Public charter schools enroll about 5 percent of the nation’s public-school students. More than 2.3 million students attend 6,000 charter schools, and more than 600,000 students are on waitlists for seats in charter schools that are oversubscribed. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) anticipates that 400 to 500 new charter schools will open in 2013. The authorizing environment can directly determine whether the charter seats that are created and maintained are of high quality. While authorizers are not the operators, they set the standards and measure operators against those standards.

The work of authorizers is central to the charter compact: granting autonomy in exchange for accountability. What entity decides if the compact has been honored? The authorizer decides. As Lou Erste, charter schools division director at the Georgia State Department of Education, points out, “we are the guardians of the flexibility” held sacred by charter schools. While many reformers believe that market forces determine whether charter schools live or die, charter authorizers actually sign the charter renewal and school closure orders.

One would think that, given the authorizer’s central role in the charter sector, authorizing would be a permanent item in local and state budgets, but support for authorizers often reflects the political whims of lawmakers and education officials. While some authorizers charge a fee to the schools in their portfolio, these fees rarely cover costs. Most authorizers must rely for basic funding on the year-to-year spending decisions of governments, universities, or philanthropies.

The Authorizing Landscape

With charter schools numbering in the thousands and the sector’s continual growth, one might expect that the authorizer world had developed a solid infrastructure. This is hardly the case. Instead, one finds a scattered and largely underfunded set of regulators, most of them within the traditional public-education system. As of 2011–12, 957 agencies serve as authorizers, and fewer than 80 are entities other than school districts or state education departments (see Table 1). This means that 92 percent of all authorizers are “within the educational establishment,” and that 72 percent of all charter schools are authorized by these two types of organizations.

What does the typical authorizer look like? Most authorizers are tiny shops, typically consisting of about one-half of a staffer’s time up to the equivalent of two full-time staffers. Many school districts and state education departments do authorizing work via committee, whereby authorizing responsibilities are divided among various departments (authorizing is added to the normal workload of staffers hired to do something else). Only a few large authorizers have as many as 20 or 30 staff members. Due to this disparity between large and small authorizers, the average authorizer employs about 4 staff members; authorizers with few schools average about 2; and for authorizers with more than 10 schools, 7.5 staff members is the average.

Some 86 percent of all authorizing is done by authorizers that have fewer than five charters in their portfolios. Out of the non-school-district authorizers, a significant portion (38 percent) has more than 10 charter schools. Only 7 percent of school district authorizers have more than 10 charter schools.

There is, then, no typical authorizer. But there are good odds that a charter school has been authorized by a school district that has only a few charter schools, and that the district has about two staff members dedicated to chartering responsibilities.

What Determines Authorizer Quality?

Does the type of authorizer influence the quality of the schools? Maybe. Greg Richmond, president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), suggests that most of the school districts that authorize a small number of charter schools understand the charter concept differently than does the charter community at large. Instead of viewing charters as independently operated public schools, school districts open these schools to add innovative programs to the district. In these cases, the charters likely meet a particular need of the district, which employs the charter staff. Many of these schools have been converted from traditional schools to charters. Conversions are often referred to as “charter in name only,” since they do not usually have the full set of charter autonomies, such as freedom from the teachers union contract.

For the rest of the charter world, is there an ideal type of authorizer? Richmond explains that K–12 education is not the core business of several types of authorizers (such as universities and nonprofits). K–12 education is the core business of school districts, but they have a multitude of priorities besides charter schools, and authorizing is a sideline activity. For example, they may have a conflict of interest if they are competing for the same students. State education departments may have the most difficulty as authorizers because their purpose is to enforce regulations, not to offer autonomy in exchange for performance. The structure of independent chartering boards likely affords the least resistance to high-quality authorizing, but structure alone does not ensure quality. Factors such as targeted training, consistent resources (especially human resources), and the scale of the enterprise seem to matter more.

Does the size of the portfolio matter? We know that authorizers with fewer than 10 charter schools are less likely to implement national best practices, as enumerated by NACSA. It may be that authorizers that have less authorizing to do fail to receive appropriate training and support. They may also lack the resources required to adopt best practices like external reviewers, performance management systems, or a rigorous application process.

Susan Miller Barker, executive director of SUNY’s Charter Schools Institute, contends that in order for authorizing quality to be maximized, education stakeholders, including schools, policymakers, and the public, all need a better understanding of what authorizers do: “We are not evil regulators…. We are ‘venture bureaucrats,’ safely utilizing public funds for the best offerings of education, but also managing risk in a way that most people overseeing government funds don’t usually have to. Many people in public education don’t talk about loss of funds or funds not being spent in a way that leads to the highest level of quality education for those funds.”

Are policymakers ready for “venture bureaucrats” to conduct regular assessments of school quality and then to act on their findings? And are the same policymakers ready to provide consistent funding to those who “ruffle feathers” for the sake of accountability? Let’s hope so, because the accountability compact relies on it.

The Money Question

Is it too simple to suggest that authorizers may be underresourced and that this is an obstacle to authorizing quality? Richmond notes that “good authorizing does not cost a lot of money, but it is not free.” This sentiment is echoed by authorizers. One points out that a charter management organization in its state has five lawyers while the authorizer has two.

Authorizing is a labor-intensive business. According to NACSA, a good authorizer needs at least five to six staff members for a portfolio of 50 to 70 schools. But the accuracy of this formula depends on the type of authorizer organization. If the authorizer can rely on a special education department, for example, or an IT department, or other infrastructure assets of a larger organization, this level of staffing is appropriate. If not, the authorizer will need additional expert staffing and may need to invest in large systems such as data management on its own. The budgetary requirements of authorizers also vary depending on the particulars of the charter state law (e.g., special monitoring requirements, the quality of the student performance measurements, and other criteria). But even by this staffing formula, it is clear that most authorizers have too few staff members.

Providing an extreme example of need, with approximately 515 schools under its purview (with 18 that opened in 2012), the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools has a staff of eight. Executive director DeAnna Rowe must rely on Arizona’s state attorney general for legal support. Another authorizer notes that as the office has added more schools, the staffing level, already inadequate, has stayed the same. Many authorizers rely on staff funded by grants. Authorizers even have voluntary boards that oversee their work. This chronically inadequate and unstable funding makes it hard to become a great authorizer.

Barker of SUNY believes that the real challenge of authorizing is establishing long-term stability. SUNY’s Charter Schools Institute’s budget (like that of many other authorizers) is a stand-alone line item in each year’s state budget. Barker explains that if budgets could be stabilized, then authorizers could assess how much capacity it takes to be an innovative authorizer, one that conducts research internally, not just a “check the boxes” kind of authorizer. Erste agrees. “The technical aspects [of authorizing] are straightforward. It is the strategic aspects that make the difference between a good and great authorizer.”

Why not fund authorizers for the long term as we do local districts (based on a per-pupil rate)? Why not have a minimal funding threshold based on a number of schools and simply add this into state laws? Why not provide start-up funding for authorizers to support the creation of their major systems?

The Right People

Lou Erste of Georgia points out that a strong authorizer must assemble a staff that has the right combination of skills and knowledge: people who understand how to operate a successful charter school, who understand how to measure school performance, who can think strategically, who understand legal and fiscal issues, who have experience in the public sector, who have worked with large foundations and the federal government, and most importantly, who are skilled in relationship management. Relationship management may be the essential authorizing skill because of the complex working relationships an agency has with the state education department, state charter-school association, districts, schools, funders, and the legislature.

The need for long-term stability of expert staff is echoed by Rowe of Arizona. She notes that while she has a small team, several members have been there since the early 1990s, and this has enabled her team to handle the oversight load. She also explains that technology and transparency have contributed greatly to their efforts (e.g., online applications and a metric-driven accountability framework), but people are still the key. Rowe does hope for more staffing in the future, as it will allow for greater speed in authorizing good charter schools to open in her state.

