimate impact of the plan. In Georgia, participating districts agreed to adopt ill-defined step increases for high-performing teachers.

The remaining nine performance-pay plans were of dubious seriousness. In several applications, including Oklahoma’s and West Virginia’s, the state promised to create a bonus pool but made district participation optional, so it is possible that no teacher would receive extra pay based on merit. In Massachusetts, 1 percent of the state’s districts would pilot a locally determined, yet-to be-defined, differentiated compensation plan. In Idaho, all employees of schools in the top three quartiles of statewide student growth would receive small bonuses, meaning half of the state’s below-average schools would get schoolwide bonuses.

Before choosing Delaware and Tennessee as the first round winners, the education department identified 16 finalists. Figure 2 shows how committed the group was to key components of the new teacher-effectiveness framework.

So far, RTT has not had a revolutionary impact on performance pay. This seems to raise questions about the administration’s belief that large federal financial incentives will lead states to embrace controversial reforms. The limited use of student-performance data in teacher evaluations offers further evidence for this point. Although states, in order to apply, had to remove data firewalls, only half of applying states took the critically important but optional next step: actually making student growth a part of evaluations.

An additional data point calls into question another component of the administration’s theory of action—that major reform can be brought about through collaboration with unions. As noted above, five applicants proposed strong performance-pay plans. South Carolina has no teachers unions. Washington, D.C.’s proposal received no union support. In Florida and Arizona, 8 and 21 percent of local teachers unions, respectively, supported the state’s plan. Only Delaware was able to both craft a strong performance-pay plan and earn broad union support (100 percent).

A Solid Footing

Several factors have diluted the administration’s work on performance pay. First, Duncan, as a general rule, prefers to make reform optional, using incentives to alter behavior. Second, the secretary appears to be more interested in changing the teaching profession broadly than in advancing the narrower issue of performance pay. Third, and most important, the president and secretary remain committed to securing union support for change, reform “with” labor not “to” labor. RTT winner Tennessee made alternative compensation systems completely optional for districts and required that, before a local performance-pay plan is implemented, it receive the blessing of the local union.

But it may still be the case that, in the long term, the administration’s efforts will have a profound positive impact on performance pay. A few states were willing to consider performance pay to an extent that they hadn’t before. And while giving unions a great deal of power in negotiations about differentiated pay will severely limit the number and strength of plans adopted, it might help ensure the strength and sustainability of the few plans that do emerge. Finally, by encouraging states to measure student growth, embed student learning in annual teacher evaluations, and use evaluations to inform a range of personnel decisions, the administration has laid the foundation for performance-pay plans in the future.

The Obama administration, if nothing else, has changed the politics of performance pay. No longer can it be assumed that leading Democrats will oppose efforts to financially compensate high-performing teachers.

On January 19, 2013, in other words, we’ll be able to ask of a Democratic administration a once inconceivable set of questions. How many billions did it spend on performance pay? How many new state-level performance-pay plans did it bring about? Did its activities cause unions to drop their reflexive opposition? Is performance pay now widely viewed as one part of an integrated teacher policy framework?

Depending on the answers to these questions, performance pay and the new teacher framework—not turnarounds, a reauthorized ESEA, or another higher profile issue—may be the Obama administration’s most important education legacy.

Andy Smarick, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of education, is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

All Together Now?

Michael Petrilli — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 12:34:35 +0000

Video: Education Next talks with Mike Petrilli.

The greatest challenge facing America’s schools today isn’t the budget crisis, or standardized testing, or “teacher quality.” It’s the enormous variation in the academic level of students coming into any given classroom. How we as a country handle this challenge says a lot about our values and priorities, for good and ill. Unfortunately, the issue has become enmeshed in polarizing arguments about race, class, excellence, and equity. What’s needed instead is some honest, frank discussion about the trade-offs associated with any possible solution.

U.S. students are all over the map in terms of achievement (see Figure 1). By the 4th grade, public-school children who score among the top 10 percent of students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are reading at least six grade levels above those in the bottom 10 percent. For a teacher with both types of students in her classroom, that means trying to challenge kids ready for middle-school work while at the same time helping others to decode. Even differences between students at the 25th and at the 75th percentiles are huge—at least three grade levels. So if you’re a teacher, how the heck do you deal with that?

In the old days, “ability grouping” and tracking provided the answer: you’d break your students into reading groups, with the bluebirds in one corner, tackling advanced materials at warp speed, and the redbirds in another, slowly making their way through basic texts. Likewise for mathematics. And in middle and high school, you’d continue this approach with separate tracks: “challenge” or “honors” for the top kids, “regular” or “on-level” for the average ones, and “remedial” for the slowest. Teachers could target their instruction to the level of the group or the class, and since similar students were clustered together, few kids were bored or totally left behind.

Then came the attack on tracking. A flurry of books in the 1970s and 1980s argued that confining youngsters to lower tracks hurt their self-esteem and life chances, and was elitist and racist to boot. Jeanne Oakes’s 1985 opus, Keeping Track, was particularly effective in sparking an anti-tracking movement that swept through the nation’s schools.

According to Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, this advocacy led to fundamental changes at breakneck speed. In a report for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute last year, he wrote,

An eighth grader in the early 1990s attended middle schools offering at least two distinct tracks in [each of] English language arts, history, and science. Mathematics courses were organized into three or more tracks. The eighth grader of 2008, however, attended schools with much less tracking. English language arts, history, and science are essentially detracked, i.e., schools typically offer a single course that serves students at every level of achievement and ability. Mathematics usually features two tracks, often algebra and a course for students not yet ready for algebra.

One of the reasons that detracking advocates claimed so many victories is that they painted their pet reform as a strategy in which everybody wins. Oakes and others insisted that detracking would help the lowest-performing students (who would enjoy better teachers, a more challenging level of instruction, and exposure to their higher-achieving peers) while not hurting top students. But by the mid-1990s, researchers started to compile evidence that this happy outcome was just wishful thinking.

In 1995, scholars Dominic Brewer, Daniel Rees, and Laura Argys analyzed test-score results for high-school students in tracked and detracked classrooms, and found benefits of tracking for advanced students. They wrote in the Kappan magazine, “The conventional wisdom on which detracking policy is often based—that students in low-track classes (who are drawn disproportionately from poor families and from minority groups) are hurt by tracking while others are largely unaffected—is simply not supported by very strong evidence.”

And this was before the policy incentives shifted sharply to prioritize low-achieving students. In another study for the Fordham Institute, Loveless found a clear pattern in the late 1990s when states adopted accountability regimes: the performance of the lowest decile of students shot up, while the achievement of the top 10 percent of students stagnated. That’s not surprising; these accountability systems, like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002, pushed schools to get more students over a low performance bar. They provided few incentives to accelerate the academic growth of students at the top.

This dynamic might have been most pernicious for minority students. Earlier this year, an Indiana University study found that the “Excellence Gap,” the racial achievement gap at NAEP’s advanced level, widened during the NCLB era. One possible explanation is that high-achieving minority students are likely to attend schools with lots of low-achieving students, and their teachers are focused on helping children who are far behind rather than those ready to accelerate ahead.

The Power of Peers

The attack on tracking also claimed an innocent bystander: ability grouping, which became suspect in many circles, too. Yet in recent years, the “peer effects” literature has shown the benefits of grouping students of similar abilities together. One clever study, by economists Scott Imberman, Adriana Kugler, and Bruce Sacerdote, looked at the fallout from Hurricanes Rita and Katrina. They wanted to know what happened when students who were evacuated from New Orleans ended up in schools in Houston. They found that the arrival of low-achieving evacuees dragged down the average performance of the Houston students and had a particularly negative impact on high-achieving Houston kids. Meanwhile, high-achieving evacuees had a positive effect on local students. As Bruce Sacerdote told me, “The high-achieving kids seemed to be the most sensitive. They do particularly well by having high-achieving peers. And they are particularly harmed by low-achieving peers.” He added, “I’ve become a believer in tracking.”

In 2006, Caroline Hoxby and Gretchen Weingarth examined the Wake County (North Carolina) Public School System. For the better part of two decades, the district, in and around Raleigh, had been reassigning numbers of students to new schools every year in order to keep its schools racially and socioeconomically balanced. That created thousands of natural experiments in which the composition of classrooms changed dramatically, and randomly, and that, in turn, provided Hoxby and Weingarth an opportunity to investigate the impact of these changes on student achievement.

They found evidence for what they called the “boutique model” of peer effects, “a model in which students do best when the environment is made to cater to their type.” When school reassignments resulted in the arrival of students with either very low or very high achievement, this boosted the test scores of other students with very low or very high achievement, probably because it created a critical mass of students at the same achievement level, and schools could better focus attention on their particular needs.

Does that mean students should be sharply sequestered by ability? Not exactly. Here’s how Hoxby and Weingarth put it in their conclusion: “Our evidence does not suggest that complete segregation of people, by types, is optimal. This is because (a) people do appear to benefit from interacting with peers of a higher type and (b) people who are themselves high types appear to receive sufficient benefit from interacting with peers a bit below them that there is little reason to isolate them completely. What our evidence does suggest is that efforts to create interactions between lower and higher types ought to maintain continuity of types.”

In other words, a little bit of variation is okay. But when the gap is too wide—say, six grade levels in reading—nobody wins.

Enter Differentiated Instruction

So if grouping all students together leads to pernicious effects, but divvying kids up by ability is politically unacceptable, what’s the alternative? The ed-school world has an answer: “differentiated instruction.” The notion is that one teacher instructs a diverse group of kids, but manages to reach each one at precisely the appropriate level. The idea, according to Carol Tomlinson of the University of Virginia (UVA), is to “shake up what goes on in the classroom so that students have multiple options for taking in information, making sense of ideas, and expressing what they learn.” Ideally, instruction is customized at the individual student level. Every child receives a unique curriculum that meets that individual’s exact needs. A teacher might even make specialized homework assignments, or provide the specific one-on-one help that a particular kid requires.

If you think that sounds hard to do, you’re not alone. I asked Holly Hertberg-Davis, who studied under Tomlinson and is now her colleague at UVA, if differentiated instruction was too good to be true. Can teachers actually pull it off? “My belief is that some teachers can but not all teachers can,” she answered.

Hertberg-Davis worked with Tomlinson on a large study of differentiated instruction. Teachers were provided with extensive professional development and ongoing coaching. Three years later the researchers wanted to know if the program had an impact on student learning. But they were stumped. “We couldn’t answer the question,” Hertberg-Davis told me, “because no one was actually differentiating.”

Teachers admit to being flummoxed by this approach. In a 2008 national survey commissioned by the Fordham Institute, more than 8 in 10 teachers said differentiated instruction was “very” or “somewhat” difficult to implement. Even ed-school professors are skeptical. A 2010 national random survey of teacher educators asked them the same question and got the same result: more than 8 in 10 said differentiated instruction was very or somewhat difficult to implement.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I was curious to see differentiated instruction in action, so I visited my local elementary school in Takoma Park, Maryland. Piney Branch Elementary serves an incredibly diverse group of 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders, from the children of übereducated white and black middle-class families, to poor immigrant children from Latin America, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, to low-income African American kids.

I sat down with the school’s principal, Bertram “Mr. G.” Generlette, who has the friendly, laid-back manner of his native Antigua. I cut right to the chase. I’m wondering if I’d be making a mistake to send my son to a school like Piney Branch. Is it going to slow him down if his classmates are several years behind or still learning the language? (Of course, not all poor or minority children are low-achieving, nor are all white students high-achieving. Still, achievement gaps being what they are, the range of academic diversity does tend to be larger at schools with lots of racial and social diversity.)

It was pretty obvious that Mr. G. had heard these questions before, particularly from white folks like me. I asked him if that was the case. “Parents come in, yes,” he told me. “They are new to the neighborhood. Or their child is in kindergarten, or they are moving from private school. After a few minutes, you get the idea.” However, he said with a sly grin, “they very rarely ask the question directly.”

But he wasn’t afraid to answer me directly. “We are committed to diversity,” he started. “It’s a lens through which we see everything. We look at test scores. How are students overall? And how are different groups doing? It’s easy to see. Our white students are performing high. What can we do to keep pushing that performance up? For African American and Hispanic students, what can we do to make gains?”

Since Mr. G.’s arrival five years ago, the percentage of African American 5th graders passing the state reading test is way up, from 55 to 91 percent. For Hispanic children, it’s up from 46 to 74 percent. It’s true that scores statewide have also risen, but not nearly to the same degree.

And there’s no evidence that white students have done any worse over this time. In fact, they are performing better than ever. Before Mr. G. arrived, 33 percent of white 5th graders reached the advanced level on the state math test; in 2009, twice as many did. In fact, Piney Branch white students outscore the white kids at virtually every other Montgomery County school.

What’s his secret? Was he grouping students “homogeneously,” so all the high-achieving kids learned together, and the slower kids got extra help?

“There’s no such thing as a homogenous group,” Mr. G. shot back. “One kid is a homogeneous group. As soon as you bring another student in, you have differences. The question is: how do you capitalize on the differences?”

Well, that sounds OK in theory. But come on, Mr. G., how are you going to make sure my kid doesn’t get slowed down?

“My job as a principal is to let my parents know that your child will get the services they need,” he answered patiently. “We are going to make sure that every child is getting pushed to a maximum level. That’s my commitment.”

And that’s when I was introduced to the incredibly nuanced and elaborate efforts that Piney Branch makes to differentiate instruction, challenge every child, and avoid any appearance of segregated classrooms.

So how do they do it? First, every homeroom has a mixed group of students: the kids are assigned to make sure that every class represents the diversity of the school in terms of achievement level, race, class, etc. Then, during the 90-minute reading block, students spend much of their time in small groups appropriate for their reading level. (Redbirds and bluebirds are back!) However, in the new lingo of differentiated instruction, the staff works hard to make sure these groups are fluid—a child in a slower reading group can get bumped up to a faster one once progress is made.

For math, on the other hand, students are split up into homogeneous classrooms. All the advanced math kids are in one classroom, the middle students in another, and the struggling kids in a third. This means shuffling the kids from one room to another (a process that can be quite time-consuming for elementary school kids). But it allows the highest-performing kids to sprint ahead; one of the school’s 3rd-grade math classes, for example, is tackling the district’s 5th-grade math curriculum. (Because of large achievement gaps at the school, these math classes are more racially and socioeconomically homogeneous than the student population as a whole.)

The rest of the time—when kids are learning science or social studies or taking “specials” like art and music—they are back in their heterogeneous classrooms. Even then, however, teachers work to “differentiate instruction,” which often means separating the kids back into homogeneous groups again, and offering more challenging, extended assignments to the higher-achieving students.

It sounds like some sort of elaborate Kabuki dance to me, but it appears to succeed on several counts. All kids spend most of the day getting challenged at their level, and no one ever sits in a classroom that’s entirely segregated by race or class.

Reading War

Test scores indicate that the strategy is working, too, but that doesn’t mean all parents have been thrilled. Three years ago, Mr. G. told me, a group of white parents pushed to get the school to move to homogeneous classrooms for reading as well as math. “Parents felt that the only way to get kids to read at a high level was to have other kids around them who read at a high level,” he explained. (That didn’t sound so unreasonable to me.) “We had a lot of meetings. The staff overwhelmingly supported the diverse approach, the heterogeneous approach. That was good for me as an administrator because the staff was behind me.”

I tracked down one of the “troublemaker” parents. Her name is Sue Katz Miller and she personifies much of what makes Takoma Park great: she’s smart, she’s an activist, and she’s committed to helping make the city a welcoming community for families of all incomes and backgrounds. (A neighbor of mine called her “a force of nature.”) A former Newsweek reporter and now a regular columnist for The Takoma Voice, she spent two years as PTA president at Piney Branch and is an enthusiastic booster of the school and its diversity. “My kids have both benefited enormously from being in a Piney Branch social milieu,” she told me.

But the reading decision still sticks in her craw. “Why is it OK,” she asked, “to have homogeneous grouping in math and not have it in reading? The answer you get is: well, we can’t do both, they would be switching classes all the time, it would be like middle school and they won’t be able to handle it…. It’s a huge disservice to the kids who are ready for rigor in the humanities and are not math kids. It’s bizarre. We’ve said we’re going to accommodate kids in math but not in reading. It’s completely insane as far as I’m concerned. It makes me angry.”

She lost that battle, but Mr. G. and his teachers didn’t ignore the parents’ concerns, either. He went out and found reading programs suitable for advanced students, like William and Mary, Junior Great Books, and Jacob’s Ladder. He trained his teachers on these programs, ensuring that the students in the top reading groups would be challenged with difficult material. (The teachers loved it.) He tried hard to live up to his promise to push all students as far as they could go.

Competing for Kids

Mr. G. and Piney Branch face some healthy competition. Montgomery County offers a half-dozen “Centers for the Highly Gifted,” magnet schools that are designed for supersmart kids and located in elementary buildings throughout the district. Pine Crest, just a few miles away from Piney Branch, hosts one such center, and an increasing number of Piney Branch 3rd graders were testing into it for 4th and 5th grades.

A year ago, 25 Piney Branch kids were accepted—more than any other elementary school in the district. If they all took up the offer, Mr. G. said, “That’s a teacher walking out of my building.”

So in 2009–10, in cooperation with the district, Piney Branch launched a pilot program to bring the “Highly Gifted Center” curriculum into its classrooms. This wasn’t easy; there wasn’t a curriculum, per se, at the centers. Teachers had the freedom to do what they wanted. So the district helped the teachers put down on paper everything they were doing in the classroom.

Mr. G. arranged to have a 4th-grade and a 5th-grade teacher trained on the Highly Gifted approach, and formed a “cluster group” of gifted students in their classrooms. This means that, in one classroom in each of these grades, there are 12 or so gifted students, along with another 12 or so “on-level” kids. While they are taught together some of the day, they are frequently broken into small groups, so the gifted kids can learn together at an accelerated pace.

Pulling this off takes an energetic and gifted educator; 4th-grade teacher Folakemi Mosadomi, who has the gifted group in her classroom, appears to fit the bill perfectly. Now in her 5th year of teaching (all of them at Piney Branch under Mr. G.), Ms. M. acknowledged that differentiating instruction in this way requires “extensive planning and training,” not to mention someone who is well-organized and creative. But even that’s not always enough.

In the first year of the pilot, she had four different reading groups in one classroom, from kids still learning English to the highly gifted students. “I went from sounding out the ‘A’ sound with one group, to talking to another group about how the Exxon Valdez oil spill was like the Battle of Normandy.” That range was simply too much for one teacher to handle—remember Caroline Hoxby’s finding about “continuity of types?”—so the next year she had just two groups: the gifted students, and the next level down. “Now it’s easier to do more with both groups of students together,” she told me.

And the strategy seems to be working in one important way: last year, about half of the gifted children chose to stay at Piney Branch.

Fragile Compromise

So with a well-trained and dedicated staff, and lots of support, “differentiated instruction” can be brought to life. But even at Piney Branch, which benefits from the vast resources of a huge, affluent school system in Montgomery County, Maryland, it sure seems rickety, held with lots of duct tape and chewing gum, and subject to collapse without just the right staff and parent support.

If the school community placed its highest value on pushing all kids to achieve their full potential, including its high-achieving students, it would probably organize its classrooms differently. It would embrace “ability grouping” and homogenous classrooms wholeheartedly, and would skip all the gymnastics required to keep classes academically, racially, and socioeconomically diverse throughout the day. But Piney Branch understandably seeks to balance its concerns for academic growth with its interest in maintaining an integrated environment, so this uneasy compromise is probably the best it can do.

Piney Branch and Ms. M. might be able to pull it off. But how many Piney Branches and Ms. M.’s are there?

Technology may someday alleviate the need for such compromises. With the advent of powerful online learning tools, such as those on display in New York City’s School of One, students might be able to receive instruction that’s truly individualized to their own needs—differentiation on steroids.

Perhaps. But until that time, our schools will have to wrestle with the age-old tension between “excellence” and “equity.” And that tension will be resolved one homogeneous or heterogeneous classroom at a time.

Michael J. Petrilli is executive editor of Education Next, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is working on a book for parents considering diverse public schools like Piney Branch.

The Middle School Mess

Peter Meyer — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 13:54:56 +0000

Video: Peter Meyer talks with students and teachers about the problem with middle schools.

“Caught in the hurricane of hormones,” the Toronto Star began a 2008 story about students in the Canadian capital’s middle schools. Suspended “between childhood and the adult world, pre-teens have been called the toughest to teach.”

“The Bermuda triangle of education,” former Louisiana superintendent Cecil Picard once termed middle schools. “Hormones are flying all over the place.”

Indeed, you can’t touch middle school without hearing about “raging hormones.”

Says Diane Ross, a middle-school teacher for 17 years and for 13 more a teacher of education courses for licensure in Ohio, “If you are the warm, nurturing, motherly, grandmotherly type, you are made for early childhood education. If you love math or science or English, then you are the high school type. If you love bungee jumping, then you are the middle school type.”

Even in professional journals you catch the drift of “middle-school madness.” Mayhem in the Middle was a particularly provocative study by Cheri Pierson Yecke published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in 2005. American middle schools have become the places “where academic achievement goes to die,” wrote Yecke.

Hyperbole? Or sad reality? Sometime last year, while walking the hallway of my school district’s middle school, I was pulled aside by one of our veteran teachers, who seemed agitated. I was more than happy to chat. I had known this teacher for years. Let’s call her Miss Devoted: she is dedicated and hardworking, respected by her peers, liked by parents and teachers, one of those “good” teachers that parents lobby to have their children assigned to.

I mentioned that I was coming from a meeting with the literacy consultant, who had shown me her improvement strategy on a fold-out sheet with red arrows and circles that, I said, “looked like battle plans for the invasion of Normandy.”

Miss Devoted rolled her eyes. “I understand,” she said. “The progressives keep doing the same thing over and over, just calling it by different names.

“All I’m doing is going to meetings, filling out forms, getting training. My kids are struggling with substitute teachers.”

Here was a bright and talented teacher in a school that had failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the infamous benchmark of the equally infamous 2002 No Child Left Behind law, for four consecutive years. That meant that nearly half of the school’s 600 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th graders were failing to make grade-level in English and in math. Further, only 10 percent of the school’s African American 8th graders (who made up 30 percent of the total) could pass the state’s rudimentary math exams.

Thus, a swarm of state education department consultants had descended on the school.

“Why won’t they just let me teach?” Miss Devoted asked, clearly frustrated.

By all accounts, middle schools are a weak link in the chain of public education. Is it the churn of ill-conceived attempts at reform that’s causing all the problems? Is it just hormones? Or is it the way in which we configure our grades? For most of the last 30 years, districts have opted to put “tweens” in a separate place, away from little tots and apart from the big kids. Middle schools typically serve grades 5–8 or 6–8. But do our quasi-mad preadolescents belong on an island—think Lord of the Flies—or in a big family, where even raging hormones can be mitigated by elders and self-esteem bolstered by little ones?

Parents and educators have begun abandoning the middle school for K–8 configurations, and new research suggests that grade configuration does matter: when this age group is gathered by the hundreds and educated separately, both behavior and learning suffer.

How Middle Schools Came to Be

Notwithstanding all the despairing headlines middle schools seem to provoke, the more interesting story may be how they became, in relatively few years and with hardly any solid research evidence to support the idea, “one of the largest and most comprehensive efforts at educational reorganization in the history of American public schooling,” as middle-school researchers Paul George and Lynn Oldaker put it in 1985.

The core idea is generally traced to a speech given by William Alexander at a conference for school administrators at Cornell University in 1963. At that time, the dominant organizational structure of American schools was K–8 or K–6 and junior high, a two-year “bridge” to high school conceived in the early 20th century. In fact, the conference topic was “The Dynamic Junior High School,” which was then at its peak, with more than 7,000 such schools in the U.S.

Alexander, then chairman of the department of education at George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, was assigned the keynote address but he could find no “dynamism.” He struggled over his speech, according to Jessica Hodge in a 1978 profile in Kappa Delta Pi. Thanks to a delayed flight on his way to Cornell, the professor got “the time he needed to outline a new focus and organization for the school ‘between’ the elementary and high school.” That was, as history notes, the middle school. Too many junior highs had merely appended high-school practices on to the 7th and 8th grades, said Alexander, and so the bridge had become simply “a vestibule added at the front door of the high school.” The schools, he suggested, had lost touch with the developmental needs of the preadolescent student.

Alexander told the gathered educators that these young students had their own needs, which were not being met in the junior high, including “more of the freedom of movement,” “more appropriate health and physical education, more chances to participate in planning and managing their own activities, more resources for help on their problems of growing up, and more opportunities to explore new interests and to develop new aspirations.” And he then set out what, given the subsequent battles, was his most dubious claim, that these students needed “exploratory experiences” rather than “greater emphasis [on] the academic subjects.”

Alexander was reacting to that era’s academic scare—Sputnik and its gremlins—and bemoaning the fact that greater emphasis on math, science, and “more homework” meant for many students “less time and energy for the fine arts, for homemaking and industrial arts, and for such special interests as dramatics, journalism, musical performance, scouting, camping, outside jobs, and general reading.”

The Me Generation Meets the Psychological Society

Alexander struck a nerve. “The content of his Cornell address would forever alter the nature of education at the middle level,” concluded Hodge. “Educators and citizens were receptive to creating schools that respond to the needs of young people.”

In a few short years, middle schoolers would go from Growing Up Forgotten, the title of a 1977 report by the Ford Foundation, to being what David Hough, then director of the Institute for School Improvement at Missouri State University and managing editor of the Middle Grades Research Journal, described as “studied, researched, and analyzed with a greater degree of exuberance and sophistication than ever before.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, many social and political institutions began to be viewed through the prism of psychiatry and sociology and so, in schools, through the personal psyches of individual students. Middle schools, brand new, were the blank slates for the child-centered, social-environment pedagogues. And what better population of student to study and nurture than, as education journalist Linda Perlstein puts it, youngsters whose “bodies and psyches morph through the most radical changes since infancy, leaving them torn between anxiety and ardor, dependence and autonomy, conformity and rebellion.”

It was a perfect storm for creating psychosocial-enrichment holding pens for preadolescent children: middle schools.

March of the Mediocracy

“Holding pen” is a harsh phrase, but it is not surprising that it slipped into the middle-school lexicon as the focus on preadolescent emotional development seemed to overwhelm the academics. By 1989, when President George H. W. Bush and the nation’s governors met in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the heralded education summit, that worm was beginning to turn. Academic mediocrity was not a hard case to make, since middle-school proponents had given, at best, lip service to academics almost from the inception of the model.

“I don’t know if it was deliberate or not,” recalls Trish Williams, executive director of EdSource, a California nonprofit, “but I know that when my kids were in middle school, one of the best in California, one of the teachers told me that her job was to just hold them and keep them safe until they get through puberty. So there has been a philosophy in middle school which deemphasized academic outcomes….”

As Hough noted in 1991, their popularity was “linked to programmatic characteristics…not to student outcome measures.”

The editors of Phi Delta Kappan recognized early signs of trouble when they devoted a special issue to middle schools in 1997 and noted an abundance of “observational studies,” but “little quantitative information to satisfy the demands of thoughtful practitioners and policymakers for assessment of those efforts.” They pointed out that what quantitative work there was attested to “the intellectual underdevelopment of too many young adolescents,” noting that only 28 percent of 8th graders nationally scored at or above the “proficient” level in reading in 1994. Indeed, it was beginning to be apparent that middle schools were doing little to help educate children academically.

In the 1995 Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), students who had yet to enter middle school fared better than those who had nearly completed those grades. U.S. 4th graders scored 12th among 26 countries in math while 8th graders ranked 18th. “These statistics about young adolescents’ poor academic performance suggest that many middle-grades schools are failing to enable the majority of their students to achieve at anywhere near adequate levels,” noted the Phi Delta Kappan editors.

Nothing much has changed since then. Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show the middle-school lacunae. While U.S. 4th graders increased their NAEP math scale scores by 24 points between 1978 and 2008, 8th graders improved by 17 points during the same period. And while 4th-grade readers improved by 10 points during a similar period, the nation’s 8th graders improved by just 4 points. Middle schools seem to be dampening the modest improvements being made by our primary schools.

Lightning struck when Yecke published her middle-school broadsides, The War Against Excellence (2003) and, two years later, Mayhem in the Middle. Those reports caught the No Child Left Behind wave perfectly, presenting a searing condemnation of middle schools’ failures to educate a large swath of children. “The middle school movement advances the notion that academic achievement should take a back seat to such ends as self-exploration, socialization, and group learning,” says Yecke in Mayhem.

Sure, Some Middle Schools Work

There is no doubt that some middle schools are working. Unfortunately, the answer to the “what works” question is an elusive one. Veteran middle-school educators John Lounsbury and Gordon Vars, for instance, claim that “when the tenets of the [middle school] concept are implemented fully over time, student achievement and development increase markedly.” In a 2003 story for the Middle School Journal, they argue that there is “hard evidence that the middle school does in fact work,” but they don’t supply that evidence. Instead, we are treated to empathetic descriptions of “legions of genuinely good teachers both touching lives and successfully teaching skills and content in hundreds of middle schools” and hear the complaint that “most of the mandated assessments being used to determine students’ attainment of the standards focus heavily on recall of facts, one of the lowest forms of thinking.” Or, “Is it too extreme an exaggeration to suggest that high-stakes testing may be lobotomizing an entire generation of young people?”

Ironically, the middle schools that we know “work” are those that eschew the tenets of middle schoolism. Charter schools like the Young Women’s Leadership School and those operated by the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), and private networks like the NativityMiguel schools—several dozen of which serve low-income, inner-city students—have proven that proper pedagogy and academic focus can overcome the developmental challenges of preadolescence. A recent study of 22 KIPP middle schools found “significant” gap-closing results in math and reading achievement at about half of the schools. The Mathematica Policy Research report found that, after three years in the schools, students showed gains in math equal to 1.2 years of extra instruction and in reading almost a full extra year of improvement compared to outcomes for students in schools with similar demographics. The “effects are pretty striking and impressive,” Brian Gill of Mathematica told Education Week.

The latest evidence of middle-school potential is a study from EdSource released in February 2010. “Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades: Why Some Schools Do Better” is, says Trish Williams, “the largest study of middle grades education ever conducted.”

Under the guidance of Williams and Michael Kirst, professor emeritus of education and business administration at Stanford University, a group of researchers from EdSource and Stanford looked into the “black box” of middle-school performance to analyze how district and school policies and practices are linked to higher student performance. Controlling for student background, they studied 303 middle schools and compared 200,000 student scores on California’s standardized tests in mathematics and English to responses to school practices surveys provided by 303 principals, 3,752 English and math teachers, and 157 superintendents.

“Our findings were surprising in their consistency,” the report concludes. The 44 higher-performing schools (those with average school-wide math and English test scores a full standard deviation above the mean) “create a shared, school-wide intense focus on the improvement of student outcomes,” it says. Those high-performing schools did things like “set measurable goals on standards based tests and benchmark tests across all proficiency levels, grades, and subjects”; create school missions that were “future oriented,” with curricula and instruction designed to prepare students to succeed in a rigorous high-school curriculum; include improvement of student outcomes “as part of the evaluation of the superintendent, the principal, and the teachers”; and communicate to parents and students “their responsibility as well for student learning, including parent contracts, turning in homework, attending class, and asking for help when needed.”

The EdSource study findings echo many of the principles espoused by successful “no excuses” charter schools like KIPP. But do we really want more middle schools, when only a very small portion of them will have what it takes to succeed?

Grade Configuration May Matter

The trends suggest that grade configuration matters to at least some parents and educators, who decided some time ago that separately configured schools for preadolescents are not the best way to go. Even KIPP, which has primarily served grades 5–8, began in 2006 a strategy of siting its schools in pre-K–12 “clusters.” Of KIPP’s current roster of 99 schools, 60 are stand-alone middle schools; the rest are Pre-K–4 elementary (24) and 9–12 high schools (15). “When we start in fifth grade, we’re starting in the fourth quarter, down by a touchdown, and the two-minute warning has been given,” KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg was fond of saying about running middle schools. “Every second counts, and there’s no margin for error.” With the new emphasis on clustering, he says, “we’re still down by a touchdown,” but it’s the first quarter.

Though the 6–8 middle school remains the dominant school configuration for the age group (roughly, ages 11 to 14), a countertrend has been building for much of the last decade. How many separate middle schools remain today? The numbers are not easy to pin down. Hough, now dean of the education school at Missouri State, has been tracking middle schools for 20 years and says their numbers peaked in 2005 with just over 9,000 across the United States. And he cites data from the National Center for Education Statistics that puts the number for the 2007–08 school year at 8,500. Hough says that “the trend is definitely away from stand-alone middle schools” and estimates there will be fewer than 7,950 when the 2010 data are in. The number of “elemiddle” schools, the new term for K–8 schools, has jumped from 4,000 nationwide to just under 7,000 in the last 10 years, says Hough. Cleveland has closed all 16 of its middle schools, re-opening most as K–8 schools. Philadelphia has closed 21 of its 46 middle schools since 2002. Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Maryland are all rethinking the 5–8 and 6–8 school configurations, says Hough, and cities such as Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Portland (Oregon), and Baltimore have already moved away from 6–8 middle schools.

Veteran New York educator Kathleen Cashin, a regional superintendent in the city’s sprawling system, explained the trend away from middle schools six years ago, before it was a trend, when she told the New York Times that parents “were clamoring” for a return to K–8 schools. “It’s an elementary-like nurturing environment,” she said. “Because children are older doesn’t mean they don’t need that nurturing care of a loving, caring adult. I have found the attendance is better, almost always. The violence is less, the younger kids defuse the older and the academics are at least as good if not better.”

This sums up much of what I heard from parents I spoke with about middle schools, even as some educators remained reluctant to acknowledge the possible importance of grade configuration. Meanwhile, parents are voting with their feet, and reformers can draw on recent research that offers little support for the stand-alone middle-school model.

Researchers Confirm What Parents Know

First, from North Carolina comes evidence that separating middle-school children from the other grades may exacerbate behavioral problems. “Is there a ‘best’ grade configuration for schools that serve early adolescents?” ask researchers Philip Cook, Robert MacCoun, Clara Muschkin, and Jacob Vigdor in a 2008 study in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

The “conventional wisdom” on grade configuration, Cook and colleagues say, “has changed several times over the past century,” as we have seen. To see what impact configuration may be having today, they studied public schools in North Carolina, which has “led the national trend of incorporating sixth grade” into their middle-school program. In 1999–2000, more than 90 percent of the Tar Heel State’s 379 middle schools served grades 6–8. By comparing the grade 6 cohorts that were not in a separate middle school to those that were, the researchers found some remarkable results: “students who attend middle school in sixth grade are twice as likely to be disciplined relative to their counterparts in elementary school.” They found that the behavioral problems of these middle-school 6th graders “persist beyond the sixth grade year” and that “exposing sixth graders to older peers has persistent negative consequences on their academic trajectories.”

The results of the Cook et al. research complement those of Kelly Bedard and Chau Do, whose 2005 study of national data found that moving 6th graders to middle school resulted in a 1 to 3 percent decline in on-time high-school graduation rates. Bedard and Do conclude that the decrease in graduation rates of middle schoolers is “a surprising result for a program with the stated aim of aiding less able students.” Given the oft-studied economic impacts associated with graduation rates, e.g., lifetime earnings, unemployment, and incarceration rates, “the negative economic implications of less on-time high school completion may be far reaching and multifaceted.”

Perhaps the most telling research about the impact of middle-school grade configuration is a recent study of New York City middle schools by Jonah Rockoff and Benjamin Lockwood (see “Stuck in the Middle,” research, Fall 2010). The Columbia Business School researchers studied the impacts of grade configuration on learning and concluded that “middle schools are not the best way to educate students” in districts like New York City. In fact, they argue that “students who enter public middle schools in New York City fall behind their peers in K–8 schools.” The effects are large, present for both math and English, and evident for girls as well as boys. And perhaps most troubling, “students with lower initial levels of academic achievement fare especially poorly in middle school.”

Like the Cook research on behavior, the Rockoff and Lockwood study finds that the negative achievement effect on children who moved into middle school “persists at least through 8th grade, the highest grade for which we could obtain test scores.”

The one caveat Rockoff made about this research is the effect of school size. “In New York City all the buildings are roughly the same size, which means that a 6–8 school and K–8 school have the same number of students,” says Rockoff. It may make “a very big difference” if you have 250 kids in a 6th grade (which is what you typically have in a 6–8 school) rather than 80 (which is what you might have in a K–8 school). “Imagine if you’re in a K–8 school, you have 900 kids across nine grades, and one out of every ten 6th to 8th graders is making trouble. So you have 30 troublemakers in the school. Now, imagine a middle school with 900 kids but only three grades, 300 per grade. They have 90 troublemakers in the school instead of 30.”

Needless to say, that makes teaching—and learning—far more difficult.

Peter Meyer is a former news editor at Life magazine and senior visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Teaching Math to the Talented

Eric A. Hanushek — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 05:01:29 +0000

Podcast: Paul Peterson and Eric Hanushek discuss the study.
Video: Paul Peterson and Marty West discuss the study.
An unabridged version of this article is available here.
An interactive map providing specific information for each state is available here.

In Vancouver last winter, the United States proved its competitive spirit by winning more medals—gold, silver, and bronze—at the Winter Olympic Games than any other country, although the German member of our research team insists on pointing out that Canada and Germany both won more gold medals than the United States. But if there is some dispute about which Olympic medals to count, there is no question about American math performance: the United States does not deserve even a paper medal.

Maintaining our productivity as a nation depends importantly on developing a highly qualified cadre of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and other professionals. To realize that objective requires a system of schooling that produces students with advanced math and science skills. To see how well schools in the United States do at producing high-achieving math students, we compared the percentage of U.S. students in the high-school graduating Class of 2009 with advanced skills in mathematics to percentages of similarly high achievers in other countries.

Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests. Moreover, while the percentage of students scoring at the advanced level on NAEP varies considerably among the 50 states, not even the best state does well in international comparison. A 2005 report from the National Academy of Sciences, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, succinctly put the issue into perspective: “Although many people assume that the United States will always be a world leader in science and technology, this may not continue to be the case inasmuch as great minds and ideas exist throughout the world.”

The Demand for High Achievers

The gap between the burgeoning business demand for a highly accomplished workforce and a lagging education system has steadily widened. Even as the United States was struggling with a near 10 percent unemployment rate in the summer of 2010, businesses complained that they could not find workers with needed skills. New York Times writer Motoko Rich explained, “The problem…is a mismatch between the kind of skilled workers needed and the ranks of the unemployed.”

Skill shortages have severe consequences for a nation’s overall productivity. Two of the authors of this report have shown elsewhere that countries with students who perform at higher levels in math and science show larger rates of increase in economic productivity than do otherwise similar countries with lower-performing students (see “Education and Economic Growth,” research, Spring 2008).

Public discourse has tended to focus on the need to address low achievement, particularly among disadvantaged students. Both federal funding and the accountability elements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) have stressed the importance of bringing every student up to a minimum level of proficiency. As great as this need may be, there is no less need to lift more students, no matter their socioeconomic background, to high levels of educational accomplishment. In 2006, the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education Coalition was formed to “raise awareness in Congress, the Administration, and other organizations about the critical role that STEM education plays in enabling the U.S. to remain the economic and technological leader of the global marketplace for the 21st Century.” In the words of a National Academy of Sciences report that jump-started the coalition’s formation, the nation needs to “increase” its “talent pool by improving K–12 science and mathematics education.”

A Focus on Math

We give special attention to math performance because math appears to be the subject in which accomplishment in secondary school is particularly significant for both an individual’s and a country’s economic well-being. Existing research, though not conclusive, indicates that math skills better predict future earnings and other economic outcomes than other skills learned in high school. The American Diploma Project estimates that “in 62 percent of American jobs over the next 10 years, entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra, geometry, data interpretation, probability and statistics.”

There is also a technical reason for focusing our analysis on math. This subject is particularly well suited to rigorous comparisons across countries and cultures. There is a fairly clear international consensus on the math concepts and techniques that need to be mastered and on the order in which those concepts should be introduced into the curriculum. The knowledge to be learned remains the same regardless of the dominant language spoken in a culture.

Data and Methodology

Our analysis relies on test-score information from NAEP and PISA. NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is often called the nation’s report card. It is a large, nationally representative assessment of student performance in public and private schools in mathematics, reading, and science that has been administered periodically since the early 1970s to U.S. students in 4th grade and 8th grade, and at the age of 17. PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, is an internationally standardized assessment of student performance in mathematics, science, and reading established by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It was administered in 2000, 2003, and 2006 to representative samples of 15-year-olds in all 30 OECD countries (which include the most developed countries of the world) as well as in many others.

We focus on performance of the international equivalent of the U.S. high-school graduating Class of 2009 at the time when this population was in the equivalent of U.S. grades 8 and 9. NAEP was administered to U.S. 8th graders in 2005, while PISA 2006 was given one year later to students at the age of 15, the year at which most American students are in 9th grade.

In 2005, NAEP tested representative samples of 8th-grade public and private school students in each of the 50 states in math, science, and reading. For each state, NAEP 2005 calculates the percentage of students who meet a set of achievement standards: a “basic” level, a “proficient” level, and an “advanced” level of achievement. The focus of this report is the top performers, the percentage of students NAEP found at the advanced level of achievement (subsequently referred to as “advanced”).

Only 6.04 percent of the students in the United States in 8th grade in 2005 scored at the advanced level in math on the NAEP. Some critics feel that the standard set by the NAEP governing board is excessively stringent. However, the 2007 Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS 2007), another international test that has been administered to students throughout the world, appears to have set a standard very similar to NAEP 2005, as only 6 percent of U.S. 8th graders scored at the advanced level on that test as well.

We use the NAEP 2005 advanced standard to compare U.S. performance with that in other countries. Because U.S. students took both NAEP 2005 and PISA 2006, it is possible to find the score on PISA that is tantamount to scoring at the advanced level on NAEP, i.e., the score that will yield the same percentage of students as the percentage of U. S. students who scored at the advanced level on the NAEP.

A score on PISA 2006 of 617.1 points is equivalent to the lowest score attained by anyone in the top 6.04 percent of U.S. students in the Class of 2009. (The PISA assessment has an average score of 500 among OECD students and a standard deviation of 100.) It is assumed that both NAEP and PISA tests randomly select questions from a common universe of mathematics knowledge. Given that assumption, it may be further assumed that students who scored similarly on the two exams will have similar math knowledge, i.e., students who scored 617.1 points or better on the PISA test would have been identified at the advanced level had they taken the NAEP math test. Inasmuch as a score of 617.1 points is more than one standard deviation above the average student score on the PISA, it is clear that a group of highly accomplished students has been isolated. (For more methodological details, see sidebar.)

Methodology

We start with the national share of 8th-grade U.S. public and private school students (most of whom are 14 years of age) who reach the advanced level in math on NAEP 2005: 6.04 percent. These students are assumed to be part of the cohort of 15-year-olds who participated in PISA 2006 one year later. Thus, using the PISA 2006 microdata, we can calculate the PISA math test score at which the 93.96th percentile (100.00 – 6.04) of the U.S. student population performs. All PISA calculations use the PISA sampling weights to yield nationally representative estimates. The PISA scaling methodology returns student performance estimates through a range of five plausible values, which are random draws from the estimated probability distribution for a student’s underlying performance. We perform our analysis separately for each of the five plausible values provided by PISA 2006. We then average these results. Based on these calculations, we estimate the PISA score at which the 93.96th percentile of the U.S. student population performs to be 617.1 PISA points.

Next, we calculate from the PISA microdata the share of students reaching this cutoff point for each country participating in the PISA 2006 test. This provides an estimate of the share of students in each PISA country who reach the equivalent of the advanced level in 8th-grade math on NAEP 2005. The share of students who reach the advanced level in 8th-grade math in each U.S. state is taken from NAEP 2005. For information on the statistical significance of differences among jurisdictions, see the unabridged version of this study, available here.

Because representative samples of student performance on NAEP 2005 are available for each state, it is possible to compare the percentages of students in the Class of 2009 who were at the advanced level for each state to the percentage of equally skilled students in countries from around the globe.

In short, linking the scores of the Class of 2009 on NAEP 2005 and PISA 2006 provides us with the opportunity to assess from an international vantage point how well the country as well as individual states in the United States are doing at lifting students to high levels of accomplishment.

U. S. Math Performance in World Perspective

We begin with an overall assessment of the relative percentages of young adults in the United States and other countries who have reached a very high level of mathematics achievement. It is frequently noted that the United States has a very heterogeneous population, with large numbers of immigrants. Such a diverse population, with students coming to school with varying preparation, may handicap U.S. performance relative to that of other countries. For this reason, we also examine two U.S. subgroups conventionally thought to have better preparation for school—white students and students from families where at least one parent is reported to have received a college degree—and compare the percentages of high-achieving students among them to the (total) populations abroad.

Overall results. The percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. While just 6 percent of U.S. students earned at least 617.1 points on the PISA 2006 exam, 28 percent of Taiwanese students did. (See Figure 1 for these results as well as for the international rank of each U.S. state.)

Click to enlarge

It is not only Taiwan that did much, much better than the United States. At least 20 percent of students in Hong Kong, Korea, and Finland were similarly highly accomplished. Twelve other countries had more than twice the percentage of advanced students as the United States: in order of math excellence, they are Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, Japan, Canada, Macao-China, Australia, Germany, and Austria.

The remaining countries that educate a greater proportion of their students to a high level are Slovenia, Denmark, Iceland, France, Estonia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Slovak Republic, Luxembourg, Hungary, Poland, Norway, Ireland and Lithuania.

The 30-country list includes virtually all the advanced industrialized nations of the world. The only OECD countries producing a smaller percentage of advanced math students than the United States are Portugal, Greece, Turkey, and Mexico. The performance levels of students in Spain and Italy are statistically indistinguishable from those of students in the United States, as are those of students in Latvia, which has subsequently joined the OECD.

State-level performance. The percentage of students scoring at the advanced level varies among the 50 states. Massachusetts, with over 11 percent of its students at the advanced level, does better than any other state, but its performance trails that of 14 countries. Its students’ achievement level is similar to that of Germany and France. Minnesota, with more than 10 percent of its students at the advanced level, ranks second among the 50 states, but it trails 16 countries and performs at the level attained by Slovenia and Denmark. New York and Texas each have a percentage of students scoring at the advanced level that is roughly comparable to the United States as a whole, Lithuania, and the Russian Federation.

Just 4.5 percent of the students in the Silicon Valley state of California are performing at a high level, a percentage roughly comparable to that of Portugal. The lowest-ranking states—West Virginia, New Mexico, and Mississippi—have a smaller percentage of the highest-performing students than Serbia or Uruguay, although they do edge out Romania, Brazil, and Kyrgyzstan.

In short, the percentages of high-achieving students in the United States—and in most of its individual states—are shockingly below those of many of the world’s leading industrialized nations. Results for many states are at a level equal to those of third-world countries. (Click the image below for an interactive map providing specific information for each state.)

Click to find specific information for each state

White students. The overall news is sobering. Some might try to comfort themselves by saying the problem is limited to large numbers of students from immigrant families, or to African American students and others who have suffered from discrimination. For example, the statement by the STEM Coalition that we “encourage more of our best and brightest students, especially those from underrepresented or disadvantaged groups, to study in STEM fields” suggests that the challenges are concentrated in nonwhite segments of the U.S. population.

Without denying that the paucity of high-achieving students within minority populations is a serious issue, let us consider the performance of white students for whom the case of discrimination cannot easily be made. Twenty-four countries have a larger percentage of highly accomplished students than the 8 percent achieving at that level among the U.S. white student population in the Class of 2009. Looking at just white students places the U.S. at a level equivalent to what all students are achieving in the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Poland. Seven percent of California’s white students are advanced, roughly the percentage for all Lithuanian students.

Children of parents with college degrees. Another possibility is that schools help students reach levels of high accomplishment if parents are providing the necessary support. To explore this possibility, we assumed that students who reported that at least one parent had graduated from college were likely to be given the kind of support that is needed for many to reach high levels of achievement. Approximately 45 percent of all U.S. students reported that at least one parent had a college degree.

The portion of students in the Class of 2009 with a college-graduate parent who are performing at the advanced level is 10.3 percent. When compared to all students in the other PISA countries, this advantaged segment of the U.S. population was outranked by students in 16 other countries. Nine percent of Illinois students with a college-educated parent scored at the advanced level, a percentage comparable to all students in France and the United Kingdom. The percentage of highly accomplished students from college-educated families in Rhode Island is just short of 6 percent, the same percentage for all students in Spain, Italy, and Latvia.

The Previous Rosy Gloss

Many casual observers may be surprised by our findings, as two previous, highly publicized studies have suggested that—even though improvement was possible—the U.S. was doing all right. This was the picture from two reports issued by Gary Phillips of the American Institutes for Research, who compared the average performance in math of 8th-grade students in each of the 50 states with the average scores of 8th-grade students in other countries. These comparisons used methods that are similar to ours to relate 2007 NAEP performance for U.S. students to both TIMSS 2003 and TIMSS 2007. His findings are more favorable to the United States than those shown by our analyses. While our study using the PISA data shows U.S. student performance in math to be below 30 other countries, Phillips found the average U.S. student to be performing better than all but 14 other countries in his 2007 report and all but 8 countries in his 2009 report. (Oddly, the 2007 report takes a much more buoyant perspective than the 2009 report, though the data suggest otherwise.) Phillips also finds that individual states do much better vis-à-vis other countries than we report.

Why do two studies that seem to be employing generally similar methodologies produce such strikingly different results?

The answer to that puzzle is actually quite simple and has little to do with the fact that Phillips compares average student performance while our study focuses on advanced students: many OECD countries, including those that had a high percentage of high-achieving students, participated in PISA 2006 (upon which our analysis is based) but did not participate in either TIMSS 2003 or TIMSS 2007, the two surveys included in the Phillips studies. In fact, 19 countries that outscored the U.S. on the PISA 2006 test did not participate in TIMSS 2003, and 22 higher-scoring countries did not participate in TIMSS 2007. As a report by the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics has explained, “Differences in the set of countries that participate in an assessment can affect how well the United States appears to do internationally when results are released.”

Put starkly, if one drops from a survey countries such as Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, and New Zealand, and includes instead such countries as Botswana, Ghana, Iran, and Lebanon, the average international performance will drop, and the United States will look better relative to the countries with which it is being compared.

Did NCLB shift the focus away from the best and the brightest?

Some attribute the comparatively small percentages of students performing at the advanced level to the focus of the 2002 federal accountability statute, No Child Left Behind, on the educational needs of very low performing students. That law mandates that every student be brought up to the level a state deems proficient, a standard that most states set well below NAEP’s proficient standard, to say nothing of the advanced level that is the focus of this report.

In order to comply with the federal law, some assert, schools are concentrating all available resources on the educationally deprived, leaving advanced students to fend for themselves. If so, then we should see a decline in the percentage of students performing at NAEP’s advanced level subsequent to the passage of the 2002 federal law. In mathematics, however, the opposite has happened. The percentage performing at the advanced level was only 3.7 percent in 1996 and 4.7 percent in the year 2000. But the percentage performing at an advanced level climbed steadily to the 7.9 percent attained in 2009.

Perhaps NCLB’s passage in 2002 dampened the prior rate of growth in the achievement of high-performing students. To ascertain whether that was the case, we compared the rate of change in the NAEP math scores of the top 10 percent of all 8th graders between 1990 and 2003 (before NCLB was fully implemented) with the rate of change after NCLB had become effective law. Between 1990 and 2003, the scores of students at the 90th percentile rose from 307 to 321, an increment of 14 points, or a growth rate of 1.0 points a year. Between 2003 and 2009, the shift upward for the 90th percentile was another 8 points, or a change of 1.3 points a year. Our results are confirmed by a more detailed study of NCLB’s impact on high-performing students conducted by economists Brian Jacob and Thomas Dee.

In short, the incapacity of American schools to bring students up to the highest level of accomplishment in mathematics is much more deepseated than anything induced by recent federal legislation.

Conclusions

The economic and technological demand for a talented, well-educated, highly skilled population has never been greater. Not only must everyday workers have a set of technical skills surpassing those needed in the past, but a cadre of highly talented professionals trained to the highest level of accomplishment is needed to foster innovation and growth. In the words of President Barack Obama, “Whether it’s improving our health or harnessing clean energy, protecting our security or succeeding in the global economy, our future depends on reaffirming America’s role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation. And that leadership tomorrow depends on how we educate our students today, especially in math, science, technology, and engineering.”

Unfortunately, the United States trails other industrialized countries in bringing a large proportion of its students up to the highest levels of accomplishment. This is not a story of some states doing well but being dragged down by states that perform poorly. Nor is it a story of immigrant or disadvantaged or minority students hiding the strong performance of better-prepared students. Comparatively small percentages of white students are high achievers. Only a small proportion of the children of our college-educated population is equipped to compete with students in a majority of OECD countries.

Major policy initiatives within the United States have in recent years focused on the educational needs of low-performing students. Such efforts deserve commendation, but they can leave the impression that there is no similar need to enhance the education of those students the STEM coalition has called “the best and brightest.” Yet, with rapidly advancing technologies in an increasingly integrated world economy, no one doubts the extraordinary importance of highly accomplished professionals.

Admittedly, the United States could simply ignore the needs of its own young people and continue to import highly skilled scientists and engineers who were prepared by better-performing schools abroad. But even such a heartless, irresponsible strategy relies on both the nature of immigration policies and the absence of better opportunities abroad, two things on which we might not want the future to depend. It seems much more prudent to encourage the most capable of our own people to reach high levels of academic accomplishment.

Eric A. Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Paul E. Peterson is the director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Ludger Woessmann is professor of economics at the University of Munich.

Truants

June Kronholz — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 13:25:18 +0000

Podcast: Education Next talks with Jessica Pinson Pennington, executive director of the Truancy Intervention Project in Georgia, and Barbara Babb and Gloria Danziger of the Truancy Court Program organized by the Center for Families, Children and the Courts at the University of Baltimore School of Law.

Presidents at least as far back as Bill Clinton have made attendance a priority of their school-reform efforts, in part because of the social costs of youngsters not attending. There’s a direct line from truancy to juvenile crime, gang membership, and drug use, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. There’s an equally direct line from truancy to dropping out of school, and from there to increased incidences of teen pregnancy, poor health, and dependency on welfare.

The patio of my local coffee bar in Washington, D.C., is as good a place to think about truancy as any other. A high school with 1,500 students is two blocks away; a middle school with 900 students is a block beyond that.

Between 9:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. every school day, two police officers in a white Ford van sweep the neighborhood. Armed with a gun and dressed in blue fatigues, a curly-haired officer hops out of the van, marches through the coffee shop, glances into a shoe store next door, peers down the subway escalator, hikes to a bus stop, and then retraces her steps to take in a drugstore and a Best Buy.

Typically, the two-officer patrol, one of seven full-time truancy patrols in D.C., picks up four or five youngsters at lunchtime and returns them to their schools. Another four or five “runners” take off, knowing that the officers aren’t allowed to give chase into the neighborhood’s busy streets.

As the officer makes her way through my Starbucks, some youngsters produce cell phones with parents on the other end to corroborate excuses. Others hand over school-issued passes. A few flash identity cards from Maryland schools. The D.C. officers haven’t any authority over youngsters from across the state line, a mile away; as it turns out, Maryland police haven’t much authority, either. By the end of the school year, D.C.’s truancy officers are on familiar terms with a circle of regulars. “You got your hair cut,” one officer remarked to a girl named Ashley, who produced a pass that gave no explanation for her absence from school.

Next, she checked the ID of a Maryland 9th grader named Clyde, who explained that he had missed so much school already it wasn’t worth attending for finals. How do you get away with skipping school, I asked the boy, who wore a Metallica ski cap despite the warm weather. “I just do,” Clyde said. And what do your parents say, I persisted. “They can’t force me to go to school,” he said.

School is the center of social life for most youngsters. It’s the necessary step to a good job and income, a message these kids have been hearing since kindergarten. Taxpayers spend almost $600 billion a year on public education, an average of more than $10,000 per student.

So, why are so many kids willing to dodge traffic, hide out in shoe stores, and risk apprehension by an armed officer to skip school?

Counting Kids

States and school districts vary in how they define truancy, which means that nationwide truancy statistics don’t exist. In Maryland, a truant is someone who has 18 unexcused absences per semester. In Texas, it’s 10 unexcused absences within six months. In Florida, it’s 15 in 90 calendar days.

Complicating any attempt to compare statistics are divergent state compulsory-education laws. In D.C., youngsters must attend school until age 18, in Maryland until age 16, and in Pennsylvania until 17.

No Child Left Behind lets states use attendance as an additional indicator of adequate yearly progress, and 37 states do that. But attendance is measured differently from truancy: Attendance is a daily average, and a few youngsters with perfect attendance can hide the absences of those who stay away for days at a time. Attendance tends to hover at about 95 percent in most state reports.

Where states do report truancy, the numbers are staggering. California reported that 24 percent of its 6.2 million public school children, some 1.5 million kids, were truant (missing more than 30 minutes of instruction without an excuse at least three times) in 2008–09. Wisconsin disclosed that 15.4 percent of its high-school students were truant (absent without an acceptable excuse for part or all of five or more days during a semester) in 2008–09, including 62 percent of its African American students.

The New School calculated that 24 percent of New York City’s 350,000 high schoolers had 38 or more absences in 2007–08 (the report didn’t distinguish between excused and unexcused absences). Washington, D.C., reported that in 2008–09, 20 percent of its students were truant, that is, absent 15 days without an excuse. But the district also said that it missed counting about 10 percent of its youngsters, so the true number could be higher.

Even a simple calculation suggests that adds up to a bad deal for taxpayers. If 20 percent of D.C.’s 46,000 students miss 15 days each, that’s the equivalent of 766 full school years. The U.S. Census Bureau calculates that the D.C. schools spent an average of $14,594 per pupil in 2007–08. That adds up to $11 million spent by the district on no-shows.

California, like six other states, funds its schools based on average daily attendance rather than on the once-a-year or once-a-semester headcount that many states and Washington, D.C., use. Some 16 percent of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 272,000 students were truant in 2008–09. That means the district lost at least 130,000 student days of funding.

State and federal data indicate that truants tend overwhelmingly to be African American and Hispanic. About as many girls as boys are truant. Almost half live in single-parent households, and about one-third live in poverty. Truancy spikes at about age 15, when most youngsters enter 9th grade and the less-supportive atmosphere of high school.

Diane Groomes, an assistant Washington, D.C., chief of police, whose responsibilities include the truancy patrol, said she is noticing that truants are getting younger. This year, her officers picked up more 12-year-olds than in the past, and even a growing number of 10- and 11-year-olds. Why? “Unfortunately, they’re growing up fast,” she ventured.

What’s the Problem?

Back at my coffee shop, I fell into conversation with a 10th grader who said her name was Devora. She had a school pass to keep a medical appointment, although she seemed to be settling into her patio chair for the day. Devora had big plans to study political science or philosophy in college, but she admitted she was absent “a lot,” and she put the blame on—how’s that?—her high school.

“If classes showed more relevance to life—not equations and stuff,” she might attend, she said. A chemistry teacher “yells a lot,” she added. A math teacher has “missed more school than I have. We don’t learn anything.” An English teacher is assigning “3rd-grade work.” Kids “feel trapped in school. The only thing on their mind is they want to get out.”

I read Devora’s indictment to Edward Deci and AnneMarie Conley, who study achievement motivation—Deci at the University of Rochester and Conley at the University of California, Irvine—and they knew all about it.

Deci, a psychologist, co-authored self-determination theory, which holds that we’re motivated to complete a task when we feel we’re competent to do the work, have autonomy in how we go about it, and feel some “relatedness” to the situation; we have friendly teammates or a supportive boss, for example. For lots of kids, school offers none of that, Deci says, and waves of school reforms are only making things worse, he adds.

“Kids know if they can’t do the work. They’re attuned to ‘these people are pushing me around.’ They know if teachers are relating to them in a warm kind of way or a demeaning kind of way,” Deci told me.

Middle schools, desperate to keep order in a hothouse of surging hormones, slap on tighter rules at the very time that kids crave more independence. They also tend to be larger and have many more students per grade than elementary school (see “The Middle School Mess,” features). Kids can have a tough time finding a caring adult or a circle of friends in a big school, and the pressure on teachers to boost achievement may add to that lack of relatedness. “When teachers get pressured on accountability, they get more authoritarian with kids. What kids need is autonomy and support, not control,” Deci said.

Conley, an education professor, studies expectancy-value theory, which doesn’t contradict Deci but says that we’re also motivated by what we expect to get out of a task: what do I gain vs. what do I give up by going to class, for example? Most kids see a social cost in playing hooky: They’d miss being with friends, their peers would think less of them, or they’d suffer a wound to their self-image.

But the calculation comes out differently for other kids. Going to school may mean they can’t hang out at the mall or use drugs. They might miss some serendipitous fun with truant friends or could lose some of their cool, if being truant is cool among their peers.

One morning near the end of the school year, I sat in on a string of meetings between students at Francis Scott Key middle school in Silver Spring, Maryland, and a group of adults—a family-court judge, a district attorney, a school social worker—who are part of a truancy project sponsored by the University of Baltimore School of Law.

At one point, the mentors congratulated a chubby 7th grader for his improved attendance and asked him to explain his success. The boy said his family couldn’t afford to pay for cable television any more. “I get bored so I do my homework and go to bed” instead of staying up late and missing school the next day, he added. What would he do if the family got cable again, Montgomery County judge Joan Ryon asked, hoping for lightning to strike. “I’d probably do the same thing again,” he said.

“Costs really matter,” Conley said when I told her the story. School and homework cost TV time, and that’s a price some kids won’t pay.

Who’s to Blame?

While the kids were telling me that truancy is a result of dysfunction in the schools, adults were telling me that it’s the result of dysfunction in the home. Both are probably right.

In late June, I sat in a Montgomery County courtroom, just outside Washington, D.C., as two criminal misdemeanor cases were called against three parents for failing to send their children to school. The first case was against 30-year-old Stephanie Terrell and Alexander Norris, who spoke up only to correct the court’s misimpression that he had fathered all eight of Terrell’s children or that he lived with the family. He did neither.

Attendance records showed that Terrell and Norris’s oldest child, a middle schooler, missed 14 percent of his school days in September 2009, 45 percent in October, 50 percent in November, and 71 percent in December. Four siblings did no better: two missed half of November, when the family was homeless; a third missed 44 percent; and a fourth missed 94 percent because he lacked immunizations.

Montgomery County had clearly tried to help. The schools scheduled parent-teacher conferences, home visits and, finally, three Truancy Review Board hearings, where a panel of school and social workers hoped to get Terrell and Norris to sign an attendance contract (the couple skipped two of the hearings). Social services found the family a seven-bedroom house, and produced a grant to send the children to summer camps so Terrell could attend a job-training program. “She really does want these children to go to school. She’s just overwhelmed,” Terrell’s lawyer told the judge.

Minutes later, the court called the case of Mayra Yesenia Argueta, a worried-looking woman, dressed for work, who explained that she awoke her 14-year-old daughter for school before hurrying off to her job. The state’s attorney said the girl didn’t show up.

Judge Stephen Johnson, visibly saddened by the Terrell-Norris case, admonished all three parents on the importance of education for their kids. “They need it as much as food and clothing,” he told Terrell and Norris, who—oh, the irony—works in an elementary school. But Johnson has few tools to deal with these parents, and he seemed to admit it.

He put Terrell and Norris on probation so the court can monitor their children’s school attenda nce. Court supervision is “a big stick…that’s all it is,” he told them. “Do the best you can,” he told Argueta, as he put her case on hold for six months while ordering her to see that her daughter attends summer school, the same girl who had failed to attend so much of the regular school year.

Truancy laws generally target parents because, the reasoning goes, they have violated the state’s attendance laws by not getting their kids to school. Educational neglect, the legal term in many jurisdictions, is a misdemeanor that generally carries the threat of jail time and a fine. But enforcement is typically lax: Washington, D.C., is one of only three or four cities with dedicated truancy patrols. Other jurisdictions depend on beat patrols or the occasional citywide sweep. Prosecutions are rare because schools see truancy as an issue for social services rather than the courts.

Under Maryland law, police can’t pick up truants, even to return them to school, because it is the parents who are committing the offense. Montgomery County counted 5,000 “habitual truants” between 2005 and 2010, but prosecuted the parents of just 55 of them. Sentences are minimal—10 days in jail and a $50 fine in Montgomery County—and penalties are seldom imposed. What judge is going to risk sending children into foster care while their mother cools her heels in jail?

The courts generally deal with the truants themselves only when children who already are under its jurisdiction fail to go to school: Attendance is usually a condition of probation for young offenders. The courts also can declare a child to be “in need of supervision” for missing school. But in inner cities, truancy takes a backseat to serious offenses. Some 3,752 juvenile cases were filed in D.C.’s family court in 2009, including four rapes and three armed robberies by children aged 10 to 12. The 135 child-in-need-of-supervision petitions seem almost trivial by comparison.

A few states that have aggressively enforced truancy laws have come to regret it. In 1995, Washington State passed a law that, among other things, required schools to file court actions when youngsters have seven unexcused absences in a month or 10 in a year. Students face up to seven days in juvenile hall and parents are subject to fines. The law overwhelmed the courts: 15,000 truants went to court in 2005. Lawmakers now are trying to amend the law to make truancy reporting discretionary.

School districts often have elaborate protocols for dealing with truancy. An automated call system in Fairfax County, Virginia, made 625,014 calls to parents about attendance issues between July and May, or almost four per Fairfax student. In D.C., an automated call notifies parents whose kids were absent that day and, for high schoolers, which class periods they missed. A teacher calls or sends a letter after a third unexcused absence. After the fifth absence, the school dispatches a certified letter asking for a parent conference.

After the 10th absence, the school attendance committee is convened to devise an intervention. After 20 absences, the city’s social-service agency is called in and, after 25 absences, the case is referred to family court. If the truancy patrol picks up a youngster, the process fast-forwards to the 5th day, the certified letter and parent conference.

But that all supposes that youngsters don’t erase telephone messages or destroy letters, and that they don’t slip out the back door of the school after attendance is taken. “It’s one thing to say we’re getting kids back in school; it’s another thing to know they’re back in class,” said Curtis Watkins, the director of LifeSTARTS, which works with youngsters in two Washington, D.C., middle schools. His counselors check classrooms three times a day to be sure that students who are targeted by the program are still in class.

It also supposes that parents want to and can get their children to school. Hedy Chang, who heads a research project called Attendance Counts, has calculated that children living in homes without enough food missed two days more than better-fed kids, children whose mothers are unemployed missed two more days than those whose moms had jobs, children whose mothers had less than a high-school education missed 1.5 more days, and those whose mothers are in poor health missed two days more.

Chang’s research was on kindergartners, but it would also seem to apply to older children. At the Francis Scott Key middle school meeting, the mentors told a 7th grader who had been tardy 58 times in three months that her attendance hadn’t improved enough for her to graduate from the program and receive the promised reward, an MP3 player. The girl shrank sullenly into her hooded sweatshirt and said she’d been “too tired” to come to school one day the previous week because she had had to watch a three-year-old niece who “screamed all night long.”

On other weeks, the girl had explained that another family had moved into the house and disrupted things, that she was tired because boys came around to visit her at night, and that her mother takes medication for a chronic illness and can’t awaken herself to get the girl off to school.

Truancy is never the problem, school staffers, social workers, prosecutors, and police officers told me over and over. Truancy is the symptom.

Promising Efforts

When Mel Riddile took over as principal of Fairfax County’s J. E. B. Stuart High School in 1997, he said, average daily attendance for the year was 89 percent, which means there were 19 absences per student. Within three years, Riddile says, average daily attendance was up to 96 percent. There were some easy victories: early on, Riddile linked a computer to Stuart’s phone system, which made autodial wake-up calls to youngsters with the worst attendance records. One youngster thanked him, Riddile said: No one had ever cared whether he came to school.

But mostly, cutting truancy was a hard slog. Some Stuart parents from Central America and the Middle East weren’t interested in having their daughters complete school. Teacher absenteeism was high, Riddile said, which seemed to some kids to validate their own absences (the daily absentee rate for teachers nationwide is about 5 percent, according to some studies, compared to about 1.7 percent for private-sector workers).

Riddile, now associate director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, held parent conferences aimed at forging “partnerships” with families. He referred 70 youngsters to court for child-in-need-of-supervision hearings: That was enough to jolt all but 12 into coming to school. And to avoid diffusing staff energy, he kept his focus on just two or three outcomes. They’re reflected in the name Riddile chose for his reform efforts: RAGS, for Reading Plus Attendance Means Better Grades and a Safer School.

The challenge is even harder in tumultuous inner-city schools, although no-excuses charters seem to be making headway. KIPP DC says that from 3 to 8 percent of the students in the five grade schools that it operated last year had 15 or more unexcused absences, the D.C. definition of truancy. KIPP operated just one high school, and it enrolled only 9th graders, which likely skewed the truancy rate downward compared to the city’s district schools. But KIPP also takes a tough stand. Parents and students sign an attendance contract during a lengthy home visit. Kids can be dropped from the rolls after 20 unexcused absences, and a handful have been, says Irene Holtzman, the director of accountability, although the school is “still willing to have a conversation” with youngsters who pile up more absences.

Sick days require a doctor’s note at KIPP. Social workers provide wake-up calls, go-to-bed calls, and bus passes, if necessary, as well as the occasional McDonald’s lunch as a reward for good attendance. “It’s helpful to frame expectations up front,” Holtzman adds.

What to Do?

A generation of school reforms has aimed at making school a place that youngsters should want to be. Districts are slowly breaking up megaschools and weeding out teachers—hopefully the yellers and those missing in action that Devora complains about. They’re adding dual-enrollment programs that allow high-school youngsters to take some college classes. A few are setting graduation requirements that are based on learning rather than “seat time,” and that could move youngsters through high school more quickly. Fairfax County, like many districts, no longer flunks a youngster for missing class if he otherwise earns a passing grade.

But critics also say that the No Child Left Behind focus on testing has narrowed and standardized curricula, and discouraged teachers from experimenting with lesson plans that do more than get kids past a test. Deci proposes a vast reform of all this reform in an effort to motivate kids. Abandon standardized testing and curricula to give teachers and students more autonomy, he says. Create more small schools where youngsters can develop relationships with teachers and peers. Individualize instruction so it accommodates youngsters who are behind and challenges those who want to race ahead.

Conley proposes finding out what kids feel they give up by being in school. “We can’t just tell them to go to school; we have to increase the costs of not going to school,” she says.

Those costs already seem extraordinarily high to taxpayers, employers, the police, the schools, social workers, college admissions officers, and most parents. Truancy seems a dumb choice and a lousy bargain to us. Still, on a spring afternoon at Starbucks, teenaged customers were sitting with me in the sun.

June Kronholz is a former foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and education reporter for the Wall Street Journal. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Meeting of the Minds

William Howell — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:02:58 +0000

Video: Marty West and Paul Peterson discuss the survey.

Complete survey results available here.

Democrats and Republicans in Washington, D.C., are more polarized today than they have been in nearly a century. And among the general public, party identification remains the single most powerful predictor of people’s opinions about a wide range of policy issues. Given this environment, reaching consensus on almost any issue of consequence would appear difficult. And when it comes to education policy, which does a particularly good job of stirring people’s passions, opportunities for advancing meaningful policy reform would appear entirely fleeting.

Against this backdrop, the results of the 2010 Education Next–Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) Survey are encouraging. With the exceptions of school spending and teacher tenure, the divisions between ordinary Democrats and Republicans on education policy matters are quite minor. To be sure, disagreements among Americans continue to linger. Indeed, with the exception of student and school accountability measures, Americans as a whole do not stand steadfastly behind any single reform proposal. Yet the most salient divisions appear to be within, not between, the political parties. And we find growing support for several strategies put forward in recent years by leaders of both political parties—most notably, online education and merit pay.

Nearly 2,800 respondents participated in the 2010 Education Next–PEPG Survey, which was administered in May and June of 2010 (see sidebar for survey methodology). In addition to a nationally representative sample of American adults, the survey included representative samples of two populations of special interest: 1) public school teachers and 2) adults living in neighborhoods in which one or more charter schools are located. With a large number of respondents, we were able, in many cases, to pose differently worded questions to two or more randomly chosen groups. In so doing, we were able to evaluate the extent to which expressed opinions change when a person is informed of certain facts, told about the president’s position on an issue, or simply asked about a topic in a different way.

Grading the Nation’s Schools

Americans today give the public schools as a whole poor marks. When asked to grade the nation’s schools on the same A to F scale traditionally used to evaluate students, only 18 percent of survey respondents give them an “A” or a “B.” This equals the percentage that awarded one of the top two grades in 2009, which had been the lowest level observed across the three years of our survey. More than one-quarter of respondents, meanwhile, continue to give the nation’s schools a “D” or an “F.” These sentiments are shared widely. Fewer than one-quarter of African Americans and Hispanics give the nation’s schools an “A” or “B,” as do just 18 percent of parents of school-aged children. Most telling, perhaps, only 28 percent of teachers give the nation’s schools an “A” or a “B,” while 55 percent give them a “C” and 17 percent a “D” or “F.”

However, as in the past, the public’s assessment of the local schools is far higher. No less than 65 percent of those surveyed are willing to give the school they identified as their local elementary school one of the two highest grades, and 55 percent are willing to give one of those grades to their local middle school. Only 6 percent assign their local elementary school a “D” or and “F,” while 12 percent assign those low grades to their local middle school.

School Spending and Teacher Salaries

Though evaluations of schools remain low, the public appears as willing as ever to support more spending on schools—until, that is, it becomes clear that their own community would foot the bill. In 2010, amid mounting national, state, and local deficits, 63 percent of the public favor an increase in “government funding for public schools in your district,” about the same level as in early 2008, just before the economic recession.

Public support for additional spending is more fragile than it appears, however. When asked whether “local taxes to fund public schools in your district should increase, decrease, or stay the same,” only 29 percent of the public favor an increase (see Figure 1a). Such strong resistance to local taxation suggests that any increases in school spending are likely to come, if at all, from higher levels of government.

Whether or not the public supports higher teacher salaries also depends on how the question is worded. When the survey asked whether teacher salaries should be increased, 59 percent of respondents favor the idea in 2010 (see Figure 1b), well below the 69 percent support observed in 2008. Support for increased teacher salaries falls sharply when respondents are first told the average annual salary of teachers in their state. Supplied with that information, only 42 percent favor a salary increase.

It should come as no surprise that teachers are more supportive of additional school spending. Seventy-two percent favor more spending if no mention is made of taxes, and 45 percent continue to favor spending more even if that means a local tax increase. Teachers are also far more likely to think that their salaries should increase. In 2010, 75 percent support the idea, regardless of whether they are informed of average state salary levels.

Support for Reform

The public’s willingness to consider alternatives to traditional public schools and traditional public-school practices has expanded in many, though not all, directions. The public remains friendly to school choice, but the kinds of choices it prefers are changing. Meanwhile, support for policies that base compensation on teacher performance has risen, but backing for other proposals to introduce standard business practices into the education sector has stayed about the same. The public’s long-standing support for school and student accountability measures remains high, though it is expressed in slightly more qualified terms than in the past.

School Choice

When it comes to school choice, charter schools and online education are “in,” while private school vouchers are “out.” The charter option is especially popular among minorities and parents in neighborhoo ds where charter schools are already present.

Charters. Charter schools have emerged as the most widely discussed alternative to traditional public schools. Initiated in 1991 by a Minnesota law allowing private non-profit entities to receive public funding to operate schools if authorized by a state agency, the idea has spread to more than 40 states, and some 1.5 million students today attend charter schools. Charters have been praised for opening the schoolhouse door to entrepreneurial, energetic teachers and leaders as well as for raising student achievement in high-need regions. But the practice of chartering has also been criticized for allowing low-quality schools to remain in operation and for siphoning resources away from district schools.

To see whether the presence of a charter school within a neighborhood is correlated with public opinion—either favorable or unfavorable—we surveyed a representative sample of residents living in zip codes in which at least one charter school is located. The presence of charter schools in the community has not gone unnoticed. Forty-eight percent of all adults—and 50 percent of parents of school-aged children—living in a neighborhood with at least one charter school were aware of that fact.

After describing a charter school in neutral language, the survey asked respondents if they favor or oppose “the formation of charter schools.” The survey also gave respondents the option of staying neutral by saying they neither favor nor oppose the policy. Those holding the neutral position declined from 44 percent to 36 percent between 2009 and 2010, likely reflecting the heightened attention to charter schools in national debates over education reform (see Figure 2). Among African Americans and Hispanics, indications that opinion has begun to solidify were even stronger: The portion of African Americans holding the neutral position crashed from 48 percent to 23 percent between 2008 and 2010. For Hispanics, the drop was from 46 percent to 33 percent. Similarly, only 27 percent of the parents who live in charter neighborhoods take the neutral position.

Support for charter schools has remained reasonably steady over the last several years. Between 2008 and 2009, the portion of the public saying they favor charters fell from 42 percent to 39 percent, but that trend reversed in the past year, putting charter support at 44 percent in 2010. Opposition to charters now stands at 19 percent, giving supporters a better than two-to-one advantage over opponents.

Within minority communities, however, support for charters appears to be rising. Among African Americans the portion who support charters grew from 42 percent to 49 percent between 2008 and 2009 and leapt to 64 percent in 2010, with only 14 percent expressing opposition. Among Hispanics, levels of support grew from 37 to 47 percent across the three annual surveys.

In communities where at least one charter school is located, overall levels of support are only somewhat higher: 48 percent of the public favor the formation of charters, while 20 percent are opposed. But fully 57 percent of the parents in communities with charter schools favor them, compared to 51 percent of parents nationwide (a group that includes some parents living in communities with a charter school presence).

Both proponents and critics have noted that charter schools are over-represented in communities with high concentrations of minorities, yet this fact alone does not explain the higher levels of support in areas with a charter school. Among residents of communities with a charter school, 63 percent of white parents express support for the idea, as compared with 50 percent of white parents nationally. These numbers may be encouraging, then, for those who hope that the gradual spread of charters will strengthen support for this reform strategy. However, our data do not tell us whether the charter presence is causing opinion to change or whether charters took root in these areas because of underlying public support for charter schools. What we can say with confidence is that the presence of charters—and the intense local debates it often generates—has not been sufficient to undermine popular support for this policy option.

Bucking all of these trends, teacher opposition to charters has intensified. Support for charters among public school teachers fell from 47 percent to 39 percent between 2008 and 2010, while opposition grew slightly from 33 percent to 36 percent. Once leaning toward charters, teacher opinion is now almost evenly divided between support and opposition.

Although overall public support for charters shows signs of solidifying, key facts about charters remain unknown. Only 18 percent of the public know that charters cannot hold religious services, 19 percent that they cannot charge tuition, 15 percent that students must be admitted by lottery (if the school is oversubscribed), and just 12 percent that, typically, charters receive less government funding per pupil than traditional public schools. In each instance, the remaining portions either answer the question incorrectly or, more often, confess that they simply don’t know.

In several respects, parents in communities with a charter presence are only marginally more knowledgeable than the public at large. However, 30 percent of parents are aware that charters cannot charge tuition, and 28 percent realize charters must use lotteries if oversubscribed. In other words, parents with a charter nearby appear better informed about the mechanics of enrolling a child but no more informed than the broader public about other regulations on charter practices.

Virtual education. Online learning is rapidly penetrating the higher education system, and, according to some estimates, more than 1 million high school and middle school students are also taking courses online. As these changes take place, online learning is growing more acceptable to the public at large. In 2009, 42 percent of the public said they thought high school students should receive credit for state-approved courses taken over the Internet. Within one year, that number jumped to 52 percent. Opposition meanwhile fell from 29 percent to 23 percent. One-quarter of the public express indifference (see Figure 3).

Support for online coursework by middle schoolers, though not as great as for high schoolers, also increased from 35 percent to 43 percent between 2009 and 2010. Still, the practice of online learning remains nascent. Less than one-tenth of those interviewed said they personally know any high school or middle school student who has taken a course online.

School vouchers. Compared to charter schools and online learning, private school vouchers have long been a more controversial feature of the school politics landscape. In recent years, voucher supporters have suffered political defeat at least as often as they have enjoyed success. A recent federal study of the much-watched voucher program in Washington, D.C., for example, showed that using a voucher boosted a student’s chances of graduating from high school. That positive development for voucher supporters, however, was offset by congressional action, supported by President Barack Obama, that shut down the program.

So even as support for charters and online learning has grown, the popularity of vouchers has slipped. When in 2007 we asked the public about a program that would “use government funds to help pay the tuition of low-income students…to attend private schools,” 45 percent favored the idea, but that number has steadily fallen in the three subsequent years. In 2010, only 31 percent express approval. Meanwhile, opposition has grown from 34 percent to 43 percent (see Figure 4).

Support for vouchers is greater within the African American and Hispanic communities, but declines are evident there as well. Sixty-eight percent of African Americans and 61 percent of Hispanics supported vouchers in 2007, but only 51 percent and 47 percent of the two groups, respectively, take a similar position in 2010.

Interestingly, support for vouchers is higher in communities where charter schools are located. Forty-six percent of the parents in these neighborhoods support vouchers, as do 40 percent of all residents. Again, however, our data do not tell us whether the charter presence has caused opinion to change or whether charters have simply located in areas that are more hospitable to school choice.

Tax credits. A number of states—Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, for example—provide tax credits for low-income families who send their children to private schools or to those who give to charities established for such purposes. Support for tax credits is much higher than for vouchers, especially if the question makes clear that credits may be used for school expenses at both public and private schools. Still, support for this policy has also lost ground in the past three years. In 2008, 64 percent of the public favored tax credits, whereas only 55 percent do so in 2010. Opposition has grown from 15 percent to 20 percent (see Figure 5).

The idea remains extremely popular among African Americans, however, with levels of support hovering around 70 percent during the last three years. Among Hispanics, support fell from 75 percent to 65 percent between 2008 and 2010.

Tax credits for donors to scholarship programs that help low-income students attend private schools garner twice as much support as opposition. Half the public support the idea, while only 22 percent oppose it. Support for this form of school choice is again greater in neighborhoods where charters are located, both among parents and the general public. And in contrast to other policies that would expand access to private schools, support for this idea increased modestly in the past year.

Teacher Policy and Teachers Unions

Public discussions of the best way to recruit, evaluate, and compensate teachers have proliferated of late, largely due to research demonstrating the importance of teacher quality for student achievement. But with one exception, public opinion on these issues has remained relatively stable.

Merit pay. That exception, paying teachers according to their classroom performance, received support from the Obama administration when it invited states to include this innovation in their proposals to obtain federal funds from its signature education reform initiative, Race to the Top.

To assess public support for this policy, commonly known as merit pay, the survey asked respondents in 2009 whether they favored “basing a teacher’s salary, in part, on students’ academic progress on state tests.” Only 27 percent opposed the idea, while 43 percent welcomed it. In 2010, support increased to 49 percent (see Figure 6), although one-quarter of the population continue to oppose the idea.

Teacher tenure. In February 2010, the superintendent of schools in Central Falls, Rhode Island, announced the dismissal of all teachers at her district’s high school on the grounds that the school was persistently underperforming. To the surprise of many, her actions received presidential approval. “If a school continues to fail its students year after year, if it doesn’t show signs of improvement, then there’s got to be a sense of accountability,” President Obama announced. “And that’s what happened in Rhode Island.” Eventually, the board and local teachers union reached a compromise, and media attention shifted to other topics.

Obama’s comments reflected the balance of opinion in the public at large. Opponents of the practice of offering tenure to public school teachers outnumber its supporters in 2010 by a margin of nearly two to one. Forty-seven percent of the public oppose teacher tenure, while only 25 percent are in favor (see Figure 6). Not surprisingly, the distribution of teacher opinion is almost exactly the opposite. The events in Rhode Island apparently were too isolated to alter national opinion on tenure policy, as responses remain essentially the same in 2010 as they had been one year earlier.

Teachers unions. Nor did public opinion concerning teachers unions change significantly, despite rising union opposition to many of the Obama administration’s education reform initiatives. Those who think unions have a “negative effect” on their local schools ticked upward from 31 percent to 33 percent between 2009 and 2010, while those who think unions have a “positive effect” remained unchanged at 28 percent. In both years, a plurality of roughly 40 percent took no position on the question.

Student and School Accountability

Few ideas are more popular than holding students accountable for their performance. In 2007, 85 percent of those interviewed said they thought students should be required to “pass an examination” in order to graduate from high school, as they are required to do “in some states.” In 2010, 76 percent of the public continue to express such sentiments. In both years, opposition hovered around 10 percent of the total. Support is high even among teachers, of whom 63 percent think students should be required to pass an exam to receive their degree.

Hardly less popular is the more stringent rule that students must pass a test before moving on to the next grade, as is currently required for 3rd graders in both Florida and New York City. Eighty-one percent supported that idea in 2007 and nearly the same percentage—79 percent—favor it in 2010. Again, in both years, opposition amounted to no more than 9 percent of the total. Teachers are nearly as likely to favor the idea, perhaps because it would help to ensure that their students are prepared for the material they are asked to impart.

It is surprising that an idea that is so popular does not find its way into the national political agenda. To be sure, there are some signs that the public’s appetite for student accountability measures may have waned somewhat. Overall levels of support have declined of late, and the percentage of Americans who profess to “strongly support” either of the proposals discussed above has dropped by even larger margins. More likely, though, elite politics are responsible for the exclusion of this policy reform from public debate. Teachers unions, which are core constituents of the Democratic Party, oppose these measures. And the Republican Party, with its historical support for local control, has thus far proved unwilling to step into the fray.

The nationwide practice of releasing to the public the average test scores for every school is slightly less popular than holding students accountable. The survey posed the question, “Do you support or oppose making available to the general public the average test scores of students at each public school?” In 2007, 60 percent voiced support, and 57 percent favor the practice in 2010. Opposition stood at 20 percent in both years. But only 45 percent of the teachers favor making this information available to the public. Clearly, school transparency is more popular with the public than with those who work inside the schools (see Figure 7).

Given the general level of support for student and school accountability, it is to be expected that the public supports those provisions of No Child Left Behind that require regular testing in grades 3 through 8 and once more in high school. When the survey asked whether respondents favor maintaining current federal testing requirements, 62 percent of the public say yes, though only 50 percent of teachers agree (see Figure 7). If the respondent is informed that President Obama proposed that these provisions be continued, support increases slightly to 66 percent of those surveyed (see Figure 8). If the president’s endorsement seems to have only slight general effect, it helps solidify support among a key constituency, as support among teachers moves decisively upward to 59 percent.

To further explore Obama’s capacity to shape public opinion, the survey asked half the respondents whether they favor “toughening” state standards used to evaluate student performance. Even with no mention of the president’s views, the idea appears to be popular, as 58 percent say they support the idea and only 15 percent oppose it. The support level is still higher among the half of the sample informed of Obama’s support for the proposal. Among this group, 65 percent support more rigorous standards.

Bipartisan Agenda?

A clear plurality, even a majority, of the American public support a wide range of policy innovations ranging from charter schools and tax credits to tougher standards, accountability measures, and merit pay for teachers. But pluralities and bare majorities are often not enough to alter public policy in a country where power is divided between two highly competitive and increasingly polarized political parties. If Republicans and Democrats disagree strongly on the options for school reform, changes are unlikely—despite clear signs that the public is concerned about the quality of public education.

To examine the extent to which self-identified Democrats and Republicans differ on education issues, we calculated the difference between the average position on key issues held by Democratic respondents and the position held by Republican respondents. On each issue, individual responses were placed on a 1–5 scale, ranging from “strongly oppose” (1) to “strongly support” (5). Figure 9 shows the extent to which Democrats, on average, differ from Republicans on a given issue. The longer the bar, the more polarized the party supporters. If the bar falls to the left side of zero, Democrats support the policy more than Republicans; if the bar falls to the right, Republicans support the policy more than Democrats.

Overall, there appears to be far less polarization between the parties than might be expected. On questions concerning their overall assessment of the nation’s schools, student and school accountability, and even the creation of charter schools, the distance between the parties amounted to less than 0.2 points on the 5-point scale. In the case of accountability measures, the combination of strong overall support and minimal partisan conflict suggests that such policies will continue to be central to the nation’s education reform agenda. In the case of charter schools, for which overall support is more mixed, it appears that the important divisions in public opinion are within rather than between the nation’s major political parties.

The divergence between the parties is slightly larger on school vouchers and tax credits for education expenses, at 0.22 and 0.25, respectively. But in contrast to the patterns observed among elected officials, ordinary Democrats are somewhat more supportive than Republicans of these policies, in part due to the strong support for private school choice within the heavily Democratic minority community. Thirty-five percent of Democrats express support for vouchers, compared to 30 percent of Republicans. And Democrats are more likely than Republicans to support tax credits by a 60 percent to 53 percent margin.

The key exceptions to the general story of cross-party agreement involve school spending, teacher tenure, and the influence of teachers unions. Democrats are more supportive than Republicans of increasing teacher salaries and especially overall school spending, for which the difference in average positions is larger than 0.5 on the 5-point scale. Fully 70 percent of Democrats support increased spending if no mention is made of taxes, compared to only 40 percent of Republicans. The differences on teacher tenure policy are even larger, as 62 percent of Republicans but only 34 percent of Democrats altogether oppose the practice. Most strikingly, Democrats have a far more sanguine view of the influence of teachers unions on their community’s schools: 39 percent consider them to have a positive effect, while only 19 percent see their effect as negative. Among Republicans, only 17 percent believe that teachers unions have a positive effect, and 50 percent believe they have a negative effect.

President as Opinion Maker

Our data do not allow us to identify all the factors that are reshaping public opinion. But inasmuch as the president of the United States has the largest “bully pulpit” and is in the best position to set the public agenda, it is reasonable to suppose that the Obama administration has contributed to some of the changes in opinion reported above.

At the same time, the president’s persuasiveness is likely to depend on his popularity with the general public. To investigate this possibility, we asked parallel sets of questions in March 2009, when President Obama was at the peak of his popularity, and in May 2010, when his approval ratings had fallen below 50 percent. On both occasions, one-half of respondents were asked their opinion on several issues only after being told the president’s position, while the other randomly chosen half were asked the question outright.

In early 2009, exposure to the president’s views had the effect of shifting public opinion in the direction of the president’s by 13 percentage points on merit pay and 11 percentage points on charters and vouchers (see Figure 8). Sizable increases were observed for both Democrats and Republicans. But one year later, Obama’s influence foundered. In the summer of 2010, public support for merit pay actually decreased by 1 percentage point when respondents were told that the president favored the idea. Among Democrats, knowing the president’s position increased support by 8 percentage points, enough to bring the share in favor of merit pay to 53 percent. Among Republicans, however, being told of the president’s position reduced support for merit pay by 12 percentage points, from 55 to 43 percent. Public opinion on maintaining federal testing requirements shifted in the president’s direction by only 4 percentage points when respondents were told of his position, with support falling by 1 percentage point among Republicans and increasing by 6 percentage points among Democrats. Finally, when respondents were told that the president opposed vouchers, public support fell by only 5 percentage points—less than half the decline observed on the same issue in 2009 (see Figure 8).

These experimental data suggest that by 2010 President Obama wielded few of the persuasive powers he brandished during the honeymoon months of his presidency. It is possible, though, that his influence in 2009 was put to good use. Between 2009 and 2010, public opinion on merit pay, charter schools, and vouchers all shifted closer to the president’s position. The public became 6 percentage points more supportive of merit pay, 5 percentage points more supportive of charter schools, and 4 points less favorable to vouchers. Of course, these data do not establish that presidential appeals are responsible for these changes in public opinion. The president, after all, is hardly the only opinion maker in society. But if opinion reflects the cross-currents of conversations taking place in a society, then the holder of the nation’s highest office may be able to alter opinion on the issues of the day, at least at those moments when presidential popularity is high.

Conclusions

Democrats and Republicans are at each other’s throats in the nation’s capital. On cable news and talk radio, the Left rants about the Right, and vice versa. More than any time in recent memory, American politics is defined by hectoring, sniping, and bullying. For those fond of democratic deliberation and consensus building, these are unhappy times.

The results of the 2010 Education Next–PEPG Survey, however, suggest that the public does not necessarily subscribe to all the positions taken by the most vocal elements in our society. Indeed, our results suggest the possibility of advancing meaningful policy reform. The American public shows growing support for online learning and merit pay for teachers and continued support for accountability, standards, testing, and charter schools—education innovations that have been endorsed by leaders in both major parties. No less important is the fact that opinion on many key education issues does not polarize the public along partisan lines. Moreover, we find suggestive evidence that while the current president’s persuasive powers may have waned, they appear to have had an impact.

Clearly, we mustn’t get carried away. With the exception of student accountability measures, no single policy reform garners the support of huge swaths of the American public. But taken as a whole, the results from this year’s Education Next–PEPG survey are cause for some optimism among school reformers. With appropriate leadership, a bipartisan majority may yet rally in support of a significant school reform package.

William G. Howell is professor of American politics at the University of Chicago. Paul E. Peterson is professor of government at Harvard University. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Survey Methods

The 2010 Education Next–PEPG Survey of Public Opinion was conducted by the polling firm Knowledge Networks (KN) between May 11 and June 8, 2010. KN maintains a nationally representative panel of adults, obtained via list-assisted random digit–dialing sampling techniques, who agree to participate in a limited number of online surveys. Detailed information about the maintenance of the KN panel, the protocols used to administer surveys, and the comparability of online and telephone surveys is available online at
www.knowledgenetworks.com/quality/.

The main findings from the Education Next–PEPG survey reported in this essay are based on a nationally representative stratified sample of 1,184 adults (age 18 years and older) and oversamples of 684 public school teachers and 908 residents of zip codes in which a charter school was located during the 2009–10 school year. The total sample of 2,776 adults consists of 2,038 non-Hispanic whites, 280 non-Hispanic blacks, 263 Hispanics, and 195 individuals identifying with another or multiple racial or ethnic groups.

In general, survey responses based on larger numbers of observations are more precise, that is, less prone to sampling variance than those made across groups with fewer numbers of observations. As a consequence, answers attributed to the national population are more precisely estimated than are those attributed to subgroups. With 2,776 total respondents, the margin of error for responses given by the full sample in the Education Next–PEPG survey is 1.86 percentage points for questions on which opinion is evenly split.

On many items, we conducted survey experiments to examine the effect of variations in the way questions are posed. The figures and online tables present separately the results for the different experimental conditions.

Percentages reported in the figures and online tables do not always add precisely to 100 as a result of rounding to the nearest percentage point.

Advocating for Arts in the Classroom

Mark Bauerlein — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:19:16 +0000

Every chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts must advocate for arts education. The arts need a voice in power, say people in the field, someone in the corridors of influence to argue the benefits of teaching the nation’s students about classical and jazz music, ballet, and sculpture. With No Child Left Behind (NCLB) emphasizing math and reading, business and manufacturing leaders calling for workplace readiness in our graduates, and politicians citing lagging international competitiveness in science and math, the Arts Endowment chairman must utilize the bully pulpit more than ever before. Dance, music, theater, and visual arts show up ever further down the priority ladder, and arts educators feel that they must fight to maintain even a toehold in the curriculum. The Arts Endowment chairman, they insist, must help.

It is no surprise, then, that in a November 2009 profile in the Wall Street Journal, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts Rocco Landesman offers pointed remarks when arts education comes up. Examine closely what he singles out about the field:

When [Landesman] starts talking about his ideas for integrating the arts in education, his rhetoric becomes less bipartisan: “We’re going to try to move forward all the kids who were left behind by ‘No Child Left Behind’—the kids who have talent or a passion or an idiosyncratic perspective. Those kids are important too and they should have a place in society. It’s very often the arts that catches them.”

The emphasis falls on the unusual student, the difficult kid, not on the arts as a subject for study. Landesman doesn’t defend arts education as a rigorous discipline that builds concentration and requires practice, practice, practice. Nor does he say, We need arts education to keep alive the legacy of American art—Thomas Cole, Martha Graham, Duke Ellington… He doesn’t highlight the provocative stuff with something like, We need arts education to train young people to comprehend innovative, boundary-breaking art. Instead, the purpose is salvation. Some students don’t fit the NCLB regime and other subjects don’t inspire them. Talented but offbeat, they sulk through algebra, act up in the cafeteria, and drop out of school. The arts “catch” them and pull them back, turning a sinking ego on the margins into a creative citizen with “a place in society.”

Saving Kids with Art

To educators outside the arts field, it sounds like an odd approach to a school subject. If you want to advocate a field, you have to justify it as a discipline. It has to form a body of knowledge and skills that students study at least partly for its own sake. In the case of the arts, a graduated curriculum would incorporate technical skills and art history and theory, just as English language arts integrate literacy skills and the lineages of English, American, and world literatures. Yes, arts learning may have social and moral and professional benefits, but if people don’t value the materials of the fields themselves—if they can’t say that if High School X doesn’t acquaint students with Renaissance painting, classical music, and modern dance, its graduates will be undereducated—then arts educators lose in the competition for funds and hours in the day. Arts education remains an extracurricular, and school administrators focused on math and reading can push it aside: The arts are fine, so let kids who are interested in them study in an afterschool program like band practice.

The arts-saves-kids rationale crops up frequently near the centers of political power. I heard it repeated time and again while working on arts education policy at the Arts Endowment from 2003 to 2005. In gatherings such as the thrice-yearly meetings hosted by the Arts Education Partnership (AEP), a venture funded by the Arts Endowment and the U.S. Department of Education, arts education directors at state arts councils, officers at foundations, community arts school leaders, and various education-school professors outlined programs and research that related arts in classrooms directly to students in classrooms, especially to low-income, minority, at-risk, and underserved populations. Participants tended not to be classroom teachers, but to come from a network of public agencies, nonprofits, and academic centers, such as the Arts in Education Program at Harvard University. Their job was promotion, not instruction, their audience funders and politicians and school administrators, not students. They didn’t talk much about the arts canon (Shakespeare, Beethoven, etc.) or the interpretation of forms and contents (how to understand ancient tragedy, modern dance, etc.). Nor did they offer practical strategies for teachers and administrators who want to maintain the arts but face budget cuts and faceless bureaucracies. Instead, they talked about where to find money, how to build alliances, react to new policies, and firm up political support. And their preferred mode of vindication was to cast arts education as an agent of social change and individual transformation. As Dick Deasy, director of the Partnership (who retired in 2008), liked to say, “Teachers don’t teach a subject—they teach kids.”

In 2004, for instance, the Arts Endowment sponsored a summer institute organized by the Ohio Arts Council in Dayton. The stated aim was to bring educators from around the state together to hear about ways of strengthening arts curricula in schools. The headline speaker the first day was Harvard professor Jessica Hoffman Davis, who gave a rousing summary of what arts learning does for kids, stating at one point that the arts, among other things, allow schools to get away from letter grades. In the breakout sessions, participants had a common reply: “That was great, but we already believe in the arts. We need to find more classrooms, more resources, more money!”

In such discussions, the social dimension, the salvation purpose, overrode more mundane concerns. In a plenary session of the September 2003 AEP forum at Lincoln Center in New York, Kurt Wootton of Brown University offered a representative vignette in histrionic detail. After asking everybody in the room to say hello to people sitting nearby and to explain why they were there, he illustrated why the arts are “uniquely positioned to create social opportunities for learning.” (The address is reproduced on AEP’s web site in You Want to Be a Part of Everything: The Arts, Community, and Learning.) His proof came in the form of the story of Carlos, “a real gangster.” According to one of his teachers, Carlos was “the bad boy of the neighborhood,” a tough kid who “didn’t take s— from anyone.” He spent his first two years of high school on suspension, in detention, and now and then in class. Teachers dreaded his presence and administrators threw up their hands.

But in English class, something special happened. Carlos read at a 5th-grade level, but in discussions of Othello and Of Mice and Men, “he always had something interesting, and more often comical, to add to the class.” As the year progressed, his commitment did, too. With the help of a visiting theater artist, the students began to design and rehearse a pastiche of scenes from works they had read along with accounts from their own lives. The year would culminate in a schoolwide performance.

After three weeks of rehearsals, the teacher realized, Carlos had not missed a single session. Amazing, but even more so was what the teacher noticed later that day on the school’s daily attendance sheet. At the top of the “out of school suspension” list stood Carlos’s name! He had been kicked out of school for 10 days and had already served 7. And yet, his theater attendance was perfect. Carlos was sneaking back into school for theater.

When Wootten finished Carlos’s story, the room erupted in applause. It had all the ingredients of arts education advocacy and some enticing rebelliousness as well: a caring teacher who doesn’t give up on sliding students, a bad kid with a heart and a brain, a visiting artist in a tough school, and a minority group member defying administrative powers for love of theater.

One can appreciate the motivation that theater inspired in the young man, but the story had some dark undertones unrecognized in the speech. I asked one man who had to deal often with school administrators about what a principal would say. He shook his head and replied, “If a principal suspended a student, he did so for a pretty good reason, and if he knew that the kid was sneaking back onto the grounds, he’d be furious.”

One could hardly imagine the story stirring teachers in other fields, either, for it didn’t validate the arts as an academic discipline. A history teacher might respond, “You think the arts are more ‘motivational’ than history?” A math teacher might say, “Getting an ‘A’ on an algebra final raises self-esteem just as much as doing a self-portrait in art class.” If arts advocates instead emphasize the material—Shakespeare, major and minor chords, etc.—other teachers might show respect for their position, even if only to avoid appearing anti-art or anti-intellectual.