Who provides support for authorizer development? NACSA, state charter-school associations, and a few consultants do. The National Charter School Resource Center offers professional development and networking for a group of state education department authorizers. Is this enough support for authorizers? Not by a long shot. Maine recently passed what is considered to be one of the best charter-school laws in the country, and its newly formed statewide commission was given no start-up funds to facilitate learning about authorizing from others around the country before it had to begin its work. Despite some philanthropic support, there is not enough investment in the training organizations that could consistently assist authorizers that lack funds for development. The lack of training and ongoing support for authorizers is especially acute for authorizers with only a few schools.

Remarkably, most authorizers do not complain much about the high caseload of schools and the small numbers of people to do the work. Members of the Los Angeles Unified School District explained that as can happen with students in a classroom, a few “troubled schools” require 80 percent of authorizer time. Authorizers do worry that being understaffed may become a larger problem as larger charter networks continue to expand. In this case, risks become more serious, and a small authorizing mistake may have enormous rippling implications due to network scale.

Changing Charter Laws

Each state’s charter law can create an environment that either supports professional charter-school operations and high-quality authorizing or does not. And every year, states pass comprehensive school-reform laws and make simple tweaks to charter laws that have an impact on authorizing. Since 2011, several states have lifted caps on charter school growth, and 14 states have moved to strengthen charter school authorizing and accountability (see Table 2). Four states created independent statewide charter authorizers. Three states—Hawaii, New Mexico, and Rhode Island—passed charter school quality-control measures. In Georgia, where in 2011 the state supreme court abolished the statewide charter authorizer, the state’s legislature proposed a constitutional amendment that would allow the authorizer’s reinstatement. Voters approved the amendment in November 2012.

State-level charter school–law developments are closely monitored by Todd Ziebarth, senior vice president at NAPCS. Ziebarth believes that the ideal scenario is for charter laws to require at least two authorizers in the state (preferably one statewide authorizer and one large district that is interested in authorizing). In the past several years, there has been a significant advocacy push to create “multiple” authorizers in each state. But the policy of having dozens of low-quality authorizers has turned out to be a mistake for several states. In theory, having more than one authorizer should raise charter quality, but the magic number of authorizers depends on the state’s particulars (size, political dynamics, strength of charter law, among other factors).

Ziebarth contends that the real public-policy issue is how to hold authorizers accountable: Should there be several regional charter commissions created in each state instead of one statewide commission? Should state laws and regulations require that each authorizer apply to do this work and be reviewed for its own performance? Should there be provisions in state laws that allow authorizers to be closed for shoddy performance? (Minnesota recently shut down 40 of its 70 authorizers, and Ohio has closed one.) Should there be requirements regarding an authorizer-staff-to-school ratio or other authorizing practices? Should state laws put an end to schools “shopping for a new authorizer” as is allowed in certain states? And who has authority over authorizers (state departments of education, state legislatures, the courts, state ballot initiatives)? Do the regulators need to be regulated to improve their practice?

Moving Forward

Experimentation with different authorizing structures and resources will be needed, as no silver bullet approach has emerged thus far. But there are clear signs of progress. Minnesota’s education department has created an authorizer application and continues to improve the state’s authorizing capabilities. Another attempt at improving authorizer quality via state law that deserves attention is an effort in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, to create authorizer standards. As a result of a school reform law (the Cleveland Plan), experts recently created a set of regulatory authorizing standards that will be rolled out in 2013.

Carolyn Bridges, senior director of the Office of Magnet, Choice, and Charter Schools in Polk County, Florida, is a founder of the Florida Association of Charter School Authorizers (FACSA), whose members include 36 of the state’s 42 authorizers. The association has created a shared renewal process, application process, and model contract, and has built a best practices website, all with a series of federal grants. The federal resources permitted the authorizers to have product retreats and to create uniformity in practices, despite many different authorizing structures and levels of expertise. The funds also permitted Bridges to hire staff to create these best practices and products for Florida authorizers. Michigan and Ohio also have created state-level associations of authorizers in order to pool resources and talent and to focus on authorizer quality.

Peer-to-peer networks of authorizers seem to be filling some of the gap between support and need. In each of these examples, success has come from individuals working in small teams determined to improve authorizing. The teams had a vision and spent time and found resources to deliver it. The problem with these stories of authorizer accomplishments is that they are not the norm.

Richmond explains that good authorizing has relevance for public education as a whole: “Authorizing is a small R&D activity within public education that is helping us explore how we can organize public schools better. On a macro-level, authorizing is helping us to understand how to give schools autonomy, what is the [best] way to hold schools accountable in meaningful ways, and how do we promote innovation and offer families more variety for differentiation for kids.”

For choice and deregulation advocates, some of the findings about charter authorizing have been difficult to absorb. The assumption that local and state policymakers will naturally understand what quality authorizing looks like or costs has proved incorrect. If we want poorly performing charter schools to be closed, we have to ensure more than subsistence funding for authorizers; taking strong action requires adequate staffing and legal support, to name some of the costs.

If charter school accountability is to exist as intended, we have to fund authorizers on a secure and permanent basis. If local and state policymakers decide how much to fund authorizing bodies on an ad hoc basis instead, then we will continue to get accountability that is hit or miss. Only high-quality authorizing will ensure that only high-quality charter schools open and grow.

Joey Gustafson is CEO of Manchester, Massachusetts-based JM Consulting, Inc., which specializes in charter diagnostics, growth planning, and evaluation.

Subjective performance evaluation holds the promise of measuring what matters. When evaluators are allowed to exercise their own judgment, rather than following a formal decision rule, however, the subjective measure may be corrupted by such behaviors as favoritism. One type of subjective evaluation, onsite inspection, is nonetheless used in many school systems around the world. In-class evaluations by external assessors have been proposed recently in the United States for the K–12 sector, as well as for the Head Start preschool program. Yet there is very little evidence to date on the validity of inspection ratings and the effectiveness of inspection-based accountability systems in improving school quality.

This study evaluates a subjective performance-evaluation regime in place in the English public school system since the early 1990s. Under this regime, independent inspectors visit schools, assess schools’ performance, and disclose their findings on the Internet. Inspectors combine hard metrics, such as test scores, with softer ones, such as observations of classroom teaching, in order to arrive at an overall judgment of school quality. Schools that receive a fail rating may be subject to sanctions, such as more frequent and intensive inspections.

I provide evidence on the effectiveness of several aspects of the inspections system. First, I demonstrate that inspection ratings can aid in distinguishing between more- and less-effective schools, even after controlling for test scores and various other school characteristics. Second, exploiting a natural experiment, I show that a fail inspection rating leads to test-score gains for primary school students that remain evident even after the students move into secondary schools. I find no evidence that schools that receive a fail rating are able to inflate test-score performance by gaming the system, suggesting that oversight by inspectors may mitigate such strategic behavior.

The English School Inspection System

The English public schooling system combines centralized testing with school inspections. Over the period relevant to this study, tests took place when students were age 7, 11, 14, and 16; these are known as the Key Stage l to Key Stage 4 tests, respectively. Successive governments have used the results of Key Stage tests, especially Key Stages 2 and 4, as performance measures when holding schools to account.

Inspectors examine students’ work and engage in discussions with students and parents.

Since the early 1990s, a government agency called the Office for Standards in Education, or Ofsted, has inspected all English public schools. Ofsted has three primary functions: 1) to offer feedback to the school principal and teachers; 2) to provide information to parents to aid their decisionmaking process; and 3) to identify schools that suffer from “serious weakness.” Although Ofsted employs its own in-house team of inspectors, the agency contracts out the majority of inspections to a handful of private-sector and nonprofit organizations via a competitive bidding process. Ofsted retains responsibility for setting overall strategic goals and objectives, putting in place a framework to guide the inspection process, and monitoring the quality of inspections.