But such tactics don’t obtain at AEP or similar meetings. Turnaround tales and the like carry too much emotional freight to be displaced by talk of art history. Perhaps those engaged in arts ed lobbying believe that class- and race-based melodramas best sway elected officials and philanthropic organizations. Or perhaps they genuinely find the social and personal benefits of arts instruction more compelling than the arts themselves.

Arts as Discipline

When Dana Gioia took control of the Arts Endowment in January 2003, he didn’t share the arts-as-salvation outlook. One of the first things he told his education staff was of his preference for the Core Knowledge curriculum. While he believed that arts education enriches young people’s minds and transforms their lives, he felt that arts education had the strongest impact when students encountered lasting works of force and beauty. Students needed to experience great art—classic and contemporary—to acquire a solid foundation for their own general education and creativity. Otherwise, arts education would remain a sidelight in the curriculum, marginal and ineffective. How to impart the importance of artistic tradition without estranging arts ed advocates?

Gioia launched two reforms. First, he asked David Steiner, whom he hired to direct the Office of Arts Education, and me to review grant guidelines and suggest ways to strengthen their content requirements. We came up with a simple, but far-reaching stipulation: applicants for arts education grants had to align their programs with national or state standards and evaluate student learning by them. Awards to “Learning in the Arts for Children and Youth” must “apply national or state arts education standards,” we insisted, and “Students will be assessed according to national or state arts education standards.”

This created a challenge for arts organizations applying for Arts Endowment awards. Many of them had evaluation plans already in place, but those usually amounted to questionnaires issued to students at the end of the program that measured their attitudes and enjoyment. Or, they involved observations by evaluators who measured participation—for instance, how many kids talked in class. They did not focus on learning outcomes. From now on, they’d have to.

Arts advocates didn’t protest the change, in part because the field had already embraced outcome measures: the National Standards for Arts Education. The project was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Endowment for the Humanities; a consortium of arts teacher organizations developed comprehensive standards for dance, theater, music, and the visual arts. Significantly, the designers weren’t primarily engaged in advocacy and fundraising. The final version appeared in 1994, and ever since it has garnered solid esteem, even though its premises run against the child-centered dramaturgy described above. Above all, arts educators wanted to establish strong disciplinary standards for their respective fields, both to regularize arts instruction across the country and to win higher recognition for the fields in the overall curriculum. Wisely, the designers insisted on the fundamental place of art history in the document. “In this document,” they wrote, “art means two things: (1) creative works and the process of producing them, and (2) the whole body of work in the art forms that make up the entire human intellectual and cultural heritage.” They define a “good education in the arts” as including “a thorough grounding in a basic body of knowledge.”

Furthermore, the standards “help ensure that the study of the arts is disciplined and well focused,” and that “arts instruction has a point of reference for assessing its results.” Assessments in the document follow not from social and personal impact, but from knowledge and skills. For instance, dance standards for grades 9–12 include this skill test: “Students choreograph a duet demonstrating an understanding of choreographic principles, processes, and structures”; and this content test: “Students create and answer twenty-five questions about dance and dancers prior to the twentieth century.” Music 9–12 includes this one: “Students classify by genre or style and by historical period or culture unfamiliar but representative aural examples of music and explain the reasoning behind their classifications.”

Gioia’s other reform was to develop separate arts education initiatives based squarely on art historical content. These programs were a primary instrument for building congressional consensus on Arts Endowment funding overall:

• Shakespeare in American Communities—tours by theatrical companies to smaller towns and thousands of schools across the United States to give performances of Shakespeare plays and run workshops for students. The program included a toolkit for English and theater teachers that contained educational materials; by 2008, the toolkit had been delivered to teachers of more than 24 million students.

• American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius—a multidimensional program providing, among other things, educational materials to schools on the high-culture heritage of American art.

• Poetry Out Loud—modeled on the National Spelling Bee, a competition at the school, state, and national levels for high-school students, who memorize and recite a poem selected from a list of works both contemporary and classic, John Donne to Allen Ginsberg. Winners receive college scholarships and cash prizes for their schools’ libraries. In 2008, 250,000 students participated, and media coverage included a front-page story in USA Today and a segment on CBS News Sunday Morning.

The content of art and artistic tradition was at the center of each initiative. When Gioia first unveiled Poetry Out Loud, some state arts officers protested because it didn’t allow students to present their own compositions. Gioia’s reply was, in effect, “That isn’t what the competition is about.” With this particular effort, he wanted to encourage more reading of great poems, not more writing of adolescent verse.

Other figures in the arts education network considered Gioia’s programs tame and conservative, a Bush administration retreat from edgy and provocative art. On PBS NewsHour, for instance, after Gioia cited the Shakespeare initiative, interviewer Jeffrey Brown remarked, “Of course, for some people, though, this is the essence of ‘safe.’ Shakespeare? Who’s against Shakespeare?”

Gioia’s sage reply hinted at the social benefits of art while still honoring the art itself: “I could come up with 100 adjectives for Shakespeare before ‘safe’ would be the one I would offer [Regan and Goneril safe? The climax of Hamlet?]…. I was in a production in New York and we had all these New York insider theater people as half the audience and then in came 50 kids from the South Bronx. They were seeing Richard III. This production alarmed, excited. It was provocative. It wasn’t safe. It opened up possibilities in life and imagination to these kids that they weren’t getting otherwise.”

It helped, too, that the initiative gave 2,000 actors in 77 theater companies employment, and that Gioia was able to fund the Shakespeare project without taking any funds away from existing theater grant categories. Moreover, the Arts Endowment’s allocation from Congress grew steadily, jumping $20 million from 2007 to 2008 alone. Even if they bristled at the high-art, standards-based nature of Gioia’s approach, arts education advocates had to appreciate the resources he steered their way.

Beyond the Divide

For all the talk about why the arts are important and how they must be funded, the most successful support tactic I have encountered came from an actor/director in Los Angeles, Pierson Blaetz, co-director of Greenway Arts Alliance. The Greenway Arts Alliance runs a theater on the grounds of Fairfax High School, a large public school in the middle of West Hollywood. Living in the neighborhood during the’90s, Blaetz and co-founder Whitney Weston became interested in bringing more arts to students, but had to figure a way to provide the two necessities, space and money.

The project was an ingenious act of entrepreneurship. Blaetz and Weston surveyed the Fairfax High School campus and saw hidden value. First, they spotted an unused, roomy student social hall that lay separate from the main buildings and could serve as a venue for practice and performances. Second, they noted that the campus had an asset that was not in use on weekends: land. Fairfax High sits on expensive real estate right next to the L.A. Farmers Market. On Saturdays, while locals and tourists flooded the market, Blaetz noticed, acres of Fairfax High sat quiet and empty. What if, they proposed to school administrators, they leased and renovated the student hall and ran a weekend flea market at the school? They would charge a small admission fee, have merchants pay for spaces, let students work it, and pass the proceeds to the school. In return, Fairfax High would integrate Greenway into the curriculum and support its professional activities.

Administrators agreed, and now the Melrose Trading Post opens every Sunday in the Fairfax High parking lot with as many as 4,000 customers browsing some 200 stalls filled with antiques and collectibles. Meanwhile, students take courses at Greenway in drama, dance, and film, including theater classes for low-skilled 9th- and 10th-grade readers. Students also join Greenway in various productions after school, and their weekly Poetry Lounge is one of the most popular slam events in the country. While Greenway’s curriculum emphasizes its work with “at-risk high school students” and the power of the arts to “motivate youth” and impart “essential life skills,” it also aims at “skills, knowledge, and/or understanding of the arts consistent with national and state arts education standards.” In other words, while nodding to the social benefits of the program, Greenway recognizes the bottom line: demonstrated learning of the art, history, and practice of theater itself.

The Greenway Arts Alliance is an obvious model for arts education. Greenway has received support from public agencies, including the National Endowment for the Arts and the City of Los Angeles, but it has staked its continuance year-to-year on private enterprise. The program has thrived for years, and Fairfax High principal Ed Zubiate couldn’t be happier. Money comes in each week, affording the school needed resources, while the Fairfax curriculum expands nicely into the arts. In addition, 15 students have paid employment at the Melrose Trading Post each semester, and adults in the area with no connection to the school visit the grounds to attend performances (thus enhancing the school’s community profile). The relationship is symbiotic, not one of arts educators beseeching a few crumbs and class minutes.

Blaetz says that there are thousands of schools across the country ready for the same kind of creative economizing. A school might run a small farm that teaches students ecology and agriculture—and sells produce on weekends. The strategy transcends arts education and poses a logistical question about all schools. Why are they sitting on underused resources year after year, while scrambling to fund the arts and other programs?

When I shared Blaetz’s story with arts education advocates, not one of them followed up. I mentioned it to several attendees at AEP meetings and received blank glances in return. I’m not sure why, but I can guess. The people I encountered prosecute their mission by appealing directly to federal, state, and local governments and to nonprofit foundations for help. Blaetz went first to the free market. That approach is simply foreign to the network of arts ed folks hovering around public agencies and philanthropic groups.

That’s too bad, because what arts education needs in a time of fiscal crises are fewer advocates and more entrepreneurs.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

Toothless Reform?

Andy Smarick — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:08:45 +0000

Video: Andy Smarick talks with Education Next
Podcast: Andy Smarick and Joe Williams

To many education reformers, the passage of the federal government’s massive stimulus plan, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), appeared to be a final bright star falling into alignment.

For years, consensus had been building across the political spectrum that the nation’s schools, especially those in urban America, were in urgent need of fundamental change. The election of reform-friendly Democrat Barack Obama presented the opportunity for K–12’s Nixon-goes-to-China moment. The subsequent selection of Arne Duncan, the battle-tested former Chicago schools chief, as secretary of education provided a trusted, steady hand to lead the charge and take the flak.

The ARRA seemed to complete the constellation: an astounding $100 billion of new federal funds—nearly twice the annual budget of the U.S. Department of Education—to jump-start and sustain the improvement of America’s schools. When Duncan expressed his intention to make the very most of this once-in-a-lifetime “moon shot,” some advocates eagerly prophesied an epochal shift for reform.

The ARRA’s results to date, however, have been soberingly quotidian. So far, the vast majority of its funds have served to sustain the status quo, funding the most traditional line items and actually helping schools and districts go about their everyday business. With one notable exception (spurring long overdue changes in some state laws), the implementation of this mammoth statute has confirmed several humbling, hoary lessons of federal policymaking, including the limited ability of Uncle Sam to drive education reform.

Though deflating (not to mention terribly expensive), these bumps and bruises, if taken to heart, could help build a better understanding of the federal government’s inherent strengths and weaknesses in K–12 education policy, a particularly valuable exercise as NCLB reauthorization looms. As important, they could still have a critical influence on the ARRA itself—helping to salvage its crown jewel of reform, the vaunted Race to the Top (RTTT).

Easy Money

The ARRA was crafted during the darkest stage of the recession and signed into law in February 2009. To help revive the nation’s flagging economy, Congress and the administration were determined to have funds enter the financial bloodstreams of states and districts as quickly as possible. So about $75 billion of the $80 billion the law designated for K–12 schools was funneled through formula-based programs, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and Title I, two of the nation’s oldest and most familiar federal education funding streams. Simply by virtue of having students, states and districts would begin receiving funds. No grant competitions, no long, complicated applications, no review teams with complex scoring rubrics.

The lion’s share of these ARRA education dollars was appropriated through the new $50 billion State Fiscal Stabilization Fund (SFSF), a population-based program created to expeditiously replenish education budgets decimated by declining tax revenue.

Despite the priority placed on getting lots of money out on the double, some policymakers were determined to see that these funds were also well spent. So the legislation required that, in advance of receiving their SFSF allocations, governors sign “assurances,” statements promising that their states were taking action to improve teacher quality, develop better data systems, enhance standards and assessments, and address low-performing schools. Duncan went even further, repeatedly telling state leaders that these formula dollars had to be used to improve student learning and innovate, not merely fund more of the same.

States that spent the funds unwisely, the secretary warned in March 2009, would seriously compromise their ability to vie for the $5 billion of ARRA competitive grants. “States that are simply investing in the status quo will put themselves at a tremendous competitive disadvantage for getting those additional funds,” Duncan said. “I can’t emphasize strongly enough how important it is for states and districts to think very creatively and to think very differently about how they use this first set of money.” The department also took the unusual step of creating a document for state and district leaders that explained how these funds could be used in reform-oriented ways.

Had everything gone according to Hoyle, this massive infusion of federal funds would have protected state and district education budgets from major cuts while advancing invaluable reforms by supporting new, innovative, and promising programs. But as is often the case in education policy, the best laid plans of Uncle Sam went awry.

Reality Check

In a July 2009 report to Congress, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that SFSF dollars were being used to protect the status quo. After studying a sample of 16 states and select jurisdictions within them, GAO reported that federal funds were in fact being used for “retaining staff and current education programs.” Instead of advancing important reforms, states and districts were addressing a “more pressing” matter—their fiscal needs. In discussions with district leaders, GAO found that “most did not indicate that they would use [SFSF] funds to pursue educational reforms”; instead, they wanted to fill their existing budget holes. For example, officials in Flint, Michigan, decided to use SFSF funds to “cope with budget deficits rather than to advance programs.” Miami-Dade planned to save 2,000 teaching jobs; Richmond County in Georgia funded teachers, paraprofessionals, media specialists, and other existing positions.

Then, in an August report that the Washington Post referred to as a “reality check,” the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) also found that funding was being used to protect jobs and programs. The survey of administrators reported that most of the funds were merely repairing budget holes and that little if any reform was being accomplished. “Everybody appreciated getting the money,” the association’s executive director told the Christian Science Monitor, “but primarily all the money did was help to backfill the budget deficits they were already facing.”

The single-minded focus on jobs and the status quo was confirmed by hard numbers. In September, the U.S. economy lost 190,000 jobs, but the education sector gained nearly 11,000 jobs. In October, the Obama administration announced that more than half of the 640,000 jobs created or saved across the entire economy by the ARRA were in education. In November, after studying states’ quarterly stimulus reports, Education Week found that 96 percent of the ARRA education funds spent to that point had been “focused on creating and saving jobs.”

How did one of the ARRA’s education goals (reform) get completely displaced by the other (job and program preservation)? The answer can be found in two sets of factors, one mostly economic and beyond the federal government’s control but the other legislative and fully within it. Combined, they offer an unmistakable overarching lesson: local dynamics, not the will of Washington, determine the pace and scope of education reform.

Survival Instincts

The greatest confounding factor was the severity and duration of the nation’s financial decline. Revised 2009 figures indicated that the U.S. economy had contracted twice as much as previously estimated, amounting to the largest downturn since the Great Depression. Nationwide, unemployment topped 10 percent in October, considerably higher than most experts had anticipated.

State budgets were drastically affected. California famously faced a $26 billion shortfall, but many other states, including Ohio and Illinois, confronted multibillion-dollar deficits as well. A University of Denver study declared that Colorado’s government had been hit by a “budgetary tsunami.” The chair of Alabama’s finance committee called the state’s financial crisis “worse by far than we’ve ever seen it.” One estimate predicted that, were the recession to end in 2009, the states would still have combined deficits of $230 billion, comparable to the entire gross domestic product of Singapore.

Regrettably, but predictably, education systems went into self-preservation mode. Part of the explanation can be found in districts’ DNA. Local education systems, particularly the largest urban districts, are infamously Byzantine, change-averse organizations. They are also generally among their communities’ largest employers. Notably, both the GAO and AASA studies reported that local school officials felt compelled to disregard the calls for reform given “the realities of strained federal, state, and local budgets,” and the resulting likelihood of layoffs and other cuts.

External forces exacerbated these internal tendencies. In some cases, unions pressured policymakers to direct funds toward job protection. The California Teachers Association organized a “Pink Friday” rally to protest pink slips and furloughs. In Michigan, a local union sued a district over layoffs. Some in Montana sought to use stimulus funds to shore up teacher pensions, and the Utah Education Association ran television ads urging legislators to dedicate ARRA dollars to restoring education programs.

As a number of commentators have noted, the economic downturn offered school systems the opportunity to alter expensive, outdated practices such as strict salary schedules, protective tenure rules, and bloated pension programs. Though sensible in theory, this was probably wishful thinking when applied to the often confounding realities of K–12 politics and policy. Indeed, Kevin Carey, of the Washington-based think tank Education Sector, has written that there is no evidence that districts “implement a whole suite of needed reforms” in response to recessions.

Carey’s argument is strongly supported by recent events. In instances where stimulus funds failed to fill budget holes completely, states and districts generally did not blaze a trail for reform, instead opting for temporary, shortsighted cuts designed to help them hunker down and ride out the current storm. A number of states instituted flat reductions in district aid, while others made across-the-board cuts to programs. California’s Saddleback Valley district cut athletic programs, while districts from Houston to Boston to Atlanta slashed bus service. Seattle-area schools eliminated groundskeeper positions, Prince George’s County in Maryland cut “parent liaisons,” and Illinois reduced spending on bilingual and early-childhood programs. There was a nationwide trend in summer-school reductions, and Hawaii cut school days. Lake Washington School District in Washington had teachers remove microwaves from their rooms to reduce energy bills. In total, it appears that when education budgets wane, schools’ survival instincts, not their reform inclinations, kick in.

Policy Matters

Though the course of the recession, local political dynamics, and district preferences were beyond the reach of federal policymakers; the contours and implementation of the ARRA were not. They could have factored in these considerations to craft and administer a plan more likely to bring about reform. Astonishingly, however, the legislative language and departmental pronouncements enabled—actually, all but guaranteed—this $75 billion investment in the status quo.

While the use of formula-based programs certainly facilitated the speedy distribution of funds, it also set the stage for conventional spending patterns. In the case of Title I and IDEA, states were provided grants under their existing program agreements, meaning the federal government provided billions without extracting new reform promises.

Guidelines made clear that these funds had to be used in ways consistent with long-established program requirements. But over decades, tens of billions of dollars have flowed through these programs, failing to generate the improvements needed. Instead of tying new dollars to specific reform-oriented strategies, the law required that they fund more of the same.

Even more trouble was embedded in the SFSF. The law stipulated that states first use their allotments to fill budget holes and, instead of giving states the opportunity to reconsider their allocation of resources, it mandated that they use their existing funding formulas. So, rather than requiring or even encouraging state leaders to use this $50 billion investment to pursue new projects and ways of thinking, the ARRA prioritized preservation of the current order.

If dollars remained after budget holes had been filled, states were not allowed to invest them in new reform initiatives; they had to distribute what was left to the districts by formula. Districts then had nearly unfettered control over how these funds were spent; activities merely had to comport with four major federal education statutes, including the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—laws that, despite many years and billions invested, hadn’t adequately improved our schools.

Congressional leaders could have empowered governors, often among the nation’s leading education reformers, to direct how portions of these funds were used. Instead, federal guidance made clear that governors and state superintendents were prohibited from doing so.

Finally, meaningful federal oversight was lacking. States were not required to provide advance details of how dollars would be spent. The applications approved by the department are staggeringly devoid of specifics. While governors had to sign a form committing their states to pursuing four general areas of reform, these assurances carried little weight. States could receive their first allotments without explaining how the funds would actually be spent, and, amazingly, states could receive their second allotments even if they hadn’t followed through on their promises. In an April 2009 letter to governors, Secretary Duncan wrote, “States are not required to demonstrate progress in order to get phase two Stabilization funds. We are only asking…that states have in place systems to report on final metrics that are developed through rulemaking so that parents, teachers, and policymakers have clear and consistent information about where our schools and students stand.”

In retrospect, it’s easy to see why the new federal funds didn’t lead to reform. Though $75 billion now appears to be a lost cause, it did buy important lessons. If properly applied, these lessons could contribute mightily to the ARRA’s final major education initiative.

Racing to the Top?

As expectations for the formula-based stimulus funds have rightfully abated, hopes for the reform-driving Race to the Top fund have risen. At $4.35 billion, RTTT is petite compared to other ARRA programs, but as a competitive grant program, it represents by far the largest amount ever at the discretion of an education secretary (see Figure 1).

The administration has tried to make the most of this opportunity by identifying specific reform priorities and requiring interested states to craft proposals that respond to each (see Table 1). While some roundly criticized the department’s audacity—former assistant secretary of education Diane Ravitch called the strategy embedded in the department’s draft documents “coercive” and North Carolina governor Beverly Perdue described it as “prescriptive”—others believed this would ensure the wise investment and use of these funds. That is, if a state doesn’t agree with the department’s favorite reforms, it simply won’t apply; if a state does agree, it will devise the strongest possible plan that faithfully responds to all priorities.

Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to be the case. First, because states are still desperate for money, it’s doubtful they will take a pass on the opportunity to compete for several hundred million dollars. In fact, a month before the first filing deadline, no state had announced that it would forgo the entire competition. Moreover, states’ financial fortunes are expected to get worse.

State budgets typically suffer most in the year after a recession ends. The Rockefeller Institute has found that education spending remains depressed several years after economic growth returns. These effects could be even more pronounced this time. Nationally, property taxes still account for 30 percent of all school revenue. The recession and associated housing crisis have significantly depressed property values; according to one widely used index, home prices declined continuously for three years beginning in July 2006. As rolling assessments catch up with these reduced prices, property tax revenues are likely to be adversely affected. An August report from the National Conference of State Legislatures noted, “While Fiscal Year 2009 can be summed up in one word: dismal, FY 2010 can be characterized by two words: even worse.” The National Governors Association and National Association of State Budget Officers concur: governors’ 2010 budget submissions showed the largest general fund reductions since 1979.

Second, federal dictates don’t alter local preferences; they only force them into temporary hiding. Yes, governors signed the ARRA’s reform assurances but states didn’t use SFSF dollars for reform. Yes, states developed standards and assessments as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) required, but many adopted weak standards and set low cut scores. Yes, districts developed policies for NCLB public school choice and supplemental education services, but they cleverly thwarted the full implementation of these programs, evidenced by the shockingly low student participation rates. As others have noted, the federal government can make states and districts do what they don’t want to, but it can’t make them do it well.

We know that states and districts desperately need money, that they have a preference for preserving the status quo, and that when the federal government asks them to do things they’re not fond of, they may just go through the motions. So when the U.S. Department of Education places $4.35 billion on the table during a serious recession and tells states to respond to Washington’s favorite ideas, it would be wise to anticipate their responses with a stockpile of skepticism.

Trust but Verify

The ultimate challenge for the administration will be reducing the gulf between reforms promised and reforms delivered. Among actions deserving a raised eyebrow are the modifications made to state laws since the passage of the ARRA. Duncan ingeniously used Race to the Top to induce states to improve their policies. If you want a grant, said the secretary, your state had better be hospitable to reform. The swift and positive response from the states amounts to the greatest achievement of Secretary Duncan’s tenure: Illinois, Louisiana, and Tennessee lifted charter school caps. California and Wisconsin ended prohibitions on linking student performance data to individual teachers. Delaware passed legislation making the state more hospitable to Teach For America, and Rhode Island put a stop to all seniority-based teacher assignments. A number of states, including Massachusetts and Michigan, were hurrying to make legislative changes before the first submission deadline in January, and others, including Maine, Maryland, Nevada, and Washington, were planning to apply in the second round to give their legislatures time to pass reform laws.

But as discussed above, there’s considerable daylight between a reform-oriented policy and its faithful implementation. The department should remember that while many states permit linking teachers to student test scores, few districts actually do so, and that while Virginia and Mississippi have each had a charter law for more than a decade, combined they have only five charter schools. In November, Tennessee provided a perfect and alarming example of how this might play out with regard to RTTT: though the state lifted its charter cap as Duncan desired, in the span of two days Memphis and Nashville denied all 24 charter applications submitted to them.

A good leading indicator of whether a state’s heart will actually be in its reforms is whether it sees the RTTT as an engine for change or as bags of cash. Secretary Duncan has said that the program “is not about the money,” and that “If folks are doing this to chase money, it’s for the wrong reasons.” But there have been numerous indications that the potential for a titanic federal payday is a huge, if not the decisive, consideration for many. Maybe the starkest case came from Massachusetts, where Governor Deval Patrick, after years of consistent charter school antagonism, conducted a high-profile volte-face and announced his support for lifting his state’s restrictive charter cap. This occurred after a visit from Secretary Duncan and a reminder that the Bay State was on the brink of disqualifying itself from RTTT consideration.

There are plenty of other examples. Illinois governor Pat Quinn said, “We want to get Illinois in that race and make sure we get as much money as possible from Washington.” The spokesperson for Idaho’s department of education noted, “Race to the Top is the only opportunity for education to get additional funding over the next two to three years.” A lobbyist for the California School Boards Association said, “The money would be nice because of our budget situation.” Even Ohio’s reform-minded Senator John Husted said, “During these tough and uncertain financial times, I believe it is imperative that Ohio be in a strong position to take advantage of the Race to the Top dollars.” A Wisconsin legislator angry about the lack of teeth in an ostensibly reform-oriented piece of legislation may have spoken for many when he said, “This is basically a race for the money, not a race for the top.”

Also to be approached with suspicion are the promises that will appear in state applications. To satisfy the administration’s requirements, states will have to change policies affecting teachers, intervene in failing schools, support charters, and more. With so much money at stake, we should expect carefully assembled plans that convey earnest guarantees of reform. But the SFSF assurances taught us the hard way that reform commitments plus a governor’s signature do not necessarily equal real reform.

So when state proposals hit Arne Duncan’s desk, the secretary must become the toughest schoolmarm in America. The first step is to not reflexively reward the states that improved their policies in response to the RTTT carrot. The department should instead view such moves cynically. Had these states really believed in reform, they would have adopted these measures ages ago. Deathbed conversions are always suspect.

Lifting a legislated charter cap shouldn’t be enough. There should be proof that state and district officials are not inhibiting charter growth, that new schools are opening, and that they have the requisite flexibility and funding to thrive. Likewise, a new law that brings down a “data firewall” should be coupled with affirmative policies that link individual test scores to individual teachers in the state data system and watertight district policies that tie this new information to tenure and evaluation decisions.

When a state promises in its RTTT application to develop a new teacher-preparation system, the administration must pry: Is this really a new initiative or just a renaming of your existing certification process? When a state proposes to create a major new intervention for failing schools, the department must confirm that this isn’t just gussying up an old and meek school improvement strategy.

As important, the department must insist that all reform proposals be completely shovel-ready upon submission. A state’s promise to launch a performance pay system is meaningless unless all pieces of the supporting architecture are already in place. That means the state legislature has authorized the program, union contracts have been modified to allow it, data systems have been updated to support it, and a state disbursement process is prepared to allocate funds as soon as the federal grant arrives.

Watch and Wait

There is some reason to wonder just how tough the department will be. Though the final documents released in November are still laudable, they certainly represent a step back from the publicly released draft versions. States can score points for a charter law with a cap. A state without a charter law can score points with a pale facsimile of one. A performance-pay system plays a smaller role than many expected. The door was opened to weak interventions for failing schools. And, possibly most curiously, despite Duncan’s earlier warning that a state’s unwise use of early ARRA funds would cause it to be tremendously disadvantaged in the RTTT competition, this issue only comprises 1 percent—5 of 500—of the total points available (by comparison, not signing on to the common standards initiative would cost a state 8 times the number of points). These shifts were widely noticed. In an editorial titled “School Reform Retreat?” the Wall Street Journal noted that the administration had eased requirements, and the Washington Post editors wrote bluntly, “draft regulations have been weakened.” Equally instructive was the national teachers unions’ support for the changes.

Despite these shifts, hope remains that the department will stand firm for reform. Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, told the New York Times, “The administration clearly listened to the unions, but they haven’t backtracked.” As the first competition got underway in the fall, Secretary Duncan maintained that the bar will be “very, very high,” telling Education Week, “There will be a lot more losers than winners.”

In hindsight, perhaps Washington should have crafted a different education package for the ARRA. Under alternate circumstances, federal leaders might have recognized that stabilizing and reforming our schools are quite different goals and that the complications associated with driving education reform from the nation’s capital are at least equal to the opportunities. But in early 2009 the economy’s condition didn’t afford much time for deliberation, and in the wake of the historic 2008 elections, few ascendant federal policymakers were overflowing with modesty and prudence.

Much will be learned from these experiences in the years ahead, but for the time being one immediate takeaway merits repeating: Local policy prerogatives and dire financial conditions trumped federal pleas for reform and led to the spending of massive amounts of aid on preserving the status quo and protecting existing jobs and programs.

With similar factors coalescing around RTTT, the administration should be wise to the potentially regrettable outcomes absent additional protections. Moving forward, the administration might reconsider talk of “moon shots” and transformational change and instead adopt a more humble creed: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

Andy Smarick, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of education, is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Invisible Ink in Teacher Contracts

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:39:40 +0000

Video: Emily Cohen talks with Education Next.

When the Cleveland, Ohio, school board had to make radical cuts in its budget last spring, it was forced to eliminate 540 teaching jobs. There wasn’t a whole lot of mystery about which teachers among Cleveland’s 3,500-member teaching force would be the ones to lose their jobs.

The state’s hard-and-fast seniority rule—last hired, first fired—provided Cleveland school officials with little wiggle room for deciding which teachers had to go. Among the first were a number of teachers who had been handpicked to staff the district’s 10 new “innovation” schools. Ann Mullin, senior program officer for education at Cleveland’s George Gund Foundation, told the city’s Plain Dealer, “There’s something wrong when a state law forces removal of teachers without regard to their effectiveness in the classroom.”

Across the country, many cash-strapped districts fretting over likely layoffs are eyeing seniority rules as they hammer out new contracts. To the surprise of some district superintendents, contract negotiations are not likely to offer much relief. In fact, when it comes to seniority rules, and many other core aspects of teachers’ employment, the contract is not the problem. State law is. In Ohio’s case, state law dictates that teachers on continuing contracts and those with greater seniority should have preference, language that is effectively emulated in 14 other states in the country. While teacher contracts may flesh out the details of school rules and rights of teachers, states are in the driver’s seat. Local control—although it is still brandished when expedient—is today more myth than reality, at least when it comes to matters involving teachers.

The contract certainly still plays a big role in determining a teacher’s pay, work schedule, and benefits, but the power behind the policies with the most impact on teacher quality, such as tenure and performance assessment, lies with states. That power has steadily increased over the decades, especially in recent years, as federal initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have pushed states to assume more authority over education.

Special Interest

What best explains increasing legislative involvement in teacher governance is the rise of teachers unions. The public-sector labor movement took hold in the second half of the 20th century when, in the face of poor working conditions and low wages, unions began lobbying for collective bargaining rights. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order that allowed federal workers to bargain collectively, and one by one states followed, affording unions substantial bargaining power by the mid-1970s.

As unions matured, their leaders realized that it is more efficient to lobby state legislatures on particular workplace provisions than to negotiate the conditions into hundreds of individual contracts. And once the stipulations are passed, there is generally no clock ticking on a law’s expiration as there would be if the provision were part of a collective bargaining agreement.

For a number of reasons, the unions have had considerable success in passing teacher-friendly legislation in spite of frequent opposition from school districts in a state or even the department of education. Because union interests are narrowly defined (unlike, for instance, those of the business community), teachers unions can go after an issue with laserlike focus, and they are quite adept at drawing on the public’s generally supportive view of teachers. Unions are highly effective lobbyists in part because, unlike many advocacy groups, they are membership organizations (for the nation’s largest profession). Whereas other groups typically rely on grants and donations, unions collect a steady stream of income from member dues and are flush with discretionary funds, which can be used to build campaign war chests and contribute to lobbying efforts (see “The Long Reach of Teachers Unions,” features). State union affiliates typically have full-time paid staff devoted to producing a successful outcome from the legislature. In cases of ballot initiatives, unions have a bloc of votes they can count on should they need to press for one outcome or another. Unions are a force that legislators want to cultivate, as much as the unions want to cultivate the legislators. Each ignores the other at its peril.

To see just where union efforts lead in practical terms, one only need look at campaign finance disclosures. The California Teachers Association (CTA), for example, was the state’s largest political spender in the last decade, devoting $212 million to ballot measures, campaigns, and lobbying. It’s no surprise then that during that time, California legislators voted down measures for reforms such as differentiated teacher compensation and the use of student achievement data in teacher evaluations.

Only recently have education advocacy organizations entered the scene, pushing agendas that are distinct from those of the unions, most notably Connecticut’s ConnCAN, Advance Illinois, Florida’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, and various state chapters of Democrats for Education Reform. These groups appear to be a growing force in state legislatures, particularly, though not only, because of the Race to the Top initiative dangling money before states to spur reform. In 2009, ConnCAN had a hand in overhauling teacher certification requirements in Connecticut, securing approval for alternative routes to certification like the Teach For America program, a legislative change fought tooth and nail by the teachers union. No legislative success, however, trumps that achieved in Colorado in May 2010. The perfect storm—a charismatic, Democratic legislator who is a Teach For America alumnus, the lure of Race to the Top funds, and a whole array of advocacy groups that included the Colorado chapters of Democrats for Education Reform and Stand For Children—pulled off teacher legislation that was bitterly opposed by the state union and which no one dreamed possible a year ago.

State Clout

The involvement by states in teacher employment issues is largely unknown, not just to the general public, but to policymakers themselves. A look at state laws reveals a surprisingly high level of intervention into the most important concerns of teachers:

Evaluations: Although school districts, rather than states, employ teachers, nearly every state has something to say about how and how often teachers must be evaluated. All but eight states determine the minimum frequency of teacher evaluations. Districts technically have the leeway to exceed the minimum set by the state, though they rarely do. The minimum therefore becomes the de facto maximum. Since the announcement of Race to the Top, several states have increased the frequency of evaluations for tenured teachers to at least once a year; 19 states now mandate that all teachers receive a performance review annually.

Many states also decide what the evaluation instrument must look like, or what its components must be, and whether student performance can factor into a teacher’s evaluation rating. Thirty-one states either determine the evaluation instrument a district must use, require state approval for district evaluation instruments, or provide explicit guidance. Twenty-one states now have data systems that match individual teacher records with student records. In a direct effort to compete in Race to the Top, California, Nevada, Indiana, and Wisconsin have eliminated obstacles to using student performance data in teacher evaluations. In California, the law had been in the making since the 1980s, but stalled repeatedly as a result of infighting among state agencies and a lack of political support. According to the Los Angeles Times, “The new bill removed one of the system’s key limitations—it set aside a 2006 state law that, at the insistence of teachers unions, prevented California from using the system to evaluate teachers based on the academic gains of their students.”

Tenure: There are two kinds of teachers: those with tenure (also known as “continuing contract” status) and those without it (those on a “probationary” or “provisional” contract). A veteran teacher with tenure receives preferential treatment over newer teachers in school assignments and with respect to layoffs and dismissal procedures. Tenure may also play a role in how frequently a teacher is evaluated. In Virginia, for example, nontenured teachers are evaluated annually, whereas tenured teachers can expect a performance review every three years.

Tenure is hugely important to teachers. Yet look at any contract and you’ll see that very little is said about it, particularly about the process by which it is conferred. The language isn’t there because states, not districts, decide when teachers should be eligible for tenure. All 50 states have tenure laws, but only about one-third of the largest districts even mention tenure in their contracts.

State laws are responsible for making tenure a relatively automatic milestone, which, depending on the state, is awarded after one year (in Mississippi and Hawaii) or following as many as seven years of service (in Ohio), but most often in only three years. If state laws put any other condition on a teacher’s eligibility for tenure, it is usually a record of satisfactory evaluations, a benchmark that all but a tiny fraction of teachers meet. The New Teacher Project’s recent report, The Widget Effect, noted that in the 12 school districts it examined, less than 1 percent of all teachers had received an unsatisfactory evaluation, even in schools where students were chronically underperforming. Louisiana state law illustrates the relative ease in earning tenure: “Such probationary teacher shall automatically become a regular and permanent teacher in the employ of the school board of the parish or city, as the case may be, in which he has successfully served his three-year probationary term.”

Theoretically, a district can impose a more rigorous tenure requirement than that established by the state, but not without great difficulty. In 2007, New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein sought to change the process for awarding teachers tenure, allowing student data to be factored into that decision. The local teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), strongly opposed the change. The UFT took the fight to the state legislature, as state law precluded locals from having any say on tenure matters. Joining forces with the powerful state teachers union, the UFT succeeded in blocking Klein’s tenure changes by embedding a provision in the 2008–09 budget that made it illegal to consider a teacher’s job performance as a factor in the tenure process.

Compensation: Though school districts negotiate with their unions the exact amount of pay at each step of the salary table, states often decide when teachers receive pay increases and by what criteria. Half of all states have specific salary regulations that school districts must respect. Of those, 17 spell out the terms under which districts must provide teacher raises, including that teachers must be provided a raise if they earn a master’s degree, or two, or even three. The love affair that states have with master’s degrees really cannot be justified, as no study of any repute has ever found that these degrees make teachers more effective, particularly when the degrees are earned in education.

Increasingly, states are supporting performance pay initiatives, with the latest tally at 19 states. However, by the time these initiatives make their way down to the individual teacher, the bonuses tend to be on the paltry side. Because wholly new sources of money have to be identified to fund these pay experiments—they cannot draw on the many millions of dollars dedicated to rewarding teachers for master’s degrees—these efforts fail to have much of an impact.

Dismissal: While teacher contracts often lay out the steps a district must take to help a teacher who is struggling, contracts rarely account for those teachers whose performance does not improve, even after they receive additional support and professional development.

States, meanwhile, offer a detailed set of policies for how to handle dismissal. Half of the states set forth specific dismissal procedures, including the number and nature of appeals a teacher or union may file, the compensation a teacher may earn during the appeals process, and whether a teacher is allowed to stay in the classroom during this period. It has been well documented that dismissal procedures are time-intensive, often taking two to three years to complete. California’s dismissal process includes 10 different steps, which perhaps explains why just 100 dismissal hearings were held in the state between 1996 and 2005, according to the California Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Part of the reason these procedures are so complicated is that teachers have rights to appeal that effectively treat the district’s dismissal as a threat to a teacher’s licensure. These laws fail to distinguish between dismissal based on poor performance and dismissal resulting from criminal or moral infractions. Most states allow a teacher to appeal a district’s decision to dismiss at least twice. Washington State goes even further: not only can a teacher appeal a principal’s decision to the local school board; the board’s decision can be appealed all the way to the state supreme court.

Promise of State Role

Without question, some elements of teacher governance remain the purview of the local district and teachers union. But states play an outsized role in structuring the scope, nature, and specifics of contracts, even before union leaders and school superintendents reach the bargaining table. Enactment of education policy at the state level is a boon for the unions as long as the policy runs in their favor. But the rise of education advocacy groups bears watching, as in some instances they have broken a virtual union monopoly on the policymaking process.

Prior to the flurry of unprecedented activity by states competing for Race to the Top, states’ teacher policies were, on the whole, a mixed bag. Now, even when the legislative goals are relatively progressive, the final language may provide a strong foothold for the status quo. For instance, while Nebraska recently passed a performance pay law, if 75 percent of Nebraska’s school districts do not adopt the plans in their contracts within five years, the law goes away. It will not matter that some districts want to participate. In the 2008–09 school year, Florida state policy required that evidence of student learning be the primary criterion for teacher evaluation, yet 99 percent of all Florida teachers were rated satisfactory. This (and Race to the Top) prompted state legislators to craft an even stricter law that required fully half of a teacher’s evaluation to be based on students’ test performance; the union put up a fight and Governor Charlie Crist vetoed the measure.

Although the legislature is traditionally where policy is enacted, state school chiefs have always had considerable authority—but either they were unaware or not inclined to use it. That may be changing, and nowhere is this development more striking than in Rhode Island. Seventeen years into his tenure but just a few months before retirement, Peter McWalters took on that state’s famously strong union, voiding teachers’ seniority rights in the troubled Providence school district. While the action was widely cheered by reformers, many reformers were also asking why it was so long in coming and why so unique among states. By contrast, current state commissioner of education Deborah Gist has not wasted any time, only a few months into her tenure issuing a directive to superintendents to stop transferring teachers into new jobs on the basis of seniority, mandating instead that vacancies be filled based on a set of performance criteria and on student need. This directive trumps locally bargained contracts and inserts the state into an area long viewed as one that districts and their local unions must work out at the negotiating table.

Superintendents who, like Gist, are directly appointed by a reform-minded governor are more likely to be given the leeway to take bolder stances. Superintendents directly elected by voters, as is the case in 14 states, are probably less likely to take these risks. Still, not only has Gist set an example that other state superintendents can follow, but the promise of Race to the Top has emboldened at least some of the more cautious superintendents. One of the nation’s longest serving school chiefs, Nancy Grasmick, willingly took on the Maryland legislature in order to be more competitive in Race to the Top, using her regulatory power to interpret a new state law on teacher evaluation much differently than the union-friendly legislature intended.

For state superintendents and legislatures, being on the side of reform is no longer such lonely ground on which to stand. They are backed by a growing legion of education advocacy organizations that are proving to be a forceful—and politically savvy—counterweight to the unions. The question is whether states will remain emboldened over the long haul or whether they will back down in the face of union opposition. But given the spate of state reforms this past spring, the future looks considerably more optimistic than even a year ago. State involvement promises to raise standards for the teaching profession to a degree that would be impossible for districts at the bargaining table.

Emily Cohen is district policy director at the National Council on Teacher Quality, of which Kate Walsh is president.

The Long Reach of Teachers Unions

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 04:01:18 +0000

When the Florida legislature, on April 8th, passed a bill that sought to replace teacher tenure with merit pay, the Florida Education Association (FEA) sprang into action, organizing members and community activists to lobby Governor Charlie Crist to veto the measure. FEA, with the help of its parent union, the National Education Association (NEA), generated thousands of e-mails, letters, phone calls, and Internet posts in opposition to the legislation. When Governor Crist delivered his veto on April 15th, the union ran television and Internet ads, thanking him. A few weeks later, FEA gave a much-needed boost to Crist’s independent bid for a U.S. Senate seat by endorsing both Crist and Democratic candidate Kendrick Meek.

If you think it’s far-fetched to suggest that a teachers union could play the role of political kingmaker, think again. The largest political campaign spender in America is not a megacorporation, such as Wal-Mart, Microsoft, or ExxonMobil. It isn’t an industry association, like the American Bankers Association or the National Association of Realtors. It’s not even a labor federation, like the AFL-CIO. If you combine the campaign spending of all those entities it does not match the amount spent by the National Education Association, the public-sector labor union that represents some 2.3 million K–12 public school teachers and nearly a million education support workers (bus drivers, custodians, food service employees), retirees, and college student members. NEA members alone make up more than half of union members working for local governments, by far the most unionized segment of the U.S. economy.

The Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in State Politics joined forces last year to produce the first comprehensive database of political campaign spending at both the state and national levels. The results should open the eyes of policymakers and educators alike, as well as those involved in the wider world of domestic politics. In the 2007–08 election cycle, total spending on state and federal campaigns, political parties, and ballot measures exceeded $5.8 billion. The first-place NEA spent more than $56.3 million, $12.5 million ahead of the second-place group. That’s not all. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the smaller of the two national professional education unions, ranked 25th in campaign spending, with almost $12 million, while NEA/AFT collaborative campaigns spent an additional $3.4 million, enough to earn the rank of 123rd. All told, the two national teachers unions distributed $71.7 million on candidate and issue campaigns from California to Florida, Massachusetts to South Dakota. Millions more went to policy research to support the unions’ agenda.

The teachers unions outspent their union peers by a large margin. The next highest-spending public sector union is ranked at number 5: the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) contributed some $35 million. The AFL-CIO’s largest member union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), at less than half the size of NEA, spent about $21 million and ranked 11th.

A Long Arm

With such large sums of cash in hand, NEA can involve itself in a wide variety of campaigns in many states without diluting its efforts in any single one of them. During the 2008–09 school year, the national union sent a total of $17.3 million to 24 state affiliates, both large and small. In the case of the large affiliates, this money merely supplements what the affiliate raises on its own. According to a 2010 report by the California Fair Political Practices Commission, 15 organizations spent a combined $1 billion on state campaigns and ballot measures from the beginning of 2000 to the end of 2009. The California Teachers Association (CTA) was the biggest political spender over the period, disbursing nearly $212 million. That’s almost double that of the second place spender, which also happened to be a public employees union. A portion of the funds CTA spent was received from NEA, but the bulk was generated from CTA assessments on California teachers.

In the smaller states, NEA’s political reach is perhaps best illustrated by the campaign against Measure 10 in South Dakota, a state not normally considered a union stronghold. The November 2008 initiative would have banned the use of tax money for campaigns or lobbying and restricted political contributions by government contractors.

NEA contributed $1.1 million to air TV ads against the measure. That amount of money goes a long way in a media market so small. NEA’s state affiliate, the South Dakota Education Association, has only 5,600 active members and could never have appropriated such a sum on its own. It would have required an additional assessment of almost $200 per member. Measure 10 was defeated, prompting its committee chairman to say, “We’ll be able to prepare accordingly next time knowing that the real opposition to ethics reform in South Dakota is NEA union officials back east.”

Legislative and campaign spending is far from the sum total of teacher union expenditures with a political aim. Both NEA and AFT send additional millions to a vast panoply of advocacy groups, coalitions, community organizations, and charities. Along with their statutory role as labor unions and stated role as professional organizations, NEA and AFT fill the role of philanthropic benefactors for a host of causes, most of them left-leaning (see sidebar).

Leaning Left

NEA funds groups that overwhelmingly fall on one side of the political spectrum. Here are a few examples of the organizations, large and small, that benefited from NEA’s largesse, along with the amounts they received and excerpts from their mission statements. Alliance for Justice: $7,000. “Our Student Action Campaign cultivates the next generation of progressive activists and strengthens public interest grassroots advocacy.”

America Votes: $150,000. “America Votes is the centerpiece of a permanent progressive campaign infrastructure nationally and in the states, benefiting hundreds of progressive organizations in both election and non-election years.”

Americans United for Change: $250,000. “Americans United for Change has challenged the far right conservative voices and ideas that for too long have been mistaken for mainstream American values.”

Campaign for America’s Future: $25,000. “At the Campaign for America’s Future, our daily work is to bring about the progressive transformation.”

Center for American Progress: $110,000 (another $10,000 from AFT). “CAP is designed to provide long-term leadership and support to the progressive movement.”

Center for Community Change: $10,000. “We believe that vibrant community-based organizations, led by the people most affected by social and economic injustice, are key to putting an end to the failed ‘on your own’ mentality of the right and building a new politics based on community values.”

Democratic GAIN: $10,000. “Democratic GAIN exists to support the professional needs of individuals and organizations that work in Democratic and Progressive Politics.”

Demos: $5,000 (another $10,000 from AFT). “We publish books, reports, and briefing papers that illuminate critical problems and advance innovative solutions; work at both the national and state level with advocates and policymakers to promote reforms; help to build the capacity and skills of key progressive constituencies; project our values into the media by promoting Demos Fellows and staff in print, broadcast, and Internet venues; and host public events that showcase new ideas and leading progressive voices.”

Media Matters: $100,000. “Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”

Midwest Academy: $5,000. “Courses and consulting services are designed for progressive organizations and coalitions that utilize civic engagement activities to build citizen power at all levels of our democracy.”

U.S. Action: $203,000. “USAction builds power by uniting people locally and nationally, on-the-ground and online, to win a more just and progressive America. We create the nation’s leading progressive coalitions, making democracy work by organizing issue and election campaigns to improve people’s lives.”

A look at teachers union governance and financing will demonstrate how this philanthropic giving occurs. The school district’s payroll office deducts union dues from each teacher’s paycheck as a lump sum. The money is transmitted at regular intervals to the local union affiliate, which keeps its share and transmits the remainder to the state affiliate, which keeps its share and transmits the remainder to the national affiliate. NEA has an affiliate in every state and claims 14,000 locals. NEA received $162 from each member teacher this school year, and $93.50 from each full-time education support staff member. NEA’s budget for 2010 is $355.8 million.

AFT has a similar arrangement, although its power cannot be wielded as widely since most of its members reside in a single state, New York. AFT receives $190.70 in annual membership dues. The union’s 2010 budget is estimated at $165 million.

NEA spends its money in roughly equal thirds. One-third supports the physical plant and operating costs of the union’s D.C. and regional headquarters buildings. Another third pays the salaries and benefits of NEA’s staff of some 600 employees. The final third is returned to state affiliates in various forms, the largest being UniServ grants. This money helps pay for the labor negotiators and professional staffers employed by the state affiliates.

This third pot of cash also includes money for discretionary spending or, as it is categorized in the union’s financial disclosure report, “contributions, gifts and grants.” Ten dollars of each NEA member’s dues is set aside each year for the national union’s Media Fund and Ballot Initiative/Legislative Crises Fund. The Media Fund pays for national media campaigns and PR grants to state affiliates. The Crises Fund is the primary source of funding for whatever ballot measures or pending bills NEA state affiliates are supporting or opposing each year. Unspent money is carried over, leaving the national union with considerable sums to spend on campaigns in general election years.

The discretionary money is disbursed in a number of ways. The money can be distributed to the state affiliates, which then use it for ballot or legislative battles (see Figure 1, and its underlying data). The national union also makes direct contributions to campaigns or coalitions created around single issues. In the 2007-08 cycle, NEA gave some $17 million to ballot initiative groups in 12 states for a variety of measures related to constitutional conventions, property taxes, income taxes, labor laws, hotel taxes, redistricting, corporate taxes, and vehicle taxes.

More than any other single national entity, NEA is a driving force supporting attempts to raise state taxes, and defeating tax cut or limitation measures. The relative success of the national teachers unions in ballot initiative campaigns and legislative battles can greatly affect a state’s bottom line.

Spin Cycle

NEA and AFT apply their influence directly, through lobbying and election campaigns, but also indirectly via a network of friendly organizations made friendlier through substantial contributions. NEA’s “community outreach” efforts are particularly formidable, gaining the union allies in the fields of research, advocacy, and the media. Through the use of front groups, the teachers unions are able to disguise their role in funding these activities and thus their self-interest in a host of political issues.

The national teachers unions provide generous funding for research that supports their positions on education ($150,000 to FairTest) as well as budgetary issues ($650,000 to the Economic Policy Institute) and social policy ($165,000 to People For the American Way).

For example, NEA contributed $250,000 to the Arizona State University Office for Research and Sponsored Projects Administration. ASU’s Education Policy Research Unit is responsible for a series of highly critical studies of charter schools and vouchers. The unit also annually bestows its Bunkum Awards on think tanks that produce what the ASU panel considers to be the worst research of the year. The “honorees” are almost always conservative or libertarian organizations.

That particular project is “made possible by funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.” The Great Lakes Center also received $250,000 from NEA (out of a total income of $262,000), but its union entanglements don’t end there.