Over the time period covered by this study, schools were generally inspected once during each three- to six-year inspection cycle. An inspection involves an assessment of a school’s performance on academic and other measured outcomes, followed by an onsite visit to the school, typically lasting one or two days for primary schools. Inspectors arrive at the school on very short notice (maximum of two to three days), which should limit schools’ ability to make last-minute preparations for the visit. Inspections take place throughout the academic year, September to July.

During the onsite visit, inspectors collect qualitative evidence on performance and practices at the school. A key element of this is classroom observation. In addition, inspectors hold in-depth interviews with the school leadership, examine students’ work, and engage in discussions with students and parents. The evidence gathered by the inspectors during their visit, as well as test-performance data, form the evidence base for each school’s inspection report. The school receives an explicit headline grade, ranging between l (“Outstanding”) and 4 (“Unsatisfactory,” also known as a fail rating). The full inspection report is made available to students and parents and is posted on the Internet.

There are two categories of fail, a moderate fail (known as “Notice to Improve”) and a more severe fail (“Special Measures”), which carry different sanctions. Schools that receive a moderate fail rating are subject to additional inspections, with an implicit threat of a downgrade to the severe fail category if inspectors judge improvements to be inadequate. Schools that receive the severe fail rating may experience more dramatic consequences: these can include changes in the school leadership team and the school’s governing board, increased resources, as well as increased oversight from the inspectors.

Over the period, September 2006 to July 2009, 13 percent of schools received the best rating, “Outstanding”; 48 percent received a “Good” rating; 33 percent received a “Satisfactory” rating; and 6 percent received a “Fail” rating. The fail group included 4.5 percent of schools receiving the moderate fail rating and 1.5 percent of schools receiving the severe fail rating.

Official policy statements indicate that inspectors place substantial weight on test scores, which is borne out by analysis of the data. A decline of 10 national percentile points on a school’s test performance in the year before inspection is associated with a 3 percentage point rise in the likelihood of being rated fail, taking into account the proportion of students eligible for free lunch, as well as the local authority in which the school is located. Nevertheless, test scores are not the only measure inspectors use to rate schools. Around 25 percent of schools that had scored in the bottom quarter nationally on the test were rated Outstanding or Good during the 2006 to 2009 period.

Validating Inspection Ratings

I first investigate whether inspection ratings convey any information on school quality beyond what is captured by test-score rankings. The critical question is whether inspectors visiting the school are able to gather and summarize information about school quality that is not already publicly available. If inspectors rely mostly or exclusively on test scores to arrive at the overall rating, then these ratings will not provide new information to educators, parents, and policymakers.

I test the validity of the inspection ratings by examining to what extent these ratings can forecast measures of school quality not observed by the inspectors, after taking into account the measures they do observe. I construct two measures of school quality—student perceptions of teacher practices and parent satisfaction—using data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE), a major survey supported by the Department for Education. Students age 14 are asked how likely teachers are to: take action when a student breaks rules, make students work to their full capacity, keep order in class, assign homework, check that any homework that is assigned is done, and grade students’ work. Parents are asked about their satisfaction with the interest teachers show in the child, school discipline, child’s school progress, and feedback from teachers.

I combine the student questions into a single measure of student perceptions of teacher practices and the parent questions into a single measure of parent satisfaction. I then examine whether these survey measures, which are not observed by the inspectors, are higher in schools that received better inspection ratings, controlling for various characteristics of the schools and survey respondents. For this analysis, school characteristics taken into account include national percentile test rank, the proportion of students eligible for a free lunch, whether the school is secular or religious, and the local education authority in which it is located. Student factors include prior test score, gender, ethnic background, parents’ education, income and economic activity, and whether the family receives government benefits.

Click to enlarge

My results confirm that lower inspection ratings are associated with sharply declining school quality as measured by student perceptions of teacher practices. The strength of this relationship may be gauged by comparing the change in quality associated with changes in the school’s position in the national test-score ranking: the results show that an increase of 50 percentile points is associated with an increase of 0.15 standard deviations in student perceptions of teacher practices (see Figure 1). A two-unit improvement in the inspection rating, such as from Satisfactory to Outstanding, is associated with an even larger increase of 0.21 standard deviations.

Results for the parent satisfaction measure are very similar to those reported for the teacher practices measure. A two-unit increase in the inspection rating is associated with an increase of 0.17 standard deviations in the parent satisfaction measure. The relationship between test scores and parental satisfaction, however, is statistically insignificant after controlling for inspection ratings. In short, this analysis confirms that inspection ratings can help detect differences in teacher practice and parental satisfaction among schools with similar test-score rankings and socioeconomic composition.

The Effect of a Fail Inspection on Test Scores

What is the effect of a fail inspection on students’ subsequent test scores? The challenge to answering this question is that receiving a fail rating is based at least partly on past test performance. Schools that have a bad year on the standardized test are more likely to receive a fail rating when they are next inspected. If the low score is due in part to bad luck, the score is likely to increase the next year, toward the school’s typical performance. Thus, schools that receive fail ratings may appear to improve in the following year for reasons other than the fail rating.

I address this concern by comparing schools inspected early in the year to those inspected late in the year. This analysis exploits a specific feature of the English testing system, namely, that the age-11 tests take place each year over five days in the second week of May. The results are released in mid-July. Schools that are inspected and receive a fail rating early in the academic year can respond to that rating and potentially improve their scores by the time of the May test. But schools that are failed later in the year—in particular, those that are failed after mid-May—cannot. I therefore estimate the effect of receiving a fail rating by comparing the May test results for schools inspected very early in the same academic year, the treatment group, with a comparison group of schools inspected after the test is taken in early May but before the results are released in July. The key idea is that inspectors have the same information on past test scores for both groups of schools.

I conduct this analysis using mathematics and English test scores for schools failed in one of the four academic years, 2005–06 to 2008–09. The key comparison is between students enrolled in schools that received a fail rating in the early part of the academic year, September to November (the treatment group) with those attending schools that received a fail rating late in the academic year, mid-May to mid-July (the control group). It is important to bear in mind that this methodology does not compare the effect of attending a school that received a fail rating with the effect of attending a school that received a higher rating.

The validity of this approach is supported by the fact that the treatment and comparison groups in general have very similar student and school characteristics. The proportion of students receiving a free school lunch, the proportion of students who are white British, student performance on the age-11 test in the prior year, and the school’s inspection rating from the previous inspection round are all similar, on average, in the treatment and control schools.

The results indicate that the effect of receiving a fail rating is to raise standardized test scores in a school by 0.12 standard deviations in math and by 0.07 to 0.09 standard deviations in English. These gains, which roughly equate to between one-third and one-half a year of typical instruction, are especially noteworthy given that they can only reflect the efforts of schools made between an inspection in the period from September to November and the tests administered in May, a maximum of eight months.

Testing for Strategic Behavior

An outstanding question is whether these improvements reflect strategic behavior by schools that face strong incentives to improve their test scores. These strategies could include the removal of low-performing students from the testing pool, teaching to the test, and targeting students close to the mandated proficiency threshold. I conduct three tests for the presence of these types of strategic responses.

First, I examine to what extent gains in test scores following the fail rating are accounted for by selectively removing low-performing students. Specifically, I examine whether the results change when I adjust my results to account for differences in student characteristics, including prior (age 7) test scores; gender; eligibility for free lunch; special education needs; month of birth; whether first language is English; ethnic background; and census information on the home neighborhood deprivation index. I find that controlling for these factors in the analysis has little impact on the estimated effect of receiving a fail rating. In other words, it doesn’t appear that schools try to game the system by systematically discouraging certain groups of students from taking the exam.

Second, I investigate whether there is any evidence that teachers target students on the margin of attaining “Level 4” proficiency; the percentage of students attaining that proficiency level is the key government target for age-11 students. Following a fail rating, the incentives to maximize students passing over the threshold are more intense than prior to the fail rating. Schools may therefore try to target resources toward students on the margin of attaining this threshold, to the detriment of students far below and far above.