The press release announcing the center’s launch in September 2000 described it as “a nonprofit tax-exempt organization of education stakeholders with a common goal: the qualitative improvement and healthy growth of all public schools in the entire Great Lakes region. The organization represents a unique partnership between Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and other Great Lakes states.” There was no mention of teachers unions, even though the “unique partnership” wasn’t unique at all. It was exclusively a consortium of NEA state affiliates in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.

Sixteen of the center’s 17 officers and trustees are NEA national and state officers and employees. The 17th is Alex Molnar, who is, coincidentally enough, the director of the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University.

America Learns?

While the Great Lakes Center keeps its union ties quiet, at least the information is available to those who look for it. Communities for Quality Education (CQE) is entirely an NEA front group, although none of its material, nor any information on its web site, mentions the union at all.

CQE was created as “America Learns” on February 22, 2004, and two weeks later “notified” NEA of its existence and asked for “the largest possible contribution it can to help us launch America Learns and to encourage your affiliates and all members of the NEA family to give as generously as possible.”

Its mission was “spreading the word about the misguided so-called NCLB law, and how to fix it.” This, as it happens, was NEA’s primary focus at the time.

This ostensibly independent organization had a three-member board of directors: Anne Davis, at the time the president of the Illinois Education Association; Robert Bonazzi, executive director of the New Jersey Education Association; and Maurice Joseph, NEA’s deputy general counsel. The executive director was John Hein, who had been the associate executive director of government relations for the California Teachers Association.

By June, CQE had offices, staffers (including NEA employee Corina Cortez), and was airing ads against the No Child Left Behind Act in four battleground states. Many of the teachers featured in the ads were teachers union officers, though they were not identified as such. The cost of the ads: $2.9 million.

How did the fledgling organization come into such cash so quickly? As it turns out, CQE received donations from a number of NEA state affiliates, but the bulk of its funding came from the national NEA turning over its entire media campaign fund of $4 million to CQE. In addition, NEA sent $1.8 million in PAC money to CQE. All told, CQE received $8.9 million in 2004, and there’s no evidence that any of its funding came from anywhere except NEA and its affiliates.

CQE was active in the 2004 presidential election campaign, and the news coverage it received invariably failed to mention its union connections. It continued to receive millions from NEA in 2005 and 2006, mostly to advance the union’s agenda against the No Child Left Behind Act.

In 2007, CQE turned up in Utah, where a referendum was being held to overturn the state school voucher law. A CQE staffer helped organize an antivoucher rally and when asked by the Salt Lake Tribune who was paying his way, he replied, “a variety of sources.” CQE ultimately spent $336,000 on the Utah campaign.

With 2008 being another election year, NEA sent $1 million to CQE, though its activities rarely turned up in press coverage. The organization now seems to be on hiatus, last appearing in February 2009 in support of the Pennsylvania State Education Association’s “Save Pennsylvania’s Schools” campaign, and as the creator of Schoolhouse Talk, an Internet radio show.

The purpose of going to the trouble of creating groups like the Great Lakes Center and CQE is to give the appearance of widespread support for NEA’s education positions. The union’s use of proxies, or subcontractors, if you will, is not limited to that field. Through the generous disbursement of funds, NEA is able to secure the good offices of ideologically compatible groups involved in every domestic U.S. issue (see sidebar).

Beyond Education

Some of the teachers union donations would not be considered objectionable, regardless of one’s political orientation. NEA gave to All Stars Helping Kids, Boys & Girls Club of the Gulf Coast, Ford’s Theatre, and the U.S. Fund for UNICEF. AFT added donations to Freedom House, Special Olympics, and Vietnam Veterans Assistance Fund.

Not only did other contributions have an ideological component, they seem rather far afield for teachers unions. NEA gave $150,000 to the Sierra Club and smaller amounts to the American Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center, the Hip Hop Caucus, National Immigration Law Center, and the World Outgames. AFT contributed to the American Ireland Fund and the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, as well as to ACORN in D.C. and Maryland.

Two very large donations concerned a noneducation issue on which NEA has been active: health care. The union contributed $450,000 to Health Care for America Now (AFT chipped in another $125,000) and $275,000 to the National Coalition on Health Care (AFT, $10,000). Last year, NEA president Dennis Van Roekel was part of the labor coalition that persuaded the White House to delay the implementation of the “Cadillac” excise tax on health care coverage, but only when it applied to union members.

Are All Teachers Liberal?

Knowing what we do about how various groups line up politically, it probably does not come as a surprise to see a labor union contribute so heavily to progressive groups and causes. The problem is that it should come as a surprise.

NEA members lean no further to the left than any other large group of Americans. The national union conducts periodic internal surveys to ascertain member attitudes on a host of issues. These surveys are never made public, and results are tightly controlled, even within the organization. The 2005 NEA survey, consistent with previous results, found that members “are slightly more conservative (50%) than liberal (43%) in political philosophy.”

The 2009 Education Next-PEPG Survey of Public Opinion (see “The Persuadable Public,” features, Fall 2009) asked public school teachers about their views on education reforms their unions work tirelessly against, among them, charter schools and merit pay. The survey found that more than one-third (37 percent) of public school teachers somewhat or completely support the formation of charter schools, a figure that rose to 43 percent when respondents were told that President Obama supports charter schools. When told that the president supports merit pay, 31 percent of public school teachers express some or complete support for these policies as well.

The obvious question then is, how does a group with a politically diverse membership spend its money almost exclusively in support of liberal causes? And not just on those related to public education, but every conceivable issue?

It may be that the rank-and-file members don’t know anything about NEA’s expenditures. Thirty-six percent of respondents to the NEA survey admitted they were “not at all” involved with the union at any level. The organization has a vast and unending supply of funds from its rank-and-file membership. If members are largely ignorant of or apathetic to where that money is spent, it’s a paradise for a cadre of political activists.

The real solution to the mystery, though, is that NEA’s decisions are made by union leaders, most of whom identify themselves as liberal.

In concert with its member survey, NEA conducted a survey of its local affiliate presidents. The union asked the same political philosophy question of presidents, dividing the results by the size of the local (see Figure 2).

Even among the smallest locals, more of the presidents identify themselves as liberal than do members, and this becomes increasingly true as the size of the unions increases. Though we have no data on the subject, it is likely this trend continues through the hierarchy of the state and national affiliates. Indeed, about 80 percent of local union presidents at each level indicated that they thought NEA’s political philosophy was as liberal as or more liberal than their own. Local union presidents, at least, are aware of the strong liberal bias in the national union’s agenda.

Into the Light

The extent of teachers union influence over education policy is widely known. Education reformers have long recognized the clout of NEA and AFT when it comes to contentious issues like performance pay, charter schools, and testing. School administrators know of their power to affect education budget and personnel decisions. Politicians are aware of their unmatched ability to turn out volunteers for the dog work of campaigning—phone banks, precinct walks, and rallies. Reporters write about all of this.

Yet teachers unions as a massive general political force is an untold story. Rarely discussed is union influence over state and federal elections and over domestic policy, from fundamental issues such as taxation and health care to more esoteric ones, such as gay marriage and redistricting. It’s astonishing that a single organization can spend more than $56.3 million in an election cycle and still fly under the radar.

Part of the reason is that Americans are devoted to their public school teachers. An annual Harris poll routinely lists teachers among the professions Americans most trust (union leaders rank near the bottom). Because they represent people working with children, NEA and AFT benefit from residual good will in a way that the Teamsters and United Auto Workers do not. Press coverage of the teachers unions is usually assigned to an education reporter, which ensures the story will be framed around education issues. It’s only natural that agendas and motives related to the scope of collective bargaining, tax revenue streams, and internal union politics receive short shrift.

Coverage of teachers unions needs to emerge from its current position as an afterthought on the education beat, and assume its place alongside national fiscal and political reporting. Only then will the public see that Big Oil and Big Tobacco have a brother called Big Education.

Mike Antonucci is the director of the Education Intelligence Agency, which specializes in education labor issues.

Authorizing Charters

Chester E. Finn, Jr. — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:27:33 +0000

Video: Chester Finn and Terry Ryan talk with Education Next.

Adapted from Chester E. Finn Jr., Terry Ryan, and Michael B. Lafferty, Ohio’s Education Reform Challenges: Lessons from the Front Lines, Palgrave McMillan Publishers (June 2010).

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation’s long and deep immersion in Ohio education policy, particularly in the charter-school realm, includes a half decade of direct experience as “authorizer” of several charters. To recount and draw lessons from that experience, Fordham president (and Education Next senior editor) Chester Finn, Fordham vice president for Ohio policy and programs Terry Ryan, and veteran journalist Michael Lafferty authored the new book from which this article is adapted.

Initially, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) was chief authorizer of charter schools in the Buckeye State. After the state auditor released a scathing review of ODE’s handling of its role, the legislature “fired” the agency and in early 2003 invited a host of other entities to undertake the challenges of school sponsorship. Along with state universities, and district and county school systems, the list of potential authorizers included nonprofit organizations that met certain criteria. If too few new authorizers were willing to step up to the plate, however, the legislature’s move would orphan more than 100 extant charter schools, forcing them to close.

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation had long been active on the Ohio charter scene as critic, policy analyst, facilitator of new schools, and source of assistance (both financial and technical) to promising charter operators. But we had never really rolled up our sleeves and plunged into the fray. After fruitlessly seeking new sponsors to take on the potential “orphans”—eligible organizations feared the political, financial, and legal-liability risks—and after much internal soul-searching and debate, Fordham decided in 2004 to apply to become a school authorizer and by June 2005 we found ourselves occupying that hot seat.

Our 10 schools were a varied bunch. Eight had previously been sponsored by the Ohio Department of Education. The other two were allowed to open by virtue of winning the state’s 2005 lottery for new charters; both were sister schools of Cincinnati’s acclaimed W. E. B. Du Bois Academy, a now-defunct charter school that was much acclaimed at the time. All 10 schools faced challenges that generally paralleled those of other charter schools across Ohio. Among the eight schools with track records, one was rated Excellent by the state in 2005 (Du Bois), and one was rated Continuous Improvement (Dayton Academy, an Edison-operated school), but the remaining six were in Academic Emergency. (At the time, 60 percent of Ohio’s charter schools were rated in Academic Emergency, 11 percent in Academic Watch, 18 percent in Continuous Improvement, and just 11 percent Effective or Excellent.)

Troubled Schools

The Moraine Community School had struggled since opening in 2002, but surely it was worth trying to rehabilitate. The charter represented this Dayton suburb’s only public school. Moraine was a General Motors industrial town, and many of its families were connected to the GM plant that had once made Frigidaires and later built SUVs. (The last vehicle rolled off its assembly line on December 23, 2008. The sprawling factory is now dark.)

Before the charter opened, all Moraine students were bused to schools in the nearby suburbs of Kettering and West Carrollton. Many felt like strangers there, and they and their parents longed for a neighborhood school of their own. For that reason, the Moraine charter originally enjoyed the support of community leaders and served about 200 children in grades K–12. Almost from the start, however, the school encountered serious governance, leadership, financial, and academic difficulties. Moraine Community School was in Academic Emergency for two years prior to Fordham sponsorship, and its board and principal had gone through a nasty split just before we took over. A serious leadership vacuum remained. Our sponsorship agreement made clear that we expected it to improve markedly—and fast. Its board assented. According to our contract, the school would show

• adequate academic gains from autumn 2005 to spring 2006, as measured on a national norm-referenced test

• market demand by enrolling at least 225 students by April 2006

• compliance with all special-education requirements by October 2005

• implementation of a viable curriculum by February 2006.

As the February deadline approached, we received a letter from the school’s board president stating, “Our one-year sponsorship agreement had renewal terms that we likely won’t meet. There was an opportunity to secure 2006/2007 sponsorship through the Cincinnati-based ERCO (Education Resource Consultants of Ohio).”

With those words, Fordham learned, the Moraine school was fleeing our tough-love embrace. We had thought its leaders were game to make the hard decisions needed to render their school effective. We were wrong, and they spurned us for a less-demanding sponsor. What’s more, under Ohio law the school was within its legal rights to “sponsor hop” when its leaders realized we were serious about holding them to account for improving their school. Two years later, the Moraine school and three others (with no Fordham sponsorship connections) would be sued by then Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann, citing a failure to educate children.

In hindsight, we were naïve about the Moraine school and our ability to turn it around through tough love. No matter how much we wanted the school to succeed academically, those in charge—the school leadership and teachers—did not have the capacity to make it perform at a high level. Even more important, we gradually realized that the school’s leadership did not see their primary mission as delivering academic success to children.

For them, the goal was to provide a place that cared for the community’s children with love, respect, and understanding. If learning also occurred, well and good, but the school’s very existence was a sufficient end in itself for both the board and many parents. It was, quite simply, “their” school. Our efforts to inject a sense of urgency and focus on academic results just did not fly. That we didn’t share the same values should have been obvious from the start. But we failed to see it.

Technical Assistance

Moraine was not the only school in our new “portfolio” that opened our eyes to some realities of the charter world that we had not fully appreciated in our earlier think-tank role. As we were learning, threats and deadlines alone did not bring about better performance. Thus, within the bounds of state law and our budget, we also provided technical assistance to “our” sponsored schools to improve their performance. For example, we offered all those in Academic Emergency expert counsel on how to use achievement data to improve instruction, develop a strategy for maximizing performance on state assessments, and help students gain test-taking prowess.

Toward that end, we engaged Douglas Reeves and his team at the Denver-based Center for Performance Assessment (CPA). In November 2005, participating schools were provided with the tools to analyze their own test data to ascertain where their students needed the most help. In February 2006, CPA trainers conducted sessions at each participating school to assess staff needs and provide more-focused professional development based on school and student-specific data. This assistance cost Fordham about $70,000, but held out hope of helping the schools to boost student achievement relatively quickly.

We also offered the schools outside evaluations by a Massachusetts-based team of charter experts that provided school leaders and Fordham with thorough analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of individual schools and assisted in developing plans for bettering their performance. We asked team leader Joey Gustafson for a written report on each school akin to those produced by the acclaimed British school inspectorate. Four schools agreed to such evaluations—at Fordham’s expense.

After visiting the schools, Gustafson reported that all four—each an independent “mom-and-pop” operation with no links to national groups—faced a host of challenges, including strained budgets, low enrollments, curriculum problems, inexperienced staff, weak professional development for teachers, and board members ignorant of testing and other academic essentials. She also found a widespread belief that their academic setbacks were not the schools’ responsibility but, rather, the result of too many students from poor families with “home life” issues.

According to Gustafson, “These kids cannot” was the start of far too many conversations. She urged Fordham to take school leaders to visit high-performing charters in other states so they could see how such institutions worked. The result was a trip to Washington, D.C., where the heads of Fordham-sponsored schools spent time in a high-performing Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) school and the excellent charter boarding school called SEED Academy.

These repair efforts bore some fruit. The Phoenix Community Learning Center in Cincinnati, for example, made solid academic gains during 2004–5, when it was in Academic Emergency, to 2005–6, when it was rated Effective by the state. (The school sustained those gains in both 2006–7 and 2007–8, then faltered in 2008–9.) This school, led by a savvy, veteran educator, was committed to constant academic improvement and willing to change course in order to strengthen student results. It also built a strong instructional team and in time turned into a reasonably solid performer, a lamentably rare success within Ohio’s bumper crop of “mom-and-pop” schools.

It was evident, however, that some schools still needed far more help than we felt appropriate delivering as their sponsor, and more than we could afford financially. There was a real risk of veering from our role authorizing schools into school operations as we delved deeper into their problems and possible solutions. In 2004, before we even became a sponsor, one of the nation’s leading experts on charter schools and authorizing (and a Fordham board member), Bruno Manno, urged us to stop issuing grants to schools we would sponsor and to refrain from doing anything that could be seen as entangling us in their operations. Indeed, we agonized throughout the first year of sponsorship as to how much direct support to give schools for which we also served as monitor, evaluator, and judge. In the end, we offered financial help via modest grants and reduced sponsorship fees, plus substantial technical assistance in the form of advice from outside experts.

This support was manifest in our budgets. In 2005–6, Fordham collected $244,840 in school fees while our sponsorship expenses for the year totaled $715,512, of which more than one-third went toward outside consultants, school-specific grants, and foregone sponsorship fees. The following year, we collected $197,674 in school fees while our operating budget was $788,520, nearly half of it for consultants, grants to schools, and reduced fees. In fact, during the first four years of our sponsorship operation, we spent more on consultants and grants (targeted toward helping individual schools to tackle specific problems or needs) than we actually received in school fees. Under state law, we could charge schools sponsorship fees of up to 3 percent of their per-pupil funding, but our schools were paying closer to 1 percent, and several received free sponsorship. As a result, school fees covered just 30 percent of our costs from 2005 through 2009.

We continued to remind ourselves, the schools, and the state that we would not cross the line into providing direct services nor would we charge schools anything beyond their sponsorship fees. In June 2006, we shared a formal policy along those lines with every Fordham-sponsored school, building on what we had told the Ohio Department of Education in our sponsorship application two years earlier. In short, our provision of technical assistance was a good-faith effort to help schools improve but, at the end of the day, they were responsible for their results and we were responsible for holding them to account for those results.

Our refusal to sell services to sponsored schools proved prescient in the long run, as became obvious when another sponsor’s school, Harte Crossroads School in Columbus, blew up in 2007, revealing deep financial maladies. Its collapse resulted in much finger-pointing between sponsor and school as to who was responsible—and liable—for what. Even today, the state is still trying to sort out these tangles. In any case, this cautionary tale strengthened our conviction that sponsors ought not sell supplemental services to their schools. Unfortunately, many sponsors in Ohio made—and today still make—their own ends meet by doing precisely that. Legislation introduced in 2006 and 2007 to prohibit sponsors from selling supplemental services to their schools failed to become law. It would have unbalanced the books of too many sponsors. But neither did lawmakers solve the underlying problems of sponsor funding in Ohio: the chronic need to raise operating funds from the schools themselves, whether by charging fees or selling services, combined with the perverse incentives and inherent role conflicts that arise when saying no to a school is tantamount to reducing one’s own revenue.

Dollars and Cents

Sponsors weren’t the only ones on the Ohio charter scene that faced financial challenges. We also came to realize that independent charter schools faced almost insurmountable hurdles in delivering high-quality academic instruction while running these small businesses on tight margins. Consider the Omega School of Excellence, one of the ODE “orphans” that Fordham came to sponsor in Dayton and a school that in 2005 enrolled just 184 students. It received about $1.4 million a year from state and federal sources, which worked out to about $7,610 per pupil. In contrast, the Dayton Public Schools were at the time operating at about $13,000 a child. That difference was the result of some $5,500 per student in local tax dollars going to district schools that charters such as Omega did not receive—all this in addition to money for facilities and other outlays that were also denied to Ohio charters.

From its meager per-pupil allocation, Omega had to pay for all staffing, food services, special education, facilities, instructional materials (books, computers, etc.), and other expenses associated with running a school. Omega spent about $120,000 annually on facilities and utilities alone, and another $75,000 on food services, leaving about $1.2 million for instruction and operations. It was required to contribute to the state retirement system some 14 percent of salaries for every employee. Omega also offered basic health insurance and met the cost of federal Medicare payments. That meant the school paid about $645,000 in salaries and $175,000 in benefits. The result was that the average Omega administrator earned about $36,500 in 2005 while the average teacher made about $38,350. By contrast, Dayton’s district-school administrators earned about $68,500 and teachers about $50,550.

Starting in July 2005, charter schools also had to pay fees to their sponsors, which cut further into their operating margins and was seen by many in the charter community as a harsh tax. It certainly created animosity between new sponsors and schools. More than once we heard complaints that “under ODE we received free sponsorship, and now we’re paying you for sponsorship and you actually scrutinize our efforts far more than the state ever did.” This was another reason for us to keep our sponsorship fees as low as possible, but it made for an unsustainable situation over the long run.

Quality sponsorship costs money that somebody has to pay. Other states have realized this and fund their authorizers in more rational (and less tight-fisted) ways. For example, Florida provides sponsoring agencies 5 percent of revenue, as do Colorado and Oklahoma. These dollars come directly from the state to the sponsors, not out of the schools’ operating funds. In fact, the average payment structure for U.S. sponsors falls in the range of 3 percent to 5 percent of a school’s per-pupil allotment.

Besides keeping charter schools on short fiscal rations and “taxing” them for sponsorship, Ohio imposed onerous and disruptive reporting requirements. For example, charters had to report their student counts to the state every month while districts did so only twice a year. A charter school’s monthly revenue could suddenly drop by several thousand dollars if, for example, a mother lost her job and moved her five children to another school. Districts also feel the pain of losing students but they adjust their spending annually, not monthly. This becomes significant as teachers and other staff sign yearlong employment contracts, meaning that the charter school is on the hook for these costs whether pupils stay or leave.

Districts, of course, can also seek operating levies from local taxpayers to boost revenues beyond what the state affords them, while charters depend entirely on state and federal per-pupil allocations and whatever they can raise from philanthropy (see Figure 1 for current spending estimates). Some states—but not Ohio—provide charter schools with extra dollars in an effort to partially compensate for the absence of local dollars. Many now assist their charters with facility costs, too.

Strengthening the Support Network

The economic challenges facing charter schools, especially the mom-and-pop variety, were not just problems for Fordham-sponsored schools. In 2009, Ohio had 309 charters, of which almost 100 were independent operators. All but a handful served fewer than 300 students and many enrolled fewer than 200. In fact, fully 75 percent of the charter schools operating in Ohio in 2009 served fewer than 300 children apiece. Many ran on razor-thin margins.

In hindsight, many were financially doomed from the outset. In examining the causes of charter school closures in the United States, former National Charter Schools Institute CEO Brian Carpenter reported in 2008 that low enrollment was pivotal in the demise of almost three-fourths of the 100 cases he studied. He advised school boards and authorizers to “strive for 300 students as the minimum desired enrollment for each school.” Yet most Ohio charters were and are below that threshold.

In studying charter schools nationally, Paul Hill of the University of Washington observed in 2008 that, while money doesn’t assure educational success, it’s needed to innovate successfully. “Due to the way money flows,” Hill wrote, “new [charter] schools face major competitive disadvantages. Only entities that believe they can run effective schools with less money than district-run schools, or are able to gain some forms of subsidy, either philanthropic contributions or donated labor, can hope to compete.” The exception seemed to be schools associated with large, deep-pocketed national school-management organizations such as Edison and National Heritage Academies.

Worried about the appearance, the legitimacy, and the politics of a charter sector dominated by big out-of-state firms, many of them for-profit, we thought it was especially important for Ohio to develop and sustain a healthy crop of mom-and-pop schools with bona fide community roots. In 2001, we launched the Education Resource Center (ERC), originally housed at the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce and later within a private-scholarship organization named PACE.

The concept was straightforward. We would help independent charter schools acquire benefits of scale by concentrating some of their needs and corresponding services in a single place, particularly their business management and other “back office” functions. This should, we thought, lead to lower-cost services for individual schools while improving the quality of those services for all. This, we expected, would reinforce their capacity to compete, stay viable economically and, ultimately, deliver stronger academic achievement.

In 2003, ERC became a standalone nonprofit organization named Keys to Improving Dayton Schools, Inc. (k.i.d.s.). At the outset, Fordham’s Terry Ryan (as volunteer executive director) and Dayton businessman Doug Mangen ran the day-to-day operations of k.i.d.s., with help from Dayton-area philanthropists and business leaders, including the former CEO of Copeland Industries, Matt Diggs, who also worked to raise money for the new venture.

About 20 charters were then operating in Dayton. Mangen surveyed their needs and found that their most pressing challenges were improving financial management while boosting academic performance. It wasn’t just record keeping and poor test scores. Several schools admitted that they were on the verge of financial collapse. The situation was captured in a memo from Ryan to the k.i.d.s. board in late 2003. “Early hopes for their transformative potential,” he wrote, “are yielding to the realities of meager academic results, financial woes, leadership and governance difficulties, and political challenges. Local charter schools are largely consumed by issues of survival. As a result, they’re not pointing the way toward educational excellence.”

The Omega School of Excellence was first to sign on with k.i.d.s. Organized to serve 5th through 8th graders, Omega was modeled after the acclaimed Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools. Its graduates won scholarships to top local private high schools and to several of the country’s elite prep schools. But, like other one-off charters, Omega faced severe challenges on the business side. Co-founder Vanessa Ward (with her husband) admitted that she lacked those skills. “This is a business. It’s a start-up business. I think most persons who are in education don’t necessarily come with those gifts managing budgets and forecasting, insuring that you’re making the best decisions fiscally to allow a start-up business to survive.” The Wards and their colleagues on the Omega board craved quality financial-management support, and k.i.d.s. was set up to help provide it to worthy but needy schools like this one.

By mid-2005, k.i.d.s. employed six staffers and three consultants who not only had the school-finance knowledge and appropriate state certifications, but also possessed real expertise in navigating Ohio’s byzantine data-reporting systems. At the start of the 2005–06 school year, k.i.d.s. was serving 11 schools in four cities with a combined enrollment of about 1,860 students. The services generated about $400,000 in fees for “back office” services. Fordham also subsidized k.i.d.s. to the tune of about $150,000 a year.

The board of k.i.d.s., which included Fordham’s Finn as well as Ryan, widened its mandate, adding academic and operating activities (e.g., food service support) and new schools in other cities. Too many Ohio charter schools were struggling academically as well as financially. K.i.d.s. wanted to see if it could build a full-fledged, high-quality, local charter-management effort, something almost absent from Ohio at that time. This service might even include running whole-school operations.

By this point, the Omega school was facing serious academic as well as financial challenges. Its initial success had been driven largely by Vanessa Ward’s vision, energy, and commitment. In 2005, however, she had to shoulder more church responsibilities when her husband became seriously ill. School heads came and went. Enrollment dropped and the school faltered. Such challenges, we were coming to discover, plagued many one-off charter schools that depended too much on the vision and leadership of a single dynamic individual.

Gradually, Omega’s future prospects became more and more entwined with those of k.i.d.s., both because the school came to consume more of the nascent CMO’s (charter management organization) time and attention and because k.i.d.s.’ other revenues were drying up. A support grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was spent. In 2006, Mangen spun off the one successful part of k.i.d.s.’ work—the financial services program—into his own new private business. Though Fordham and one or two other private donors did their best, the money just wasn’t there to keep k.i.d.s. afloat so long as its main client was the faltering, shrinking Omega School of Excellence.

When the Omega board authorized a formal resolution ceasing the school’s operations in June 2008, its demise dealt a mortal blow to k.i.d.s. and to our dream of creating a nonprofit school-management organization that could run successful schools across Dayton and southwestern Ohio.

Both organizations were also wounded by the national economic downturn that reduced Fordham’s endowment—and those of many others—by more than one-third. This fiscal misery made it far harder to raise money for a struggling school and a fledgling CMO that faced uncertain futures, even in flush times.

Human capital proved problematic, too. Finding and keeping great talent to work in Dayton’s charter sector was a nut that k.i.d.s. never cracked. And when it engaged the services of really capable individuals, they swiftly proved to be in great demand elsewhere.

Under these circumstances, we had to shelve our hopes for a Dayton-based CMO. There are, to be sure, several national charter outfits—e.g., Edison Learning, National Heritage Academies, Building Excellent Schools, KIPP—operating in Ohio and some of them do good work. But what this approach neglects, and what Ohio (and many other places) still needs, are mechanisms for strengthening the “mom-and-pop” schools like Omega that have deep roots in their communities yet lack the educational and management capacity necessary to sustain success.

Sobered and a bit battered, Fordham continues as an authorizer of Ohio charter schools—six of them today, with a seventh in the offing—and a vigorous participant in the state’s larger education-policy debates. We’re constantly exploring new options including, at this writing, possible merger with several other authorizers into a larger and, we hope, more stable and effective statewide sponsorship venture. Meanwhile, we’ve learned a lot about how much harder it is to walk the walk of education reform than simply to talk the talk, and about how the most robust of theories are apt to soften and melt in the furnace of actual experience. ?

Competition Makes a Comeback

June Kronholz — Thu, 20 May 2010 13:15:19 +0000

Video: George Thampy, winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 2000.

Paige Kimble won the 1981 Scripps National Spelling Bee with “sarcophagus,” a word that any middle schooler who has studied a unit on the boy king Tutankhamun can use with aplomb.

Now consider the words tossed at the bee’s 2009 finalists, all 12- and 13-year-olds: Laodicean, Maecenas, menhir, apodyterium, herniorrhaphy. Even a computer spell checker doesn’t recognize them.

Palatschinken? What’s happening here?

“The words are getting harder because the level of competition has risen,” says Kimble, who’s now the director of the national spelling bee. There are more children spending more hours studying more words, all for “the opportunity to shine on a national stage,” she adds.

Today’s teachers generally cringe at everything about that development. All those hours spent on one narrow academic focus! All that rote learning! All that stressful competition! And if some children shine on that national stage, what about the self-esteem of every other child whose luster is publicly shown to be not as bright?

Good points, perhaps. But they haven’t slowed the apparent growing interest among middle schoolers in the Scripps spell-off or any of the other bees, bowls, and academic olympiads that will climax in national championships this spring. The Scripps bee claims that 10 million children will take part in its spell-offs this year. Last year, 293 of them made it to the televised finals in Washington after winning local or regional runoffs sponsored by newspapers and community businesses. In 1981, there were just 120 finalists.

The National Geographic Bee, run by the National Geographic Society, claims between 4 million and 5 million yearly participants from 14,000 schools. One finalist from each state and territory will compete for $50,000 in scholarships during the televised finals in May.

MATHCOUNTS, sponsored by the National Society of Professional Engineers and technology companies including Raytheon, says participation is up 10 percent in two years. There’s also a National Science Bowl sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, a Bible Bowl, grammar bowls, and an International Brain Bee, where finalists identify the parts and functions of the brain—using human brains.

There may be an element of 21st-century angst in all of this: kids hoping that a national academic championship on their résumé will increase their chances of being accepted by an Ivy League college, at a time when that competition has never been tougher. “I’m setting my sights high, for Harvard or Yale,” says Arjun Kandaswamy, who placed second in the 2009 National Geographic Bee and now, as a 9th grader, has aged out of the contest.

But Arjun would seem to be a strong contender even without a bee victory to his name. He’s making “A”s in Advanced Placement U.S. history, honors literature and chemistry, and precalculus at Westview High School in Portland, Oregon. He’s a member of his school science and debate teams, mentors 5th graders in science—and expects to make the varsity tennis team this spring. He also gushes endearingly about the joys of geography. Even studying it four hours a day, “geography is never a chore,” he assured me.

Indeed, the dozen bee contestants I talked with are high achievers in everything they do: They challenge themselves with the toughest courses their schools offer, and still make time for sports, Key Club, Boy Scouts, piano, or the school robotics team. Some claim Rolodex memories; others attribute their success to hard—really hard—work. “I’m a very goal-oriented person,” said Caitlin Snaring, who won the 2007 National Geographic Bee after creating a series of study guides and color-coded maps, analyzing the tapes of past national bees, and grilling past competitors on their study techniques.

If any of them suffered by not taking home the top prize, they don’t show it. Zachary Zagorski, who came in 17th in the 2009 spelling bee, said his reaction to misspelling “strepitoso” was “OK, fine, I’m gone.” They got involved in their bee, bowl, or olympiad for the same reasons most of us get involved in a hobby or career: they liked it, it held their interest, and “I found out I was good at it,” Zachary added.

They’re the kind of kids that teachers say they don’t have enough of: motivated, articulate, eager, resourceful, and charming. So as bee season swings into high gear, why are some people so uncomfortable about these kids and their victories?

Keeping Score

Americans thrive on competition. It’s why our phones are smarter, our farms are more productive, our athletes run faster, our pop stars are raunchier, and our lives tend to be better—except for the raunchy pop stars—every year. But American schools have been suspicious of competition for generations, and are generally horrified by the idea that success should be accompanied by a reward like a title, a trophy, or a cash prize. Knowledge is its own reward, after all.

Carol Tomlinson, who taught in Virginia public schools for 21 years and is now a professor of educational leadership at the University of Virginia, makes the case against competition, even while arguing that schools have taken it to an extreme. Middle school is “the last time we have to get kids from low-income families to buy into school,” she told me. The surest way to “incorporate and affiliate” those kids is to show them they can succeed; the surest way to lose them to indifference is to hand them proof of their own failure. And what could be clearer proof than to be knocked out of a spelling bee?

Susan Brookhart, former chair of the Department of Foundations and Leadership at Duquesne University’s School of Education and now a consultant on testing and motivation, takes that argument one step further. “Anything that sets up a universe where it looks like being smart and dumb are traits that you’re born with is not good for learning for anyone except—surprise!—the winners,” she told me. She includes classroom star charts in that esteem-crushing universe, as well as anything that ranks youngsters against one another.

Competition “creates this idea among students that there are winners and losers, and ‘puts them in their place’ in that universe,” Brookhart added.

That thinking has reshaped teaching over the past two decades. Classroom work is more collaborative and team-based, especially in math and science, where girls in particular are said to have benefited. Tracking and ability grouping have fallen into disfavor, easing the slower-learner stigma. Portfolio assessments are gaining ground. Report cards set out individualized goals.

“Societally, we view child development differently” than our parents did, and that has spilled over into the classroom, says Frederick J. Morrison, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Center for Human Growth and Development. “We’re much more prone to feeling that optimal development will come through positive messages than through negative feedback or punishment.”

There aren’t a lot of data to back that up, however. Daniel Willingham, a University of Virginia cognitive psychologist, says the research on collaboration vs. competition as teaching method is muddled, and not entirely trustworthy. “People who do research like the idea that there ought to be more cooperation—that’s the sensibility within the education-research community,” he told me. “The danger is that researchers reach the answer they want to find.”

The squeamishness about competition reached its extreme with the self-esteem movement of the 1990s, when researchers decided that low-performing kids would do better in school if they just, darn it, felt better about themselves. Schools dropped honor rolls, the class valedictorian, and assemblies that recognized academic stars, but not, of course, assemblies that recognized football or basketball or golf stars. At the feel-good movement’s most absurd, “authentic experience” triumphed over standardized spelling and grammar. Ethnocentric math had its proponents. Everyone got a “good job” sticker, good job or not.

The self-esteem movement “probably backfired and made kids arrogant for no cause,” said Willingham, who included himself in the self-esteem pack. Willingham and Morrison, among others, now see a change. “It has seeped into the public consciousness that we got that wrong,” Willingham said. “Self esteem does not help with learning; high self-esteem goes with high test scores,” not the other way around.

By eliminating many of those measures that show youngsters where they stand in the classroom, “we make kids feel a lot better about themselves, but we’re not challenging them nearly as much as we did three, four, five generations ago,” added Morrison.

The Drive to Compete

It’s hard to trace the arc of the pendulum swing, but the standards movement—which led to state tests and from there to No Child Left Behind—seems one place to start. The Bush administration education law defines and punishes failure, and there are no extra points for a cocky walk.

Tough economic times are another place to look, says Aaron M. Pallas, a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Middle-class kids and their parents are worried about getting into and paying for college. A high-school transcript that doesn’t report grades or class standing doesn’t help; neither does weakness in math and reading.

A national academic championship, or membership in the National Honor Society, might help, though. The number of schools with National Junior Honor Society chapters for middle schoolers has grown to 7,552 from 4,625 since 2000, says the National Association of Secondary School Principals, which runs the program. The number of National Honor Society chapters is up by one-third in the same time.

No Child Left Behind doesn’t say anything about spelling and geography bees, of course, but its impact on academic go-getters is a matter of some debate. Teachers and researchers grumble that the law focuses teachers’ attention on getting youngsters over a bar of minimal competency. There’s no reward for getting stronger students to proficiency, or really bright kids to some advanced level. “Kids in the higher ranges of knowledge or skill find classes pretty desolate these days,” said UVa’s Tomlinson.

No Child Left Behind critics also contend that the law has narrowed learning to what’s on the test, and spelling, geography, and science aren’t. And teachers complain that they haven’t the time to teach anything else, anyway. Kids looking for a challenge may have to look outside their schools, adds Tomlinson, because “classrooms haven’t engaged anyone for a whole academic generation now.”

The bee finalists I talked with had a far brighter view of their schools than that (and most of them attended public schools), although some did complain of teachers who asked little of them and classes they claimed they could sleep through. The encouraging news is that bright, motivated youngsters can usually seek out gifted-and-talented programs, accelerated classes, and daunting amounts of extra work, which is what bee contestants appear to do.

Eric Yang, a Colony, Texas, 8th grader who won the 2009 geography bee, is taking pre-AP classes in science, U.S. history, and English at Griffin Middle School, plus geometry at the local high school. William Lee IV, who finished third in the 2008 geography bee, is taking Italian and Spanish at Woburn High School in Massachusetts, plus “honors classes for everything else.” Caitlin Snaring took her first AP class—and got a perfect AP test score—as a freshman.

For many of these superachievers, bees and bowls are just one more academic challenge, one more way to test themselves. “It’s about me working to improve myself,” said Sidharth Chand, who was knocked out of the 2009 spelling-bee finals on “apodeiterium.” “I didn’t get involved because I didn’t find school challenging; it was an extra thing.” Sidharth, who went to the 2008 spelling bee finals, too, is taking six honors classes at Detroit Country Day School and, as “an extra thing,” is on the school Quiz Bowl and Science Olympiad teams.

Indeed, the kids I talked to load themselves with extra challenges. Eric Yang has been entering science, math, art, and impromptu-speaking competitions sponsored by the University of Texas in Austin since he was in 4th grade—and that’s in addition to the piano competitions he likes. Caitlin Snaring was in a Bible memory program.

Tim Ruiter, a Centreville, Virginia, home schooler, competed in the finals of a national math and science bowl two weeks before the 2009 spelling-bee finals, where he tied for second place after flubbing “Maecenas.”

The internal challenge isn’t the only reason youngsters take on the incredible workload of a national bee, though. There’s the honor of representing their state or hometown, some of them told me. There’s the prospect of a trip to Washington, D.C., for the finals. There’s the chance to spend time with youngsters who share their passion for word roots or river systems or algebra, many said. “I thought it would be fun to meet people who know geography like I did,” said Eric Yang.

Many kids talked of the thrill, and benefits, of competition. “I’m competitive; I just like to win,” said Kirsi Anselmi-Stith, a Rock Springs, Wyoming, 8th grader who will compete in the geography-bee finals this spring for the third time.

“It’s good to have rivals—they push you to be your best,” added Kennyi Aouad, who reached the 2007, 2008, and 2009 spelling-bee finals. Kennyi, the son of Ghanaian immigrants who live in Terra Haute, Indiana, apparently found the pushing helpful: He’s now attending Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut on a full scholarship.

A bee is “something you really like doing, and it’s showing everyone I’m the best at what I’m doing and it’s the competition. It was everything coming together,” said Arjun Kandaswamy, the 2009 geography bee runner-up.

The most common refrain I heard, though, was much simpler than any of that. “It was pretty fun,” said Kennyi Aouad.

“It was real great fun,” added Sidharth Chand.

“It was very fun,” said Aishwarya Pastapur, who competed in the 2009 spelling bee.

“It was always fun,” agreed William Lee.

Fun?

Handling Defeat

That’s hard for detractors to imagine. They fret about the stress heaped on the young shoulders of bee finalists and the agony of defeat on tender egos. Indeed, newspaper accounts of the 2009 spelling-bee finals suggest swirling drama, tension, and heartbreak. Sidharth Chand “buried his head in his hands for about a minute” after flubbing his word, the Associated Press reported. A contestant from Las Vegas “took a seat in her mother’s lap and wiped a tear or two.”

The auditorium was “tension-packed,” the audience let out sighs of “nervous exhalation,” young faces “drooped,” and eliminated contestants mingled in the hallway, “stunned by defeat,” the AP added. Talk about child abuse!

The popular image of bee contestants, moreover, is that they spend hours on grinding memorization and mind-numbing rote that robs them of time for creative thought and interdisciplinary learning. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, the spelling bee’s definitive source, lists 476,000 words that might be called out. The geography bee directs contestants to a 500-page reference book written by a past winner. Are these the kinds of thinkers we want in a 21st-century economy?

But the kids I talked to saw their bees as a happy experience that broadened their knowledge rather than narrowed it. Sidharth Chand may have buried his head in his hands as the AP reported, but “after that, I became involved in my schoolwork again and then it was preparation for high school. There was other work to do and that took precedence over moping around,” he said.

Aishwarya Pastapur, who spelled the Dutch homonym “mynheer” for “menhir,” admitted she “cried for a few days” after tying for second place. “I felt so horrible because I know both words. I still feel horrible sometimes,” she said.

But that hasn’t stopped Aishwarya from going out for the scholastic bowl at her Springfield, Illinois, high school or the International Brain Bee, which was founded by University of Maryland neuroscientist Norbert Myslinski. That contest, for high schoolers only, includes a neuroanatomy practical and a patient diagnosis that Dr. Myslinski pegs to the second year of medical school.

Most of the kids I talked with told me that they were proud that they had come so far, not dismayed that they had fallen just short. “That was the best I’d ever done. My family was proud of me, so there was no reason to be disappointed,” said Kennyi Aouad.

Losing “made me want to win even more,” said Caitlin Snaring, who said her defeat in the 2006 geography bee “got me fired up” to win the 2007 contest.

“It could have gone either way,” said Arjun Kandaswarmy, who lost the 2009 geography bee to Eric Yang on a question that they both were asked about the Timi? River in Romania. “I studied hard, he studied hard. I did everything I could. It’s just bad luck that I got that close and didn’t make it,” Arjun said with amazing equipoise.

Even in losing, some found themselves hometown celebrities, which certainly would have salved any sting of defeat. “Oceanside just embraced him totally,” Shari Zagorski told me about her son, Zachary, and their Long Island, New York, community’s reaction to his trip to the 2009 spelling-bee finals. Oceanside youngsters accounted for 6 of the 31 contestants at the Long Island regional contest this fall, she said. “Spelling suddenly became cool.”

If youngsters are indeed “stunned by defeat,” Mary Lee Elden said she doesn’t see it. Elden started and still runs the geography bee for the National Geographic Society, which fetes the finalists with a tour-filled weekend in Washington before the televised face-off. Elden said she keeps cookies and juice backstage for eliminated contestants, and some years “we’ve had to send people back there to tell them to keep quiet, they’re having so much fun.”

Of course, kids who can’t handle defeat don’t generally get involved in such a high-pressure contest, or don’t make it to the national finals in the first place.

Winning Ways

In the same self-selecting way, kids who don’t find pleasure in the hours of study that generally are part of bee preparations don’t get involved, either.

Several youngsters told me they have near-photographic memories that kept preparations for their bees to a mere hour or so a night. But most said they worked darn hard—and often quite creatively—to master their subjects. Tim Ruiter, the Virginia home schooler, took a class in Greek and Latin word roots to prepare for the 2009 spelling-bee finals. This year, with one year of eligibility left (the bee is open only to those in 8th grade or lower), he is studying German to better understand the spelling patterns in words with Germanic roots.

The best spellers aren’t memorizers, “they’re word sleuths,” the spelling bee’s Paige Kimble told me, spelling out “sleuth,” just as you’d expect a spelling maven to do. The most successful contestants are kids who learn about language patterns and “have an incredible sense of how language is put together,” she added.

Some kids assembled mountains of flashcards and binders of maps, lists, and fact sheets. Arjun Kandaswamy said he studied for the geography bee finals by “layering”—starting with “the basic stuff” like continents and countries, and gradually adding layers of geographic complexity. Remarkably, I thought, only one youngster said he got any help from a teacher: a Bridgewater (MA) State College professor offered William Lee several all-day tutorials before the geography bee.

I checked the spelling and geography bee web sites for the names of bee winners for the past 12 years (the period of the greatest surge in immigration in a century), and found that exactly half were youngsters whose names suggested they are Asian immigrants or the children of Asian immigrants, and that most of those were Indian or Indian American.

Daniel Willingham attributes that in part to the Asian esteem of knowledge and tradition of rote learning. A simpler answer is that the Indian American community has embraced spelling bees in a way no other group has. There are chat rooms and blogs where Indian Americans discuss spelling, bees are widely reported in Indian papers, and winners are heroes—even back in Bangalore and Delhi. Spelling is to Indians, it seems, as baseball is to Dominicans or football to Samoans: a way for strivers to shine.

Anyone uncomfortable with that only has to look at the names of the other winners: Williams, O’Dorney, Wojtanik, Haddad-Fonda. As American as apple pie.

The one common denominator among the kids I talked to is that they read—a lot. Newspapers, cookbooks, novels, travel magazines, nonfiction. “Pretty much everything,” said Zachary Zagorski, whose current favorite is a series of novels about Artemis Fowl, a boy described as “the world’s greatest criminal mastermind.” Geography bee finalists said they also pore over maps, atlases, foreign money, and Google Earth—and have ever since a parent first traveled to Bern or a friend sent a postcard from Kashmir.

The few studies of Nobel laureates and other groundbreaking thinkers suggests that doggedness, even more than raw ability, separates them from other high-level experts in their field, says Daniel Willingham. Nobel winners “tend to be very good, but not amazing,” he told me. “What differentiates them is not that the Nobel winners have more raw horsepower, but that they have a very high threshold for mental exhaustion. They keep working at problems when the rest of us have to get up and go watch ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ or something.”

Maybe that tells us something about bee contestants, and maybe bee contestants tell us something about our kids and our schools. “Standards increase the effort; effort increases the knowledge level,” says the University of Michigan’s Frederick Morrison.

Okay, everyone: Where’s the Limpopo, what’s the currency of Nauru, and is it a-p-o-g-g-i-a-t-u-r-a or a-p-p-o-g-g-i-a-t-u-r-a?

June Kronholz is a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and education reporter. She has lived on five continents, knows the capitals of Africa, and is a good speller.

State Standards Rise in Reading, Fall in Math

Paul E. Peterson — Thu, 20 May 2010 10:25:44 +0000

Podcast: Paul Peterson and Chester E. Finn, Jr. talk about why Tennessee and Delaware were the big winners of round 1 of Race to the Top.

The data used to determine the grades in Figure 1 are available here.

Much ado has been made about setting high standards over the past year. In his first major address on education policy, given just two months after he took the oath of office, President Barack Obama put the issue on the national agenda. They ought “to stop lowballing expectations for our kids,” he said, adding that “the solution to low test scores is not lowering standards—it’s tougher, clearer standards.” In March 2010, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan accused educators of having “lowered the bar” so they could meet the requirements set by the federal education law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which requires that all students be proficient in reading and math by the year 2014.

Current conversations about creating a common national standard largely focus on the substantive curriculum to be taught at various grade levels. Even more important, we submit, is each state’s expectations for student performance with respect to the curriculum, as expressed through its proficiency standard. Curricula can be perfectly designed, but if the proficiency bar is set very low, little is accomplished by setting the content standards in the first place.

To see whether states are setting proficiency bars in such a way that they are “lowballing expectations” and have “lowered the bar” for students in 4th- and 8th-grade reading and math, Education Next has used information from the recently released 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to evaluate empirically the proficiency standards each state has established. This report is the fourth in a series in which we periodically assess the rigor of these standards (see “Johnny Can Read…in Some States,” features, Summer 2005; “Keeping an Eye on State Standards,” features, Summer 2006; and “Few States Set World-Class Standards,” check the facts, Summer 2008).

The 2009 NAEP tests in reading and math were given to a representative sample of students in 4th- and 8th-grade in each state. NAEP, called “the nation’s report card,” is managed by the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics and is currently the “gold standard” of assessments. Its proficiency standard is roughly equivalent to the international standard established by those industrialized nations that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). If a state identifies no higher a percentage of students as being proficient on its own tests than NAEP does, then the state can be said to have set its standards at a world-class level. To ascertain objectively whether state standards are high or low, and whether they are rising or falling, we compare the percentage of students deemed proficient by each state with the percentage proficient as measured by NAEP. The state assessment data used in this report consist of those compiled in 2009 by the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

States have strong incentives not to set world-class standards. If they do, more of their schools will be identified as failing under NCLB rules, and states will then be required to take corrective actions to bring students’ performance up to the higher standard. As a result, the temptation for states to “lowball expectations” is substantial. Perhaps for this reason, a sharp disparity between NAEP standards and the standards in most states has been identified in all of our previous reports. In 2009, the situation improved in reading, but deteriorated further in math.

Every state, for both reading and math (with the exception of Massachusetts for math), deems more students “proficient” on its own assessments than NAEP does. The average difference is a startling 37 percentage points. In Figure 1, we provide a uniform ranking of the rigor of state standards using the same A to F scale used to grade students (see sidebar for the specifics on the methodology we used).

The Grading

In 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009, 4th- and 8th-grade students took both state and NAEP tests in math and reading. The grades reported here are based on the comparison of state and NAEP proficiency scores in 2009, and changes for each are calculated relative to 2003 (Figure 2). For each available test, we computed the difference between the percentage of students who were proficient on the NAEP and the percentage reported to be proficient on the state’s own tests for the same year. We also computed the standard deviation for this difference. We then determined how many standard deviations each state’s difference was above or below the average difference of all observations in 2009, 2007, and 2005 on each test. The scale for the grades was set so that if grades had been randomly assigned and so were in a normal distribution, 10 percent of the states would earn As, 20 percent Bs, 40 percent Cs, 20 percent Ds, and 10 percent Fs. The grade given to each state is based on how much easier it was to be labeled proficient on the state assessment than on the NAEP. For example, on the 4th-grade math test in 2009, West Virginia reported that 60.8 percent of its students had achieved proficiency, but 28.1 percent were proficient on the NAEP. The overall grade for each state was determined by comparing the difference with the standard deviation from the average for all states for all four years on the tests for which the state reported proficiency percentages. In the case of West Virginia for 4th-grade math, the difference (60.8 percent – 28.1 percent = 32.7 percentage points) is about 0.02 standard deviations worse than the average difference between the state test and the NAEP over the three years, which is 32.4 percent. This earned West Virginia a C for its standards in 4th-grade math. We are therefore generous in that we do not require the meeting of any stipulated cutoff in the differences with NAEP to award a specific grade: no single state would be ranked A, say, if we required for this a difference with NAEP smaller than 5 percentage points. Instead, we rank states against each other in accordance to their current position in the distribution of differences over all the years for which we have observations (2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009).

Racing to the Top?

Ironically, Tennessee received an F and had the lowest standards of all states, despite the fact that it is one of the two winners in the first phase of the bitterly contested Race to the Top (RttT) competition sponsored by the Obama administration’s Department of Education. Indeed, Tennessee has had the lowest standards of all states since 2003. Based on its own tests and standards, the state claimed in 2009 that over 90 percent of its 4th-grade students were proficient in math, whereas NAEP tests revealed that only 28 percent were performing at a proficient level. Results in 4th-grade reading and at the 8th-grade level are much the same. With such divergence, the concept of “standard” has lost all meaning. It’s as if a yardstick can be 36 inches long in most of the world, but 3 inches long in Tennessee.