I address this issue by examining whether the fail rating effect varies by students’ prior ability and find a strong inverse relationship between prior ability and the effects of attending a school that received a fail rating. The fail rating effect for students with test scores in the bottom quarter prior to the treatment year is 0.20 and 0.14 standard deviations in mathematics and English, respectively (see Figure 2). Students in the middle of the prior test-score distribution also experience substantial gains of roughly 0.10 to 0.12 standard deviations in math and 0.08 to 0.10 standard deviations in English. The gains for students with prior scores in the top quarter are the smallest, at 0.05 and 0.03 standard deviations in mathematics and English, respectively.

Why are the effects of a fail rating largest for students with low prior test scores? One potential explanation relates to differences within the schools in the degree to which parents are able to hold teachers accountable. Parents of children scoring low on the age-7 test are poorer than average and may be less able to assess their child’s progress and the quality of instruction provided by the school. Teachers may exert lower levels of effort for students whose parents are less vocal about quality of instruction. My results suggest that, following a fail rating and the subsequent increased oversight of schools, teachers increase their effort. This rise in effort may be greatest where previously there was the greatest slack.

Finally, I examine whether any gains in test scores in the year of the fail rating are sustained in the years following the inspection. This provides an indirect test of the extent of teaching to the test, as gains due to crude test-prep strategies are less likely to persist over time than gains produced by improved instruction. Specifically, I examine whether the effects on age-11 test scores can be detected when the students are tested again at age 14, three years after the students have left the primary school. This is a fairly stringent test of gaming behavior, because prior research has found evidence of “fade-out” of test-score gains even when there are no strong incentives to boost test scores artificially.

The results show that a fail rating raises average math and English test scores by 0.05 standard deviations three years after leaving the primary school. These medium-term gains are largest for lower-performing students, in line with earlier results showing large gains for these groups in the year of inspection.

Conclusion

How best to design incentives for public organizations such as schools is a fundamental public policy challenge. One solution, performance evaluation on the basis of test scores, is prevalent in many countries. This paper evaluates an alternative approach, school inspections, which may better capture the multifaceted nature of education production. A key concern under such a regime is that it is open to manipulation.

My first set of results demonstrates that inspector ratings are correlated with student- and parent-reported measures of school quality, even after controlling for test-score results and other school characteristics. In other words, inspectors are able to discriminate between more- and less-effective schools, and, significantly, report their findings even when the stakes are high. Simply disseminating inspection ratings and reports may therefore better inform consumers and other decisionmakers in the education sector.

My main finding is that receiving a fail inspection rating leads to test-score improvements of around 0.1 standard deviations. There is little evidence to suggest that schools are able to inflate test performance artificially by gaming the system. If inspectors are able to evaluate actual practices and instructional quality at the school, both before and after an inspection, then inspections may well have a mitigating effect on such unintended responses.

Finally, the data reveal that the fail rating effects are especially large for students with low prior test scores. The gains are large when compared to other possible policy interventions, such as the effects of attending a school with higher average achievement levels or enrolling in a charter school. These results are consistent with the view that children of low-income parents, arguably the least vocal in holding teachers accountable, benefit the most from inspections. Consequently, the findings of this study may be especially relevant in the current policy environment where, first, there is heightened concern about raising standards for this group of children and, second, these students are hard to reach using other policy levers.

Iftikhar Hussain is a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Sussex.

Come out upon my seas
Cursed missed opportunities
Am I a part of the cure?
Or am I part of the disease?”
-Coldplay, “Clocks,” A Rush of Blood to the Head, 2002

Dear Deborah,

I am haunted by the title of your post:
“The Testing Obsession Widens the Gap” Could this possibly be true? Is test-based school reform reducing opportunity for America’s neediest children? Is everything for which we school reformers fight actually making things worse? Am I a part of the cure, or am I part of the disease?

###

“It’s OK to ask: ‘What if I’m wrong?’” you wrote last week. So let me ask it. It wouldn’t be the first time. A year ago, for example, I explored the “test score hypothesis“—a line of reasoning, undergirding much of the reform movement, that says that if we can significantly improve low-income students’ math and reading skills, as measured by standardized tests, we can significantly increase their chances of escaping poverty.

Let’s unpack this hypothesis a bit.

As it stands now, children born into poverty come into kindergarten with massive deficits—in terms of vocabulary, content knowledge, and non-cognitive skills. And if they make it to high school graduation 13 years later (and many will not), they will leave, on average, reading and doing math at an 8th-grade level. Of the low-income teens that give higher education a shot, the vast majority of will end up in remedial education and then wash out. More than half of poor children will become poor adults, with poor children of their own. The cycle will repeat. Our hope is that by improving our schools (and, yes, other things too), we can change this narrative.

Let’s imagine that our schools can help the average child born into poverty do somewhat better. Let’s say that with a combination of talented and well-trained teachers, a rich and rigorous curriculum, lots of supports, and strong leadership, we’re able to get poor students, on average, to a 10th-grade level by the time they graduate high school. Suddenly they can attend a community college, or even a four-year university, without starting in remedial education. They are much more likely to graduate, at least with an associate’s degree or a technical credential. Rather than making minimum wage, they will make a living wage.

They are less likely to get pregnant as teens, or end up in prison, or drop out of the workforce. Their children wouldn’t be born poor—they would be born middle class. This would be transformative.

Notice the key assumption built into this “theory of action”: reading and math matter a lot. Getting to the 10th-grade level instead of the 8th-grade level (even as measured by rinky-dinky standardized tests) would make a meaningful difference in real lives. With that assumption in place, it’s not crazy—in fact, it’s perfectly rational—to hold schools accountable for helping their students make progress every year with their reading and math skills. It’s smart to put in place clear, high standards—let’s call them common-core standards—that will delineate the path from poverty to prosperity, that will help schools and teachers focus on the knowledge and skills that matter most, and will get students to true readiness for college and career by the age of 18.

So Deborah, are you ready for the big question, the kicker, the heart of the matter?

How sure are we that it’s literacy and numeracy, and related academic knowledge and skills, that are the most important precursors to success in college, career, and life? What if something else is just as important, or even more important, like “non-cognitive skills” or personal relationships? (Or perhaps the habit of “serious intellectual inquiry,” as you put it?)

And what if our “testing obsession” is crowding these other things out?

These are critical questions, but here’s what gives me solace.

First, the evidence is quite strong that reading and math achievement are critical tickets to the middle class. Look, for example, at the blockbuster study from Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff that examined the impact of teachers on students’ long-term outcomes. AsKevin Carey explained at the time,

If you believe standardized tests are worthless or highly flawed or deeply inadequate or even troublingly limited in accuracy and scope-and many reasonable people believe these things-then you could dismiss or downplay value-added measures of teacher effectiveness, by definition. … But now the CFR study says that teachers who are unusually good at helping students score high on standardized tests today aren’t just unusually good at helping students score high on standardized tests tomorrow. They also have an unusual effect on the likelihood of students going to college, going to a good college, earning a good living, living in a nice place, and saving for retirement. In other words, whatever the limitations of standardized tests may be, test-based value-added scores do, in fact, provide valuable information about the things most people care most about.

Or look at the evidence that E.D. Hirsch cites about the impact of teenagers’ vocabulary on their long-term prospects, such as a 1999 study that shows that “a gain of one standard deviation on the Armed Forces Qualification Test raises one’s annual income by nearly $10,000 (in 2012 dollars).”

Or a brand-new study from the United Kingdom (flagged by Joanne Jacobs ) that finds that “math skills at 7 predict earnings at 42.”

Surely reading and math aren’t all that matters. Paul Tough makes a good case for non-cognitive skills. Others, yourself included, point to the importance of strong personal relationships with mentors. We could name more. But reading and math skills are at least necessary, if not sufficient.

On the other hand, there’s little evidence that the “testing obsession” is systematically getting in the way of good teaching and learning in high-poverty schools. That’s not because an obsession with testing isn’t a problem. It surely is, with its temptations of cheating, narrowing of the curriculum, and the culture of fear that it often perpetuates.