Delaware, the other RttT First Phase winner, also had below-average standards, for which we awarded a grade of C- and ranked it 36th of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Delaware claimed that 77 percent of its 4th-grade students were proficient in math, when NAEP shows that only 36 percent were. In 8th-grade reading, Delaware said 81 percent of its students were proficient, but NAEP put the figure at 31 percent.

From these findings one might conclude that the Obama administration is having a huge policy impact by getting states like Tennessee and Delaware to set standards they have been unwilling to establish in the past. But Tennessee earned almost full marks (98 percent) on the section of the competition (weighted a substantial 14 percent of all possible points) devoted to “adopting standards and assessments,” even though its standards have remained extremely low ever since the federal accountability law took hold. The proof will be in the pudding. If Tennessee and Delaware and other states now shift their standards dramatically upward, RttT will win over those who think it is performance, rather than promises, that should be rewarded.

Disparities in State Standards

Despite the incentive to lowball expectations, five states—Hawaii, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Mexico, and Washington—have set their standards at or close to the world-class level, earning them an A. Notice that we award grades purely for the expected standard for performance, not actual proficiency. New Mexico earned the same mark as Massachusetts, even though only about one-quarter of its students are proficient, while half of Massachusetts students score at that level. The two deserve equal grades, however, because both are rigorous in their expectations. Another eight states—Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont—earned a B for their standards.

President Obama is undoubtedly correct, however, in suggesting that many states are “lowballing expectations.” Of the remaining 38 states, 27 earned a C, and 8—Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Texas, and Virginia—a D. Three states—Alabama, Nebraska, and Tennessee—had such low standards that we awarded them an F. All of the states that earned grades of F have been ranked D or below in all three of our previous reports. This suggests that once a standard, however low, has been set, it tends to persist—another reason to be concerned about promises from Delaware and Tennessee.

Changes in Standards

Secretary of Education Duncan is not altogether correct in suggesting that educators are lowering the bar, however. Figure 2 shows that in 2009 the differences between state and NAEP standards shrank by 0.08 standard deviations as compared to the average for the three prior surveys. This is a reversal of the trend of declining standards we observed between 2003 and 2007. Eight states improved the overall rigor of their assessments by a full letter grade or more since 2007: Georgia, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia. By contrast, we gave just four states—Alaska, California, New York, and South Carolina—grades that were at least a full letter grade worse than they received in 2007.

The reversal in the overall trend is, however, driven wholly by an improvement in the rigor of reading assessments, which set expectations that are higher by 0.49 standard deviations in 4th grade and by 0.26 standard deviations in 8th grade. As a matter of fact, 17 states increased the rigor of their 4th-grade reading assessments by a whole letter grade since 2007, and 17 states did the same for 8th grade. But math standards have slipped by 0.12 standard deviations in 4th grade and by 0.31 in 8th grade. This means that at least some of the state-reported improvements in mathematics proficiency are misleading.

Converging on a De Facto National Standard?

Most changes to standards, as we noted, have been fairly small: only 12 states have made changes to their standards that alter their standing by a whole letter grade. But since our last report two states, Hawaii and South Carolina, have made major alterations to state assessments. The results of these moves have been at odds: while Hawaii’s increased alignment with NAEP raised its grade from a B+ in 2007 to an A, South Carolina dropped from an A to a C-.

States nonetheless seem to be continuing their trajectory of convergence toward standards of similar rigor in math (which, given the slipping standards noted above, constitutes a downward convergence), but are more divergent in reading since 2007, particularly in 4th grade. If the convergence of math standards were to continue, we could gradually attain something like a national standard. But it would take a great deal of national patience to achieve a national standard by convergence creep.

In this report, as in previous ones, we assess the rigor of standards that states set. This is an important task, as it reminds states that whether students have or have not learned cannot be a matter of how the test is designed and where the “proficiency line” is drawn. Rather, setting high standards for proficiency is the first step in the journey toward actually improving the learning of a high percentage of students. According to NAEP, less than one-third of students are proficient in reading and a similar proportion in math nationwide. For the sake of the children of this country, we should be doing much better than that.

Paul E. Peterson is professor of government at Harvard University, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and editor-in-chief at Education Next. Carlos Xabel Lastra-Anadón is a research fellow at the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.

Edutopian Vision

Robert Pondiscio — Tue, 11 May 2010 10:53:43 +0000

Teaching, not politics, is the art of the possible. Teachers are optimists for a living. We believe all students will learn. We believe ignorance is no match for education. We believe in our personal powers of persuasion and influence. The arc of the teacher’s universe is long, but it bends toward progress. We believe, in short, in Edutopia.

And Edutopia believes in us.

Let politicians and pundits speak darkly of the need to weed out bad teachers. Let them hold tests and accountability over our heads like the Sword of Damocles. In Edutopia, teachers rule. We are confident and inspiring. Enlightened administrators are courageous and brave. Grateful parents swoon, while bright, cheerful students meet their academic manifest destinies as their awesome teachers reject the discredited orthodoxies of industrial-age schooling in favor of hands-on projects and authentic, real-world tasks. In the bright light of Edutopia’s soul it is always six o’clock in the morning, and you cannot wait to jump out of bed and get to school.

More seductive than a fitness magazine on New Year’s Day, Edutopia inspires me. Edutopia gets me. Edutopia sees the teacher I am capable of becoming—no, the teacher I will be—and it wants to help me. True, I haven’t helped inner-city high-school students design and build a hybrid car that runs on fuel made from soybeans like that guy in Philadelphia. OK, I haven’t nailed down donations to buy an old farm so my students can garden and read Thoreau in the bosom of nature like that teacher in Vermont. Hell, I haven’t even found the time for that cool unit where my kids create digital avatars and use them to explore body issues. But I will. Yes, in fact, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Right after the tests are over. It’s possible.

Edutopia comes by its name honestly. Beyond aspirational, it is teacher porn. But here’s the thing: it’s serious. The George Lucas Educational Foundation, the 19-year-old organization that runs Edutopia, has given itself a mission to “spread the word about ideal, interactive learning environments and enable others to adapt these successes locally.” Its name notwithstanding, Edutopia does not see itself as peddling pie-eyed idealism.

Many people in education were only dimly aware of Edutopia until early 2009, when the organization suddenly became more aggressive about promoting its vision and products. Driven by a ubiquitous underwriting campaign on National Public Radio (NPR), Edutopia claims 10,000 paid members and a total monthly audience of over 300,000 educators for its web site and videos, a 70 percent jump in the past year. Its six-year-old bimonthly magazine, Edutopia, reached 100,000 subscribers until the foundation decided to go online-only starting in the spring of 2010.

Its unabashed idealism and cheerful optimism make it impossible to dislike Edutopia, which bills itself somewhat grandly as “What Works in Public Education.” What’s harder to define is Edutopia’s on-the-ground impact on America’s classrooms and the efficacy of its unique, ultraprogressive ideas. Lucas’s money has purchased an impressive collection of reported articles, videos, and web pages gathered on-site at schools across the country that practice at least bits of what Edutopia preaches. Still, foundation officials are hard-pressed to identify any school that has adopted its strategies as a whole. Thus a better Edutopia tagline might be, “What We Think Would Probably Work in Public Education If Schools Would Stop Being So Old-Fashioned and Just Try It. Plus George Lucas Thinks It’s a Good Idea.”

That might not make a compelling NPR underwriting credit. But it would be more accurate.

What Works in Public Education?

For Edutopia, “What Works in Public Education” boils down to six “core principles”: comprehensive assessment, integrated studies, project-based learning, social and emotional learning, teacher development, and technology integration (see sidebar). Project learning and technology get the biggest push, but even these two favorites serve a bigger picture. “The six core principles can be summarized in six words,” says Dr. Milton Chen, senior fellow and executive director emeritus of the George Lucas Educational Foundation. “‘School life should resemble real life.’ That’s what we’d really like to see happening in schools.”

Edutopia does not consult with schools or districts. It makes no grants. It offers no professional development or teacher training. Essentially, it’s a nonprofit media company. “Working for a filmmaker, we make films,” says Chen. “And we surround those films with other kinds of information that can support learning about how these innovative classrooms came to be.” The foundation has an annual budget of $6 million and a full-time staff of 18 editors, videographers, and web producers who work out of sleek and modern offices at Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, a 4,700-acre retreat in the Marin County hills near Nicasio, California.

Edutopia’s web site has more than 10,000 pages of content, plus videos, podcasts, and webinars that seek to redefine what is possible—even practical—in U.S. schools: Inner-city schools that stress empathy, collaboration, and personal responsibility. Green schools whose smaller carbon footprints reduce absenteeism and improve test scores. Schools where kids work alongside trained chefs to create school lunches made from scratch with fresh ingredients grown in once-abandoned local greenhouses. If these sound like the kinds of schools where you’d like to teach, that’s exactly the point. “The reaction we’d like people to have is to say, ‘I’d like that for my students,’” says Chen. “‘Whether I’m a superintendent or a parent, I want that kind of education for my kids.’ And then we have to answer the question, how do you do it?”

“What Works” according to Edutopia

Edutopia’s tagline is “What Works in Public Education.” So what works? Edutopia cites six “core concepts” but little proof to back its claims.

Comprehensive Assessment: “We know that the typical multiple-choice and short-answer tests aren’t the only way, or necessarily the best way, to gauge a student’s knowledge and abilities. Many states are incorporating performance-based assessments into their standardized tests or adding assessment vehicles such as student portfolios and presentations as additional measures of student understanding.”

Popular with teachers, portfolios and other forms of “authentic” assessment have proven difficult to implement broadly. A 1995 RAND report on a statewide program in Vermont concluded that portfolio assessment “has been largely unsuccessful so far in meeting its goal of providing high-quality data about student performance.”

Integrated Studies: “Creativity, adaptability, critical reasoning, and collaboration are highly valued skills. When it comes to fostering those skills in the classroom, integrated study is an extremely effective approach, helping students develop multifaceted expertise and grasp the important role interrelationships can play in the real world.”

Data are hard to come by. A search of “integrated studies” in the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) database yields 71 hits, only 4 of which are peer-reviewed studies.

Project Learning: “Because project learning is filled with active and engaged learning, it inspires students to obtain a deeper knowledge of the subjects they’re studying. Research also indicates that students are more likely to retain the knowledge gained through this approach far more readily than through traditional textbook-centered learning.”

“Project learning is great when it’s done well, but it’s very hard to pull off,” observes University of Virginia cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, the author of Why Don’t Students Like School? “It’s probably much worse than other methods when it’s done poorly. It just turns into nothing.”

Social and Emotional Learning: “Research shows that promoting social and emotional skills leads to reduced violence and aggression among children, higher academic achievement, and an improved ability to function in schools and in the workplace…. Before children can be expected to unite to achieve academic goals, they must be taught how to work together, and so it provides them with strategies and tools for cooperative learning.”

The idea that noncognitive skills can matter as much as IQ for career and life success is most closely associated with psychologist and author Daniel Goleman. Critics say these skills are poorly defined and hard to measure, and that claims about “emotional intelligence” are overblown.

Teacher Development: “The best teacher-preparation programs emphasize subject-matter mastery and provide many opportunities for student teachers to spend time in real classrooms under the supervision of an experienced mentor. Just as professionals in medicine, architecture, and law have opportunities to learn through examining case studies, learning best practices, and participating in internships, exemplary teacher-preparation programs allow teacher candidates the time to apply their learning of theory in the context of teaching in a real classroom.”

Teacher training programs that focus on subject mastery are still the exception, and Edutopia’s vision of teacher development is one of its stronger pillars. Ironically, it seems to be among the least emphasized of its six core principles.

Technology Integration: “Effective tech integration must happen across the curriculum in ways that research shows deepen and enhance the learning process. In particular, it must support four key components of learning: active engagement, participation in groups, frequent interaction and feedback, and connection to real-world experts. Effective technology integration is achieved when the use of technology is routine and transparent and when technology supports curricular goals.”

Technology certainly can help “make teaching and learning more meaningful and fun,” but more effective? Edutopia doesn’t say what research it’s alluding to here.

Let George Do It

George Lucas is an unlikely education philanthropist. The creator of the blockbuster Star Wars and Indiana Jones film franchises, Lucas’s $3 billion net worth places him in the top quartile of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans, along with Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and members of the Walton family, all of whom are more closely associated with funding education initiatives than Lucas, who by all accounts was a bored, indifferent student growing up amid the farms and factories of Modesto, California.

“There wasn’t much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult,” he said in a 1999 interview. As a teenager, Lucas spent most of his time under the hood of a car dreaming about automobile racing. He liked photography and briefly entertained the idea of going to art school, an idea shot down by his father, a stationery store owner, who once remarked, “George never listened to me. He was his mother’s pet. George was hard to understand. He was always dreaming things up.”

A near-fatal car crash days before his high-school graduation had a profound effect on Lucas. “The idea of trying to make something out of my life wasn’t really a priority,” he said in a 2007 interview with the Academy of Achievement. “But the accident allowed me to apply myself at school.” After dabbling in film at Modesto Junior College, Lucas won admission to the University of Southern California’s prestigious film school in 1967. USC Film School, said Lucas, “really ignited a passion in me, and it took off from there.”

And how. American Graffiti (1973) was Lucas’s second film and his first hit. That was followed by Star Wars (1977), which became the third-highest-grossing film series in history behind James Bond and Harry Potter. Waiving his director’s fee in favor of the licensing rights to the Star Wars characters earned Lucas hundreds of millions of dollars from toys, games, and action figures. His Lucasfilm studio, along with Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light & Magic digital-film effects companies made it nearly impossible to go to the multiplex without seeing Lucas’s thumbprint. At 47, the age at which Barack Obama won the White House, George Lucas took home the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in the film industry.

Clearly, boredom and daydreaming have been very, very good to George Lucas. But how did a gearhead kid with little interest in school end up making public education the object of his philanthropy? Chen describes listening to Lucas reflect on his childhood. “He said, ‘I know there are many, many students out there like me who are disengaged from school, who are kind of bored, not doing well, who in fact have skills and talents and curiosities. If harnessed they could be really great students.’”

A bit of Hollywood mythmaking could be at work here. Lucas has given mixed messages about his own public education. “Frankly, I was not very engaged in my classes,” Lucas said in an e-mail sent to me via Chen. “Occasionally, I had a teacher who would inspire me.” However, he sounded a much more generous note in accepting the Thalberg award at the Oscars in 1992, going out of his way to thank “a group of devoted individuals who, apart from my parents, have done the most to shape my life—my teachers. From kindergarten through college, their struggle—and it was a struggle—to help me grow and learn was not in vain. And it is greatly appreciated.”

Edutopia’s fixation with hands-on projects and technology is certainly consistent with Lucas’s lifelong interest in cars and computers. The source of the foundation’s other education touchstones, however, is not as easy to discern. An e-mail request for Lucas to identify his guiding lights in education went unanswered. Members of Edutopia’s National Advisory Council, which include teachers, administrators, technology experts, and ed school professors, report little influence of or even contact with Lucas. Who has his ear on “What Works”? “I have heard him talk about Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence work,” says Chen. “Also he has spoken of Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences.” Are Edutopia’s core principles the fully formed vision of a creative genius and polymath, self-educated in pedagogy? “Those core principles were developed in close communication with Mr. Lucas,” says Chen, who insists Lucas is “quite active” in Edutopia’s work. “Those are things that George Lucas feels are the linchpins of what he’d like to see in a modern school.”

Fair enough. But are those ideas—from wherever they sprang—any good? Are they “What Works in Public Education”?

Back to the Future

For all its earnestness, Edutopia can sometimes give the sense that it has a poor grasp of history. It is forward-looking to a fault. One senior Edutopia executive was genuinely surprised to learn that project-based learning is neither a new or revolutionary concept in education, but one that traces its roots to William Heard Kilpatrick’s 1918 essay “The Project Method.” No obscure figure, Kilpatrick was “the most influential teacher in the nation’s leading college of education,” spending nearly 30 years on the faculty of Columbia University’s Teachers College, notes education historian Diane Ravitch. In her 2000 book Left Back, Ravitch describes how progressive educators immediately hailed Kilpatrick’s work and its Edutopian call for “whole-hearted purposeful activity proceeding in a social environment,” as the quintessential statement of the child-centered school movement.

“Kilpatrick thought of the project as not just a method but a fundamental reinvention of education. The project was an activity undertaken by students that really interested them,” Ravitch observed. “Furthermore, it fulfilled Dewey’s demand that education should be ‘life itself’ and not merely a preparation for future living; what could be ‘a better preparation for later life than practice living it now?’”

In other words, Edutopia’s mantra—school life should resemble real life—has a century-old provenance. And while teachers are revered, “school” can be a dirty word in Edutopia. An article titled “Beats the Heck Out of School” describes a project that uses hip-hop to teach students critical thinking, technology, and business skills. “What do you think this is—school?” quips a student approvingly in another article about experimental outdoor education. Search “real life” on Edutopia’s web database and you turn up over 200 articles, videos, and blog posts. Search “hands-on” and find 400 more. Somewhere, William Heard Kilpatrick smiles quietly. Dewey, too.

“Project learning is an incredibly important tool. I think there’s ample evidence that it increases student engagement and the ability of kids to retain information,” says Nínive Clements Calegari, a member of Edutopia’s National Advisory Council and the founder of 826 Valencia, a San Francisco education nonprofit. “Every classroom should have old-fashioned multiple-choice tests and good old-fashioned lectures. But if you can engage the kids in a project that has the good tenets of project learning, the impact is more profound,” she says.

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham points out that most teachers believe in project-based learning and the methods promoted by Edutopia, yet classroom observation studies show that whole-class instruction and “seat work” account for more than 90 percent of the class time of American 5th graders. If teachers agree that project-based learning equals good teaching, if it has 100 years of momentum and George Lucas’s millions pushing it, why is so little of it happening in our schools? Teachers “do not yet have widespread support from principals, districts, and states to learn how to implement it,” says Chen. Another possibility is that even those who believe in it do precious little project-based learning because it’s nearly impossible to do well. Willingham points out that teachers, like all human beings, have “cognitive limits.” We can only pay attention to a small number of the stimuli that are competing for our attention at any moment. Small groups working independently to overcome unforeseen and unpredictable obstacles make effective planning a challenge. “This doesn’t mean that students should never do projects. It means that we should be clear-eyed about the challenges that projects present, and have a plan to meet them,” says Willingham. “Project learning is great when it’s done well, but it’s very hard to pull off,” he notes.

Edutopia is on firmer ground in its technology advocacy, where there is broad agreement on the capacity of technology to transform education, even if there is little consensus on implementation. “When done well, technology can positively impact student learning outcomes. The challenge is that most school systems are not doing it well for a variety of reasons,” says Scott McLeod, an educational technology expert and associate professor at Iowa State University. “The failings have been more in the doing, not the knowing,” adds McLeod, who credits Edutopia with helping schools think through technology implementation and get it right. “They see excellent and exciting things happening in various isolated locations around the world, tell those stories, and then try to learn and extrapolate from those to schools at large,” he says.

Technology is central to the Edutopian vision, and Chen and his colleagues are unabashed enthusiasts. “Regardless of the politics of human resistance, technology continues to show often a better and less expensive way of doing things,” says Chen. “We feel that corner is being turned in education.”

To its credit, Edutopia seems not to adhere to a rigid orthodoxy in its coverage of schools. Its impressive “Schools That Work” series, in which Edutopia throws all of its multimedia resources into detailed coverage of an individual school, recently featured YES Prep, an urban charter-school network often mentioned in the same breath with KIPP, Achievement First, and other “no excuses” schools championed by advocates of test-driven education reform. The Houston-based schools have extended days, learning contracts signed by students and parents, school-issued cell phones for teachers, and classrooms bearing the names of colleges—the now-familiar features of what David Whitman dubbed “New Paternalism” schools in his 2008 book Sweating the Small Stuff (see “An Appeal to Authority,” features, Fall 2008). While Yes Prep’s fondness for project learning was highlighted, much of Edutopia’s coverage focused on how to re-create the school’s college-bound culture and tough-love discipline code.

“Story selection is driven first by our core values. For the most part we look for stories in these arenas. Second, we look for innovation and new approaches to reform so as not to become repetitive,” says Edutopia editorial director David Markus. “But in the end, it is about audience. Will the topic and our execution of our coverage plan quench their thirst for new insights and new solutions to improve the learning process?”

“Our core principles are very ambitious compared to where most schools are today,” Chen concedes. “So if a school is doing a great job on two or three of them, that’s a good candidate school for us. It’s very hard, for instance, to find a school that’s really doing the integrated studies piece well. That’s a complete change in the curriculum, certainly at the secondary level.”

Creating Edutopia in U.S. Schools

For all the True Believer energy and aggressive efforts to push an agenda, it remains difficult to discern the impact of Edutopia, either in winning converts to its vision for public education or changing the classroom practice of individual teachers. Most of its staff come from the media world and default to audience metrics as a proxy for influence. “People who use it feel connected to it and celebrated by it. It is absolutely successful for those individuals,” says Calegari, a former teacher. “When I was in the classroom I felt so isolated. It could have created a community for me of like-minded teachers,” she says.

Unlike fellow eduphilanthropists, Lucas has had little to say publicly about education reform. A private 501(c)(3), Edutopia does not lobby or explicitly advocate policy, “Our main role is to provide our media so that policymakers can be informed about and advocate for the policies behind the schools we cover,” says Chen.

Washington ed policy hands are skeptical whether Lucas’s “What Works” vision can gain the traction it needs to usher in an era of, well, Edutopia. “Gates, Walton, and Broad are driven by theories of action that emphasize structural reform” such as systems, incentives, and measures, says Andrew Rotherham, co-founder of Education Sector and author of the Eduwonk.com blog. “Edutopia seems more in the camp that what we need are additions and incremental changes to the current system. They’re not nearly as disruptive.” That’s ironic, he quips, “because you have to think that Luke Skywalker would have been more with Gates, Walton, and Broad. He was all about upending an established order that didn’t work.”

Edutopia rejects the comparison. “We consider our core agenda, when implemented at scale, to be very disruptive,” says Chen, who hopes to create more demand for the ideas Edutopia promotes from teachers, principals, parents, businesses, and others. “We leave it to policy experts to create the policies needed to bring them to scale,” he says.

A former 5th-grade teacher, Robert Pondiscio writes about education at the Core Knowledge Blog.

Fueling the Engine

Frederick Hess — Tue, 04 May 2010 11:48:10 +0000

Video: Frederick Hess on funding innovation

In Education Unbound, Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and Education Next editor, argues for new education service-delivery organizations that, free from the constricting norms and rules of traditional providers, focus single-mindedly on executing their model. The challenge for reformers is to recognize that enabling such providers is not just a matter of promoting “school choice,” but also of freeing up the sector to a wealth of different approaches and cultivating conditions in which problem solvers can succeed and grow. Hess argues in the selection below that funding is the fuel required for innovators to thrive.

Greenfield is a term of art typically used by investors, engineers, or builders to refer to an area where there are unobstructed, wide-open opportunities to invent or build.

— Chapter 1, Education Unbound

New ventures can neither launch nor grow without money. In the absence of funding, greenfield efforts become soul-sucking endeavors for their founders, proceed much more slowly than necessary, or never get off the ground at all. The famous KIPP academies almost died before seeing the light of day because founders Mike Feinberg and David Levin had trouble assembling the few thousand dollars they needed to get started. Raising those funds required the two to write scores of letters and make countless appeals to Houston-area donors. As Washington Post reporter Jay Mathews has wryly recounted in his colorful history of KIPP, Work Hard, Be Nice, “Out of more than one hundred letters, only about a third responded. Most said, in polite corporate language, that they had never heard of KIPP and didn’t like the sound of it. None promised money.”

Teach For America’s Wendy Kopp also struggled to find funding when launching TFA. She has described [in Public Affairs] being schooled by Princeton faculty in just how hard it would be to raise the requisite funds, remembering, “What [Professor Bressler] really wanted to know, he said in his booming voice, was how in the world I planned to raise the $2.5 million…. He didn’t seem convinced. ‘Do you know how hard it is to raise twenty-five hundred dollars?’ he asked.”

Kopp has described sitting down with Texas billionaire and former presidential candidate Ross Perot, trying to get that $2.5 million:

All I remember is Mr. Perot talking. He talked a lot, and I had trouble following much of what he was saying. I was mostly just thinking ‘I need to stay here until I get $1 million from this man.’ When Mr. Perot suggested that I contact Sam Walton and other philanthropists instead, I insisted that he himself was the best possible prospect. Finally, after two hours of back and forth, Mr. Perot agreed to offer us a challenge grant of $500,000. We would have to match his money three to one. I’m not sure what ultimately led Mr. Perot to this idea. He must have realized that I wasn’t planning to go anywhere until he committed to something.

Kopp remembers that Perot’s grant was “the catalyst we needed,” with other donors following his lead and supplying the remaining funds “in relatively short order.”

Only the most hard-headed or selfless of entrepreneurs muscle through. Those with less stomach for frustration, as well as those interested in doing well in addition to doing good, will steer their energies elsewhere. It’s not just about dollars, though. The impact of venture capital in entrepreneurial hotbeds like Silicon Valley is also a product of the personal networks, mentoring, and expertise that come with it. These networks help new enterprises get a foot in the door, and mentors provide assistance with mundane, but crucial, tasks like organizational bookkeeping, strategic planning, and governance.

Equally crucial is the quality control implicit in venture funding. Those who worry that greenfield efforts may not be publicly run, or who are hesitant to give funds to new ventures with unproven quality, often overlook the fact that competition for venture funding in the private sector comes with intensive screening. In a community like Silicon Valley, as a general rule only 10 percent of business plans that venture capitalists receive warrant any response at all, and only 1 percent are ever funded. To be sure, venture investment also has its share of blemishes. During the late-1990s dot-com bubble, for instance, investors frequently left their skepticism behind as they flocked to a slew of dubious ventures. So, it is not that this process is flawless, but only that it tends to exert a healthy discipline overall.

A particular challenge for schooling is that venture capital is not geographically dispersed. While schools operate in every corner of the country, venture capital is highly concentrated. In 2006, one-third of all venture capital investments were made in California’s Silicon Valley. That figure increases to about half of all investments if Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego are included, and to three-fourths of all U.S. venture investment if one adds the Route 128 corridor outside Boston, New York, and metropolitan Washington, DC. In other words, about three-fourths of all investment is made in a few California locales and in the Boston–New York–Washington nexus. Given this natural dynamic, we cannot expect 15,000 school districts to become hotbeds of educational entrepreneurship. Instead, the expectation should be that the requisite funding, infrastructure, and networks will likely emerge in some limited number of locales. Greenfielders need to invest in and build these hubs, and then take care to encourage and support the ventures that are able and willing to deliver their services more broadly.

The quality control and support that the investment process provides are driven by investors tending to their self-interest and happen naturally and invisibly in places like Silicon Valley. They impose a certain flexible but hardnosed quality control even while creating an entire ecosystem and equipping promising new ventures to take root. For too long, these quality assurances and development processes have been overlooked by both K–12 reformers who wonder why innovations fizzle and school choice enthusiasts who seemingly expect manicured flowers to spring from a barren, rubble-strewn plain.

The Three Phases of Investment

Though all education entrepreneurs need financing to get off the ground (venture capital) and to support expansion (growth capital), the capital market for for-profit organizations is markedly different from the one that nonprofit organizations can access (see Figure 2). While for-profit ventures can theoretically rely on their profits, nonprofits rely on a continuous funding stream (sustaining capital) even once they mature.

Startup Capital
Education entrepreneurs creating for-profit enterprises traditionally raise their initial capital from individuals (“angel investors”) or venture capital firms. As explained in the sidebar, these investors put up cash in exchange for an ownership stake (“equity”) in the new organization, and they expect that their investment will eventually yield a profit.

In 2004, just over $50 million was privately invested in businesses addressing the Pre-K–12 sector. With success stories like Amazon, Apple, and Google, one might think that early venture investors typically do quite well for themselves. But the reality is much more complex. In Fool’s Gold, Scott Shane, a professor of entrepreneurial studies at Case Western Reserve University, argues that observers focus on fabulously successful entrepreneurs, but what they do not realize is that these success stories are incredibly rare. Only a small number of entrepreneurs are really, really successful—and, by extension, only a small number of venture investors see large returns. The media contribute to this misperception because it is easy to tell the story of Google and of early Google investors, but it is much less interesting and more difficult to write stories about failure.

Nonprofit education entrepreneurs generally raise their startup capital from venture philanthropy firms like NewSchools Venture Fund and the Charter School Growth Fund, or from individual donors and foundations. Only a few foundations are comfortable with taking a risk on entrepreneurial education organizations. Those that do make these early funds available—usually multimillion-dollar grants over the course of several years—tend to be younger foundations, like the Eli & Edythe Broad Foundation, the Milton Friedman Foundation, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, that have embraced the modern school of venture philanthropy.

Before the relatively recent emergence of these new foundations, funders tended to provide these early grants in only small increments, forcing entrepreneurs to spend enormous amounts of time and energy on fundraising from multiple donors. In addition, foundation officials found it far more palatable to support a host of small, capacity-building grants than to make concentrated bets on greenfield ventures. Foundation officials rarely get in trouble for failing to have an impact, but can quickly get into hot water for supporting politically contentious measures. For this reason, traditional funders have historically preferred to support professional development, curricular reforms, mentoring programs, and similar efforts that are broadly popular and appear to be risk-free.

What Is Venture Capital?

Crucial money for greenfield ventures is startup funding—the kind of investments that are often referred to in business magazines or popular culture as “venture capital.” Venture capital plays a key role in launching and supporting the firms responsible for innovation and growth in the U.S. economy.

Companies backed by venture capital include many of today’s titans, like Intel, Microsoft, Medtronic, Apple, Google, Genentech, Starbucks, Whole Foods, and eBay. In 2007 and 2008, the National Venture Capital Association reports that there were more than 2,400 venture capital deals worth more than $13 billion in the United States, with the bulk of activity concentrated in knowledge-driven industries like software, biotechnology, medical devices, and energy. One would normally expect to see education comfortably ensconced on a list like that—yet it is nowhere in sight.

Since such funding is largely alien to most individuals involved in K–12 education, it is worth taking a moment to understand how venture capital typically works. What exactly is a venture capital fund? It is typically an investment fund initiated by a group of partners who contribute their own money and then raise additional dollars from outside investors. The partnership agreement specifies both the lifespan of the fund (typically 10 years) and the management fee. As Joe Keeney and Daniel Pianko have explained [in Hess, The Future of Education Entrepreneurship], “The typical management fee structure is ‘two and twenty’—that is, 2 percent per year of the total capital raised, plus 20 percent of the profits after…100 percent of their invested capital [has been recovered] at the end of the fund’s life.” Over those 10 years, venture firms raise funds, pursue promising investments, and eventually exit by selling their stakes.

Given the risks, venture capital investors seek to win big or cut their losses. For this reason, they typically provide only enough funding for a venture to reach the next stage of development, so that it can attract support from those with a smaller tolerance for risk. This need to realize investment returns leads new ventures to focus on becoming successful enough to attract buyers, which involves a private transaction or “going public” and selling shares of stock. And a venture capitalist’s aim—to win big on the front end and get out fast once the profit is made—leads venture firms to identify an exit strategy early on.

Growth Capital
For an education entrepreneur, finding startup capital is challenging, but fundraising for growth can be even tougher. For-profit companies that have a good track record may find that venture capital firms such as Quad Ventures are willing to invest in growth for later-stage education organizations with promising early results. Even venture capital firms that don’t focus on education are willing to entertain the notion if they see a successful business emerging.

Nonprofits, on the other hand, have a much more difficult time attracting growth funds. They struggle to raise the kind of large, multiyear investments needed to support expansion because even terrific nonprofit ventures cannot deliver a handsome return to investors. In addition, there is a perverse incentive for growing nonprofit organizations: The better the organization is doing, the more likely donors are to drop their support, believing they have done their part or are no longer needed. As such, many foundations seem willing to support strong nonprofit organizations and help them expand on a limited scale, but few are willing to sustain an organization as it grows over time.

It is especially difficult to raise large amounts of funding from foundations because, according to federal regulations, program officers need only spend 5 percent of the foundation’s total assets each year in the form of grants and other expenses. Except in unusual cases, the other 95 percent of a foundation’s assets are not used to fund grantees but instead are invested for the long term to preserve its endowment. If foundations are to seek a bigger impact, they may need to tap these endowments more aggressively.

One possible strategy for augmenting the available funding relies on program-related investments, which are loans that come from endowment funds. Several foundations, including the Walton Family Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, have made program-related investments to help charter school entrepreneurs secure facilities for their schools. There is room for more such investment: According to the Foundation Center, foundations nationwide hold nearly $500 billion in their endowments, but use just over $200 million of that for charitable loans or program-related investments—less than one-twentieth of 1 percent.

Nonprofits and philanthropies that have taken on the explicit mission of helping other nonprofits grow include the Growth Philanthropy Network, the Draper Richards Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation, and the Tipping Point Community. The Draper Richards Foundation, for instance, was founded by famed venture capitalist Bill Draper and seeks to give nonprofits both management knowledge (a Draper Richards board member sits on participating nonprofits’ boards) and capital in their infant stages ($100,000 per year for three years).

Another foundation that is doing things differently is SeaChange Capital Partners, which makes multimillion-dollar infusions to help established nonprofits grow. SeaChange was founded by Chuck Harris, a retired Goldman Sachs partner. Harris had previously worked with nonprofit organizations and noted a serious problem. He explains [in Philanthropy News Daily]:

I was involved with a couple of non-profit organizations that had fantastic management, good results, a fair amount of financial discipline, and were ambitious. And if they had been for-profit businesses at a similar stage of development, they would have gone out and raised a multi-million-dollar, multi-year round of funding tied to their business plan. Instead, they were sending out scattershot proposals for relatively small amounts of money over short periods of time. In other words, there was no financial certainty…[and] the most senior people in the organization were spending a disproportionate amount of their time fundraising as opposed to driving the ship. It seemed to me to be a very ad hoc, inefficient, and restrictive way to grow.

SeaChange adopts Wall Street methods to support proven nonprofits with ambitious growth plans. Harris explains the key shift is “seek[ing] to fund the business plans of these nonprofits rather than [to] fund a piece of their program…. We plan to conduct the financing much like a private placement in the business sector, with the goal of raising $5 million, $10 million, $15 million for organizations on the threshold of a growth phase.”

Scrambling for Startup Capital

Eric Adler is cofounder and managing director of the SEED Foundation, a grades 7–12 boarding school in Washington, DC, that has won awards from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and other entities for its astonishing success sending at-risk kids to college. Adler relates how he and cofounder Rajiv Vinnakota struggled to find funding for the initial DC boarding school. At first, Adler explains, “We thought we were going to build a private school.”

After a quick survey of boarding program costs and what it would require in terms of annual funding or raising an endowment, however, Adler and his partner concluded that “it was not economically feasible. We would have been talking about many hundreds of millions of dollars of endowment. Or it would have meant raising money hand-to-mouth year after year.” Instead, Adler and Vinnakota began looking at nonprofit models in which the government might provide startup capital and then SEED would raise money annually to sustain the school. “You get the slug up front because everyone needs some activation energy and some capital to get going and then after that you raise the money year after year,” Adler explains. But, he adds, “We…pretty quickly concluded that that wasn’t going to work, either. Because, again, it was going to involve a level of annual fundraising that just wasn’t sustainable.”

After dismissing those two stratagies, Adler wondered, “Could [we] reverse it? Could [we] go to the private sector and get the upfront slug of money in exchange for getting the public sector to promise the operating costs indefinitely?” This led the SEED Foundation to charter schooling. Adler recalls Vinnakota and himself approaching DC and federal officials and saying, “In exchange for the private sector putting up a whole bunch of new facility money, would you be willing, then, to pay the difference between the regular day cost and the boarding cost?” And they were talking simultaneously to philanthropists and private-sector investors, saying, “Yes, we need to raise a bunch of money from you now, and we’ll still have to raise some in the first few years while we’re getting up to scale. But once we get up to scale, we promise we’ll never come back to you saying we won’t survive unless [you’re willing to provide additional support].” This strategy allowed the SEED Foundation to raise the required $25 million for the 1999–2003 launch of the school.

Sustaining Capital
Entrepreneurial K–12 ventures launch and grow with private capital or philanthropic support. Once up and running, however, sustainable ventures seek to rely on earned income from fees or the sale of products or services. However, despite increasing acceptance of income-generating for-profit and nonprofit organizations, few education entrepreneurs have built models that sustain themselves on these revenues alone. And, as Dan Katzir and Wendy Hassett of the Eli & Edythe Broad Foundation have observed [in Hess, With the Best of Intentions], “Many foundations will not support a grantee for more than a specified number of years, regardless of where the organization is in terms of its growth cycle.” This means that nonprofits scramble to offset the loss of philanthropic support by finding ways to sell their services or by finding new funders, while for-profits seek to achieve a scale that makes them economically viable. One of the few successful school builders to have addressed this challenge is National Heritage Academies, a for-profit charter operator that enrolls 35,000 students in 57 schools across 6 states and has managed to attain profitability while generating impressive academic outcomes. Even academically successful ventures, however, have found it challenging to mimic NHA’s financial success.

Although some nonprofit education entrepreneurs can support their organization’s ongoing operations through public funding—such as by per-pupil dollars that flow to charter management organizations—most rely, at least in part, on fundraising from individuals and foundations. The limits to this approach are legion, however, as scholars estimate that total philanthropy to K–12 probably amounts to less than $3 billion a year—or less than 1 percent of all K–12 spending [as shown in Figure 1]. To date, entrepreneurial ventures have been disproportionately funded by this tiny sliver of funding—and especially by funds from younger foundations with roots in the 21st-century economy.

Some leading “new” philanthropies, like the Gates, Walton, and Broad Foundations, have attempted to adapt the venture investment mind-set to the social sector. Funders have begun to weigh criteria like scalability and financial sustainability more heavily, have taken seats on nonprofit boards, and have requested regular performance updates. This marks a shift in thinking—though it’s a development that has also encountered skepticism as to how willing these funders actually are to take bold chances and whether their efforts sometimes cross from smart oversight into micromanagement. Whatever one makes of such concerns, it is clear that support from philanthropic funders has proven instrumental in launching or expanding heralded greenfield ventures like KIPP, New Leaders for NewSchools, Aspire Public Schools, College Summit, Green Dot, and Achievement First.

In education circles, the two best-known venture philanthropies may be the decade-old NewSchools Venture Fund and the much younger Charter School Growth Fund. The San Francisco-based NewSchools Venture Fund secures investments from both for-profit and nonprofit sources and then seeks to provide startup capital to ventures—both nonprofit and for-profit organizations—that are sustainable and designed to achieve scale. The Colorado-based Charter School Growth Fund, with over $150 million in support, provides grants and loans to promote the growth of high-quality charter management and support organizations. These venture philanthropists accept that some investments will fail, so long as the failures are the product of efforts to address hard, important challenges. As the Broad Foundation’s Katzir and Hassett have explained, “We do not regard our grantmaking as charity…[but] think of our work as making investments in areas in which we expect a healthy return.”

Surviving a Midlife Crisis

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 12:40:29 +0000

In 1956, 1,220 college-bound juniors and seniors in 104 American high schools took the first Advanced Placement (AP) exams conducted by the Educational Testing Service for the College Board.

Only 11 subject areas were offered at the time: American history, biology, chemistry, English, French, German, Latin IV (fourth-year Vergil), Latin V (prose, comedy, lyric), mathematics, physics, and Spanish. So few students took the earliest exams that the first AP European history exam, which debuted in 1957, was scored on the second floor of a firehouse near the ETS headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey. “There were 59 exams and four of us examiners,” recalled Henry Winkler, then a professor of history at Rutgers and later president of the University of Cincinnati. Each answer booklet held responses to one long essay question and the 25 short-response items on the three-hour test. They finished scoring the exams the same day.

“The AP program was unabashedly elitist when it began,” says AP chronicler Eric Rothschild, who became a teacher of AP history teachers after retiring from 38 years of teaching social studies at Scarsdale (New York) High School. “Those taking the exams in the early years were largely male, largely students from private prep schools and elite public high schools, and probably mostly Protestant.’’

And no wonder. The idea for the program emerged from elite colleges, prep schools, and high schools in two collaborations. One was initiated by Kenyon College and the other by Harvard, Princeton, and Yale as a way of accelerating and fortifying the education of the nation’s future leaders in anticipation of cold war national-security demands. “Shortening the conventional process for some students by even one year,” concluded one of the group’s final reports, “if it could be done with no significant educational loss, would add thousands of professional ‘man years’ of service to the nation’s communities.”

A half century later, the cold war over, the AP program is still with us, still growing (see Figure 1). Advanced Placement courses and exams now cover 35 subjects including art history, economics (macro and micro), and studio art (2-D and 3-D design), and they are taken by more than a million students (including many blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and more girls than boys) from 11,000 public and 4,000 other schools (including more than 800 in other countries and territories).

The essentials remain the same: high-school students take college-level courses, taught by teachers in their schools, and then take exams designed by the College Board to show that they have mastered the subject at college-level proficiency. Good exam results can be parlayed into college credits and permissions to advance directly to higher-level college courses. And despite the vast expansion of the number of students taking AP courses and exams, the average number of tests taken by students during their high-school careers has barely changed: 1.7 AP tests per examinee in 1956 and 1.8 per examinee in 2005.

Aside from its explosive growth, the most visible change during the program’s first 50 years has been the transformation of the demographic profile of the typical AP examinee. But has the program actually increased student college readiness? Do AP courses boost student achievement? Many of the national barometers of high-school student achievement and college readiness show a flat line on proficiency scales over the past 50 years. This is true even of the top 10 percent of students taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exams, many of whom, presumably, take AP exams. Their scores have not improved in 30 years. And findings from research about the impact of AP course taking have been ambiguous. The College Board is also facing an outburst of quality-control problems with some of its more popular AP courses. If the AP program is so good, why hasn’t it made more inroads into high-school academic life? It seems that the much-admired program is suffering the slings and arrows, creaks and pains, of middle age.

The Advanced Placement Boom

On the surface, the AP program looks better than ever. By May of 2005, participation in AP exams was at record levels, with 1,221,016 high-school students taking one or more AP test. If recent patterns held, 83 percent of the test-takers were juniors or seniors; the rest, mostly sophomores. And despite the popular media image of an AP student as an overstressed overachiever from a high school in an upscale suburb, examinees now come from a broad swath of U.S. high schools.

A hint of the enterprise’s current problems, however, is in the fact that 300,000 additional American students were enrolled in AP courses last year but didn’t take an AP exam in May, potentially embarrassing college admissions officers who had recruited some of those students because of transcripts loaded with AP courses. AP teachers say some students who skip the test feel unprepared, while others are seniors who have already been admitted to college and no longer need to use AP scores to gild their credentials.

Still, the AP program has become so widely accepted that one-fourth of the public-high-school graduates in the class of 2004 had taken an AP course. One-fifth had taken at least one AP exam, and just over 13 percent had earned a “passing” AP score of 5 (extremely well qualified), 4 (well qualified), or 3 (qualified). (A score of 5 is considered the equivalent of an A+ in a college course, a 4 is a college B, and a 3 is considered to be a C in an introductory college class.)

“This is way more than ever took rigorous, college-level courses” in high school, says Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, but “13 percent isn’t enough. Fifty-seven percent of high-school graduates enter college.” In addition, exultation at the record numbers of AP participants has to be tempered somewhat by unsettling reports that nearly a third of public-high-school students drop out or fall behind before their class graduates. The bottom line: those passing one or more AP tests probably comprise less than 10 percent of the group that entered high school together.

Moreover, ACT Inc., which began measuring college readiness as the American College Testing Program in the 1950s, reports that among the college aspirants who took its admission exams last year, only 21 percent of the graduating seniors attained scores high enough in all four subjects—English, reading, math, and science—to indicate that they wouldn’t need to take a no-credit remedial course when they entered college. Colleges are now requiring nearly 3 out of every 10 first-time college students to take at least one remedial course in reading, writing, or math in their freshman year. Apparently, the AP program hasn’t so much raised the level of the curriculum in the American high school as it has created an escape hatch that lets a small number of ambitious students get out of the low-demand environment for a few hours.

Diversity on the Move

At this year’s annual AP national conference in Houston, attended by more than 2,500 teachers, professors, and administrators, College Board officials stressed that their efforts to extend the benefits of college-level courses to previously underserved high-school students are beginning to pay off. In 1955, the typical AP examinee was a boy; today, by a margin of 56 percent to 44 percent, she is a girl. While the number of white students taking AP exams grew in recent years, it grew more slowly than the numbers in other groups. By last year, only 64.5 percent of the test-takers identified themselves as non-Latino whites.

Caperton points to Florida as “an example of what a statewide effort will do” to increase AP participation, especially in rural, small, or heavily minority schools. Like many states, Florida subsidizes examination fees. But Florida also gives faculty bonuses and extra AP funding to a public high school every time one of its students scores a 3 or better on an AP exam. The money can be used for AP materials or for professional development in AP content and techniques for teachers. Florida was also one of the first states to form a virtual school, offering free online AP courses to students who wanted to take an AP course that wasn’t offered in their own schools. Between 1999 and 2005, the number of public-school students in Florida who took AP exams jumped by 95 percent. That included increases of 132 percent for African Americans and 137 percent for Hispanics.

What’s the Point of Advanced Placement?

Proponents of AP courses and exams, especially the expansionists, believe that the experience of taking an AP course pays dividends for students down the road, making them more likely to do well academically in college courses and to receive their degrees on time. The most enthusiastic believe that AP courses are so good that they help students do well in college even if the students skip the exam or score only a 1 (no recommendation) or 2 (partially qualified).

Such proponents frequently cite statistics published by the National Center for Educational Accountability (NCEA), which tracked the performance of Texas AP students who entered public universities in Texas in 1996 through 1998. The center’s researchers found that students who had enrolled in AP courses earned higher GPAs in college and had higher college graduation rates than those who didn’t take AP courses. The AP advantage appeared even when students were separated into groups by ethnicity and income.

But other research, using more sophisticated analytic strategies to control simultaneously for the effects of multiple distinctions among students taking AP courses, casts doubt on these findings. In fact, in another study of Texas school records, presented at the 2005 meeting of the American Economic Association, Kristin Klopfenstein of Texas Christian University and Kathleen Thomas of Mississippi State University found, as Klopfenstein says, “zero effect for the average kid” of AP enrollment on college performance.

At first, researchers at the Austin-based NCEA vigorously disputed Klopfenstein and Thomas’s findings. But when they reanalyzed their data using similar techniques, the NCEA researchers quietly slipped a one-paragraph announcement into their newsletter conceding that AP exam scores, not AP enrollment, predict how well a student will do in college. In other words, simply taking an AP class isn’t enough in itself. Only those who do well on the exam see benefits down the road. And it could be the case, says Klopfenstein, that these students were simply smarter to begin with. “We don’t know yet.”

Another possibility for the discrepancy is that the results of both studies are warped by misleading data in Texas. If a significant fraction of the AP courses in Texas are, as critics charge, just preexisting courses that were relabeled by educators eager to please government and business leaders who have been crusading for more AP participation, it would not be surprising that the studies found that simply taking a course labeled AP did not boost preparedness for college.

Transcript analysts do run into cases where schools are merely “changing the marquee but showing the same movie inside,” says Clifford Adelman, a veteran federal researcher at NCES.

“It looks like the labels [on some AP courses in Texas] do not necessarily match the content,” said Chrys Dougherty, research director of the NCEA. “Lots of kids are getting [high school] credit for advanced placement who can’t pass an AP exam.”

AP Cleans Up Its Act

While the AP exams have maintained their high reputation as a mirror of typical introductory college course requirements, opinions about whether AP courses themselves are better or worse than they were 50 years ago are split. Up to now, the College Board has not monitored the courses, and any school could call any of its courses an AP course. The theory was that the exams offered sufficient validation of the rigor and focus of the course. Poor courses would lead to poor exam results.

However, now that AP course taking influences college admission decisions, which are often made before seniors take their AP exams, the use of tests as the only quality control for the courses no longer satisfies the colleges and universities that dominate the College Board. Warnings were issued in 2001 by the College Board’s Commission on the Future of the Advanced Placement Program and again in 2002 by a committee of the National Research Council (NRC). “Coverage of content [in science courses] may be superficial and opportunities for inquiry-based experiences insufficient,” the NRC committee said after examining AP courses in biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics. “The committee also has learned that some teachers discourage students from taking AP … courses or the final examinations when poor performance is anticipated.”

That’s a shame, because common sense tells you that taking a genuine AP course is good for students, even if they flunk the test, contends Washington Post education writer Jay Mathews. “Even if they struggle with it, they’ve gone one-on-one against the academic equivalent of Michael Jordan. They’ll have a visceral sense of what they’re going to come up against in college.”

Caperton points out that the College Board has implemented or started to implement virtually every recommendation of its own commission and the NRC committee.

One reform, seen as advisable in an era of widely publicized data-driven comparisons of schools, involves a new way of measuring the success of an AP program in a school (or, for that matter, a district or state).

Until quite recently, the College Board honored schools in which a high percentage of exam-takers scored a passing score of 3 or higher on an AP test. But educators complained that this approach gave schools an incentive to discourage all but their very best test-takers from taking an AP exam.

Another metric was invented by Mathews and is published periodically by Newsweek as the “challenge index.” It is based on the ratio of seniors in a school (the fewer the better) to the number of AP exams taken (the more the better) by all the school’s students, regardless of performance. That perversely rewards schools where few students reach the senior class. “Technically, a school could rank high by having all its students take lots of AP exams, even if they all bombed because their AP courses weren’t high quality,” said Trevor Packer, executive director of the College Board’s AP Program.

So the board this year unveiled a new measure that it described as “the best single measure of equity and excellence in AP”: the percentage of the student body or of a graduating class that earns a passing score of 3 or higher on at least one AP exam. That way, a school can’t inflate its rank by relying on a small number of polymath geniuses, by sending ill-prepared students into AP exams, or by restricting access to AP. Students who score 1 or 2 on an exam would neither raise nor lower a school’s standing.

Two more substantive changes are on the way:

The College Board is revamping its science and history courses, which now mirror typical introductory courses in colleges that receive score reports on a lot of AP students. The courses have been described as “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Redesigning the courses to reflect “best practices” is expected to take the rest of this decade as the board attempts to strike a balance between those who favor the mile-wide approach and those who prefer the mile-deep. Each subject has been assigned to committees led by college professors and including experienced AP teachers, with expert advice being solicited from groups that include the congressionally chartered National Research Council and the American Historical Association.
Starting in the 2006–07 school year, the College Board will protect the reputation of its AP trademark by refusing to let a school call a course an AP course unless the school meets two conditions. First, the course must cover a genuine AP subject (as opposed to bogus subjects, such as the AP journalism course mentioned by the NRC committee). Second, the school’s principal must submit a satisfactory self audit describing such items as the course’s outline, some lesson plans, available support materials, and the teacher’s experience, content knowledge, and opportunities for professional development.

This move toward quality control could be the first step back toward renewing the drive for national curriculum standards that flared up and flamed out in the 1990s in disputes over ideology, pedagogy, course content, and control of the public schools, speculated Bruce Johnstone, former chancellor of the 64-campus State University of New York.

“People could start wondering who authorized the College Board to set national standards for high schools,” says Johnstone, who served on the College Board’s AP commission. “This question has been glossed over as long as the AP has been perceived as basically good—a lot like collegiate introductory courses and not ideologically influenced—and the rest of the high-school curriculum has been seen as so flawed.”

Perhaps there could be worse fates, however, than being perceived as setting the gold standard for high-school curricula.

The Resistance to AP

In Houston this summer, Nina Shokraii Rees, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement at the Department of Education, renewed the DOE’s pledge of support for the College Board’s efforts to see that the AP program will “leave no child behind.” But she also noted that small rural schools and schools in poor neighborhoods remain much less likely than suburban schools to offer AP courses.

In fact, low-income examinees remain few and far between, even though two-thirds of public high schools, including many in large cities, now offer at least one AP course. Though federal, state, and College Board subsidies pay all or part of their AP fee, currently $82 per exam, only 10 percent of last year’s AP examinees came from low-income families, according to the DOE. That was up from 8 percent five years previously and ahead of the benchmark targets in the department’s five-year performance plan. But it was also well below the official federal estimate that 16 percent of public school students are from low-income families.

However, teachers say poverty is seldom a major factor in holding down the number of students taking AP courses or AP exams. Teachers at the Houston conference said more common reasons are that students aren’t offered an AP course in subjects that they like, attend a school that resists letting students who might fail an AP exam into an AP course, don’t have friends who take AP courses, or haven’t been taught that it takes more than a high-school diploma to be ready to succeed in college.

Such concerns don’t arise among the eager beavers competing for admission to the 15 percent of colleges and universities that are highly selective, says Michael Kirst, a professor of education at Stanford University. Kirst has spent years documenting the wide gap between the relaxed class schedules of many high-school students and the set of rigorous core courses that would prepare them to succeed in college.

“The ones who get hurt [by a failure to take AP and other rigorous high-school courses] are the 80 percent of students who are not in Advanced Placement or honors classes, and who want to go to the 85 percent of colleges and universities that offer broad access,” Kirst says. Many get into a less selective college, but never graduate. Too many, he explains, “won’t be ready for college because they have no clue about which high-school courses they need to take.”

Vertical Teaming

The influx of underprepared students into colleges has created today’s strange paradox: colleges are offering more high school-level remedial courses for no credit at a time when high schools are offering more college-level courses that earn college credits.

Many high-school students who say they want to go to college also believe (sometimes, justifiably) that they haven’t been taught to read and do math at the level needed to pass a college-level course. That is why the College Board uses some of the fees it gets for AP exams on an array of programs designed to get middle-school educators and high-school educators to cooperate with one another in preparing students for the rigor of AP courses.

One of the board’s approaches is “vertical teaming” between AP educators in high schools and the “pre-AP” teachers in Grades 9 and 10 and in the middle schools that supply their freshmen. Yet partnerships between middle and high schools on pre-AP and AP sequencing remain rare. One reason: trying to get overscheduled educators from one school to work with those from another isn’t easy, especially when tight budgets in many states lead to demands to focus spending “in the classroom” rather than on planning and professional development for teachers.

Like the Houston conference goers, members of the online discussion groups that include some 29,000 of the more than 110,000 AP teachers in the United States debate the pros and cons of the trend toward lowering barriers, such as GPA requirements, to AP courses.

“The biggest assumption by other people is that somehow AP teachers have an easier job because they have the smartest kids,” says Carol Wingard, an AP English teacher in Columbus, Georgia. “First of all, the smartest kids aren’t always the best motivated. Second, we also deal with more-motivated kids who aren’t necessarily the smartest. I work many more hours than I ever did before.”

Certainly the College Board’s efforts, now some 15 years old, to simultaneously increase access, equity, and excellence in the AP program seem praiseworthy, despite the persistence of the gap that Caperton laments between the many who want to go to college and the few who take AP courses.

AP Changes from a Way Through to a Way In

The AP program has evolved quite far from its roots—winning the cold war and alleviating the boredom of superbly educated students who had been exposed to virtually identical courses during their last year of prep school and their first year of college. But it remains focused on academic excellence. That is why many schools give extra weight to AP grades in calculating GPAs and why many college admission officers see AP course taking as a sign that applicants were ambitious enough to take the most rigorous courses available in their schools.

The College Board and other AP enthusiasts still tout the program as a cost-saving tool for accelerated learning. They tell the status-conscious or cash-short that high scores could help students save time or money by rushing through college. But numerous studies have shown that hardly anybody sharp and obsessive enough to pass several AP courses wants to rush through college.

RoperASW was hired by the College Board to survey students who had scores of 3 or higher about why they took AP classes. The firm reported that 83 percent said they wanted to increase their chances of going to the college of their choice. But only 33 percent said they wanted to finish college sooner. All but 15 percent did get credits for advanced placement in college, but they used those concessions to make room for other courses, rather than to graduate ahead of schedule.

“The AP program is useful because it has made it easier for [high school] students to get higher-level, more sophisticated courses,” says Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of admissions for Harvard College. “More students who are applying to demanding and rigorous colleges are able to get a more rigorous level of preparation for college than was once the case.”

In effect, ironically enough, a program designed to help speed students through college as fast as possible is now used by most students to get into college. Perhaps that fact alone answers today’s most vexing question about the AP: does it improve the academic experience of those who take part? But it remains to be seen if the College Board is up for tackling a bigger problem in its next 50 years: using AP as a lever to raise the academic standards of high schools.

Andrew Mollison, a freelance education writer, has been a Washington correspondent since 1974. He is a former president of the National Press Club.

Palace Revolt in Los Angeles?

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 12:01:38 +0000

Antonio Villaraigosa, the handsome high-voltage mayor of Los Angeles, really comes alive when recalling his start in local politics—as a labor organizer agitating for reform inside decrepit and overcrowded schools. “I cut my teeth working for the union. I cultivated these young teachers who had come to these schools to change the world,” he said, brimming with pride.

Back in 1989, one of those teachers, Joshua Pechthalt, joined Villaraigosa for a rally downtown in Exposition Park. Pechthalt remembers his charismatic young friend pumping up the crowd. “Antonio was the master of ceremonies who had parents and teachers on their feet,” recalled Pechthalt, now vice president of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA). “When we see each other, to this day, we give each other a hug.”

By 1994, the popular Villaraigosa was departing for the state capitol, rocketed into a legislative seat by grateful teachers, not to mention the union’s campaign contributions. Fellow legislators chose Villaraigosa to become the first-ever Latino Speaker. Back home in East Los Angeles, the teachers associations would spend over $1 million during his six-year tenure in Sacramento to ensure that Villaraigosa would be reelected.

“As Speaker, I was without question the number one advocate for the unions,” Villaraigosa reminisced. Teacher pay hikes sailed through the legislature. He made sure that the push to hold educators accountable for results stopped short of challenging protection of dismal teachers and stymied efforts to send strong teachers into weak schools.

Fast-forward to 2010 and Villaraigosa finds himself in the vortex of a political torrent. “I’m Public Enemy Number One within the UTLA,” he told me. In his quest to turn around the schools, the mayor has united working-class Latino parents, civil rights leaders, and big-money Democrats to challenge union leaders. “It’s been a war,” he said. “It’s a war I’m willing to wage.” After a series of bloody battles against his old union friends, including a 2007 loss in the courts, the mayor gained the upper hand last fall when the L.A. school board passed a radical reform plan that he helped to craft. Over the next few years, the district intends to hand off one-third of its 800-plus campuses to managers of charter schools, other nonprofits, and inventive district educators.

Democratic leaders have enriched the unions over the past half century, creating millions of jobs for dues-paying teachers, feeding the building trades via school construction, and granting bargaining rights to teachers in the 1970s. But union leaders, of late, find themselves on the far edge of the national debate over how to lift students and their flagging schools. Test scores have largely stalled in recent years and gaps have widened slightly, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Labor chiefs are openly miffed over President Obama’s offer of moral support and billions of federal dollars to escalate the “war” being waged by Villaraigosa and his fellow mayors. “In a place like L.A. or Detroit, where the public schools are dysfunctional,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told me, “I don’t think that the system can by itself go where it has to go. You have to rally all elements of the community. The person who can rally all those actors is the mayor.”

Villaraigosa is not the only city chief to take charge of urban schools. But his battle for mayoral control in Los Angeles offers a cautionary tale for all sides. It reveals new tensions between teachers union leaders and Democratic mayors. But charter school enthusiasts should not expect that close alliance, nurtured over many years, to be disrupted overnight. Politicians are highly skilled at finding a middle ground between demands for reform and protection of old connections. As much as Villaraigosa—and the school superintendent with whom he is allied—have appeared committed to rapid charter school expansion, when the L. A. school board took decisive action in February, charters were forced to settle for much less than they expected. Instead of getting the lion’s share of the schools they sought, charters were left with only four. Newly formed teacher groups won the vast majority of school contracts after they formed an alliance with UTLA. The charters were left with their tongues hanging out.

The Players

Villaraigosa returned to L.A. in 2000, eager to become the city’s first Latino mayor since 1872. His union friends contributed another $2 million in traceable dollars to his mayoral campaigns in 2001 and 2005. Leaders of the California Teachers Association even talked up Villaraigosa as California’s next photogenic governor, the Democratic heir apparent to Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger.

At first, the old polarities seemed to hold, pitting education groups like the UTLA against downtown developers and fiscal conservatives. Then the mayor began to echo the impatience expressed by blue-collar Latino parents, packed into graying apartments and tiny cottages spread across East Los Angeles. For decades these families saw no options other than sending their children to overcrowded, sometimes dangerous schools. Villaraigosa grew up in a broken barrio home. “My father left when I was young; we lived in abject poverty,” he recalled. His roots in Chicano politics taught him about L.A.’s racial dynamics in the 1950s, when “Mexicans” were simply kept out of predominantly white schools.

Running for mayor in 2005, after losing his first bid, Villaraigosa began talking with a variety of activists, including Maria Brenes, who runs Innercity Struggle, a group that fights for small, more rigorous high schools. She works from a modest office in the heart of East Los Angeles. A musty fragrance permeates two rooms, blending L.A.’s unrelenting heat with too many eager organizers stuffed into a small space. “Public education has been going downhill in East L.A. for some time,” Brenes said. “Schools built for 1,000 students are now at 5,000.”

Parents worry over these densely packed schools in which teachers simply lose track of kids. Alicia Ortiz, for example, made sure that her daughter escaped Garfield High School, once home to Jaime Escalante, the math teacher made famous in Stand and Deliver. “They have so many students it doesn’t matter if your student is in school or not,” Ortiz said. Her daughter now attends a charter school.

Candidate Villaraigosa also met with wealthy Democrats worried sick over the quality of the schools, like developer and philanthropist Eli Broad. “In L.A. there is no one responsible for the schools,” Broad said. “The board is made up of political wannabes. The only time we have seen dramatic change in urban education is when you have mayoral control.”

Initial evidence backs Broad’s claim. After tracking progress in a dozen cities where mayors have grabbed the tiller—including Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C.—Brown University professor Kenneth Wong concluded that students benefit significantly. Reading performance in these cities’ high schools climbed by one-third of a standard deviation when compared with urban districts serving similar kids, on par with the impact of providing quality preschools. City residents also reported feeling better about their local schools, a key win for municipal leaders eager to stem white flight and shrinking property values, as Wong detailed.

Broad’s collateral assault on the downtown school bureaucracy includes growing new charter schools and attracting strong principals who gain unfettered authority to hire and fire their own teachers. L.A.’s activists are further bolstered by a statewide charter lobby that’s picked up considerable clout in recent years, capitalized by Broad, Netflix founder Reed Hastings, and most recently Bill Gates. Villaraigosa soon came to see charters as a lever for organizational innovation, since “parents are hungry for change,” he said. And these well-heeled Democratic donors, for now, offset declining campaign support from the unions.

The Setting

Villaraigosa’s predecessor, James Hahn, did little to challenge the pace of change inside the L.A. Unified School District. Roy Romer, the former Colorado governor and head of the Democratic National Committee, came to L.A. as superintendent in 2001. He pushed to award principals more discretion over budgets and the power to assemble strong teams of teachers, reforms largely thwarted by the UTLA. Romer standardized the curriculum and required teachers to follow weekly timetables. Student scores inched upward on Romer’s watch. Still, less than one-sixth of L.A. 8th graders now read and write proficiently, according to federal assessments.

After winning the mayor’s race in 2005, Villaraigosa wasn’t about to accept this glacial pace of progress. Catching his union benefactors off guard, he soon announced his intention to take control of the far-flung L.A. school system, citing strides made by Mayor Richard M. Daley in Chicago and Michael Bloomberg in New York. “We have got to move away from a model where school boards are defenders of a failed status quo, where the unions just control the board,” Villaraigosa said.

But wresting control of the schools from Romer and loyal board members required that Villaraigosa return to Sacramento to win legislative approval. Unlike other states, California sets the powers of local school boards in the state constitution. Villaraigosa had to negotiate with statewide teacher groups since they continue to sway Democratic legislators through old alliances and rich campaign contributions.

UTLA president A. J. Duffy sensed an opening, negotiating with Villaraigosa to grant teachers greater control over curriculum and pedagogical practices. In return, the unions would endorse the mayor’s plan. The surreal and controversial power-sharing deal that emerged in Sacramento resembled governance of the Palestinian territories (see “Power Struggle in Los Angeles,” forum, Summer 2007). And the school board, which the UTLA could often dominate, would have lost most of its authority. The union’s conservative wing came unglued, forcing a vote on Duffy’s deal with the mayor, which the rank and file soundly rejected.

The Plot

The notion that anyone might take command of the sprawling L.A. Unified’s 885 schools, even a mayor with boundless energy, feels like a Disney movie, an ever-hopeful fiction. The district spreads across 710 square miles, half the size of Delaware, and serves more than 688,000 students. The system hosts the nation’s single largest public-works program, a $27 billion effort to build more than 130 new schools and renovate countless others. It employs over 36,700 classroom teachers and, curiously, an equal number of managers and support staff.

Back in Sacramento, Villaraigosa emerged victorious. The legislature passed the mayoral-control plan, and Governor Schwarzenegger signed the deal in the summer of 2006. But Romer fought back in the courts, winning on appeal in spring 2007. So, the unstoppable mayor simply pivoted and went with Plan B. “We also had a Plan C,” Villaraigosa joked, reviewing his battles against the union. “We would go to the end of the alphabet if necessary.”

Villaraigosa outflanked Romer, rallying support for three challengers to incumbent members of the school board who had sided with the schools chief during the prolonged legal battle. “I raised millions, defeated the union candidates, and we won a majority of the board,” the mayor recalled. Three million to be exact, coming mostly from wealthy Democratic donors. Among the mayor’s allies, newly elected to the school board, was another rising L.A. star, Yolie Flores.

Petite in stature, soft-spoken in style, Flores seemed an unlikely dragon slayer. Yet she had already proven to be a Latina Saul Alinsky of sorts, organizing parents around the issues of scarce child care and unsafe schools. She arrived on the board impatient and eager to ramp up reform efforts. “The community has reached a level of exasperation, of ongoing failure (in the schools),” she told me. Little love was lost between Flores and the UTLA. During her campaign, she opposed a moratorium on opening new charter schools. In turn, the union refused to endorse her candidacy. Still, no one predicted that she would lead a palace revolt.

Flores’s idea to push charter expansion and parental choice took shape by early 2009. Sessions with advocates included well-connected operators like Ben Austin, first a deputy to Republican mayor of Los Angeles Richard Riordon, then a political aide to film director Rob Reiner. Austin is a hard-driving politico from the affluent west side of L.A., and now the unlikely head of Parent Revolution, a mostly Latina advocacy group led by the Los Angeles Parents Union and bankrolled by Broad and charter proponents. He argued that newly built campuses would provide the affordable facilities that charter firms required to expand. Flores also found on her desk a UCLA study of dropout rates, revealing that fully two-thirds of students entering the high schools in her area, including Garfield High, never graduate. Flores felt like the only sane person in an asylum, “walking around not knowing whether to cry or scream. In the district office there was a very casual sense of the crisis,” she said.

By early summer, Villaraigosa felt that he could swing his school board to support Flores’s dramatic proposal. He also received an unexpected dose of capital to advance the plan from Hollywood mogul Casey Wasserman, who donated $4.5 million to the district’s own reform office. For Villaraigosa, charters were just one piece of the puzzle. Along with the new schools chief, Ray Cortines, the mayor sought to integrate Flores’s charter plan with his own “partnership schools” and Cortines’s commitment to “pilot schools” and thin labor contracts. Together, these experiments were to extend decentralized management and dollars to hundreds of L.A. schools (see sidebar).

One Democratic donor told me, not for attribution, “This is an all-out war that needs to be attacked from every angle. Charters are a piece of the puzzle, but not the only, nor the largest, piece.” With about 55,000 kids enrolled in L.A. charter schools, “you don’t solve the problem through 10 percent of the kids.”

Tensions were intensifying between Latino leaders and the UTLA by early in the summer of 2009. As Flores walked into the cramped auditorium at Annendale Elementary School for a meeting, she suddenly deciphered the shrill chanting of neatly dressed 2nd graders. “Shame on you, shame on you,” they cried out with quizzical faces, miffed by their own angry words. “I was shocked, I couldn’t believe it,” Flores recalled. She had voted for necessary budget cuts as the recession deepened, and her reform ideas had surfaced. Now union activists had wound up these children to deliver their barbed message. Villaraigosa parried back, calling Duffy and company “the most backward labor union in the nation. We’re not going to be held hostage by a small group of people,” a thinly veiled reference to UTLA leaders.

By mid-summer, Flores and Villaraigosa were ready to hatch their charter-and-choice initiative, at first urging the school board to hand off 50 recently opened campuses to charter firms and nonprofit reform groups. Then, a second board ally pushed the mayor to include a total of 251 low-performing schools within the proposal. If the mayor could deliver his new majority on the board—the vote was set for late August—more than one-third of L.A.’s schools would eventually compete in a marketplace unprecedented in scope. UTLA leaders, not surprisingly, went ballistic.

Building on Prior Reforms

The Los Angeles charter-and-choice effort has attracted plenty of national attention, in part because its foundations resemble those of President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative. But L.A. has over the past two decades built ambitious programs to decentralize school management and widen options for parents.

In partnership with nonprofit groups and local universities, the mayor’s office runs five iDesign schools (also dubbed partnership schools). The mayor’s consolation prize after he lost his bid to take over the entire system, these schools operate under “a more localized decision-making authority as a strategy to improve student achievement,” according to Superintendent Ray Cortines’s 15-page guide to school options.

The district’s pilot schools, similar to those in Boston, are a key part of the L.A. school board’s own experiment with semi-autonomous schools. Cortines struck a deal with the union to expand their number from 10 to 30, beginning in the fall of 2010. These typically small schools operate under thin labor contracts, giving principals more authority over the hiring and firing of teachers and awarding teachers a wider range of flexible roles. Some teacher groups, opposed to charter school expansion, submitted bids to take over eligible choice campuses as pilot schools.

Magnet schools are mission-driven organizations with specialized curricula, similar to magnets in other cities, and aim to lessen racial segregation among schools. L.A. currently operates 15 magnet schools and 173 magnet programs, many hosted by conventional public schools. Competition is fierce to win a magnet slot, as less than one-fifth of applicants gain admission.

Charter schools number 161 in L.A., more than operate in any other district nationwide. Still, they serve less than one-tenth of the district’s students.

The Mayor Wins a Round

To bolster their stance, union leaders highlighted their recent support of certain innovations, including expanding Cortines’s experiment with decentralized pilot schools, operating under flexible labor contracts and granting principals greater authority. But the union reluctantly endorsed this model, “because teachers are demanding them,” said Brian Fritch, a Garfield High history teacher and union insurgent. Fritch’s generation of teachers has few historical roots with the labor movement, yet they speak of social justice and daily serve kids from working-class families. He has spoken out publicly against the UTLA’s habits of protecting lousy teachers and resisting greater power for reform-minded principals.

UTLA leaders, including the mayor’s old friend, Joshua Pechthalt, worry that new Democrats, like Flores, Villaraigosa, and even President Obama, are “looking to have one teacher competing against another, one school against another.” Market values and monetary incentives are displacing a cooperative spirit, Pechthalt argued. “Our satisfaction (as teachers) comes when you look around and say, ‘the students got it,’ and you have connected with the kids.”

But Villaraigosa is not one to mull over competing political theories. The week before the crucial board vote on the charters-and-choice proposal, he convened a press conference, surrounded by six civil-rights leaders who endorsed Flores’s radical plan. Tom Saenz, national head of the Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund, talked of “parents whose kids are victims of poor schools. There’s a level of impatience because of repeated reforms that have not provided the dramatic change on the quick timeline that the community expects.” Or, as one East L.A. parent, Maria Leon, told me, “We need more options.” Each charter school “takes only 400 students, and there’s a very long waiting list.”

The new school year was just getting under way as the board convened to vote on Flores’s proposal. At sunup that morning last August, a line of buses snaked around the 28-floor tower that houses the city schools office. Out came 3,000 mostly Latino parents sporting bright yellow and powder blue T-shirts that read, “My Child, My Choice.” Villaraigosa arrived to stir the already animated crowd. “We are here to stand up for our children,” the mayor shouted, beneath a banner that proclaimed, “Parent Revolution.”

Inside, UTLA’s Duffy, appearing before the board, was berating Flores. “When all is said and done, you will have sold this district down the road for political gain and for a mayor whose own program has been a dismal failure,” he said. But once again, Duffy had overplayed his hand. The board voted 6–1 to approve the reform plan. Los Angeles would now host “the most important charter-school reform market in the country,” said Jed Wallace, head of California’s charter lobby.

The Twist

It didn’t turn out quite that way. For the school year beginning in the fall of 2010, 36 schools on 30 campuses were eligible for takeover, including 12 so-called focus schools with lifeless achievement trends, along with 24 newly opened schools. When the takeover plans were tallied in January, far more had arrived from local district managers and teachers than from charter operators (see Figure 1). The schools attracted more than 80 bids in total, about half coming from within the district, including area superintendents, teacher confederations only sometimes involving union activists, and the mayor’s own partnership school organization. Charter firms, including Aspire, Green Dot, Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, and smaller charter operators, put forward one-quarter of the takeover plans, but only one plan was aimed at turning around a chronically low-performing focus school. The Los Angeles Times editorial board blasted the charter firms, questioning their commitment to equity. Independent nonprofits submitted the remainder of the proposals.

Few predicted that renegade teachers and grassroots activists would out-bid the established charter firms. The L.A. school board’s decision to hand off potentially hundreds of schools had been powered largely by charter school advocates who had won over Flores and Villaraigosa. But now upstart teachers had joined in common cause with neighborhood activists, arguing that even popular charter firms were “outsiders.”

Cortines formed an independent panel to review the bids. By February, Villaraigosa’s majority on the school board began to unravel. The neutral panel recommended a balanced mix of charter firms, nonprofits, and district educators to take over the 36 schools. But after joining forces with charter comrades to pass the public school choice legislation, neighborhood activists and teachers now split off to fight the charter awards, alleging that charter firms were too imperial and noting fresh statistics that special education students were underrepresented in the charter sector. Over the mayor’s and Flores’s vocal objections, the board awarded just four schools to charter organizations.

Devil’s in the Details

Despite the charter lobby’s reversal of fortune, L.A. Unified has become “a network of schools,” as Claremont Graduate University professor Charles Kerchner points out. Even before Villaraigosa pushed through public school choice, the district watched over 15 magnet schools with long waiting lists, and Cortines’s pilot campuses were showing promising results, at least in terms of decentralizing school management. The 161 charter schools operating within the district’s boundaries ranged from fragile mom-and-pop organizations to those run by franchise firms like the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools and the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). The Gates Foundation has begun funneling $60 million to these big charter players, hoping to boost teacher effectiveness through incentives and training efforts. L.A. may yet become the poster child for Secretary Duncan’s $4.3 billion Race to the Top initiative.

New questions continue to surface from the twists and turns of the L.A. story. How rapidly and responsibly can L.A. Unified hand off as many as 251 schools to charter firms, nonprofits, and breakaway teachers? Will a robust count of charismatic innovators surface in Los Angeles to take over complicated urban schools? “No. 251 schools, no,” says charter advocate Wallace. “Most of our organizations are going to be up for taking on one or two schools every other year.” This capacity constraint allowed local nonprofits and teacher confederations to compete against charter firms.

The nerve-wracking work of handing off schools began on cue. Matt Hill is Cortines’s top aide for crafting the emerging confederation. A total of 219 letters of intent were initially submitted. “It’s more than I anticipated in the first year,” Hill said. “As far as a jolt to the system, it has been a great process.” Yet the major charter firms moved prudently, each bidding on just one or two schools, and favoring the spanking-new campuses rather than attempting to turn around chronically ailing schools.

Teacher groups went after and won most of the schools, with some opting for the pilot model, embracing the idea of autonomy with all the trappings, “except a thin labor contract,” Hill said. This model, in which principals are no longer hog-tied by elaborate bureaucratic or confining union rules, proved attractive to teachers eager to take over campuses, but who equate charters with privatization of school management. And the UTLA much prefers flexible labor contracts under the pilot model to charter agreements that freeze out the union.

Parents are confused over their options. “It was so rushed (in this first year) parents didn’t really understand what was going on,” Hill said. “Empowerment is a relationship,” as UCLA law professor Joel F. Handler remarked.

And the story is far from over. The UTLA filed suit in December to block the mayor’s entire charter-and-choice program, even as the union helped some teachers to develop school bids. Soon Villaraigosa will be back in court, once again battling his old friends.

The Roots of Reform

Back in 1989, Bill Clinton and his fellow governors first pushed labor to swallow more demanding learning standards and stiff accountability measures, betting this would renew voters’ confidence in the schools. The patient responded with strong vital signs for a time, as test scores climbed in the 1990s and achievement gaps narrowed. Now President Obama is upping the ante, spurring local activists to shake up, even break up, downtown school bureaucracies. “Charters…force the kind of experimentation and innovation that helps to drive excellence in every other aspect of life,” the president told the Washington Post. His Race to the Top fund sends dollars to states that have lifted caps on charters, offering aid and comfort to urban agitators like Villaraigosa. “The president is demanding innovation, and there are funds out there,” as L.A.’s Brenes put it.

Still, Washington’s feeding of new charters may fail to lift students until quality climbs. Warm results arrived this past winter in New York City from Stanford University economist Caroline Hoxby, who detailed how students winning slots via lotteries in over-subscribed charters out-performed applicants who remained in regular public schools. Secretary Duncan, up to speed on the national evidence, told me, “I am not for charters. I’m a fan of good charters. Second- and third-rate charters should be closed down.” But will Washington nudge states to prune lifeless charter schools after pushing for a major expansion?

Still, the political realignment seen in L.A. narrows the choices available to union leaders: either navigate these treacherous waters more mindfully, or get swept away downstream. “My style is never about being in your face,” Duncan said. “[But] do the unions have to move? Absolutely. We all have to get outside our comfort zones.”

One unforeseen lesson for Duncan from L.A. is that high-quality charter firms can expand only so quickly. And once the neighborhood-control genie is out of the lamp, managing democratic impulses is difficult, no matter how disciplined the charter lobby. After pushing the school board to cut out several charter bids and go for pilot schools instead, Brenes explained, “Some of our best teachers rolled-up their sleeves and developed quality plans.” As for the charter schools? “A lot of folks out there were just not grounded in the community, [they] underestimated our organizing capacity in East L.A.”

When the school board finally turned 36 schools over to new management, only four were awarded to charter school operators. Most of the remaining schools were allocated to the newly formed teacher groups who had greatly strengthened their political position by siding with UTLA against the charters. “We knew from the beginning there was a lot of push back from the unions,” said Yolie Flores, one of the two board members who opposed the decision. But Steve Zimmer, one of the members who voted with the majority, said the board had found an appropriate compromise. “There was a lot of pressure from UTLA not to vote for a single charter,” he explained.

Of course, the mayor was furious over losing his earlier majority on the board. “We have accountability in our schools, and high-quality charter schools hold themselves to these standards,” Villaraigosa said in a statement. “Choosing more of the same reinforces the status quo.”

The lesson for Villaraigosa, and fellow mayors committed to charter schools that have shown results, is to remain steadily engaged and forceful politically. When Villaraigosa lost focus, then assumed his board majority would hold tight, reputable charter organizations lost out.

All sides will be back next year for another round of takeover bids. And union leaders may warm up to decentralizing management, even with more flexible labor contracts, especially if they can win control of pilot and autonomous schools by uniting with Latino neighborhood activists.

The UTLA’s sudden enthusiasm for innovative school management is breathtaking, and largely the work of a young generation of impatient members. Fritch, after helping to win a pilot school with Brenes, put it simply, “We need to become a more progressive union, or we’re going to be a done union.”

Bruce Fuller is professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent book is Standardized Childhood (Stanford University Press).

Claire Anderson provided invaluable research assistance.

A Courageous Look at the American High School

Paul E. Peterson — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:00:31 +0000

Video: Paul Peterson talks with Nathan Glazer

Podcast: Paul Peterson talks with Mike Petrilli

In Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning, scheduled for release by Harvard University Press this spring, Paul E. Peterson tells how five individuals—Horace Mann, John Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr., Al Shanker, and William Bennett—shaped American education in ways they never expected. Peterson chronicles how education became ever more centralized and bureaucratized, creating the monolithic system in place in the early 21st century. The story nonetheless ends on a hopeful note, as Peterson characterizes Julie Young’s innovative work at Florida Virtual School as a harbinger of an educational future in which learning finally becomes customized to each student’s circumstances.

In Peterson’s account, sociologist James Coleman plays a pivotal role. In the following excerpts from the book, Peterson recalls the bitterness of the controversy provoked by Coleman’s writings and reveals, for the first time, how Coleman’s insights were rooted in his own high-school experiences.

Adapted from Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning by Paul E. Peterson, to be published March 2010 by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

Excellence was seldom to be found in 2006, when David Ferrero, an officer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, reviewed five firsthand, book-length accounts of teaching and learning at individual high schools. In one account, a rookie teacher, telling her own story, “struggles to establish authority in her classes and generally fails;…her students ritually defy her, going so far as to openly declare their intention to get her fired for the sheer sport of it.” At another school, “numerous attempts” by well-meaning, hardworking teachers fail “to coax students out of their shells, engage them in important issues, and motivate them to perform on tests.” On and on such tales go. A powerful but hostile peer group seemed in charge of the learning process.

According to Cornell economist John Bishop, the problem begins in middle school, where “nerds” are harassed. “Studiousness is denigrated…in part because it shifts up the grading curve and forces others to work harder to get good grades…. Victims of nerd harassment hardly ever tell their parents, their siblings, or their friends. Most accept the proposition that…acting like a dork is bad…. Complaining to a teacher is self-defeating. Squealing on classmates only exacerbates [the situation].”

The problem did not appear suddenly at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Fifty years earlier James Coleman, reflecting on his own adolescence, had detected something quite similar and then provided a sociological explanation for the phenomenon.

James S. Coleman

Born in 1926, Coleman began his graduate studies in sociology at Columbia University in 1951, one year before [John] Dewey died at the age of ninety-two. The two intellectuals had much in common. Both came from ordinary, small-town families, but they both had entrepreneurial spirit, tremendous energy, and personal fortitude that belied their surface modesty. Neither was a brilliant lecturer, but both were kind, gentle, supportive mentors, surrounded by devoted graduate students. Like most Americans, both were pragmatists—concerned less about systematic theory than about learning what worked in practice. Neither saw his work on education as the centerpiece of his life’s work. Dewey was a philosopher, Coleman a social theorist and mathematical model-builder. Yet neither man would have made as lasting a contribution were it not for his work on schools.

Despite the similarities, Dewey and Coleman walked in contrasting intellectual worlds. If Dewey’s thinking was shaped by Rousseau, Hegel, and the Romantic tradition more generally, Coleman’s owed more to two Scottish empiricists: David Hume and Adam Smith. The “Emile” of significance to Coleman was not Rousseau’s mythical child but Emile Durkheim, a sociologist whose point of departure was not the state of nature but a well-defined community context. Coleman’s work was more disciplined than was Dewey’s. Trained in survey research and modern analytic techniques—random sampling, systematic data collection, rigorous comparisons—taking hold at Columbia, Coleman was able to test his ideas in ways unavailable to Dewey. Most important, Dewey and Coleman had separate agendas: Dewey’s ideas shaped the public schools of the twentieth century; Coleman deconstructed what Dewey had built.

Unlike Dewey, Coleman never became a household name, yet his impact on American education has been immense. At his memorial service in 1995, New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed that the man they were remembering was among “a very small number of people who end up defining a major part of the intellectual agenda for their times. Their work is both so powerful and so well argued…that others are inspired to focus on these same issues.” Coleman’s impact was not without its ironies, however. His research served the civil rights movement King had begun but also the reaction that was to follow. His studies first accelerated and then helped put the brakes on school desegregation. A part of his work has been taken to mean that schools are insignificant, while another part suggests they are decisive. Coleman himself saw no contradictions.

We know few details about Coleman’s early educational experiences, in part because Coleman himself wanted us to believe that at age twenty-five he had sprung directly from the head of—well, not Zeus, but Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld, two men in Columbia’s sociology department whom many students thought had godlike qualities. Reflecting back on what seems to have been something like a conversion experience, Coleman said: “I left a job as a chemist…and took on a new life…. The transformation was nearly complete. Except for my wife (and other kin who lived far away in the Midwest and South), I shed all prior associations…. [After] the resocialization I underwent at Columbia from 1951 to 1955… I was a different person.” It was Merton’s social-theory course that did the trick, “a conversion experience for those of us eager for conversion.”

The grandson of an evangelical preacher, Coleman certainly knew the religious meaning of the concept he was invoking. But his first twenty-five years left more of a mark on him than he was willing to acknowledge. Born in Bedford, Indiana, he began high school in Greenhills, Ohio, a place he wrote about almost wistfully: “School life had, for a few of us, a more academic focus, in retrospect surprisingly so.” Shortly thereafter his father took a job as a factory foreman in Louisville, Kentucky, a city that had two public high schools for boys: “Male (with a college preparatory curriculum) and Manual (with vocational and pre-engineering curricula).”

Coleman adjusted to his new school [Manual High] by becoming a member of the school’s football team. The “boys who counted in the school,” he writes, “were the first-string varsity football players,” because “Male and Manual were locked in a fierce football rivalry that culminated every Thanksgiving Day but flavored the whole school year.” He was quickly drawn in. “[The] environment had shaped [his] own investment of time and effort, intensely focused on football, although arguably [his] comparative advantage lay elsewhere.” Otherwise, high school “failed” him. Apart from an eleventh-grade algebra class, he could not find anything “to excite my interest and capture my full attention.” One day, while hitchhiking to football practice, he thought longingly: “If only they would not destroy in us the interest with which we came to school, I would ask for nothing more.” Only when Coleman arrived at Columbia did he find faculty members with a “personal (that is, selfish) interest in some of their students. They seemed to be interested in those students in a way I had never felt since the ninth grade,” perhaps because “graduate students help bring professors closer to immortality.”

He nonetheless attended a small college before joining the Navy in the middle of World War II. After his discharge, he used his benefits under the voucher-like GI Bill to earn a B.S. degree in chemical engineering from Purdue University. Though he was then hired by Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, Coleman was still a frustrated product of Manual High, a technician who wanted a more intellectual challenge. Despite his limited resources, he made a dramatic career decision to pursue a Ph.D. in sociology. Rejected by Harvard and Michigan, he won admission to the overcrowded program at Columbia.

He could not have been more fortunate. In 1951, Paul F. Lazarsfeld was using newly developed quantitative techniques to look at practical topics: mass media, advertising and political campaigns. At the same time, Robert K. Merton was systematizing his sense of the ironic—unexpected things happen for reasons no one anticipates—to which he gave the rather pompous label “latent-function theory.” Coleman drank from both professorial wellsprings, but it was Merton who “provided the inspiration for it all.” In his italicized words: “I worked with Lipset, worked for Lazarsfeld, and worked to be like Merton.” Like Merton, Coleman viewed the world with an outsider’s irony: things are not as they seem, and consequences differ from what is expected. At a personal level, Merton endeared himself to Coleman the day he asked the young man about his dissertation plans. Told that none had been devised, Merton suggested that Coleman simply use the chapters he had drafted for a study of trade unions he was writing in collaboration with Seymour Martin Lipset, the department’s up-and-coming assistant professor. Acting on this advice, Coleman had his thesis completed just three years after matriculation. Shortly thereafter, he submitted a research proposal to the U.S. Office of Education’s new Cooperative Research Program.

Until this point, nothing in Coleman’s early career indicated he would become the premier education sociologist of the twentieth century. No one at Columbia specialized in educational sociology, a field Coleman disparaged as languishing in the cellar of the discipline. But as he was ruminating over possible topics for a federal grant proposal, Manual High came up one night at a dinner party the Colemans were hosting for Martin Trow (coauthor, with Coleman and Lipset, of the trade union study) and his wife. The Trows had attended elite schools where sports were subservient to academics, not only in the schools’ official focus but also in the students’ interests and social relationships. How different from Manual High!

Turning the conversation into a research proposal, Coleman laid out a plan to study several schools in Illinois, near the University of Chicago, where Coleman had been hired as an assistant professor. The book that emerged, The Adolescent Society [1961], which is as much a theoretical commentary on Manual High as an analysis of ten schools in Illinois, remains Coleman’s masterpiece. According to Coleman, the focus at these schools was on sports stars, cheerleaders, and other members of the leading crowd, known more for smart dressing than for smarts per se. Those who studied hard and got good grades were edged to the social sidelines. For those who excelled scholastically, success must appear to have been “gained without special efforts, without doing anything beyond the required work.” Otherwise, one is socially isolated by “the crowd.” Ostensibly, schools are educational institutions, but their latent function is social and quite inimical to educational purposes. It is the way in which U.S. schools are organized that is the problem, Coleman says. They resemble jails, the military, and factories: all of these institutions are run by an “administrative corps” that makes demands upon a larger group (students, prisoners, soldiers, workers). In response, the larger group develops a set of norms that govern the choices individuals make. “The same process which occurs among prisoners in a jail and among workers in a factory is found among students in a school. The institution is different, but the demands are there, and the students develop a collective response to these demands. This response takes a similar form to that of workers in industry—holding down effort to a level which can be maintained by all. The students’ name for the rate-buster is the ‘curveraiser,’…and their methods of enforcing the work-restricting norms are similar to those of workers—ridicule, kidding, exclusion from the group.” With his typical irony, Coleman dedicated the book “To my own high school, du Pont Manual Training High School, Louisville, Kentucky.”

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The occasion for his contribution was provided by a little-noticed clause buried in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which called for a “survey concerning the lack…of equal opportunities…by reason of race, color, religion or national origin in public education.” Though not a prominent public figure, James S. Coleman was the logical choice for directing the survey. He had been trained in survey research, was an acknowledged expert on high schools, and was sympathetic to the civil rights movement—he and his son had been arrested at a demonstration in Baltimore. Coleman…agreed to take on the assignment only after “some hesitation” and “extensive discussion” that transformed what at first seemed to be nothing more than a collection of racial-segregation statistics into the first nationwide study of the factors that affect student achievement. Students at 4,000 randomly selected schools across the country were tested in various subjects. The study also collected information on characteristics of the schools the students attended: racial composition, per-pupil expenditures, the college degrees teachers had earned, teacher ability (as measured by performance on a test), the number of books in the school library, and much more. Family background information was collected as well.

The study was to go forward with more-than-deliberate speed, as results were expected to reveal a need for federal action to equalize educational opportunity, the keystone of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” Imagine, then, the shock inside the White House when a draft of the report began circulating inside the administration. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of Johnson’s top domestic advisers, gave a sense of the reaction when he recalled being greeted in the spring of 1966 by Harvard professor Martin Lipset with the query: “You know what Coleman is finding, don’t you?” “I said, ‘What?’ He said: ‘All family.’ I said, ‘Oh, Lord.’” The next day Moynihan informed the secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) to get ready, as the research project was about to produce findings the administration “was not going to like.” The project report [Equality of Educational Opportunity, 1966], later known as “Coleman I” after two additional reports appeared, was released on Independence Day weekend, 1966. That was thought to be a good time to announce negative news, since much of the press was on holiday. The strategy worked: few but academics paid attention, and only gradually did its message sink in.

To everyone’s surprise, Coleman I found that within regions and types of communities (urban, suburban, and rural), expenditures per pupil were about the same in black and white schools. Even more remarkable, students did not learn more just because more was spent on their education. Nor did any other material resource of a school have much of an effect on how well Johnny and Suzy read—not the number of students in the class, nor the teacher’s credentials, nor the newness of the textbooks, nor the number of books in the library, nor anything physical or material that schools had for years considered important. What did count were a host of family-background characteristics: mother’s education, father’s education, family income, having fewer siblings, the number of books in the home, and other factors—all of which together explained more of the variation among students in their reading achievement than any school-related factor.

One finding in Coleman I saved the day for the Johnson administration. The authors found that student achievement was affected by the social composition of the pupils at a school. If a low-income African American child had fellow students who were white or from a higher socioeconomic status, the child did better at reading. The converse was not true, however: a white child did not suffer educationally from having black classmates. In other words, the influence of peers was asymmetrical. Desegregation helped blacks without hurting whites. Many years later, the Nobel Prize–winning econometrician James Heckman and his colleague Derek Neal called that asymmetrical result Coleman’s “least robust” finding. But Coleman never doubted it. Testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, he said black students at segregated schools were “deprived of the most effective educational resources contained in the schools: those brought by other children as a result of their home environment.” Whatever regrets the Johnson administration might have had about some parts of Coleman I, it was pleased by the ammunition the report provided for the ongoing desegregation campaign.

So it was truly ironic that Coleman, the very academic whose work provided the clearest educational justification for school desegregation, would in his next major study [Trends in School Segregation, 1968–73, 1975], the “white flight” study (known as Coleman II), produce findings that called into question many of the policies being used to desegregate the schools. Using data collected by the newly established Civil Rights Commission, Coleman II tracked trends in black and white school enrollments in cities across the United States. He and his colleagues found that white families were moving outward more rapidly from those central cities where racial desegregation plans were being implemented.

Coleman expressed concern that, as a practical matter, busing of students within districts was self-defeating. Within school districts, to be sure, the segregation index fell from 0.63 to 0.37 in the years 1968–1972. But that only intensified segregation between districts. Said Coleman, “The emerging problem with regard to school desegregation is the problem of segregation between central city and suburbs.” Schools were at risk of being as segregated as they had ever been, exactly as Justice [Thurgood] Marshall had predicted.

Not since Cleopatra heard about Antony’s dalliances has a messenger come so close to being poisoned. Scholars turned on Coleman with an unexpected vengeance that introduced a more virulent tone into the world of education policy research. Well-known Harvard psychology professor Thomas F. Pettigrew claimed that Coleman II “should not be taken seriously.” The NAACP general counsel called the Chicago sociologist “without a doubt, a first-class fraud…. He is not entitled to any credence or any reliability or any belief with respect to the things he says he has found.” A Washington Post columnist questioned whether Coleman was mixing research with advocacy, quoting then deputy director of the National Science Foundation (and future president of the University of California) Richard Atkinson as saying, “A lot of what goes under the name of social science is just junk…. Too often [when] speaking on issues of education [scholars use] research evidence as a disguise for advocating a particular policy.” Atkinson was careful not to mention Coleman by name, but such innuendo by distinguished leaders fed the anti-Coleman fire. It flamed into an effort, led by the sociologist Alfred McClung Lee, then the president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), to censure or expel Coleman from the organization’s membership for having spread “flammable propaganda.” Though that blaze was contained, “few sociologists ever had to endure the high profile public controversy which swirled around him.” Years later, Coleman recalled the ASA plenary session held to debate the report: “The passions generated at that session are hard to reconstruct now, but I still have the posters that were plastered at the entrance to the ballroom and behind the podium, covered with Nazi swastikas, epithets, and my name.”

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In 1981, Coleman wrote his third major report, identified here as Coleman III. Two years previously, Coleman and his colleagues at the University of Chicago had been asked by the National Center for Educational Statistics to extend the work begun in Coleman I. The study was to be more than a single-shot survey along the lines of Coleman’s earlier work. Instead, several rounds of data were to be collected. A nationally representative sample of high schoolers was to be tested as sophomores and then again as seniors, after which they would be followed into college and the labor force. In this way, Coleman expected to find out how much students learned between their sophomore and senior years, as well as the impact of schooling on college attendance and labor force participation. Coleman also convinced the U.S. Department of Education, which was funding the study, to look at private schools as well as public ones. He now got his chance to see if private and public schools across the country were as different from one another as Manual High differed from those elite schools his friends at Columbia had attended.

The survey of some 70,000 students at more than 1,000 high schools was conducted in the spring of 1980. Working at his usual extraordinary pace, Coleman reported his team’s findings back to the government that same September, even as a presidential election campaign was in full swing. After the election was over and the Reagan administration had assumed office, the results from the first round of data collection were released. Coleman reported that sophomores in Catholic schools performed at higher levels than those in public schools, apparently showing in practice what [Milton] Friedman had argued in theory. In education circles, it was about as dramatic as the first proof of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Coleman explained his findings by claiming that students at Catholic schools benefited from the “social capital” surrounding the religious school: parents knew and supported one another as they attended Mass and participated together in other religious activities. As another group of sociologists put it, “Catholic schools benefit from a network of social relations, characterized by trust, that constitute a form of ‘social capital.’… Trust accrues because school participants, both students and faculty, choose to be there.”

The attacks on Coleman III were no more polite and detached than the attacks on Coleman II. The day it was released, “people entering the auditorium were handed leaflets attacking the study.” The executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals insisted that the study used “incomplete data inappropriately applied.” The New York Times chided Coleman for publicizing his results, saying that “sociologists invite trouble” when they seek “the stardom of advocacy based on their fallible predictions.” Its news reports quoted Coleman out of context in order to give the impression that he himself thought “the study was deeply flawed and that [he] was retreating from his conclusions,” though Coleman had said nothing of the sort. A number of professors and education experts denounced the report. One called it a “premature” report of “an ax-grinding nature.” Fumed one Harvard faculty member, “While the findings are wrapped in a mantle of social science research, the report is inconsistent with the notion of disciplined inquiry,” curiously objecting to the fact that “the findings are presented quite plainly.” Another set of critics opened their essay with: “The methods and interpretations used by [Coleman and his colleagues] fall below the minimum standards for social-scientific research.”

A good deal of the rhetoric can safely be ignored, but two criticisms were valid. (1) Students at fee-charging private schools cannot easily be compared to those attending free public schools, because they come from families who are willing to pay for their children’s education. Although Coleman III adjusted for parental education and many other family background characteristics, that adjustment did not necessarily take into account the greater educational commitment of parents who were willing to pay for their children’s education. (2) The study showed that sophomores in private school performed at a higher level, but it did not prove that they had learned more there. It was possible that the children who were being sent to private school were, to begin with, more capable students.

Coleman and his colleagues replied to these criticisms two years later when the second round of “High School and Beyond” data became available. This time, they were able to show that students in private schools had learned more between their sophomore and senior years than their counterparts in public school had. The findings calmed the skepticism of the more reasonable of their critics.

Coleman and his colleagues made some errors. They might have decided to withhold their results until they’d gathered information on student gains in achievement in high school, not just the initial sophomore scores. And they made various methodological errors, as frequently happens when one is undertaking an innovative project. But the biggest tactical errors were made by Coleman’s opponents. By relentlessly attacking Coleman III, they helped to place school choice on the national political agenda. What had been an academic debating point during the 1970s became, in the 1980s, a part of the national conversation.

High School 2.0

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:03:30 +0000

In 2003, leaders at the School District of Philadelphia, district CEO Paul Vallas and chairman of the School Reform Commission James Nevels, enlisted the help of the Microsoft Corporation in a bold effort: reshape the archaic 19th-century high school model to better prepare students, especially urban students, to live and work in the 21st. Three years later, they opened a sleek, eco-friendly, technologically advanced $62 million building in west Philadelphia bounded by a vast urban park, the city’s historic zoo, and some of the most blighted streets in the city. It was called School of the Future (SOF).

Here, it was forecast, nothing less than the transformation of American secondary education would take place. This would be a neighborhood school, in the heart of impoverished urban America, committed to educating all students, not to weeding out the most challenging. Technology would bring the students to new heights, and serve as a prototype for reform and innovation elsewhere.

Each student—or “learner”—would have a laptop or tablet computer. The course of study would be dynamic, interdisciplinary, and driven by their interests. The teachers, called educators, and the community would collaboratively develop a “continuous, relevant, and adaptive” curriculum. Learning would spill out of the building into the surrounding neighborhood and, virtually, across the world.

The September 2006 opening of the school, thick with dignitaries, was featured on the national morning talk shows. Politicians jostled to get their faces in the picture during the ribbon cutting. Vallas declared the dawn of a new educational era. “This is how schools of today can and should be designed and developed to adequately prepare students for life and work,” he said.

Parents and students, who were chosen by lottery, exclaimed in wonder as they walked through the glass doors for the first time. Among them were Carmen Thomas and her son Sekou Thomas-Bamba. Thomas could barely contain her elation.

“This is just absolutely amazing,” she said, according to an account the next day in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “It’s like a fresh start, new dreams, new adventure, hope. For him to walk in and be a part of the first graduating class is exciting.”

Full of enthusiasm, Thomas said that she would volunteer at the school and learn the technology herself.

Fast-forward to the fall of 2009. On a Thursday evening in October, Thomas had kept her promise to volunteer: she and her son were among a handful of parents and students who came to the school to help evaluate the graduation project proposals of the first senior class.

Did the school turn out to be everything she expected?

Thomas thinks for a minute. An adventure, certainly. But not in the way she had anticipated. “There have been challenges,” Thomas said. “The transition from books to learning from laptops—I’m not sure all the students were ready.”

Sekou, who had spent his elementary years in a highly structured religious school, described his freshman year as “out of control. No one knew what to do exactly.” Sophomore year, he considered transferring. “I felt I wasn’t learning enough,” he said.