But here’s the rub, Deborah: Studies of high-poverty schools in America have demonstrated for decades that great teaching and learning have always been the exception, not the norm. To believe that testing is making these schools worse, you have to believe that they were once pretty good, or at least better than they are now. I just don’t see it. Do you? Where’s the evidence of that?

Furthermore, think back to Kevin Carey’s comments on the Chetty study. If an obsession with reading and math was crowding out more important tasks, why would students with stronger reading and math gains do better long-term than their peers?

Here’s what your readers need to remember: The choice today is not between 100,000 Central Park Easts or Mission Hills and 100,000 test-prep factories. If it were, I’d pick the Deborah Meier schools in a heartbeat. But let’s face it: There aren’t more than a handful of Deborah Meier schools out there. (The same goes with Don Hirsch schools or Mike Feinberg/Dave Levin schools, or any other brand you want to name.)

The typical high-poverty school is, and has always been, pretty mediocre. That’s not an indictment of the people who work in these schools; the problem is the system. And it’s not unique to education. Any big, bureaucratic government agency is going to struggle to achieve effectiveness, much less excellence. (Think the DMV.) Heck, even most large, private-sector companies are pretty lame, especially ones that don’t face much competition. (Think the electric company.) Layer on top of that all of the distracting demands placed upon schools, the fragmented nature of education governance, and, in some places at least, too few resources, and it would be a miracle if the typical high-poverty public school were good, much less great.

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So do I think testing and accountability make matters worse? No. In fact, based on the studies cited above, I think they will make matters marginally better. I also think stronger standards and tests (a la common core) will make things better still.

What about you, Deborah? Are you willing to ask “What if I’m wrong?” What if it’s true that reading and math skills are hugely related to opportunities in life, and indeed are malleable? What if “direct instruction,” which you say isn’t needed, really is the most effective method for helping children in poverty develop those skills? What if it’s patently untrue that children learn “vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and spelling … the same way we learn everything else that matters,” as you stated last week, but instead have to be taught systematically? What if the perfect for which you have spent decades championing really is the enemy of the good—and the greater good, for millions of boys and girls throughout America?

Deborah, with all due respect, I ask you to ask yourself: Am I a part of the cure, or am I part of the disease?

-Michael Petrilli

This article originally appeared on the Bridging Differences blog, where Mike Petrilli will be debating Deborah Meier for the next month.

Peterson and Matthew Chingos published a study in the Summer 2013 issue of Education Next, “The Impact of School Vouchers on College Enrollment,” that found that African-American students benefited the most from receiving vouchers.

—Education Next

What, you ask, is this all about?

Thirty years after a blue-ribbon panel declared the United States to be “a nation at risk” due to the weak performance and shoddy results of our public education system, one of the two great reforms to have enveloped that system is the setting of explicit academic standards in core subjects, standards that make clear what math youngsters should know by the end of fifth grade, what reading-and-writing skills they must acquire by tenth grade, and so on. (The other great reform: widespread acceptance of school choice.)

Up to now, individual states have set their own academic standards. Some did this well, but according to reviews undertaken by Fordham and others, most stumbled badly, putting forth vague expectations that lack content and rigor and often promote left-wing dogma. And even the good ones differ so much from state to state that school and student performance cannot be compared around the country, much less with other lands.

Public education is indisputably the responsibility of states—embedded deeply in their constitutions—but preparing young Americans to succeed in a mobile society on a shrinking and more competitive planet calls for some commonality of education expectations across the land, expectations that, if met, truly prepare young people for college and good jobs.

Many state leaders understand this and, beginning five years ago, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers (to which most state superintendents belong) launched a foundation-funded project called the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which gave birth to a set of commendably strong standards for English language arts and math from Kindergarten through high school. Our reviewers found them superior to the academic expectations set by three-quarters of states—and essentially on par with the rest.

But would states actually embrace them in place of their own? This was—and remains—totally voluntary, but decisions grew more complicated when the Obama administration started pushing states toward such adoptions by jawboning, hectoring, and luring them with dollars and regulatory waivers.

Whether it was the standards’ intrinsic merit, administration pressure, or the potential advantages of commonality—not just comparability but also cheaper textbooks and tests that need not be tailored to each state’s specifications—forty-five states plus D.C., several territories, and the Pentagon’s school network signed on. (Texas and Virginia are the big exceptions.) The top-priority education initiative in most of those places today is preparing teachers, parents, and others for these demanding standards—and for the likelihood that scores will plummet on the tougher tests now under development.

Then came the backlash. Some arose on the left from foes of testing and teacher groups wary of being evaluated against sterner criteria. Some arose from parents and educators fretful that heavier emphasis on English language arts and math will eclipse music, art, and the rest of a balanced curriculum.

The heavy artillery, however, came from the right. In true tea-party style, the Common Core was presented as a federal plot—worse, an Obama plot, in cahoots with the Gates Foundation, maybe even the United Nations—to take over American schools, end local control, undermine state sovereignty, and abolish school choice. Some decried the Common Core as a lowering of standards because, for example, it doesn’t mandate algebra in eighth grade. (Never mind that few eighth graders study real algebra today.) Others prophesied that Jane Austen and Mark Twain would be replaced by close study of auto-repair manuals. (The list of recommended readings that accompanies the Common Core is excellent—but bad choices by teachers or curriculum directors can subvert any standards.)

Many respected conservatives back the Common Core, including such scarred veterans of the education-reform wars as Jeb Bush, Bill Bennett, Chris Christie, Rod Paige, and Mitch Daniels. They understand that academic standards are just the beginning, describing a destination but not how to get there. They understand, too, that a destination worth reaching beats aimless wandering—and that a big modern country is better off if it knows how all its kids and schools are doing against a rigorous set of common expectations. As good conservatives, they realize that the Common Core in the long run should save dollars, enhance accountability, hasten development of powerful instructional technologies, strengthen American competitiveness, give a boost to the country’s shared civic culture, and (by supplying parents with better information about school performance) advance school choice.

They also recognize, however, that the Common Core is voluntary and that states unserious about implementing it are better off not pretending to embrace it.

Some day, we’ll know whether schools and students in the Common Core states do better than those in places that opt to go it alone. It’s hard to imagine that they’ll do worse.

Education reform is hard. Admiral Rickover once compared it to “moving a graveyard.” Standards-setting is just part of it—and common standards aren’t inherently better. (Newly released standards for science appear to have serious shortcomings.) But when a group of state leaders, many of them Republicans, can come together to set expectations for the curricular core that surpass what most of them set on their own, conservatives ought to applaud, not lash out.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry first appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

I love this thing—great data on a critically important part of our field. If you’re interested in chartering, school-level accountability, or The Urban School System of the Future, you definitely want to check it out.

Almost a decade ago, NACSA produced the equivalent of industry standards—the stuff a high-quality authorizer ought to do. These relate to assessing charter applications, monitoring school performance, helping grow high-performers, revoking the charters of low-performers, etc.

This report assesses authorizers against what NACSA deems the 12 “essential practices” of the industry.

Overall, authorizers’ scores improved over last year’s, and large authorizers (those with 10+ schools) scored better than small ones.

Continuing a long-term trend, authorizers are increasingly picky shoppers—they approve far fewer applications than they did back in the day. The average approval rate is now 33 percent.

But many authorizers are still falling short on the back end of accountability: 34 percent of authorizers lack a clear, established policy to close underperforming schools.

Some of the report’s most interesting findings relate to the different types of authorizers (there are six kinds nowadays). The vast majority (more than 90 percent) are local school districts, but they generally authorize few schools apiece; their portfolios combine for only 53 percent of all charters.

Districts score lower than non-district authorizers overall, and their policies are far less friendly to replication than non-district authorizers, meaning they are less likely to help great charters create more high-quality seats.

I strongly oppose permitting districts—especially failing urban districts—to authorize charters. In fact, I believe giving districts the power to authorize was the biggest charter-policy mistake made during this sector’s two decades of existence.