To be sure, the future has not yet arrived at School of the Future. Its early years have been plagued by a crisis in leadership, a revolving door of principals and wavering support for its mission from the Philadelphia district. The school’s downtown champions, Vallas and Nevels, were gone soon after SOF opened its doors. Some of the more exciting plans for technology use, including a Virtual Teaching Assistant that would allow teachers to track individual student progress online, never materialized. Solar panels were designed to transmit real-time data on energy use so students could study it, but the equipment has yet to be installed. Despite the awe that the school generated in the community, it has not filled to capacity. Built for 750, enrollment is below 500 in its fourth year. Walk through classrooms today and what you will see, pedagogically, is not terribly different from what happens in any high school.

Mary Cullinane, who has directed the project for Microsoft since the beginning, acknowledges the difficulties but has few regrets. Today’s children, she said, deserve learning communities that are inspirational, not just functional. And she says that, despite the problems, the experience at SOF has been invaluable.

“We’ve learned that we have to prepare for a very long journey,” she said. “If we want to be disruptive and allow for education to have a different experience in the United States, we need to recognize the long-term nature of this work and stop using short-term yardsticks to measure progress.”

Cullinane adds, “I’m not sure anybody has the stomach for this…innovation swims upstream in the river of status quo.”

Learning on the Fly

Developing SOF has been compared by more than one person to building an airplane while flying it. Those involved discovered that the default educational model—organized around bell schedules, teaching separate subjects in isolation, the assumption that most students learn the same material in the same way, the lockstep progression through grade levels, report cards with letter grades, and other conventions that most of America understands as “school”—does not give ground easily. Even the effort to start later in the morning, citing research that this is best for adolescents, ran up against bus schedules and the demand of after-school athletics.

The first two years of the school’s existence were marked by turmoil. The first principal, called “chief learner” at SOF, Shirley Grover, had a background in private schools, most recently in Italy, not in urban education. But her vision for change was bold and ambitious, her optimism boundless, and she was intensely recruited to help design the school and hire the first teachers. But she left, for personal reasons, in the summer after the first year.

After that, the school was run on an interim basis first by a retired principal who described himself as a seat warmer and then by an administrator who had no high school experience and didn’t quite get its mission.

Now in her second year as principal, Rosalind Chivis had a hand in the school’s start-up and spent several years in the district central office before being sent to rescue SOF. Always on the move, she presents a stern face to students and visitors alike. Students who arrive late or break the rules get little sympathy from her.

Shortly after taking over, Chivis cracked down on discipline and engineered the transfer of more than 60 problematic students, more than 10 percent of the student body, a move that some teachers equated to abandoning the mission of educating every child. “These were not all bad kids, they were kids who made bad choices,” lamented one.

Chivis doesn’t see it that way.

“When I came, I had to create a culture and climate conducive to effective teaching and learning,” she said. “I think we’re at a place now. I feel comfortable focusing attention on instruction.”

At the same time, Chivis wants SOF to blaze new trails and fulfill its original mission.

“We’re all in agreement we want an organization and a learning environment that is student-centered, we want instruction to be student-driven, we want it to be engaging, and we want there to be lots of opportunities for experiential learning, reflection, and inquiry,” she said.

Grand Challenge

Microsoft helped design and launch the school but, contrary to public perception, did not pay for it. The company deliberately tried to work within the resource and bureaucratic limits of the existing system, determined to create something that was scalable and replicable in other big school districts. So it declined to pull out all the stops in hiring staff, for instance, instead combining its intensive, competency-based hiring process with the rigid, centralized, and seniority-based system in Philadelphia. For the most part, school leaders, and later, committees led by teachers themselves, were able to choose the new staff members as the school added a grade a year.

But, with dual-subject certification required for all applicants to facilitate the interdisciplinary model, prospective teachers weren’t beating down the doors to work there. Especially after it began to gain a reputation as having problems, the school has had trouble filling all the teaching jobs.

Many of the mostly young educators who were lured by the promise that they could create something entirely new have felt stymied. They were drawn to SOF precisely because it was refusing to cream top students, but was instead ready to work with those who were dropping out in droves or would graduate with substandard knowledge and skills from traditional neighborhood schools.

“It was presented as a school, it still is a school, that is trying to ‘fix’ education,” said Aruna Arjunan, who came in the beginning and teaches social studies and math. “That sounds grandiose, but the whole point is to do things a different way.”

Yet this challenge proved greater than anyone had anticipated. The students, almost all African American, more than 80 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, came with skill levels all over the map; a majority read at a 5th-grade level or below. Used to worksheets, paper-and-pencil tests, and being asked to regurgitate information, many weren’t prepared to take control of their own learning. Some thrived on the project-based, interdisciplinary, and technology-rich model, and were finally able to connect to the purpose of school; others simply found it bewildering.

“I could only imagine what it was like for the learners when they first arrived in this building,” said Kathleen Lee, a veteran Philadelphia teacher whose longtime interest in project-based learning brought her to SOF. “Everything’s online for you. Your math’s online. Your writing’s online. Your foreign language is online. They were never taught like that. They needed gradually to be eased into this.”

The technology itself created problems for managing the classroom. “I would spend 30 or 60 minutes of a period deleting games from the computer,” lamented one teacher. Students would be instant messaging and checking emails during class. “When you’re exhausted because you’ve been telling kids to stop playing Halo all day, you’re not actually teaching them literature or skills or the content that they need to drive their own learning.”

Several people involved have gone so far as to say that there has been a culture clash between the design and expectations of the school and the learners’ readiness to take advantage of it.

“The leadership when we opened the building went into this with certain assumptions, and they were that the children…were coming already motivated to learn and were at a certain skill level. That was not the case,” said Chivis. “Had more thought been put into where these learners were coming from and what they were coming with, we may have realized a greater degree of success.”

Balancing Act

Any way you look at it, developing the curriculum for School of the Future has been a roller-coaster ride. Wrote one young SOF teacher, “Programs begun one year vanished the second; systems implemented one minute were overhauled the next. And thus, like the demoralized Biblical man who builds his home on a foundation of sand only to see it fall, any sense of agency our learners had [developed] disappeared as their expectations for the future collapsed.”

There was no set curriculum in the first year: “Educators wrote their own curriculum,” said one member of the original faculty. “It was project-based, mission- and vision-driven.” Working in teams, they devised projects with the help of a web exchange called Understanding by Design, which provides materials and helps educators develop interdisciplinary, project-based units that meet the subject-matter standards in a specific state. Teachers team taught, there was no defined bell schedule, and at the end of the day, it was hard to quantify what the students had learned, a mortal sin in today’s accountability climate.

Educators spent the second year designing an interdisciplinary project system with levels 100 through 400, similar to college courses. Students were assigned based on their skill levels and progressed at their own pace. Many educators were proud of this, but it had some of the same problems as the first year, primarily an inability to be “transparent” to the standardized test–based accountability system in use by the school district.

For starters, the school district’s computer couldn’t accept SOF’s narrative-style report cards, which evaluated students’ proficiency in the core competencies rather than giving them traditional numeric grades in individual subjects. District officials were concerned that students couldn’t easily transfer from a school with this sort of interdisciplinary structure and projects that spanned over years to a more traditional school.

By the middle of year three, the district had pressured the school to begin using its core curriculum and, like other neighborhood high schools, administer biweekly benchmark tests based on it. Two periods a week were set aside for mini-projects.

Today a core group of educators is hard at work, through a committee called Curriculum 2010, to meld the best aspects of project-based and interdisciplinary learning with the school district’s core curriculum and state standards. But the debate over how best to educate these students is likely to rage along. The first state standardized test scores are in, and the 11th graders did no better than those at other comprehensive, non-selective city high schools: about one-quarter of the students met proficiency standards in reading and a mere 7 percent in math.

English teacher Kate Reber is among those leading the curriculum effort. A graduate of Columbia University with a master’s degree in education from the University of Pennsylvania, this is Reber’s first teaching job. Scattered around her classroom are several dark red books that comprise the “planning and scheduling timeline” of Philadelphia’s core curriculum. It is no easy task to reconcile the core curriculum with her educational vision, or the vision of SOF. She points to a page inside the English book and quotes from it. It requires, for a particular week, that classes “study prefixes and suffixes using Jonathan Edwards’s sermons.” Reber shrugs. “I can study prefixes and suffixes. I can study Jonathan Edwards.”

She barrels on. “Where is the student voice, the project direction, the community engagement? If you would like me to develop a project that is learner-centered, community-focused, and academically rigorous, how also can it require that we ‘study prefixes and suffixes using Jonathan Edwards’s sermons’? Does this have problematic assumptions about teaching and learning? I think it does.”

Down the hall, math and technology teacher Thomas Gaffey is trying mightily to get a dozen or so 9th graders to understand scientific notation. He is using software rather than chalk and erasers, but the lesson would not have changed much if he had. This is not how Gaffey envisioned teaching at SOF when he was recruited right out of grad school at Temple University by the original chief learner.

Before the order to begin using the core curriculum, he was helping a team of girls understand math and physics by designing a complicated double-Dutch jump-rope game.

“As soon as we had to fit within the system, we lost everything innovative,” he said. “All over the country, urban districts are failing with the traditional curriculum. There’s a 45 percent dropout rate. These students don’t need that. They need something very different. Successful people learned by tinkering, by doing, they did not learn by sitting in a classroom in front of a board.

“At this point,” he added, “the School of the Future exists only in the minds of a few educators. We’re fighting against a leviathan.”

Control Central

The “leviathan” right now is embodied in the person of Arlene Ackerman, the superintendent of the Philadelphia schools, who previously led districts in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.

Ackerman believes strongly that centralized leadership can bring schools into line. Experimenting and nurturing innovation and new ideas from the bottom up is not her thing. In interviews and meetings, she still talks about “what works” in terms of what worked for her in her St. Louis high school almost 50 years ago.

At the same time, Ackerman has a strategic plan called Imagine 2014 that lays out a vision of high school strikingly similar to what SOF has been laboring toward. It calls for flexible schedules, more project-based and interdisciplinary learning, a more engaging and real world–based course of study, increased opportunity for teachers to work in teams, and better integration of technology across subject areas. But she has shown little sign, so far, that she wants to explore the connection between what is needed to make that a reality and what has been happening, in fits and starts, at SOF.

Microsoft’s Cullinane said she is encouraged by “the language [of Imagine 2014] and some of the things they’ve been talking about at the district level. I feel they have an opportunity here to bring it to fruition and demonstrate what it looks like via work done at School of the Future.”

She is also heartened that the Obama administration is talking about looking differently at assessment and ways to promote inquiry-based learning. “There’s a natural tension between creating an innovative culture and doing it within a system that requires demonstrated accountability, metrics, quantitative results, etc.,” she said. “It will be interesting to see how that starts to look and sound different under the current administration.”

Glimmers of the future are apparent, if not institutionalized at SOF. Microsoft’s liaison to the school works to tailor technology training to teachers’ individual backgrounds and needs, and even the most traditional have learned to incorporate wikis and blogs into their classes. Most of the educators use Microsoft OneNote to organize work, create project guides and digital books. The portal allows for each class to have its own web site, and students manage their assignments online.

Despite the school’s rocky start, students at SOF have done remarkable things. One group of students created a College Resource Center. A math teacher devised a class called “Help Desk” in which students learn to solve technological issues. An indifferent student in middle school who blossomed at SOF was upset at her peers’ teasing and intolerance of autistic schoolmates. She took the lead in developing a mini-project she called All in Together, in which students learned to be mentors to their autistic peers. While the endeavor was not problem-free—it didn’t work out as a full-blown project—it succeeded in creating more awareness and acceptance of difference around the school and sparking an interest among students for more independent projects.

Success for Sekou

Sekou Thomas-Bamba is getting ready to graduate. He is not sorry that he has attended School of the Future. With ambitions to study business in college, he’s looking at colleges like Maryland, Pitt, Morehouse, and Villanova. He’ll get expert counseling and lots of personal attention as he applies and makes his choices.

While freshman and sophomore years were chaotic, he said, starting in his junior year, the year Chivis came, things got a lot better. While he still feels more comfortable in traditional classes, he started to enjoy the multidisciplinary projects—one led to a job as a tour guide at a historic house in Fairmount Park—and he feels that he is a step ahead of other students because he’s had so much practice making presentations and learning how to work with other people. Not to mention his ease with technology. “Technology is the future,” he said.

As he and his mother evaluated the graduation projects, they considered a wide variety of proposals, everything from investigating crocodiles and wetlands to researching Down syndrome to studying how society responds to infectious diseases. Some students wanted to probe gender roles in society, teen pregnancy, and gang violence.

Although the hoopla and euphoria of the first day in the shiny new building wore off quickly, Sekou’s mother is not sorry, either, even if the road has been rough. She understands what SOF is trying to do. “The ideal is good,” she said, “but you have to take it in stages.”

Dale Mezzacappa covered education for the Philadelphia Inquirer between 1986 and 2006 and is now a contributing editor at the independent Philadelphia Public School Notebook and a freelance writer. This article was adapted from a chapter in What Next? Educational Innovation and Philadelphia’s School of the Future (2010, Harvard Education Press).

Straddling the Democratic Divide

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:15:25 +0000

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Senate confirmation hearing in January was thick with encomiums. He was praised by Democrat Tom Harkin of Iowa for the “fresh thinking” he brought to his post as Chicago schools chief for seven years. Republican Lamar Alexander, education secretary under George H. W. Bush, told Duncan he was the best of President Barack Obama’s cabinet appointments. Ailing Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy, in written comments entered into the record, praised Duncan for having “championed pragmatic solutions to persistent problems” and for lasting longer in Chicago than most urban superintendents.

The warm greetings given by both Republicans and Democrats on the committee reflect Duncan’s reputation as a centrist in the ideologically fraught battles over education reform. He has received national attention for moves favored by reformers, such as opening 75 new schools operated by outside groups and staffed by non-union teachers; introducing a pay-for-performance plan that will eventually be in 40 Chicago schools; and working with organizations, including The New Teacher Project, Teach For America, and New Leaders for New Schools, that recruit talented educators through alternatives to the traditional education-school route.

At the same time, Duncan maintained at least a cordial working relationship with the Chicago Teachers Union, and both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) backed his nomination. He supported the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB), but also called for dramatic increases in spending to help schools meet the law’s targets, and additional flexibility for districts like his own. In nominating Duncan, Obama said, “We share a deep pragmatism about how to go about this. If pay-for-performance works and we can work with teachers so it doesn’t feel like it’s being imposed upon them…then that’s something that we should explore. If charter schools work, try that. You know, let’s not be clouded by ideology when it comes to figuring out what helps our kids.”

Given the strong union support for the Obama presidency, there was great speculation within education circles throughout the fall as to whether the new president would turn out to be a reformer—willing to challenge existing practices and the teachers unions in order to achieve dramatic changes in schools—or play it politically safe by backing programs that brought only marginal changes. A sharp divide among Democrats was in full view at the party’s national convention in Denver, where urban mayors and educators, gathered at a forum sponsored by Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), challenged the dominant role of teachers unions in shaping policy. Newark mayor Cory Booker told those assembled, “We have to understand that as Democrats we have been wrong on education, and it’s time to get it right.”

Even before the national convention, conflicts between the unions and Democratic reformers were intensifying. At a New York fundraiser in 2007, Obama reportedly made a similar point. According to Joe Williams, DFER’s executive director, Obama incriminated the teachers unions when the director of a Harlem charter school asked the then candidate why Democrats threw up so many obstacles.

Williams explained, “We’re at this point where the nation wants to change education more than the unions and the unions are going to have to decide if they’re going to be part of the change or be left out of it entirely.”

Two manifestoes issued during the Democratic primaries laid out competing philosophies on improving student achievement that were intended to influence the eventual Democratic nominee. A “Broader, Bolder Approach to Education,” a letter issued by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, signed by national leaders across much of the political spectrum, and endorsed by the AFT, argued that improving schools alone would not close achievement gaps between disadvantaged and advantaged students. It called on policymakers to provide preschool, afterschool programs, and summer school, and take steps to improve students’ health and social development. Another letter, issued by a coalition called the Education Equality Project, advocated addressing school system failures through greater accountability, school choice, and changes in compensation that would promote teacher quality. Those who signed on to the project, a diverse group of leaders in education, philanthropy, and public service, vowed to “challenge politicians, public officials, educators, union leaders and anybody else who stands in the way of necessary change.”

Obama has allies in both camps. Arne Duncan was one of only a handful who signed both statements. Yet in his confirmation hearing, Duncan left little doubt that the administration wants to make systemic changes.

“We must do dramatically better,” Duncan told the Senate committee. “We must continue to innovate. We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn’t work. And we have to continue to challenge the status quo.”

Advisors to Obama say the rhetorical distinction was overdrawn and that the thrust of the president’s strategy is to make progress without causing further polarization. His education platform reflected that approach. Like many Democrats, he wants to spend more money: on helping students attend college; early childhood care and education; and improving teaching through mentoring and professional development for both principals and teachers. He has criticized NCLB for encouraging teaching solely focused on preparing students to pass tests. But in line with many Republicans and more conservative Democrats, Obama, like Duncan, supports school choice, charter schools, performance-based pay, and alternatives to education schools for teacher preparation (see sidebar). He and his opponent, Senator John McCain, both praised the work of Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who has fought the local union as well as the AFT over tenure and teacher pay.

Clues from the Campaign

Throughout his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama expressed support for higher teacher pay in exchange for greater accountability for teacher performance.

August 19, 2007, Democratic primary debate on This Week

“Every teacher I think wants to succeed. And if we give them a pathway to professional development, where we’re creating master teachers, they are helping with apprenticeships for young new teachers, they are involved in a variety of other activities that are really adding value to the schools, then we should be able to give them more money for it. But we should only do it if the teachers themselves have some buy-in in terms of how they’re measured. They can’t be judged simply on standardized tests that don’t take into account whether children are prepared before they get to school or not.”

April 27, 2008, Fox News interview:

As president, can you name a hot-button issue where you would be willing to buck the Democratic Party line and say, You know what? Republicans have a better idea here?

“I think that on issues of education, I’ve gotten in trouble with the teachers union on this—that we should be experimenting with charter schools. We should be experimenting with different ways of compensating teachers.”

August 27, 2008, Democratic National Convention:

“Michelle and I are here only because we were given a chance at an education. I will not settle for an America where some kids don’t have that chance. I’ll invest in early childhood education. I’ll recruit an army of new teachers, pay them higher salaries and give them more support. In exchange, I’ll ask for higher standards and more accountability.”

SOURCE: Ontheissues.org

Economic Stimulus

Widespread agreement that only a massive stimulus package could rescue the U.S. economy presented the new administration with the opportunity to placate both sides of the Democratic divide. The unions and their allies would get a massive infusion of federal funds into the schools that would help offset state and local budget cuts. And this would give Obama cover to push for tougher reforms down the road.

House Democrats, after negotiations with Obama’s team, in mid-January proposed a stimulus package of $825 billion that included between $120 billion and $140 billion for public schools and colleges. Most of the money would have few strings attached.

The spending package would boost federal spending on Title I programs for low-income students and for special education, distributing the money according to current formulas. It would also provide at least $39 billion to offset state cuts in education budgets and $20 billion for capital improvements at schools and colleges. About $15 billion would be available to states as bonuses for efforts such as ensuring that low-performing schools and districts have effective teachers and that the performance of English-language learners and special education students is properly assessed (see Figure 1). One Obama aide said similar incentives would be incorporated into education programs to be introduced later in the spring.

The stimulus package also proposed to boost funding for the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF), a Bush-era program that provides financial incentives to teachers and principals who raise overall student achievement and close achievement gaps. After Democrats took control of Congress in 2006, they zeroed out funding for TIF but restored $100 million for the following year. In his last budget, Bush requested $200 million for the program, the same amount Obama’s team has proposed.

Thirty-six states plus the District of Columbia already have local or statewide teacher compensation systems that add some sort of financial incentive to the standard step-and-column pay plan, according to the NEA. Former NEA president Reg Weaver cautioned that “while we can be open to alternatives, we should always oppose politically motivated, quick fixes designed to weaken the voice of teachers and the effectiveness of education employees. If they want to talk about changing the way we’re paid, they need to do that with us, not to us.”

In Obama’s platform, he agreed that such plans should be developed in consultation with teachers. Among the promising models is a voluntary pay-for-performance program in place in districts in a dozen states, funded in part by TIF, and implemented by Duncan in Chicago. The Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) provides teachers with professional support, helps them to use data in instruction, holds them accountable for results, and provides bonuses. Teachers in 10 Chicago schools voted to participate in TAP starting in the fall of 2007, and bonuses totaling $340,000 were given out the following year for improved test scores at 9 of the schools. “This is a landmark event for Chicago’s schools—recognizing and rewarding educators for exemplary work and compensating them accordingly,” Duncan said at the time.

The scale of the proposed spending on education is stunning, more than doubling the federal contribution. Of course, even an increase of that magnitude would leave the feds as the junior investors in public education, their contribution dwarfed by current state and local spending. But the funds proposed to offset cuts in state funding would mean that, for the first time, the federal government would be directly covering the cost of basic school operations. That kind of money could buy a lot of goodwill, especially if it helps states avoid laying off thousands of teachers. By December 2008, 19 states had cut K–12 education spending, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group. Even with the infusion of federal support proposed so far, states may have to make further cuts in their education budgets if the economy does not improve quickly. States spend between one-third and one-half of their budgets on elementary and secondary education, and the revenue available to state and local governments is shrinking fast. By January 2008, states had reported deficits of $350 billion. “If the economy doesn’t get better, schools are in trouble,” said Jack Jennings, founder and CEO of the Center on Education Policy. “For the sake of the schools it’s important that Obama pay attention to the economy.”

Even if the economy recovers and the stimulus package goes through intact, some observers question whether the proposed spending will do enough to address persistent disparities in achievement. Despite past federal support directed toward the needs of low-income students, African American 4th and 8th graders did not make measurable progress on the National Assessment of Educational Progress between 2005 and 2007. “Is the stimulus going to benefit kids in ways that are palpable and real and that improve achievement?” asked Dianne Piche of the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights. As the House was passing its version of the stimulus package (see Figure 1), Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute noted that most of the money simply gave states dollars to keep intact the programs of the past: “It’s like an alcoholic at the end of the night when the bars close and the solution is to open the bar for another hour,” he told a New York Times reporter.

No Child Left Behind

The pressing economic issues, as well as difficult politics, will likely push reauthorization of NCLB into 2010 or even 2011. California Democrat Representative George Miller, who was one of four members of Congress who worked with the first Bush administration on the original NCLB, wants to see it revised and reauthorized. Yet Miller acknowledged to the Washington Post that “at the end of the day, it may be the most tainted brand in America.”

NCLB has been a great success in the sense that no one disagrees with its goals: accountability for results, addressing issues of teacher quality, putting a spotlight on the learning of all students, and better targeting of funds to districts serving the most disadvantaged students. Still, its detractors argue that the law has had unfortunate side effects: too much time spent teaching to narrow tests, schools focused on boosting the scores of students who are just below the proficiency threshold, and some states lowering their standards to reduce the number of schools missing their achievement targets.

“We’ve learned over the past five to 10 years that we have to align curriculum, align standards, and align tests with professional development,” Jennings said. “We’ve also learned that it is very, very hard to do. We’ve also learned that if we really set certain goals…teachers will pay attention to those students who are just below the goal and not pay attention to those who are further down or further up.”

Obama spoke during his campaign at length about the ins and outs of testing and decried teaching to the test. Rather than abandon the testing in NCLB, he has said he wants to invest in improving assessments, so that they measure a broader range of skills than just the basics.

The battle fought over reauthorization of NCLB in 2007 offers a preview of the challenges the Obama team will face. In a speech at the National Press Club outlining his priorities for reauthorizing the law, Representative Miller said, “Throughout our schools and communities, the American people have a very strong sense that the No Child Left Behind Act is not fair, not flexible, and is not funded. And they are not wrong.”

Hope for Reform
Despite the challenges, many in Washington are hopeful that public schools may in fact improve under an Obama administration. Although he cannot ignore the unions that form a key part of the party’s constituency, Obama owes less to them than did past Democratic presidents. The unions did not support him in the primaries and, because he raised so much money on his own, Obama was not as dependent on their money as others have been. Of course, he is hugely popular with teachers, and the staggering amount of money he appears to be willing to spend on education will only make him more so.

In addition, the leaders of the two unions at least appear more willing to be flexible on some long-standing issues. AFT president Randi Weingarten has said several times that “nothing is off the table” except vouchers. Not that much is known about Dennis Van Roekel, the Arizona math teacher who became president of the NEA last summer (see “Same Old, Same Old,” features, Winter 2009). But he was among those who supported Bob Chase, an earlier NEA president, when he tried to get the union to endorse what he called the “new unionism.” Chase wanted the union to experiment with new forms of performance pay and peer review of teacher performance, but the rank-and-file members nationally were reluctant to go along. It remains unclear how far Weingarten and Van Roekel will be able to push their members now to accept changes in compensation, evaluation, tenure, and so on.

Weingarten finds it “very sad” and frustrating that unions are always blamed for opposing reforms. “There’s a lot of demonizing and blame-mongering going on in education and it’s ridiculous…because it just creates excuses,” she said. “It says to me that they don’t think anything can be done because they are looking for the fall guy rather than helping all kids achieve.”

Weingarten expressed hope that Obama would push for more rigorous standards, better curricula, more valid assessments, and investments in helping teachers improve. “You can’t buy it by putting money out there and saying to teachers, ‘if you don’t do it, you’re fired,’” she said, referring to her opposition to Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C. “We have the responsibility…to recruit and support and retain teachers if they’re doing a good job, and if not, to counsel them out of the profession.”

But Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, counters that the unions have resisted that course of action. “I think the unions are up against the wall,” she said. “The whole movement toward the notion that teachers don’t have a basic right to be in the classroom unless they are effective is proving so powerful as an idea that they’re weakened because they’ve run away from it rather than embrace it.”

It is well known that one of the strongest threads in the narrative of Obama’s journey from his childhood to the White House is educational opportunity (see “The Early Education of Our Next President,” features, Fall 2008). Schooled first in Indonesia, he returned to Hawaii because his mother wanted him to get a better education. There, his maternal grandmother and grandfather enrolled him in the private Punahou School, where he studied with the island’s elite. Then, it was on to Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School.

“I wasn’t born with a lot of advantages, but I was given love and support, and an education that put me on a pathway to success,” Obama said during a major campaign speech on education last September in Dayton, Ohio. “The reason Michelle and I are where we are today is because this country we love gave us the chance at an education. And the reason that I’m running for president is to give every single American that same chance.”

Joe Williams believes that all of those factors, as well as Obama’s personal commitment to improving education, create a real opportunity to bring about systemic, long-lasting changes. “Everyone says they support the goals of NCLB and if that’s real, then he can use his bully pulpit to say that we’ll do in education the equivalent of saying we’ll put a man on the moon in 10 years.

“He can say that we will make sure that every kid who starts the race will cross the finish line and it will give everyone goose bumps and start a new type of discussion about what the game is. But it only has the potential to change the game if he treats it as an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and inspire people to think very big about what is possible,” adds Williams. “Obama is the only person I’ve seen in the last 20 years who may be up to that job.”

“His vision of education is as a foundation not just of the economy but of a society in which people take care of each other,” explained Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond, who advised Obama during the campaign and handled education policy for the president-elect’s transition team, in remarks delivered in November 2007 at a National Academy of Education event. “I think we can make great strides in a very short time.”

Although some may worry about the cost of all of the new programs, Darling-Hammond views the amount Obama wants to spend on education as a relatively small part of the overall bailout and recovery package, which could exceed $1.5 trillion.

In his speech last September in Dayton, Obama assured his audience, “We can do it all.”

Richard Lee Colvin is a longtime education journalist and director of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, Teachers College, Columbia University.

Can Catholic Schools Be Saved?

Peter Meyer — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Bobby and I stood outside the small public elementary school that our children attended, pondering our respective 1st graders’ prospects. The weeds poked up through the asphalt, the windows on the 30-year-old building were dirty, the playground equipment was rotting. Inside the K–2 school, some 600 kids were being prepared for academic underachievement: in a few more years two-thirds of them would be unable to read at grade level.

“Nothing wrong with this place,” Bobby finally said, “that a busload of nuns wouldn’t solve.”

I laughed. I knew exactly what he meant. We grew up on opposite sides of the country (he in New York and I in Oregon), but we both grew up Catholic, in the ’50s, and that meant one thing if nothing else: nuns.

The guardians of moral order and academic achievement for several generations of Catholic boys and girls, these robed religious women ruled with—well, with rulers. And paddles. And, sometimes, fists. Before “tough love” there was Sister Patrick Mary or Sister Elizabeth Maureen. Before No Child Left Behind there were behinds burnished by a swift kick from a foot that emerged without warning from under several acres of robes.

Indeed, our childhood memories, different in detail, were singular in their moral clarity: we knew what a busload of nuns could do. They would march up and down the aisles. (Yes, there would be aisles, in a room filled with 30 to 50 kids—phooey on class size.) And with a glance from behind their starched white wimples, we would learn.

The problem is that there no longer are busloads of nuns; in fact, most schools would be lucky to have a Mini Cooper’s worth of such minimum-wage professional teachers. Their ranks have declined by a staggering 62 percent since 1965 (from 180,000 to 68,000). The staff composition of Catholic schools has similarly been turned on its head, from some 90 percent female religious in the ’50s to less than 5 percent today (see Figure 1). “The school system had literally been built on their backs,” reported Anthony Bryk, Valerie Lee, and Peter Holland in their 1992 study Catholic Schools and the Common Good, “through the services they contributed in the form of the very low salaries that they accepted.” Consequently, costs have soared; average annual tuition has gone from next to nothing to more than $2,400 in elementary schools and almost $6,000 in high schools.

Despite a growing Catholic population (from 45 million in 1965 to almost 77 million today, making it the largest Christian denomination in the United States), Catholic school enrollment has plummeted, from 5.2 million students in nearly 13,000 schools in 1960 to 2.5 million in 9,000 schools in 1990. After a promising increase in the late 1990s, enrollment had by 2006 dropped to 2.3 million students in 7,500 schools. And the steep decline would have been even steeper if these sectarian schools had to rely on their own flock for enrollment: almost 14 percent of Catholic school enrollment is now non-Catholic, up from less than 3 percent in 1970 (see Figure 2). When Catholic schools educated 12 percent of all schoolchildren in the United States, in 1965, the proportion of Catholics in the general population was 24 percent. Catholics still make up about one-quarter of the American population, but their schools enroll less than 5 percent of all students (see Figure 3).

What happened to the Catholics? What happened to a school system that at one time educated one of every eight American children? And did it quite well.

May I Have Your Attention, Please!

As most educators know, Catholic schools work and have worked for a long time. Sociologist James Coleman and colleagues Thomas Hoffer and Sally Kilgore, in 1982, were among the first to document Catholic schools’ academic successes, in High School Achievement: Public and Private Schools. A variety of studies since, by scholars at the University of Chicago, Northwestern, the Brookings Institution, and Harvard, have all supported the conclusion that Catholic schools do a better job educating children, especially the poor and minorities, than public schools.

According to the Common Good authors, Catholic high schools—and many believe that this applies to elementary schools as well—“manage simultaneously to achieve relatively high levels of student learning, distribute this learning more equitably with regard to race and class than in the public sector, and sustain high levels of teacher commitment and student engagement.” One of the keys, they concluded, is the organization of Catholic schools. Parochial schools are less likely to fall into the public-school habit of “structuring inequities”: public schools offer students the chance to take weaker academic courses while Catholic school courses are “largely determined by the school.” The irony, say Bryk et al., is that such a “constrained academic structure” contributes more to “the common school effect” than the potluck served by the public schools. Catholic schools give less weight to “background differences” of their students and thus do not allow those background differences to be “transformed into achievement differences.” Even after adjusting for student background differences, Bryk and his colleagues found significant “school effects” on academic achievement.

“You know the story about the kid whose parents got fed up with their son’s constant discipline problems in the public school?” asked James Goodness, communications director of Newark Catholic Schools, while entertaining journalists at a recent archdiocesan-sponsored luncheon. Newark, the tenth-largest parochial district in the country, closed nine elementary and two secondary schools in 2005, with a corresponding enrollment decline of 5 percent, from some 47,300 to 44,750 students. Goodness, with his story about the problem public-school boy, was explaining what made Catholic schools special. “‘That’s it!’ says the dad. ‘It’s Catholic school for you.’ They sent him. They waited. No calls from school. ‘What’s up?’ the dad finally asks. ‘The nuns been boxin’ your ears?’ ‘No,’ says the kid. ‘They didn’t have to. When I got to school, I saw this guy hanging from a cross with nails in his hands and feet and I figured they meant business.’”

What Catholic schools are very good at, it seems, is getting kids’ attention. No surprise to those of us who grew up in them. The establishment of order and discipline, in all things: We wore uniforms. We had homework. We had to eat our lunch, even the peas and carrots. My wife remembers classmates having to put a nickel in the “mission box” if they mispronounced a word—“libary” instead of library or “pitcher” instead of picture—at her Jersey City parochial grade school. Grammar counted. Posture counted. So did skirt length. It was all for the greater glory of God, of course. By reaching for God, the “all-knowing,” so the nuns said, we might know something even if our reach fell short. There were no prizes for just showing up. All of it, we knew, on some preternatural level, made us “better.” And the research seems to support that view. In fact, one of the “surprises” for the Common Good researchers, who deemed Catholic schools’ academic focus both consistent and laudable, was that the schools seemed to succeed even when the teaching and the curriculum were “ordinary.”

Such Catholic rigor was part missionary zeal—to spread “the word”—and part defense against the encroachments of an increasingly secular world. And secular, for Catholics, meant a certain slackness in moral and academic discipline. In the United States, the so-called “wall of separation” between church and state, between order and freedom, eventually forced Catholics to build their own school system, the only country in the world where they have one (see sidebar). The battles to safeguard order, and academic excellence, were fought early and often. At the turn of the 20th century, for example, Catholic school leaders refused to follow their public school counterparts into a vocational and utilitarian tracking system. “Catholic youth should not be the ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water,’ but should be prepared for the professions or mercantile pursuits,” went one early protestation by the Association of Catholic Colleges.

Catholic schools toyed with progressive education models in the 1970s, but gave it up, report the authors of the Common Good, when they realized they could not be all things to all children. Catholic high schools soon “returned to conventional class-period organization, heightened academic standards and a renewed emphasis on a core of academic subjects.”

Everything but a Plague of Locusts

So, if they are so good, why are Catholic schools disappearing? And if there are so many more Catholics, why are there fewer schools? No more nuns? No more money? Charter schools? Loss of faith? Indolence? Scandal? Irrelevance? The answer seems to be all of that—and less.

“The answer is fairly simple,” says James Cultrara, director for education for the New York State Catholic Conference. “The rising cost of providing a Catholic education has made it more difficult for parents to meet those rising costs.”

The Catholic-school story has been covered, as education journalist Samuel Freedman wrote in the New York Times, “as either a sob story or a sort of natural disaster, the inevitable outcome of demographics.” But Freedman believes that “there need not have been anything inevitable about the closings,” especially since Catholic populations are increasing.

Brooklyn closed 26 elementary schools in 2005, even though its Catholic population has grown by some 600,000 since 1950. “But the other trends were unmistakable,” says Thomas Chadzutko, superintendent of the diocese’s schools, and the man who presided over the closings. “Enrollment was down and expenses up.”

If only it were that simple.

The loss of nuns has undoubtedly added to the financial burden. But demographic change, and the failure to respond to it, has created other burdens. Since the Catholic school “system” is actually a loose and quite decentralized confederation of 7,500 schools supported, for the most part, by 19,000 parishes in more than 150 dioceses, it took “the Church” some time to see the trends, much less develop new strategies to respond to them.

“We have a system of schools, not a school system,” explains Newark’s new vicar for education, Father Kevin Hanbury. “The local parishes traditionally have been responsible for the schools.” Those parishes, and their schools, feel change at the local, neighborhood level quite quickly. But it takes time for the huge, theologically monolithic, and institutionally undemocratic Church to react.

The flight from inner cities to the suburbs by working- and middle-class Americans affected Catholic schools as much as, if not more than, it did public schools. Downtown churches were suddenly filled by poor immigrants from Catholic nations (Latin America and the Caribbean) without a tradition of Catholic schools, much less a habit of paying for them. According to the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA), between 2000 and 2006, nearly 600 Catholic elementary and secondary schools closed, a 7 percent decline, and nearly 290,000 students left, almost 11 percent. The largest declines were among elementary schools in 12 urban dioceses (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Cleveland, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Boston, Newark, Detroit, and Miami), which together have lost almost 20 percent of their students (more than 136,000) in the last five years.

One factor is that the public schools in the suburbs are not like the public schools that Catholics tried to avoid in the cities. “Folks got to the suburbs and discovered that it was not only very expensive to build new schools, but that the public schools were not that bad,” says Patrick Wolf, professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas.

And charter schools, says Father Ronald Nuzzi, director of the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) leadership program at Notre Dame, “are one of the biggest threats to Catholic schools in the inner city, hands down. How do you compete with an alternative that doesn’t cost anything?”

Ron Zimmer, of the RAND Corporation, and two colleagues studied the impact of charters in Michigan, one of the most chartered states in the nation, and determined that private schools were taking as big a hit as traditional public schools because of charters. “Private schools will lose one student for every three students gained in the charter schools,” they wrote. This had, they said, “not only…a statistically significant effect on private schools but an effect that is economically meaningful.”

And then came the sex abuse scandals. There has been nothing quite so shattering as the endless parade of headlines about priests abusing children. The Louisville Archdiocese was hit with almost 200 sex abuse suits in a single six-month period in 2003. In April of that year, the Boston Archdiocese revealed that it carried a $46 million deficit, “the largest any diocese has ever had,” according to the New York Times, because it had paid out more than $150 million in legal settlements in sex abuse cases. The crisis in Boston was heightened, said Cardinal Sean O’Malley, because parish donations fell off by several million dollars as a result of the scandal. The diocese closed more than 60 parishes, and dozens of parish schools. A Gallup survey in 2003 found that one in four Catholics withheld donations to the Church because of the scandal. Four dioceses, of the 195 administrative units in the American Catholic church—Davenport, Iowa; Portland, Oregon; Spokane, Washington; and Tucson, Arizona—have already declared bankruptcy because of lawsuits over sex abuse. Others, like Boston, are on the brink.

Marketing for Miracles

“The world changed” was a common refrain of Catholic educators with whom I spoke over several months of research. And it was clear that they included the Catholic world in that assessment. Faith, on many levels, has been shaken. The “new reality,” says Samuel Freedman of the Times, is that Catholic schools “will have to become expert fundraisers to survive.” And marketers. And promoters. And lobbyists. And miracle workers. Catholics are scrambling to find their footing in a world of charters, vouchers, and tax credits.

CATHOLIC SCHOOL HISTORY LESSON

Spanish and French colonists brought schools (which were Catholic) with them to the New World in the 1600s. There were parochial primary schools in Pennsylvania in the 1700s. The first “female academy” in America was in New Orleans, established by the Ursuline Sisters from France in 1727.

Catholic schools in those days were often supported by public funds. St. Peter’s in New York City applied for and received state aid in 1806, as did St. Patrick’s in 1816. Catholic schools continued to receive public monies in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Connecticut, and New Jersey almost to the end of the 19th century. New York State did not outlaw the practice until 1898.

Catholics perceived “public school” as not just a threat to Catholics, but, as the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia (CE) recounts, an “imminent danger to faith and morals.” And in that threat was born the modern Catholic school system, as Catholic bishops convened in Baltimore in 1884 and ordered each parish to build a school and each Catholic kid to enroll. Between 1880 and 1900, as the immigrants began arriving, the number of students in Catholic schools more than doubled.

“The vastness of the system,” the CE reported at the turn of the 20th century, “may be gauged by the fact that it comprises over 20,000 teachers, over 1,000,000 pupils, represents $100,000,000 worth of property; and costs over $15,000,000 annually.” The Church saw its “missionary” duty to educate the new immigrants and in 1910, Catholics counted 293 Polish, 161 French, and 48 Italian

schools, and a smattering of Slovak and Lithuanian schools. But the “vastness” now represented such a threat to the secular system that some considered Catholic schools “a destroyer of American Patriotism,” and John Dewey pronounced the church “inimical to democracy,” Many states simply outlawed Catholic schools. It took a Supreme court decision, in 1925, Pierce v. The Society of Sisters, to declare unconstitutional an Oregon law that required public school attendance. The Catholic “system” continued to grow and by 1965, a stunning 12 percent of all elementary and secondary students in the United States were enrolled in Catholic schools.

Then came sex, drugs, rock ’n roll—and Vatican II. The conclave of the world’s Catholic bishops and cardinals called to order in 1962 by a cherubic old pontiff, John XXIII, turned the Church on its head at a time when the Beatles, Martin Luther King, and the Weather Underground were shaking civil and social foundations to their core. Swept away were the Latin Mass, the Baltimore Catechism, meatless Fridays, the high priest at an altar with his back to his congregation.

Not only are the nuns and priests now gone, but so too is a Catholic culture that for 100 years produced nuns and priests with faithful regularity. Of course, the debate as to whether the demise of Catholic didacticism and marshal order has been good or bad still roils Church waters. But the fact remains that the American Catholic school system isn’t what it used to be.

—Peter Meyer

The Brooklyn diocese has hired a marketing firm. In Newark one of the first things Father Kevin Hanbury did when he was made vicar of education last year, before he hired a full-time marketing director, was host a white linen luncheon for the local media. “We have a story to tell,” says Hanbury, “and we want to get it as close to page 1 as we can.” The story, as Hanbury and other Catholic leaders tell it, is that Catholic schools not only work, but they are good for America. “Many of our schools are majority non-Catholic,” says Karen Ristau, president of the NCEA. Ristau herself, a laywoman, represents a new, and some would say sobered, Church. She has an armful of academic credentials, but is also a grandmother. “We have high expectations for these little kiddos,” she says, speaking of the 2-million-plus children in the Catholic school system that NCEA represents.

After I called the Memphis diocese to inquire about Catholic schools there, a FEDEX truck was at my door the next morning, with a package of press clips, brochures, and a CD. “Let me tell you this story,” says a soft-spoken Mary McDonald, superintendent of Memphis Catholic Schools, also a grandmother. Though McDonald can now describe her first days on the job as superintendent in July of 1998 with some bemusement, when she received orders from her new boss, Bishop J. Terry Steib, to reopen already closed Catholic schools in downtown Memphis, she thought she’d been sent to hell.

Memphis was a sprawling Catholic diocese that had seen the number of its faithful increase by half, but its school enrollment decrease by almost a quarter. While there were new Catholic schools and Catholic schools with waiting lists in the suburbs, inner-city Memphis had become increasingly black and poor and non-Catholic. A half-dozen Catholic schools had closed over the previous two decades. The few schools that remained were in the death grip of aging parish populations, increased costs (the number of nuns in Memphis had dropped from 160 to 80), and dwindling enrollment.

No wonder “the Bishop’s vision,” as she calls it, sent McDonald right to the diocesan chapel and onto her knees. It didn’t seem to matter to Bishop Steib that McDonald, a teacher and school principal during her 30 years in education, had never been a superintendent. “It was daunting,” she recalls. “I just went out and started talking to anyone who would listen—and even those who didn’t want to—about the value of and need for Catholic schools.” And it didn’t matter that the people in those slums where the empty schools were weren’t Catholic, says McDonald, who often quotes a line attributed to Cardinal James Hickey of Washington, D.C., which has become a call to arms in the new crusade to save Catholic education: “We don’t educate these children because they are Catholic, but because we are Catholic.”

A year after McDonald started beating the bushes of Memphis for money, on a July day in 1999, her phone rang. The call was from someone offering “a multimillion-dollar donation,” says McDonald, who told the Memphis Commercial Appeal at the time, “I know a miracle when I see one.” Though the donors—there were more than one—remain anonymous to this day, their $15 million “was earmarked for Catholic education,” says McDonald, recounting the story seven years later, as if she still can’t believe it. “And they weren’t even Catholic.”

McDonald and her staff reopened St. Augustine, a 65-year-old school that had closed in 1995, within three weeks of receiving the donation. McDonald had 20 students registered in three days. The school opened with 30 students in two kindergarten classes. The students didn’t need to have the $2,400 tuition—the donation paid for scholarships—and they didn’t need to be Catholic.

“But the schools are truly Catholic,” says McDonald. “We’re not a public school. We’re not a charter. We have the same values we’ve had for centuries—do the same things. We say prayer every day. We say the rosary at the same time every week. We have Mass for everyone.” And uniforms, of course. “Our donors believed that Catholic education could make a difference,” says McDonald, “and that Catholic schools are successful in inner cities.” Within the next six years, eight more schools reopened, adding more than 1,300 students to the Jubilee School system, the name of the new initiative. Almost 90 percent of the students lived at or below the poverty level; over 80 percent were non-Catholic.

Has all the change and consolidation affected academics? No, says McDonald. Jubilee students are reading at grade level within a year of arriving; they are then outperforming their peers on standardized TerraNova tests. So far, none of the Jubilee students are old enough to have entered high school, but McDonald is optimistic. “We have a 99.9 percent graduation rate in our six high schools. Virtually no one drops out.”

Capital Campaigns and a Voucher in Every Pot

A half-dozen years earlier in Washington, D.C., Cardinal Hickey had appointed a commission to study the problems confronting his diocese’s inner-city schools. “The commission recommended closing 12 of 16 struggling schools,” recalls Juana Brown, who was then the principal of one of those schools, Sacred Heart. Hickey issued his now-famous dictum: “Closing schools is not an option.” He ordered the group back to the drawing board.

When it returned, Hickey’s commission proposed creation of Faith in the City, an outreach and fundraising initiative that included a Center City Consortium (CCC). The task for CCC was solving the mystery of the less-than-holy trinity of modern Catholic education: financial distress, declining enrollment, and falling test scores.

This was the same mystery, on a smaller scale, that Mary McDonald was tackling in Memphis. Though details differed, the “can’t fail” spirit has marked both enterprises and made them models for Catholic school rescue and reform.

“I tried to get people to look at Memphis,” recalls George Loney, who directed Dayton’s Catholic Urban Presence program, launched in 2002 to find a solution to that city’s Catholic school crisis. Loney did help Dayton’s Catholic schools, part of the Cincinnati Archdiocese, achieve “needed economies of scale” by consolidating. And test results are good. “I just can’t get them to publicize them,” he says.

The D.C. archdiocese announced in December of 2006 that it would close—“we prefer to say consolidate,” says communications director Susan Gibbs—three elementary schools in the District. Yet the CCC schools seem to be working. Martin Davis of the Fordham Foundation writes that the 13 consortium schools achieved “remarkable growth” in grades 2 through 8 proficiency rates on the TerraNova from 2000 to 2005. “More remarkable,” writes Davis, “those growth rates include test scores from 2004–05, when 300 high-poverty children from failing District of Columbia public schools entered consortium schools through the new D.C. voucher program.”

In fact, vouchers are proving to be something of an antidote to the threat posed by charter schools. In Milwaukee, for example, according to Paul Peterson, while charters have “accelerated” the decline of private schools, vouchers seem to have “stabilized” them. Catholic schools in the city have been, since 1996, among the many private schools to benefit from the first state-supported voucher program. In 2005, each of the some 14,000 vouchers passed out in Milwaukee was worth $5,943 at any one of 117 eligible schools, 35 of them Catholic. (The 45 charters in the city, allowed since 1993, received between $7,000 and $9,000 per student.) The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel concluded in 2005 that “the principal effect of choice” in the city has been “to preserve the city’s private schools, many of them Lutheran and Catholic.”

David Prothero, associate superintendent of schools for the archdiocese, says the 6,000 Catholic-school voucher students represent nearly half of Milwaukee’s Catholic school students. “That’s significant.”

“The irony is that the research shows that private schools don’t make a big difference for high socioeconomic students,” says Patrick Wolf, author of a recent study on voucher impacts in Washington, DC. “But they do make a difference for low-income students. And they’re the ones who can’t afford them.”

“From a lawmaker’s point of view,” says Jim Cultrara, who is also co-chairman of the New York State Coalition of Independent and Religious Schools and spearheaded a serious, though unsuccessful, effort to have the New York State Legislature pass a tax credit in 2006, “it’s fiscally prudent to provide financial assistance to enroll children in independent and religious schools. It helps reduce the tax burden and alleviate overcrowding in public schools. And that’s not even counting the benefit of providing students with a quality education.”

Thus, the significance of the scholarship programs and vouchers, and the Church’s mission to the poor. The latest NCEA data show the mean tuition and per-pupil cost for Catholic elementary schools to be $2,607 and $4,268, and for high schools, $5,870 and $7,200, all below average public-school per-pupil expenditures. Thus, too, the persuasiveness of the argument that Catholic schools are a form of subsidy to the nation’s public education system. Diane Ravitch wrote, in a Daily News editorial after hearing word of the Brooklyn diocese school closings in 2005, “It will be a loss for all New York City. The Catholic schools in this city have provided genuine choice for children from low-income and working-class families for more than 150 years. What is more, they have established a solid reputation for safety, academic standards and moral values. All of this has been supplied at a nominal cost to families and at no cost to taxpayers.” The NCEA estimates the value of the Catholic school system’s annual subsidy to the nation at $19.4 billion.

Through smart financial administration and management and aggressive fundraising, many dioceses are beginning to take back some ground lost in the last several decades. Pooling resources for such things as collecting tuition, custodial contracts, and paying salaries has saved money as well as freed principals to focus on academics. Through aggressive marketing and with a corporate board of “the rich and powerful,” the D.C. consortium has raised $30 million in a capital campaign in the last five years. An annual gala fundraiser, co-sponsored by Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Representative John Boehner (R-OH), last year garnered $1 million.

“Mr. Boehner has visited every one of our schools,” says Brown. “He’s 1 of 11 children and grew up Catholic and has been a tremendous booster.”

It is probably no coincidence that Kennedy and Boehner were key Capitol Hill strategists in passing the historic No Child Left Behind Act. “Catholics believed in every child learning long before NCLB,” says Juana Brown. “We have a mission to educate.”

The dust has still not settled in the Church. But the new missionaries, like Brown and McDonald, seem as holy and determined as their habited predecessors. Given the Church’s history, one would not want to bet against them, especially on the education front. Can tax credits, vouchers, and fundraisers substitute for the devotions of the faithful? Can marketing directors get those same faithful to forget about the sexual predators? These are serious and still largely unanswered questions. But there is a more vexing concern for some of us, even those of us used to imponderables such as the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin: where do you find a busload of nuns?

Peter Meyer, former news editor of Life magazine, is a freelance writer.

In the Wake of the Storm

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:00:40 +0000

Video: Michael Henderson talks with Education Next

Voucher programs and their supporters have had a tough last few years. The Florida Supreme Court declared vouchers in that state unconstitutional in 2006. Three years later, the Arizona Supreme Court did the same. In 2007, voters in Utah handed a resounding defeat to a voucher program there. In 2009, the U.S. Congress refused to continue funding the federal voucher program in Washington, D.C., effectively killing the program in the nation’s capital.