Why?

Charter laws broke the district’s monopoly over public school operation. But some state laws only allowed districts to authorize. This regrettably continued the district-centered era of public schooling; that is, in a geographic area, every public school must either be run or authorized by the district.

Fortunately, most states have since created non-district authorizers, but this legacy mistake continues to this day in a number of places, for example, Baltimore.

The major other problem is that giving districts authorizing power blurs the essential line between these two very different functions: running schools and overseeing others running schools.

We should see districts as school operators only. Authorizing—that is, umpiring, not playing, not coaching—is much, much different work. Districts are built to run schools; they are not designed to oversee from arms-length others doing so. In fact, many of their policies, habits, beliefs, and practices run counter to the essential charter bargain of freedom for tough accountability. And many district authorizers remain hostile to charters to this very day.

(Think I’m being too pessimistic about charter-district relations? How about Chicago’s district—the only charter authorizer for the nation’s third-largest city—which recently declared that buildings no longer needed by the district are off-limits to charters for 40 years.)

The report’s findings on other types of authorizers are really quite interesting. They have much to teach policymakers and practitioners. How are independent charter boards, like the one in Washington, D.C., doing? What about Indy’s mayor’s office or nonprofits?

Read the report and find out!

Two other thoughts: New research demonstrates that charters that struggle early on seldom improve significantly. It might be the case that NACSA’s (and the charter community’s) support for five-year contracts needs reassessing.

Second, as we move to a sector-agnostic approach in urban schooling and rely on a continuous improvement process based on new starts, expansions, and closures, we must develop rigorous, transparent systems for these activities. Successfully managing a portfolio of schools demands it.

It is troubling that many authorizers still don’t have high-quality practices in place for this work. We should prioritize improvement in these areas.

-Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Choice Words blog.

I expect that PARCC and Smarter Balanced (the two federally subsidized consortia of states that are developing new assessments meant to be aligned with Common Core standards) will fade away, eclipsed and supplanted by long-established yet fleet-footed testing firms that already possess the infrastructure, relationships, and durability that give them huge advantages in the competition for state and district business.

In particular, I predict (as does Andy Smarick) that the new ACT-Aspire assessment system, which is supposed to be ready for use in 2014 (a full year earlier than either of the consortium products) and which some states are considering as their new assessment vehicle, will be joined by kindred products to be developed and marketed by the College Board. And the two of them will dominate the market for new Common Core assessments.

One straw in the wind: Alabama’s announcement last week that it is foreswearing both consortia and will use the ACT assessment system. And, of course, both Kentucky and New York have already concocted and deployed their own versions of Common Core assessments—possibly but not necessarily interim models.

Although the College Board and ACT have traditionally focused on the high-school-to-college transition, both also have experience earlier in the K–12 sequence. ACT Explore is aimed at eighth and ninth graders, ACT Engage goes down to sixth grade, and ACT “WorkKeys” is a significant player in determining career-readiness. The College Board’s Pre-SAT test is typically taken in tenth grade. Its “Readiness Pathway” assessment program reaches down to eighth grade, and its “Springboard” program to sixth—with “alignment” guides already prepared for Common Core standards in both English language arts and math for grades six through twelve.

So it’s not too big a stretch for either organization to dip deeper into the K–12 curriculum and assessment business, and it’s no stretch at all for their chief test-administration partners—Pearson in the case of ACT, ETS for the College Board. Each has ample experience in devising and administering tests from the early grades onward. (In fact, Pearson already has pre-K assessments.)

At least as importantly, these organizations know how to give tests to millions of people. They have the infrastructure and the test security. They have the systems for scoring and reporting. Perhaps above all, they have the relationships and the trust of thousands of school systems, dozens of states, and millions of parents.Plenty of states already use ACT products as part of their existing assessment systems. And both organizations are long established, well led, deep-pocketed, and pretty sure to be around a decade or two from now.

As yet, the new consortia have none of those things. They’re struggling with organizational structures, governance, post-federal financing, test-development agonies, uncertain costs, conflicting views of “cut scores,” and all manner of other puzzles.

Those would be significant challenges were there no competition, but ACT has made no secret of its intention to seek states’ Common Core assessment contracts—and Alabama may turn out to be the first of many to sign up. The College Board hasn’t (to my knowledge) announced itself yet, but testing insiders know that it’s lately been on a hiring binge—even luring key assessment developers from ACT—that surely points in this direction.

Will the ACT and College Board versions of Common Core assessments be true “next-generation” tests that probe deeper understanding and more sophisticated (“higher-order”) skills in more revealing ways? Will they be “adaptive” (via computer or otherwise) to kids at different levels of achievement or will they, like most of today’s tests (see discussion here at the seventeen-minute point), do a weak job of differentiating performance at the top and at the bottom of their range of difficulty? I do not know. But I do know that all of these accoutrements carry dollar costs that state assessment budgets may not be able to bear—and veteran testing firms are accustomed to cutting their cloth to fit the wearer’s dimensions.

I assume that scores and scales on the new assessments will be comparable across states (as are current ACT and SAT scores), but individual states will likely set their own “cut points” for purposes of grade-to-grade promotion and high school graduation. That’s tricky, however, if you’re serious about bona fide “career and college readiness,” which is a meaningless concept if it differs by state; what’s more, the new standards aren’t really worth the bother unless “proficiency” levels for every grade cumulate to a desired end-point by senior year. (I predict that, as with consortium-developed assessments, the ACT and College Board folks will recommend grade-specific proficiency scores that do cumulate in the intended way, but individual states will decide for themselves what signifies readiness for promotion and graduation.)

If I’m right that ACT and College Board scarf up much state business, there won’t be a lot left for the consortia—and they may founder. That would, of course, represent a considerable waste of federal dollars. On the other hand, it would remove from the Common Core debate (at least until NCLB-reauthorization time, if that day ever comes) the specter of Arne Duncan and Barack Obama clutching those standards to the federal bosom.

Besides, the consortia could remain useful, even if they don’t do assessments themselves. Neither ACT nor the College Board will want to alienate the many state leaders who have been earnestly advancing the consortium work, and these groups could readily convert into advisory and coordinating bodies that help member states implement and make sense out of the results on the new tests—and advise test developers and standard-setters alike on how their products work in the real world.

Time will tell. I might be jumping to premature prediction—and you may interpret these entrails differently than I do. Letters to the editor are cordially invited.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry first appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

And while one can hope that Atlanta was an outlier in terms of the scope and longevity of its cheating conspiracy, it’s hardly an isolated case, as examples from El Paso, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and other locales demonstrate.

As expected, test critics are having a field day, using Atlanta as evidence of why all this must go. They yearn to throw the accountability baby out with the testing bathwater. But they’re wrong. The better approach is to “mend it, not end it.”

Try this thought experiment: What would happen if U.S. schools ceased all standardized testing—and related consequences? No more annual assessments, no more grading schools based on the results, no more interventions in low-performing schools, no more teacher evaluations tied to test scores, no more “merit pay” for high performing teachers or job jeopardy for low performers.

The result: In our most affluent communities, little would change. Schools would continue to drive toward the real-world standard of college acceptance at elite universities, via Advanced Placement exams and high SAT scores.

At schools serving both rich and poor kids, we would probably see a return to the 1990s, when achievement gaps were overlooked, wealthy students were guided toward rigorous coursework and “college readiness,” while poorer pupils were shepherded into easier classes with less challenge and weaker teachers.

And in high-poverty schools—the main target of twenty years of reform and the primary drivers of America’s improved student achievement since the 1990s—a few might keep pushing students toward college and good jobs, but many would return to the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and be satisfied with getting their students to graduation day, whether or not they learned much along the way.

I can’t prove that my forecast would come true, but the burden rests on those who want to eliminate testing and accountability to provide assurance that the system won’t revert back to its bad old ways.

If ending testing and accountability carries huge risks, what might mending it look like?