The Louisiana legislature stood apart from this trend and in the summer of 2008 passed Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence, the state’s first voucher program, specifically for New Orleans. In the fall, 870 students in kindergarten through 3rd grade whose families earned less than two and a half times the federal poverty level and who would otherwise attend some of the worst schools in the city received vouchers worth up to $6,000 to attend private schools of their choice. In the second year, 2009–10, the maximum voucher amount rose to more than $7,000. The number of students receiving vouchers increased to 1,324. Thirty-one private schools, most of them parochial, in Orleans Parish and neighboring Jefferson Parish serve these students. As was the case before Hurricane Katrina (see “Hope after Katrina,” feature, Fall 2006), private schools educate about one-third of the students in Orleans Parish (see Figure 1).

How did the Louisiana legislature pass this proposal when so many other states were rejecting similar programs? At first glance the question may not seem particularly interesting. After all, Louisiana is seen as the perennial exception to the general rule of American political culture. The state’s most famous political personality and a uniquely Louisianan character, Huey P. Long, once described himself as sui generis, one of a kind. The moniker is as fitting to the land of Long as to the man himself. On top of that, Hurricane Katrina brought unprecedented physical destruction, demographic shifts, and economic impacts that reshaped state and local politics as well.

In fact, passage of House Bill 1347, which established the Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence Program, depended on many factors, only some of which can be traced to Hurricane Katrina. The legislative success of the program was more a political story than a fluke of geography or history.

“In a way we’ve never done before”

Policy innovation comes slowly along the muddy banks of the Mississippi River. Frequently, it seems only an external catalyst (federal civil-rights enforcement, international fluctuations in the price of oil, or floodwaters) can spur new approaches to the social and economic challenges that have long faced New Orleans. The city’s Old World persona has frustrated the reformer at least as much as it has intrigued the tourist.

School governance is no exception. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) was the strongest board politically in the state. It oversaw the largest district, the most students, and the biggest budget. It employed more teachers and staff than any other district, a ready resource for phone calls and letters directed at state officials. Its boundaries overlapped with 15 seats in the Louisiana House of Representatives and another 7 in the Senate, representing about 15 percent of the legislature, far more than any other school district. New Orleans was also home to the state’s strongest teachers union, United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO). In the 1970s, it was the first teachers union in the Deep South (and the only one in Louisiana) to win collective bargaining rights.

But the political clout of the OPSB and UTNO was not matched with a will for reform. When the Louisiana legislature proposed to address the state’s troubled schools in the 1990s with a series of policy innovations—charter schools, school accountability, and high-stakes testing—the OPSB and UTNO (occasionally even the New Orleans City Council) opposed the changes at each turn. A decade later, when the state sought to tighten fiscal oversight over the district, the OPSB balked, despite having lost track of millions of federal dollars and facing bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, public school enrollment steadily declined, dropping by more than 30,000 students over 30 years. Those students who remained attended some of the nation’s worst schools. Nearly two-thirds of the district’s schools were identified as “academically unacceptable,” the state’s lowest performance category. Only 12.5 percent of schools statewide received that designation.

Reform would have to come from outside. As House Bill 1347 approached passage in 2008, a representative from New Orleans stood on the House floor desperately urging his colleagues to delay the final vote, “We are spending $10 million on 1,500 students in a way we’ve never done before!”

He was correct. The legislature had rejected some 20 voucher proposals in the 10 years leading up to the 2008 legislative session. In 2005, a voucher proposal survived a hearing in the House Education Committee and passed the entire House. The Senate Education Committee put a stop to its progress, defeating it by one vote.

Voucher proposals were defeated because a persistent legislative coalition opposed them. Urban legislators tend to be mostly black Democrats from within the cities of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Shreveport. Legislators from the more affluent areas in and around the state’s cities tend to be white Republicans. Rural and small-town legislators are mostly conservative white Democrats and Republicans. How these groups pair off spells the fate of most any legislative proposal.

Almost without exception, suburban Republicans support urban vouchers, and urban Democrats oppose them. As a result, the stance of rural and small-town legislators has been decisive on the issue. They represent districts that are spread over large geographic areas and are typically not situated neatly within radio and television markets. Legislators from these areas build strong ties with local officials—sheriffs, parish (county) government officials, and school board members—who provide name recognition, organization, and personal contact with their constituents. Rural legislators pay particularly close attention to the interests of these officials and to groups that lobby on their behalf, such as the Louisiana School Boards Association.

Opposition to vouchers was particularly acute in rural northern Louisiana, which has relatively few private schools. Most of the state’s private schools are Catholic institutions in southern Louisiana. Critics would, therefore, cast vouchers as a handout to the majority Catholic south, an unappealing prospect in the majority Baptist north. With their constituents uneasy about vouchers and their political allies on local boards actively opposing all such programs, these legislators opposed the proposals and the bills died.

Hurricane Katrina

What made 2008 different? The easy answer is Hurricane Katrina. The storm wiped out the status quo. On the first day of the 2005–06 school year, more than 100 public schools served 65,000 students under the purview of the OPSB. Then the storm damaged or destroyed two-thirds of the district’s school buildings, an estimated loss of $800 million. It also dispersed tens of thousands of New Orleans residents throughout the country. When the school year ended, only a handful of public schools had reopened, serving fewer than one-fifth as many students as had begun the year. To recover from such devastation, the city of New Orleans needed help from the state to restore infrastructure, homes, places of business, and schools.

The need for rebuilding opened up the opportunity for reform. “We’re not going to simply re-create the schools of New Orleans,” then governor Kathleen Blanco announced in her first speech following the storm. “Tonight, I am calling on all Louisianans and all Americans to join an historic effort to build a world-class, quality system of public education in New Orleans. Our children who have weathered this storm deserve no less.” She called the legislature into special session and requested authorization for state takeover of schools in New Orleans. The legislation easily passed, and the Louisiana Department of Education took over all but the handful of top-performing schools in the city. Today, the OPSB runs only 5 schools and the state runs 30. A majority of public school students attend the 40 charter schools. Whether district-run, state-run, or charters, all of these schools operate under a system of public choice without attendance zones.

Damaged as much by revelations of its own misdeeds as by the hurricane and state takeover, the OPSB has become politically obsolete. Likewise, UTNO was decimated. In August 2005, before Hurricane Katrina, the union claimed more than 7,000 members among the district’s teachers and support personnel. Lacking schools to staff, the OPSB terminated all teachers and education personnel in January 2006. UTNO filed suit the next day to force the district to reopen more schools. More unsuccessful suits followed, for back pay, disaster pay, lost sick days, and employee-paid health care and pension contributions. When the collective bargaining agreement expired in June 2006, the OPSB declined to renew it.

So if the storm brought state takeover and dramatic expansion of charter schools to New Orleans, did it also bring vouchers? On its own, Hurricane Katrina cannot explain it. In the weeks after the storm, the superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of New Orleans appeared before the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) urging board members to consider using vouchers as a way for the state and Catholic schools to collaborate in serving the students who remained in the city. BESE declined. Later, when Governor Blanco called the legislature into special session (twice) to address the crisis, vouchers were not on her agenda. In the spring of 2006, when the legislature held its first regular session after the hurricane, it killed three voucher proposals.

“If Bobby Jindal gets elected”

Passage of a voucher bill required political change. That change came in the fall of 2007 when Bobby Jindal, a Republican and strong supporter of vouchers, was elected governor. Thirty-six at the time, Jindal is one of the state’s youngest governors. But he has a long résumé: Rhodes scholar, a stint at McKinsey & Company, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, president of the University of Louisiana System, assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services, and member of the U.S. House of Representatives for the 1st District of Louisiana, a suburban district outside New Orleans and the geographic base of the state’s Republican Party.

Jindal casts himself as a “policy wonk” and reformer, and his agenda for education features several ideas unfathomable in previous administrations: teacher pay for performance, school vouchers, and tax credits for private school tuition. Proponents of these proposals saw promise in Jindal. Just days before the vote, Howard Fuller, founder of the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) and a strong supporter of vouchers, told national reporters, “If Bobby Jindal gets elected, I think we have a chance to do something in Louisiana.”

“A few green stamps to spend”

Jindal had help from a 12-year-old term-limits law that changed the face of the legislature in 2007. Sixty of the 105 districts in the House had open-seat elections. Eighteen of 39 Senate seats were also vacant. Although 15 seats were filled by incumbents from one chamber running for election in the other, the vast majority of open seats were filled by first-time legislators. This massive influx of new blood marked the largest turnover in the Louisiana legislature since Reconstruction. The turnover changed the prospects for voucher legislation.

Most important, Republicans increased their numbers. Louisiana has been trending Republican for decades as Republicans replaced retiring Democrats, but the process was slow. When term limits forced the retirement of 60 incumbents, most of whom were Democrats, Republicans saw the largest boost in their legislative ranks in over 100 years. This increased Jindal’s base of support. But Republicans still fell short of a majority: 48 percent in the House and 42 percent in the Senate. A party-line vote would defeat the bill. Governor Jindal needed Democrats as well.

The governor initially sought to build a biracial coalition between white Republicans and black Democrats. A similar coalition had passed vouchers in Wisconsin 20 years before. Jindal was not so fortunate. The Legislative Black Caucus consists almost entirely of Democrats, and its membership overlaps significantly with the Orleans delegation. Although a few members have been prominent supporters of charter school expansion, the group has tended to support traditional public-school interests like greater funding for struggling schools and pay raises for teachers rather than choice proposals. The 2008 session was no different. With the Black Caucus opposed, the few black legislators’ “Yea” votes Jindal secured were not enough to change the outcome. However, he managed to transform the image of the proposal’s supporters. For the first time, black legislators from New Orleans, Rep. Austin Badon and Sen. Ann Duplessis, sponsored the voucher bill. All of the previous attempts (even those specifically aimed at the majority black school system in New Orleans) had been sponsored by white Republicans.

Similarly, the most prominent organizations to lobby in support of these proposals, the Archdiocese of New Orleans and the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, were represented by whites. In 2008 these organizations took a backseat. Instead, most testimony in support of the bill came from BAEO. During one key committee hearing, national and state leaders of BAEO were accompanied by two teenagers from Desire Street Academy, a private school in the New Orleans Ninth Ward. The students spoke about how attending a private school changed their lives, reflecting on the cousins, friends, and neighbors who lacked this opportunity. Each closed his comments with the phrase, “We can’t wait.” For the first time, supporters represented the population to which the bill was directed.

Still short of votes, Jindal turned to conservative white Democrats from the state’s small towns and rural areas. Local school board members and superintendents had yet to establish alliances with their new legislators. For freshman legislators, the most powerful source of political power was not the local school board; it was the new governor. When he offered to work with them on legislation to help their constituents, they were willing to listen to his agenda.

Soon Jindal had lined up votes from even the most unlikely supporters. For example, Rep. Noble Ellington Jr., a Democrat from the small northern community of Winnsboro, had opposed vouchers for more than a decade. In 2008 he had a change of heart or at least a change of vote. Ellington told reporters that he would vote for the bill because he was “willing to work with the governor as long as he is willing to work with me on things in my district.” Another northern Louisiana representative captured the political situation during debate in the House Education Committee, “We have a governor who is very interested….The administration has a few green stamps to spend.”

“What has changed is the frame”

The administration still had to provide legislators with the necessary political cover to explain their votes back home and so crafted the legislation in the most amenable terms possible. The term voucher is conspicuously absent from the 11-page act. Its official title is the Student Scholarships for Education Excellence Program. The bill’s supporters took care to use the term “scholarship” in all their discussions of the bill. House Speaker Pro Tempore Karen Carter Peterson, a prominent opponent, first noticed a reference to the program during a routine review of the governor’s proposed budget several weeks before the legislative session began. “That wouldn’t be vouchers would it?” she asked Commissioner of Administration Angèle Davis. “No. It’s a scholarship program,” Davis replied.

Opponents tried to reclaim the lead on framing the issue. During the House Education debate two months after Peterson’s exchange with Davis, Steve Monaghan, president of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, declaring “what has changed is the frame,” described the program as camouflaged vouchers. But the bill’s language remained intact and allowed legislators to tell their constituents that they had voted for “scholarships.”

The administration also won the spin battle over the measure’s cost, paying careful attention to how the bill treated the state’s education funding formula, the Minimum Foundation Program (MFP), the main source of state support for districts and a sacred cow in the statehouse. No legislator wants to be charged with cutting funds for children.

Jindal set aside $10 million for the program from the state’s general fund, rather than from dollars reserved for the MFP. Opponents argued that the bill would still reduce MFP dollars for New Orleans indirectly, as the formula is based on enrollment in public schools. But since the official enrollment counts for the MFP are conducted at the end of the school year (to determine dollars for the following year), any indirect impact on MFP funding from the voucher program was delayed for a year after the bill’s passage. Legislators who supported the bill could tell their constituents that they did not cut the MFP.

Finally, in crafting a proposal that would affect only New Orleans, the administration gave legislators additional political cover. Those who might oppose vouchers in their own districts could support them for New Orleans. In the end, the language of the bill permitted the administration to tell legislators (who could then tell their constituents) that the scholarships would not harm the MFP and would not affect schools in their own districts.

A Low Profile

The administration’s strategy to keep the bill’s profile low also helped secure passage. Except for Rep. Peterson’s exchange with Commissioner Davis in February, there were only rumors about a $10 million scholarship program. Neither Jindal’s fall campaign nor his inaugural address made an issue of vouchers. The governor never mentioned the proposal until his speech to open the legislative session in late March. Even then, the 49 words devoted to the program (out of a 4,000-word speech mostly dedicated to education issues) offered no details. Voucher opponents remained in the dark until the bill was filed one week into the session. By then, much of the administration’s work to line up votes was complete.

The administration further avoided early grass-roots opposition in New Orleans by navigating around the rules for “local” bills, a tactic that had been employed previously in Cleveland and Milwaukee. In Louisiana, bills that affect only a single community must be filed before the session begins and must be advertised in the community they will affect. The administration avoided the “local” designation by singling out New Orleans only indirectly. The bill applied to school districts with a population greater than 475,000 as of the 2000 census. Only Orleans Parish meets this criterion.

The bill received only modest press attention. There was no barrage of advertisements urging citizens to contact their representatives. One exception was a radio spot aired in New Orleans criticizing Rep. Peterson for her opposition to the scholarship program. Interest groups did not mobilize supporters or opponents to gather on the capitol steps or in the streets of New Orleans. BAEO was an exception, but its efforts were aimed more at recruiting students and parents to testify at the committee hearing than at organizing public rallies.

“This bill is already on the books”

The only close vote came in the bill’s first test. The 17-member House Education Committee heard the bill in late April. All but five members had begun their first term only six months before and were hearing the debate for the first time. Rep. Peterson joined the committee for the hearing. As Speaker Pro Tempore, she has the right to participate in any committee hearing but cannot vote. After three and a half hours of testimony and debate, all six Republicans on the committee voted for the bill. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Badon, who was also the committee’s vice chairman, voted for the bill, but the other five black representatives on the committee voted against, along with a white Democrat from New Orleans. The bill’s fate depended on the remaining five white Democrats who represented smaller towns throughout the state. Three of them voted against but two voted in support. The bill passed committee 9 to 8, with Rep. Peterson sitting on the sidelines unable to cast the vote that would have kept the bill from moving forward.

When the bill returned to the House floor in mid-May, Rep. Jean-Paul Morrell (D-New Orleans) opposed it but conceded, “At this point I think we can all agree that this bill is already on the books.” The only shot at defeat was to stall until the legislature was required to close the session in June. Rep. Peterson moved to send the bill to House Appropriations, ostensibly because it required a $10 million appropriation. The motion failed.

In the Senate Education Committee, the debate was limited to amendments dealing with implementation: how long private schools had to operate before participating, what tests students receiving vouchers would have to take, what agency would be responsible for the costs of auditing the program.

Opponents took on an air of resignation. The New Orleans Times-Picayune, one of the most prominent papers in the state, had run an editorial condemning the bill in May. By June, editors could read the writing on the wall and in their pages argued for “strengthening” the bill (i.e., amending the accountability provisions) rather than defeating it.

The amendments gave opponents their final chances at running down the clock. The bill was next heard in the Senate Finance Committee, where Sen. Edwin Murray (D-New Orleans) repeatedly asked the chairman, Sen. Mike Michot (R-Lafayette), to table the bill while the committee members took time to digest the amendments. Michot, noting the dwindling number of days left in the session, declined.

The bill returned to the House floor on June 18 for concurrence in the Senate amendments. Only five days remained in the legislative session. The House could concur in the amendments, effectively passing the bill, or reject them. Supporters voted to concur in the amendments and send the bill to the governor’s desk immediately.

The bill passed the House 62 to 34, with eight representatives recorded as absent. Almost every Republican voted for the bill and all but six members of the Legislative Black Caucus opposed it. White Democrats cast the deciding votes; urban and suburban white Democrats voted with their Republican peers. Rural Democrats split for and against the bill in almost even numbers, but this was far more support than any previous bill had found from these legislative districts. The bill passed in large part because the governor had won over more rural white Democrats than anyone had before (see Figure 2).

Beyond Sui Generis

So far, the program has survived legally and politically (see sidebar). But was passage of the Louisiana voucher program a fluke arising from situations just too unique to replicate elsewhere? Or does it offer more general lessons about the politics of school choice? The fact that the program came so close on the heels of Hurricane Katrina seems to suggest the former. The storm set the stage, raising the salience of education reform and crippling some traditional political opponents. Perhaps most important, it wiped out the political strength of the local teachers union, an occurrence unlikely to be repeated elsewhere.

So Far, So Good

Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence has not been challenged in court, which may be a feature of the state’s atypical constitution. Voucher programs are typically challenged based on a constitutional clause that either bars use of public funds to support sectarian schools or prohibits compelling individuals to support religious institutions without their consent. Louisiana is one of only three states with neither type of clause in its constitution. Thus it appears unlikely to face defeat in the state courts. In the legislature, supporters will have to regroup on an annual basis: Although the law authorizing the program remains on the books, its appropriation must be renewed each year. Given that the initial appropriation was far more than was needed for the first year, the second-year reduction need not be taken as an ill omen for the program’s future prospects.

It is not yet clear how the program will affect student achievement in New Orleans. The law requires that students who receive vouchers take the state tests, known as LEAP and iLEAP, yet so far few test score data are available. The state’s accountability testing begins in 3rd grade, so only one grade of voucher students took the tests the first year. Further, the state only requires schools with at least 10 students in a given grade to report scores publicly for that grade. Only three of the schools that accepted voucher students in the program’s first year enrolled 10 ormore 3rd graders. Early in the second year, the testing requirement was expected to apply to eight schools.

But once the stage was set, the political dynamics were not so uniquely Louisianan. Passage of House Bill 1347 ultimately depended on the votes of rural legislators unaccustomed to supporting vouchers. Winning over those votes depended on a popular governor committed to expanding choice, his willingness to put his political capital to work for the proposal’s success, and adept navigation of the legislative process. This is where voucher supporters found their greatest asset: a popular governor committed to school choice. Supporters did not have to lobby the governor for support; he was a supporter already. Instead, they could simply assist him in lobbying the legislature. The critical lesson for proponents outside the Bayou State seems to be: Get strong voucher supporters elected.

The political story of every reform will have some unique features. In New Orleans, the critical factors in establishing vouchers were 1) the weakened union presence; 2) parent-based lobbying support; 3) new faces in the legislature; and 4) strong gubernatorial support. Except perhaps for the first of these, none is too uniquely Louisianan to be inimitable.

Michael Henderson, a native of Louisiana, is research fellow at Harvard University’s Program for Education Policy and Governance and graduate student in the Department of Government.

The Why Chromosome

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 07:30:46 +0000

Gender gaps in educational outcomes are a matter of real and growing concern. We’ve known for a long time, since the 1970s, that girls outscore boys in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading tests, while boys tend to outperform girls in math and science.

Boys are increasingly less likely than girls to attend college and to receive a bachelor’s degree. Meanwhile, female college students continue to be underrepresented in such technical fields as engineering and computer science.

One popular, if controversial, response to these patterns has been a renewed push for single-sex education—an effort that has drawn support from across political divides. An amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act authorizing the creation of single-sex public schools was sponsored by Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas, but the measure passed in large part due to the support of Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, a Wellesley College graduate grateful for her opportunity to attend one of the country’s premier women’s colleges. (“Wellesley nurtured, challenged, and guided me,” she declared in her 1992 Commencement Day speech.) The National Association for Single-Sex Public Education reports that, as of April 2006, at least 223 public schools in the United States were offering gender-separate educational opportunities, up from just 4 in 1998. Although most were coeducational schools with single-sex classrooms, 44 were wholly single-sex.

The majority of arguments for single-sex schools and classrooms focus on the effects on interactions among students, but they also present the possibility of greatly increasing the number of students with teachers of the same gender. Is there any convincing evidence that doing so could make a difference in education—for boys and girls alike? So far the jury has been out, but my analysis of national survey and test-score data collected by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) allows me to offer new and convincing evidence of the differential impact of a teacher’s gender on student learning.

The Gender Gap

The evolution of the gender gaps in achievement as children mature suggests that what occurs in schools and classrooms may play an important role. According to the Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, when children enter kindergarten, the two genders perform similarly on tests of both reading and mathematics. But a few years later, by the spring of the 3rd grade, boys, on average, outperform girls in math and science, while the girls outperform the boys in reading. Disconcertingly, NAEP results show that for children between the ages of 9 and 13, the gender gaps in science and reading roughly double and the math gap increases by two-thirds. For children between the ages of 13 and 17, there is modest growth in the math and reading gender gaps but a substantial expansion of the gap in science (see Figure 1).

The gender gaps in achievement as students finish high school are far from trivial. In reading, 17-year-old boys score 31 percent of a standard deviation below 17-year-old girls, a deficit equal to about one grade level. This is nearly half the size of the black-white test-score gap in reading. In science and math, meanwhile, girls of that age score 22 percent and 10 percent of a standard deviation lower, respectively, also a difference worthy of concern.

Drowned out by the din of public argument over the role of nature vs. nurture is a debate, far from settled, over exactly how the experience of going to school shapes learning among boys and girls. One school of thought contends that teachers, both men and women, treat boys and girls differently in the classroom. For example, some controversial evidence, based on classroom observations, suggests that both are likely to offer praise and remediation in response to comments by boys but mere acknowledgment to comments by girls. Some cognitive scientists suggest that teachers may subtly communicate different academic expectations of boys and girls and these biased expectations may become self-fulfilling.

Teacher Gender Matters

Other theories, of special interest here, suggest that much depends on the gender of the teacher. One theory asserts that the teacher’s gender shapes communications between teacher and pupil, while another says the teacher acts as a gender-specific role model, regardless of what he or she says or does. According to this second theory, students are more engaged, behave more appropriately, and perform at a higher level when taught by one who shares their gender.

Tests of these theories have relied primarily on information about teachers and students in college and graduate school. Findings have been mixed, so the issue remains unresolved. Studies have not focused on young adolescents, the time when students are particularly sensitive to gender differences and when gender gaps in achievement are pronounced.

I investigated the effect of a teacher’s gender using the National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS), which contains data on a nationally representative sample of nearly 25,000 8th graders from 1988. In addition to examining the effect of teacher gender on students’ test-score performance, I examined teacher perceptions of a student’s performance and student perceptions of the subject taught by a particular teacher. I was especially interested in the influence of a teacher’s gender on students’ perceptions, because engagement with an academic subject may be an important precursor to subsequent achievement levels, course selection in high school and college, and also occupational choice. For example, the underrepresentation of women in fields like engineering and computer science may be due to levels of confidence and interest in related subjects in high school.

Indeed, my results confirm that a teacher’s gender does have large effects on student test performance, teacher perceptions of students, and students’ engagement with academic material. Simply put, girls have better educational outcomes when taught by women and boys are better off when taught by men. These findings persist, even after I account for a variety of other characteristics of students, teachers, and classrooms that may influence student learning. They are especially important for young men when one considers that the percentage of 6th-grade teachers who were female ranged from 58 to 91 percent across four core subjects (math, science, reading, and history). Although these percentages decline in later grades, 83 percent of the English teachers in 8th grade are female, as are more than half of 8th-grade math and science teachers (see Figure 2).

A Mother Lode of Gender Data

Key to my findings is the National Education Longitudinal Survey, initiated in 1988 as a survey of a nationally representative sample of 8th-grade students from 1,052 public and private schools. The DOE resurveyed a sample of these students during four follow-up reviews, in 1990, 1992, 1994, and 2000. For my study I rely only on the NELS data from 1988, which is based on surveys of 24,599 students and two of each student’s teachers.

In particular, I exploit a unique feature of the teacher surveys. For each sampled student, NELS administered questionnaires to teachers from two academic subjects: mathematics and English; mathematics and history; science and English; and science and history. Two completed teacher surveys are available for 21,324 of the 8th-grade students—a bit smaller than the full sample of NELS students because some teachers did not complete their questionnaires and some students did not have a class in one or both of the academic subjects randomly assigned to their school for which teacher surveys were administered.

The teacher survey solicited a variety of information about the teacher’s background, including gender. It also included several questions about how the teacher viewed the behavior and performance of the specific students in the study. I was most interested in the effect of gender on three assessments that appear to be particularly good indicators of academic development. Teachers were asked to simply respond yes or no as to whether the student was frequently disruptive, consistently inattentive, or rarely completed homework.

The student component of NELS includes additional outcome data for the subjects taught by each sampled teacher, including the results from multiple-choice achievement tests. The survey also asked students questions about their engagement with the subject. In particular, students indicated whether they were afraid to ask questions in that subject, looked forward to their class, and saw the subject as useful for their future. NELS also solicited information about each student’s gender as well as a variety of other demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.

NELS is a goldmine of information for those interested in gender dynamics within the classroom. Especially noteworthy is the fact that data are available from the same student in two different subjects taken from two different teachers, which enables us to account for educationally relevant characteristics of students that cannot be ascertained by conventional background characteristics. In other words, these “matched-pairs” data allow us to see how the outcomes of the same student vary with two different teachers.

When estimating the effect of a teacher’s gender, I use standard statistical techniques to adjust for the effect of several other teacher and classroom characteristics that may affect student outcomes. For example, I take into account whether the student shares the teacher’s race and ethnicity, because some of my own prior research suggests that the race of a teacher may influence student outcomes (see “The Race Connection,” Education Next, Spring 2004). I also consider the size of the class, the percentage of students in the classroom with limited English proficiency, the number of years a teacher has been working in the profession, and whether the teacher is state-certified in the subject he or she is teaching. What does this valuable set of data reveal about the connections between gender and learning?

The Most Important Findings

For three subject areas—science, social studies, and English—the overall effect of having a woman teacher instead of a man raises the achievement of girls by 4 percent of a standard deviation and lowers the achievement of boys by roughly the same amount, producing an overall gender gap of 8 percent of a standard deviation, no small matter if it can be assumed that this happened over the course of a single year. In fact, these estimates suggest that the effects of a year with a teacher of a particular gender are quite large relative to the gender gaps in achievement in the national datasets mentioned above. But I am hesitant to draw that conclusion in the absence of information about the gender of the teacher the student had in preceding years. Some of what I attribute to the 8th grade might have occurred in previous years, if the student had had multiple years of schooling from a teacher of the same gender.

While these results summarize the overall impact of teacher’s gender on test scores, the effects vary somewhat from one subject to the next. Test-score benefits for girls of having a female teacher are concentrated in social studies. I estimate that a female social-studies teacher increases a girl’s performance by 9 percent of a standard deviation. In contrast, the impact in English is not statistically significant. For boys, the largest effect appears in science. Their scores drop by 5 percent of a standard deviation if they have a female teacher. In English and social studies, the drops appear to be almost as large but are not statistically significant.

It does not seem likely that one can explain these results by the quality of the student’s teacher, because almost all teachers, whether men or women, are teaching boys and girls together. Yet the effect differs, depending on whether the genders of teacher and student match.

Still, to double-check this possibility, I isolate those situations where students of different genders had the same teacher. For the typical teacher who was surveyed by the NELS, there were three to four students included in the study. Given this information, I was able to re-estimate the effect of a teacher on students of the opposite gender, while adjusting for the overall effect of any individual teacher on student learning. In other words, because the same teacher is sometimes observed with sampled boys and girls, we can assess whether gender interactions matter after adjusting for the teacher’s unobserved traits. The overall results—the average for the three subject areas—indicate an average positive impact on student achievement of 4 percent of a standard deviation whenever the teacher-student gender was the same (see Figure 3).

Classroom Dynamics

Exactly why gender makes so much of a difference in student learning is difficult to ascertain. But the NELS data offer some suggestive evidence that the opinions of teachers about their students—and of students about their teachers—is shaped in part by gender characteristics.

Regardless of the academic subject, boys are two to three times more likely than girls to be seen as disruptive, inattentive, and unlikely to complete their homework. However, how boys and girls view academic subjects varies across subjects in ways that parallel the gender gaps in subject test scores. For example, girls are more likely than boys to report that they are afraid to ask questions in math, science, and social studies. They are also less likely to look forward to these classes or to see them as useful for their future. Meanwhile, boys, as compared to girls, register more negative perceptions of English classes.

But while boys and girls may exhibit different behaviors and prefer different subjects, that is not quite the same thing as having a different experience because of the gender of the teacher. So is there any evidence that teachers relate better to students whose gender they share—or vice versa? Significant patterns can be detected within the NELS data. When a class is headed by a woman, boys are more likely to be seen as disruptive, while girls are less likely to be seen as either disruptive or inattentive.

Furthermore, when taught by a man, girls were more likely to report that they did not look forward to a subject, that it was not useful for their future, or that they were afraid to ask questions. This dynamic is strongest in science, where student reports indicate that female science teachers are far more effective in promoting girls’ engagement with this field of study. The estimated effects in the other two subjects pointed in the same direction but were statistically insignificant when examined separately.

Boys also had fewer positive reactions to their academic subject when taught by an opposite-gender teacher. In particular, when taught by a female teacher, boys were significantly more likely to report that they did not look forward to the subject. This effect appears to have been particularly pronounced when the female teacher was in history. The patterns for boys in other subjects are quite consistent with those observed in history, though I should again be cautious in drawing strong conclusions because many of the results fall short of conventional levels of statistical significance.

Math Results Unclear

Results in math differ strikingly from those in the other subject areas, but I place little weight on the findings in this area for reasons that require explanation. My initial analysis showed that both boys and girls suffered if they had a woman teacher. Both girls and boys scored 7 percent and 8 percent of a standard deviation lower, respectively, than if they had a man. But before rushing to the conclusion that math is a subject uniquely suited for male instruction, one needs to take into account other possible explanations.

I can rule out some obvious candidates. There is no evidence, for example, that female math teachers were given larger classes or were less likely to hold the proper subject-specific qualifications, such as proper state certification or a subject-specific degree at either the undergraduate or graduate level.

But I was concerned about the likelihood that women teachers are assigned the less-promising math students. Administrators may think that women are better equipped to handle more difficult students or that men are better able to challenge the bright ones. If so, then it could appear that students benefit less from women teachers simply because they are given the lower-achieving ones in the first place.

To check this out, I estimated the effect of having a female math teacher on students’ science scores. This can be ascertained because students were tested in all four subjects, although only two of their teachers were surveyed. The reasoning behind this admittedly indirect test is that the gender of a student’s math teacher should have relatively small effects on performance in science class taught by another teacher, especially in 8th grade, when science instruction usually does not have a significant mathematical component. If a student with a female math teacher also scores poorly in science, that would be a sign of a lower-performing student overall, not evidence that the gender of the teacher in the math class is having a negative impact.

And that is precisely what I found. The apparent impact of having a female math teacher on a girl’s performance in science was a negative 4 percent of a standard deviation, a fairly large effect (though one that was only weakly significant from a statistical point of view). In fact, the apparent impact on science performance was two-thirds the size of the effect on math performance. That suggests that any estimates of the effect of teacher gender on girls’ math achievement may well be biased by the fact that women are more likely to be assigned to lower-performing math students.

For that reason, and because I found no similar connections in other subject areas when I did the same kind of analysis, I excluded the math results from the main analysis reported above. Nor should it be particularly surprising that women are assigned lower-performing students in math, though that was not the case in other subjects.

In most middle schools, for most subjects, separating students by ability levels is the exception rather than the rule. But the one subject where it is most likely to happen is in fact math, where administrators may think that a certain level of accomplishment is necessary before algebra or some other advanced math material can be introduced. And when math classes are tracked, one can easily imagine that male teachers are more likely to be assigned to the advanced class. Thus, I place little weight on the math results that were observed.

If Not Single-Sex Schooling, Then What?

My results indicate that learning from a teacher of the opposite gender has a detrimental effect on students’ academic progress and their engagement in school. My best estimate is that it lowers test scores for both boys and girls by approximately 4 percent of a standard deviation and has even larger effects on various measures of student engagement.

Adverse gender effects have an impact on both boys and girls, but that effect falls more heavily on the male half of the population in middle school, simply because most middle-school teachers are female. My estimates suggest that, if half of the English teachers in 6th, 7th, and 8th grades were male and their effects on learning were additive, the achievement gap in reading would fall by approximately a third by the end of middle school. Similarly, these results suggest that part of boys’ relative propensity to be seen as disruptive in these grades is due to the gender interactions resulting from the preponderance of female teachers.

Unfortunately, in a coeducational setting, some of this gap closing would take place at the expense of the opposite gender, an outcome few would embrace. No one wants to see girls do worse in reading, or boys fare worse in science.

Some may therefore find in these results a strong case for a particular form of single-sex education, where teachers and students share the same gender. However, one should hesitate before drawing such policy conclusions from these findings. They may not be perfectly transferable to single-sex classrooms, where gender dynamics may differ from coeducational learning environments. Moreover, single-sex education may have other drawbacks, regardless of its potential impact on the outcomes examined in this study.

Would more limited interventions prove effective? Much depends on whether the gender impacts are due primarily to interactions within the classroom or more subtle “role-model” effects. If teachers had gender-specific training based on evidence about the different learning styles of boys and girls, could gender effects be limited? What if this training were aimed at combating gender biases in teacher behavior and expectations? My study suggests that gender interactions in the classroom matter, but it is still far from clear exactly why this is so. Perhaps the best policy solution is to keep an open mind about a variety of strategies that neither unequivocally endorse single-sex education nor rule it out of order altogether.

Thomas S. Dee is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at Swarthmore College and a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

The School Lunch Lobby

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:00:27 +0000

Kids may not like the peas and carrots served up by the nation’s school lunch program, but many of the country’s leading food companies enjoy the billions of dollars in sales that bring those vegetables to their plates. Behind the overcooked vegetables and steam-table pizza that some 29 million American children confront each school day is an industry that rivals defense contractors and media giants in its ability to bring home the federal bacon–er, the seasoned lettuce cup.

School lunch. A prosaic, even nostalgic event, multiplied hundreds of millions of times–187 billion lunches served–becomes, voila! a $6.6 billion annual all-you-can-eat lunch line, one of the most popular and sturdy of all federal social programs (see Figure 1). Except for food stamps ($27 billion), it is the most expensive of all federal food programs. Pass the gravy!

But there’s more. Add to that the $1.8 billion for school breakfasts and the nearly $1 billion school commodities program (a relic of the 1930s, when the Department of Agriculture started buying food and giving it to the schools directly) and you realize that, at $9.5 billion, providing food to school children is a major federal commitment.

Consistent with the intent of the original school-lunch program, created by Congress in 1946 to provide “nutritious agricultural commodities” to children, the major purpose of today’s school-lunch program is to ensure that children, especially those from poor and low-income families, have nutritious food at school. The school-breakfast program started as a pilot in 1966 and was made permanent in 1975. How these programs, and the money that travels with them, have grown steadily over the years is a story that illustrates many of the underlying mechanisms of social policy creation in the nation’s capital. But can this aging machinery adapt to the demands of a fast-food culture? We created school lunch to feed the hungry. Can we now ask it to fight obesity?

A Special-Interest Stew

Since the strength and longevity of these programs come from an ample and well-balanced diet of public compassion, political sensitivities, and powerful lobbying, change does not come easily. There are occasional food fights between those who have stakes in the programs, but the rules are well established. The interests of the schools–primarily teachers, administrators, school nutritionists, and food-service workers–are represented by groups like the School Nutrition Association and the National School Boards Association, both headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, a stone’s throw across the Potomac River from Capitol Hill. With well-funded and sophisticated national organizations, these groups lobby for more federal money while fighting to keep federal mandates to a minimum.

The giant food and beverage industry–names like Tyson and Archer Daniels Midland–is also involved. Its various lobbying arms, including food processors, distributors, service management companies, soft drink makers, and agricultural giants, work to ensure that the government buys food products from its members and keeps schools open to vending machines and Ã la carte offerings in the school cafeteria, a little oasis of choice that represents millions of extra dollars of revenue each year. Food advocacy and nutrition groups like the Food Research Action Center and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities represent the interests of children who consume the food offered by schools. They are the nutrition watchdogs, providing reliable and timely information about any food issue that comes before Congress.

While these three sets of lobbying groups have opposing interests on some issues–the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, for instance, will throw its weight behind programs for the poor before pushing programs that cover all children–they share the goal of maintaining or increasing federal spending on school lunch and related nutrition programs. And the president’s 2006 budget proposal reflected the priorities: numerous cuts in social services, but don’t touch school lunch.

If these well-financed and effective lobbying interests keep watch over school lunch from outside government, there is a host of congressional insiders and bureaucrats at the Department of Agriculture (from where the program is administered) who help grease the skids. And it is a bipartisan effort. Bob Dole, the powerful Republican senator from Kansas (he arrived on Capitol Hill in 1960 and didn’t leave until 1996) and no friend of big government, was one of the most consistent supporters of expanded, even guaranteed (in federal jargon, “entitlement”) spending on food programs. Beyond such celebrity supporters, however, is a horde of lesser-known members of Congress who are vital to the program’s stability. Through a process of growth that even a psychologist could not explain, the chairmen of the various subcommittees with funding jurisdiction often become the biggest fans of these programs. They write the first drafts of legislation and play the major role in planning and conducting the legislative strategy to ensure passage. Then, once a program is established, there is no way to reform its statutory basis except through the same committee and, most likely, the same chairman. Even Republican chairmen, reputed to be more beholden to the frugal taxpayer than to social program spendthrifts, exhibit a sense of proprietorship over nutrition programs for children that rivals that of any Democrat.

This combination of forces is capable of producing considerable good, but it does not take to change very well.

Don’t Touch That Food Program

Anyone who doubts the political clout of the school lunch lobby will be directed to two examples of what happens when you attempt to change the channel. First, there was the Reagan revolution and a 1981 attempt by Congress, riding the new president’s spending-cut coattails, to enact legislation slashing child nutrition programs by $1 billion. At the time however, Congress did not specify how the cuts would be achieved, so the Department of Agriculture, scrambling for a palatable way of reducing the costs of the food program by more than 25 percent, proposed a novel approach: pickle relish and ketchup would count as the vegetable portion of the five required school-lunch food items (meat, milk, bread, and two servings of fruits or vegetables). So swift was the reaction to this “ketchup as vegetable” plan that the Reagan administration quickly put the billion dollars back into the program.

Republicans didn’t quite learn their lesson, however, and when Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America conservatives swept the Democrats out of power in 1995 promising to balance the budget, they included a cut in the food program among the hundreds of spending reductions they proposed. In fact, the GOP wanted to merge the five school-based food programs into a single block grant, while recommending a 4 percent increase in the overall program. They got clobbered. That rate of growth was less than projected under the Congressional Budget Office baseline, and the block grant was labeled a sneak attack on future funding. The food lobbying groups and congressional Democrats quickly charged the Republicans with stealing food from children again. One senior Democrat, James Clyburn of South Carolina, took to the podium in the House of Representatives to excoriate the Republicans for their “mean-spirited attack [and] hatchet job being waged against child nutrition programs.” And the New York Times joined in with an editorial, “The Return of Ketchup,” calling the child nutrition proposal “gratuitously mean,” certain to “imperil mothers, babies and hungry school-age children.”

Another lesson learned.

Though this powerful lobby network helps preserve the nutrition programs, its longevity and stability are also due to a certain obscurity within the much larger education universe. In recent years, especially, the effort to improve the academics of education has been so conspicuous that many of the subsidiary missions of schools–like drivers’ education, sex education, transportation, sports, and child nutrition–have been lost to view. Most school systems, burdened with accountability measures, are thankful that nutrition programs seem to run themselves.

Fighting Error, Finding Fat

Even as contentious and partisan budget authorization battles last year stalled such popular programs as Head Start and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Congress approved increases in child nutrition programs. It was not all smooth sailing, however.

Most of the debate, heated at times, focused on issues of income verification for people receiving free lunches, vending machines, and obesity. The income issue is not new to federal poverty programs, and the government is always trying to sort the fraud from the honest error–in order to find ways to save money by combating both. Recent studies for example, show that the Earned Income Tax Credit, which provides low-income working families with up to $4,300 per year in cash and costs taxpayers around $35 billion annually, has an error rate of as much as 30 percent, or well over $10 billion. Although specific causes vary across programs, the greatest problems are that the income of poor families changes frequently and that income is difficult to verify. Moreover, it is expensive to verify income because families must bring or send evidence, such as a pay stub or bank statement, to a central location, where someone must check it, record the income, and compute the benefit. If income changes three weeks later, the process must be repeated. Imagine the lumbering bureaucracy of a typical public school system trying to keep up with the income of thousands of parents, bearing in mind that such a major undertaking has nothing to do with schools’ main goal of promoting student achievement–and indeed might even drain resources away from investments in learning.

It is little surprise then, that Congress has not required schools to do very much to ensure that students receiving free and reduced-price lunches come from homes that qualify. Nonetheless from time to time, especially when money is tight, all poverty programs that have high error rates are vulnerable to attack over the issue of fraud and waste. Concerned about this problem in the late 1990s, the Department of Agriculture funded Mathematica Policy Research to conduct a pilot study in 12 mostly nonmetropolitan school districts to determine the extent to which children receiving school lunch came from families that actually met the income requirements. (In 2004, a family of four with annual income of $24,500 or less qualified for free lunch; those earning between $24,500 and nearly $35,000 qualified for a reduced-price lunch. Even the nearly 12 million children who are in families above the income cutoffs enjoy a federal subsidy of more than 20 cents per lunch.) The Mathematica study revealed that up to 20 percent of the families certified by school districts as eligible for free and reduced lunches were actually not eligible.

School lunch, then, faces a classic tradeoff: tighter income-verification procedures mean lower participation; looser income verification means lower program integrity and heightened vulnerability to criticism that could lead to funding cuts. For the time being, schools do not have strict income-verification requirements, but that could change if the broader study–which is now under way–shows high rates of participation by ineligible families.

Congress also had a lively debate about vending machines, which are pervasive in school buildings and account for about $1 billion in sales every year. Because the machines are packed with foods and drinks that feature high sugar and fat content, there is now a controversy about whether the federal government should require their removal, restrict their use, or order changes in their content.

The Obesity Epidemic

If income verification threatens to impose economic burdens on the school lunch program, the debate over vending machines feeds the growing fight over childhood obesity. Ironically, given that the original goal of child nutrition programs was to ensure that poor children received enough to eat, the school lunch program, when not being accused of helping spread the disease, is now being called on to cure obesity.

The figures on obesity are startling. According to national survey data, the number of overweight children has quadrupled since 1960, jumping from 4 percent of the youth population to 16 percent in 2002 (see Figure 2). And several studies show that the incidence of obesity is greatest among poor children. Obesity has both health and social consequences for children, but it also imposes substantial costs on society. Increased risk of diabetes, heart attack, hypertension, kidney failure, gallstones, arthritis, and several types of cancer are all associated with obesity. The surgeon general has estimated that the economic cost of obesity in 2000 was $117 billion.

There is still controversy about the exact causes of the weight-gain epidemic, but everyone agrees that physical activity and food consumption play important roles. And schools are among the chief suspects on both counts. According to the Centers for Disease Control, fewer than 10 percent of the nation’s elementary, junior, and senior high schools offer daily physical education. Children get less regular exercise at school, and many also get less at home and in their neighborhoods. A national study by University of Michigan researchers shows that the percentage of high-school boys and girls who exercise consistently declined greatly between 1979 and 2001. Among 10th-grade boys, the number of those who “exercise vigorously” nearly every day declined by more than 20 percent during this period. In view of the rising obesity rates, it is hardly surprising that professionals and parents agree that kids need gym classes.

In addition to getting too little exercise, many children are getting too much of the wrong kind of food. This simple claim, which everyone who has studied the exploding weight of children agrees is a major problem, should cause school administrators and policymakers to engage in fresh thinking about school food programs. Unfortunately, until very recently, it hasn’t.

Douglas Besharov, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has been the most outspoken critic of the traditional thinking that surrounds school food programs. “We’re still feeding the poor as if they’re starving,” he says, alluding to the original intent of the school lunch programs. In testimony before Congress in 2003 and in a long article in the Washington Post in 2002, Besharov argued that school meals give children too many calories. Worse, they do so even if they follow the new program guidelines. Specifically, federal rules require a school lunch to provide 33 percent of the recommended daily allowance of calories; a school breakfast should provide 25 percent. That leaves only 42 percent of the recommended number of calories to be consumed outside of school, more than covered by one “supersized” hamburger and a soda.

What Can Be Done?

As public and congressional concern with obesity has grown, the Department of Agriculture has commissioned two scientific surveys to examine the nutritional value of school meals. The first, conducted by Mathematica during the 1991â€“92 school year, showed that lunches served by nearly all schools failed to meet accepted guidelines for intake of fat and saturated fats.

Soon after obtaining these results, the department undertook an initiative to help school food-service personnel prepare healthy meals for students. One component of the initiative was promulgation of new standards on fat and saturated fat. Logically enough, the department then funded a second national survey to determine if school food had improved. This study, conducted by Abt Associates, found that although most schools failed to meet the guidelines, there had been a noticeable decline in the fat and saturated fat content of the lunches. (For elementary schools the fat declined from 37.5 percent to 33.5 percent, and saturated fat from 15.2 percent to 11.9 percent.) Moreover, more than 80 percent of elementary schools and 90 percent of high schools offered food choices that would meet guidelines for fat and saturated fat intake if students selected the right foods to eat. But while you can lead students to good food, you can’t make them eat it. Pizza- and doughnut-loving adults will understand: Foods that are low in fat and sugar often just taste lousy. Schools must walk a fine line between serving foods that are low in fat and sugar but boring, and foods that are high in fat and sugar but attractive to student palates. (See “What’s for Lunch?“).

Nonetheless, the Abt study shows that federal bureaucracies sometimes respond to changed circumstances with rational policies and practices. School lunch, never mind the sins of the past, is now playing at least a modest role in attempting to reduce children’s waistlines.

Children, meanwhile, continue to break records for bulk, forcing Congress to consider, at least, the kind of nutritional rethinking recommended by Douglas Besharov. Recall that one of the few sharp partisan debates during reauthorization was over vending machines. Although there was bipartisan agreement that the question should be addressed during reauthorization, Republicans and Democrats conducted a debate that fell along traditional fault lines between the parties. Democrats wanted to exert federal control over vending machines by giving the secretary of agriculture authority over all foods available in schools rather than just school lunch and breakfast. Giving such authority to the secretary was expected to result in the removal, alteration in content, or restriction of operating hours for vending machines because they contain food of questionable nutritional value. By contrast, Republicans wanted local authorities to figure out their own solutions rather than mandating a “one size fits all” federal fix. Further, Republicans pointed out that profits from vending machines, which can be considerable, are usually retained by the school and are used to pay for sports teams, drama, and other school-related activities that are important to students, parents, or faculty.

In the end, Congress, in part because of pressure from the food and beverage industry to leave vending machines in the schools, decided to require all local education agencies to have a “wellness policy” in which they spell out their goals for nutrition education and physical activity as well as provide guidelines for all foods sold in the schools. The wellness policy must be developed in consultation with parents, students, school food-service professionals, and school boards and administrators. If school districts take this policy seriously, wellness plans could lead to further improvements in the types and quality of foods served and to an increase in required physical activity during school hours. It could even lead to removal of vending machines or alteration of their contents to reduce children’s consumption of sugar and fat. But there is ample reason to doubt that many districts will aggressively implement this requirement and use it as a way to stimulate local debate and reform. Schools are generally not in the business of stirring up parents and the public to provoke reform.

The second possibility for using school food programs to address obesity is to alter the amount and types of food served. Here, as we have seen, the schools have already made some progress. Many schools now offer an impressive variety of foods, including salad bars and Ã la carte menus with many choices. There also has been a serious attempt to increase the availability of healthier foods.

The school-lunch reauthorization bill enacted by Congress last year contained a host of measures to improve nutrition, such as encouraging the Department of Agriculture to make more fresh fruits and vegetables available to local schools, creating an initiative to encourage partnerships between schools and local produce farms, and increasing the availability of whole grains in school meals. Of course, Congress and school administrators must face the fact that students will not necessarily make the food choices that are best for their health. Children will choose a salad over a juicy cheeseburger about as often as they choose educational TV over MTV.

It is hard to argue with any of these good food initiatives, but expectations about how much school food programs can contribute to increasing the consumption of nutritious foods and reducing the national problem with childhood obesity should be modest. There are after all, around 120,000 elementary and secondary schools in the United States, and more than 90 percent of them participate in the school-lunch program. Trying to move all these facilities in the same direction is a huge undertaking. What’s more, even if school food met every guideline for fat, saturated fat, and sugar, the impact on children’s weight would probably be modest because children’s consumption of food at home and in fast-food pens would continue unabated. By the time they reach middle and late childhood, students seem determined to maximize consumption of their two favorite food groups: fat and sugar. Children’s preference for foods that are bound to make them fatter is established outside the school system. Unless we are prepared to remove all unhealthy foods from the schools–to minimize consumption of sugars and fats–there are obvious limits to the strategy of giving kids food choices. Schools can and should fight to improve the consumption of nutritious foods, and even to change students’ eating habits, but unless the nation’s food culture, food advertising, and patterns of food consumption at home and in fast-food restaurants undergo massive change, the schools will be waging little more than a rear-guard action. Even so, given the level of federal spending on the school food programs, it is reasonable to expect both Congress and the Department of Agriculture to put pressure on schools to aggressively implement wellness policies that minimize the consumption of fat and sugar on school property. To do so, schools may well be forced to reduce some food choices that have minimal nutritional value.

Expect school lunch to continue moving inexorably along its well-traveled path of slow change and modest improvement while relying on its friends inside and outside Congress to fight off big shocks and spending cuts. At this very moment, as in 1981 and 1995, Washington is gearing up to make serious cuts in social programs to balance the budget. Will school lunch, and that 20 cents per meal middle-class subsidy, be on the menu? Fat chance.

Ron Haskins is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a senior consultant at the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

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