First, we should embrace testing as a diagnostic tool, not just an accountability weapon. We should get feedback into teachers’ hands much faster and make sure the tests themselves are of higher quality. All of this is the aim of the Common Core assessments currently under development, to be ready for prime time in 2015.

Second—and this is obvious—we need to invest in better test security. The Common Core assessments will be online, closing off current cheating strategies (like erasing and replacing answers on bubble sheets), but surely opening some new avenues. States need to spend the money to make sure test results can be trusted and cheaters can’t succeed.

Third, targets (for schools, students, and teachers) should be challenging but attainable. One source of the cheating scandals was educators feeling that fraud was literally the only way to produce the scores demanded by the system. They might have been right. The focus should transition to achievement growth over time, rather than hitting a particular “cut score.” (Many state accountability systems have moved in this direction recently, thanks to Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s waiver process.)

And fourth, official rankings or grades (of schools or teachers) should be informed by test scores but also leavened by human judgment. School grades might be conferred by British-style inspectors who look at pupil achievement along with much else.

And teacher evaluations should be the province of school principals, who should consider test scores as one set of data among many. The use of human judgment is particularly important if consequences are attached—closing schools, for example, or giving extra pay to great teachers, or terminating poor ones. (In this case, Duncan’s mandate for states to develop formula-driven teacher evaluations is a step in the wrong direction.)

Testing and accountability, properly conceived and implemented, can still be important tools in improving achievement and opportunity in America. Let’s keep the good, throw out the bad, and extinguish the anti-testing fire that started in Atlanta.

-Mike Petrilli

UPDATE: Joanne Weiss, Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff, wrote to make this clarification: “Federal policy doesn’t require ‘formula-driven teacher evaluations,’ only that student growth be a significant consideration in the evaluation, and that evaluations should consist of multiple measures. We don’t stipulate any weights or formulas, nor do we require their use. Further, human judgment is critical to any good evaluation system. While it’s true that many states have implemented formula-driven evaluation systems (often including human judgment factors, like teacher observations and school/community contribution as part of the ‘formula’), we have no such requirements in our policies or regulations.”

This article first appeared in the New York Daily News.

My greatest frustration, though, has been his unwillingness to offer full-throated support for school vouchers.

Maybe he’s finally ready. In a blog post yesterday, he predicted that if current reform efforts stall, the future will bring a “low-accountability environment coupled with much more choice” and pointed to the Indiana voucher program (recently upheld by that state’s Supreme Court and hailed by Michael Gerson in the Washington Post) as a sign of things to come.

What Andy may not fully appreciate is that Indiana’s voucher program has accountability in spades. As David Stuit and Sy Doan explain in their recent report for Fordham, School Choice Regulations: Red Tape or Red Herring? , the Hoosier State has an “annual performance-accountability rating system” for participating private schools that is based on the results of state assessments—the same tests that public school pupils take. Indeed, the fact that private schools will soon be held accountable under Common Core standards and assessments has become a major issue in the Hoosier State—because it gives palpitations to the right, not the left! (Other recently enacted private-school-choice programs, including those in Louisiana and Alabama, also include significant testing and accountability requirements.)

So if the lack of accountability is Andy’s (and other reformers’) beef with voucher programs, that concern has been alleviated, at least in several states.

To be sure, I can spot at least two other plausible reasons to oppose vouchers. One is that the schools aren’t required (outside of Milwaukee) to be publicly “accessible.” (Andy, many years ago, wrote a piece saying that “accountability and accessibility” should be demanded of any voucher program.) In other words, private schools can still practice selective admissions. That’s a deal-breaker for many on the left. (And impinging on admissions policies is a deal-breaker for many private schools, the Stuit study found.) But we already have selective-admissions magnet schools (of the sort profiled recently by Checker Finn and Jessica Hockett in Exam Schools) and I don’t remember many reformers calling for their abolition.

The other argument against vouchers is on church/state grounds—a concern that the current Supreme Court doesn’t share, and one that I’ve always found utterly irrational. (Why can public funds help a poor kid attend Notre Dame University but not Notre Dame High School?)

So reformers on the left: Unite! (With those of us on the right who already support the entire range of parental choice.)

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Insitute’s Choice Words blog.

The new Common Core math and reading standards adopted by 45 states have come under a firestorm of criticism from tea-party activists and commentators such as Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin. Beck calls the standards a stealth “leftist indoctrination” plot by the Obama administration. Malkin warns that they will “eliminate American children’s core knowledge base in English, language arts and history.” As education scholars at two right-of-center think tanks, we feel compelled to set the record straight.

Here’s what the Common Core State Standards do: They simply delineate what children should know at each grade level and describe the skills that they must acquire to stay on course toward college or career readiness. They are not a curriculum; it’s up to school districts to choose curricula that comply with the standards. The Fordham Institute has carefully examined Common Core and compared it with existing state standards: It found that for most states, Common Core is a great improvement with regard to rigor and cohesiveness.

For decades, students in different states have been taught different material at different rates and held to radically different standards. Several years ago, a small group of governors joined together in an effort to align their states’ standards and assessments. This group expanded through the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. In 2007, curriculum experts began to devise the new Common Core standards. Drafts were circulated among the states, comments received, and the standards adjusted. So far, 45 states and the District of Columbia have signed up to implement these new expectations.Now let’s address the false claims circulated by the most vocal critics of Common Core.

Common Core is not “ObamaCore,” as some suggest. While President Obama often tries to claim credit, the truth is that the development of Common Core was well underway before he took office in January 2009. Some argue that states were coerced into adopting Common Core by the Obama administration as a requirement for applying for its Race to the Top grant competition (and No Child Left Behind waiver program). But the administration has stated that adoption of “college and career readiness standards” doesn’t necessarily mean adoption of Common Core. At least a handful of states had K–12 content standards that were equally good, and the administration would have been hard-pressed to argue otherwise.

Education policymaking — and 90 percent of funding — is still handled at the state and local levels. And tying strings to federal education dollars is nothing new. No Child Left Behind — George W. Bush’s signature education law — linked federal Title I dollars directly to state education policy, and states not complying risked losing millions in compensatory-education funding (that is, funding for programs for children at risk of dropping out of school).

Perhaps the clearest evidence that states can still set their own standards is the fact that five states have not adopted Common Core. Some that have adopted it might opt out, and they shouldn’t lose a dime if they do.

The most prominent criticism of Common Core is that it abandons classical literature and instead forces students to read dry government manuals. This claim reflects a profound and perhaps deliberate misunderstanding of Common Core literacy standards, which do encourage increased exposure to informational texts and literary nonfiction. The goal is to have children read challenging texts that will build their vocabulary and background knowledge, a strategy grounded in what education scholar E. D. Hirsch has shown: A broad, content-rich curriculum reduces the achievement gap between the middle class and the poor.

Common Core suggests that, as a student progresses through the grades, the nonfiction proportion of materials should increase until, by the end of high school, it represents 70 percent of total reading in all classes. The standards explicitly warn that English teachers “are not required to devote 70 percent of reading to informational texts.”

These “informational texts” include foundational documents of American history — the Gettysburg Address, Common Sense, and works of thought leaders like Emerson and Thoreau. Given the evidence that most American students cannot identify the decade in which the Civil War occurred, one would think that enhancing student knowledge of our nation’s rich history would be welcome.

But facts be damned when there are standards to undermine! Headlines blare: “Common Core Nonfiction Reading Standards Mark the End of Literature.” Reporters lament that To Kill a Mockingbird is being stripped from the “U.S. school curriculum.” Never mind that there is no “U.S. school curriculum” from which beloved literary classics are to be dropped — or that To Kill a Mockingbird actually appears on the list of “exemplar” texts supported by the standards.

Perhaps the most curious Common Core criticism comes on the math side, with opponents arguing that the standards are squishy, progressive, and lacking in rigorous content. While Common Core math standards do articulate ten math “practices,” mathematical content dominates the K–12 expectations. Unlike many of the replaced state standards, Common Core demands “automaticity” (memorization-based familiarity) with basic math facts, mastery of standard algorithms, and understanding of critical arithmetic. These essential math skills are not only required but given high priority, particularly in the early grades. The math standards focus in depth on fewer topics, and ones that coherently build on one another over time.

The Common Core standards are not a panacea; much depends on the curricula that states and districts select to implement them. Some critics suggest that we are enshrining mediocre standards for eternity. But the Common Core standards are a floor, not a ceiling. Students can still be accelerated and offered supplemental learning, the standards can be improved over time, and states are free to devise something better.

Common Core offers American students the opportunity for a far more rigorous, content-rich, cohesive K–12 education than most of them have had. Conservatives used to be in favor of holding students to high standards and an academic curriculum based on great works of Western civilization and the American republic. Aren’t they still?

-Kathleen Porter-Magee and Sol Stern

Kathleen Porter-Magee is the Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Sol Stern is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.

This blog entry first appeared in the National Review Online.

To briefly review, I admonished Ravitch for repeating inaccurate facts regarding my team’s school voucher evaluations, relying on secondary sources for her information, and mischaracterizing our scientific research methodologies, which she apparently does not understand.  Kevin Welner of the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) has been especially forceful in objecting to my post in text posted on Ravitch’s blog.  Here I respond to his charges.

First, Welner argues that I owe Ravitch and NEPC an apology because the initial version of our Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) educational attainment study was the source of one of Ravitch’s factual errors, and our error was merely repeated by the person NEPC hired to review our study.  Since Ravitch used that review to source her claim, she (and NEPC) are not responsible for the mistake.

Specifically, we are discussing the claim that 75% of the students who started in the voucher program in 9^th grade were not in the program four years later.  That was an error in the initial draft of our report which Welner points out was quickly corrected to 56% in a second and final version of the report identified as “Updated and Corrected”.  Welner claims that the initial version, with the incorrect figure, was the one sent to their reviewer of our study, Casey Cobb, and that “Nobody had thought to go back and see whether Wolf or his colleagues had changed important numbers in the SCDP report.”

Welner is obviously mistaken on that last point.  Someone did think to go back and access the updated report.  Casey Cobb did.  We know this because, after mentioning the incorrect 75% figure in his executive summary and page 2 of his review, on page 4 Cobb writes:

“Notably, more than half the students (56%) in the MPCP 9^th grade sample were not in the MPCP four years later.”

Cobb could only have gotten the correct, 56%, figure from the updated and corrected report, which means that he knew that the 75% figure was outdated and incorrect but he mentioned that number as well, even though it clearly conflicted with the 56% figure.  People make mistakes.  We made a mistake in the form of the initial 75% program attrition figure.  Welner made a mistake in claiming with certainty that “Nobody had thought to go back and see” whether our report had been updated.  Cobb made a mistake in failing to delete the incorrect program attrition figure from his review after he had taken the correct 56% figure from the “Updated and Corrected” version of our report.  And Welner and his colleagues made a further mistake in not catching the inconsistency between the 75% and 56% figures in Cobb’s review, before they published and publicized it.  The big question is whether people correct their mistakes after they recognize them.  We did because that’s what scholars do.  I expect that the NEPC will issue an “Updated and Corrected” version of Cobb’s review promptly.

While Casey Cobb is correcting his review of our report, he should also revise his charge on page 4 that, “Curiously, it [meaning the report] fails to state how many program-switchers there were, when they switched and in which direction, and how many graduated.”  True, we did not provide those details in the report, but we referred readers to yet another publication of ours that does.  It is even called “Going Public:  Who Leaves a Large, Longstanding, and Widely Available Urban Voucher Program?” It was published in the prestigious American Educational Research Journal, the flagship journal of the American Education Research Association, more than a year ago.  Its mere existence definitively refutes Diane Ravitch’s charge that “Nobody knows” what happened to the students in our study who left the voucher program.  Not only do we know, we published an entire article about it that she and her colleagues really should read.

In a sense, the dust-up over the “75% versus 56%” number and the false charge that nobody knows what happened to students who left the MPCP during our study was both avoidable and immaterial.  Obviously it could have been avoided if we hadn’t initially reported the incorrect percentage of attriters.  It also could have been avoided if Diane Ravitch had actually read our updated report or, better yet, our peer-reviewed journal article, before issuing the charge in her March 29 blog post.  Instead, it is obvious that she relied solely on Cobb’s review and never read our report before criticizing it.  My original point was that this is not something that serious scholars do.

The difference between the 75% and 56% figure is largely immaterial because our “intention-to-treat” analysis exclusively measures the effect of starting high school in the voucher program on future levels of educational attainment regardless of how long you stayed in the program.  Okay, let’s all say this together, “Program attrition has no effect on the internal validity of intention-to-treat analyses of program effects.”  None.  Period.  Anyone who doesn’t accept that doesn’t understand the basics of program evaluation and shouldn’t be discussing studies that employ such scientific methodologies.

So, these are the facts:  First, 56%, and not 75%, of MPCP 9^th graders left the program before the end of 12^th grade.  Even in the face of substantial program attrition, students who were in the MPCP in 9^th grade in 2006 graduated from high school, enrolled in college, and persisted in college at rates higher than similar students in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).  Third, at the end of the study, students who started the study in the MPCP had higher reading scores than comparable MPS students.  Fourth, the researchers carefully tracked the students who left the Milwaukee voucher program and even published an article in the top education journal about it.  Unfortunately, I worry that some people are determined to avoid acknowledging these facts.

-Patrick Wolf

Ravitch spends much of her blog post attacking my motives and credibility as an evaluator of school choice programs.  I am delighted when commentators such as Ravitch spend their time and energy attacking me as a person because that demonstrates that they don’t have the ability to critique the methodological rigor and quality of my actual research.  For the most part, the best that Diane Ravitch can do is call me names.  Fine.  Doesn’t bother me.  I keep winning the competitions to perform the most important private school choice evaluations around the country, and regularly publish my results in the very best scientific peer-reviewed policy journals (see here, here, and here), Ravitch’s ad hominem attacks notwithstanding.

But Ravitch does spend at least a few paragraphs discussing my team’s research findings regarding the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, and that part of her blog post is riddled with factual and methodological errors.  To be fair, Diane Ravitch is not a social scientist.  She has never performed a statistical evaluation of anything, so perhaps it is not surprising that she doesn’t understand the social science that she nevertheless attacks.  She is an education historian, however, and historians are supposed to care about facts — supposed to, at least.

Ravitch dismisses the findings from my DC and Milwaukee voucher evaluations that these programs increased the educational attainment of students in the form of higher rates of high school graduation, college enrollment, and persistence in college.  She ignores the finding that the DC program boosted the high school graduation rate for students offered a DC Opportunity Scholarship by 12 percentage points (and by 21 if they used one) perhaps because that is an inconvenient truth that she wishes were not so.  Instead she claims that the similar Milwaukee finding of higher educational attainment from vouchers is questionable because “75% of the students who started in a voucher school left before graduation.”  For support, she cites a review of our study performed by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC).

Now, professional historians cite original sources to make their claims, but, remember, we are talking about Diane Ravitch here.  Is the NEPC claim credible?  Let’s examine the original sources.  From page 16 of our report, “the majority of students (approximately 56 percent) who were enrolled in 9^th grade in MPCP were not enrolled there by the time they reached 12^th grade.”  Also, from page 163 of our article published in the prestigious scientific Journal of Policy Studies, “less than half (44 percent) of the original MPCP panelists examined were enrolled in a voucher school by the time they reached 12^th grade.”  I realize that Ravitch is no statistician but even she should know that 56 percent is not 75 percent and 44 percent is not 25 percent.  It doesn’t excuse Ravitch that the factual error was first promulgated by NEPC.   She should know better than to trust the accuracy of their “reviews” when primary source material clearly contradicts them.

Ravitch compounds her major factual error with a methodological one.  She says, “So of the 25% who persisted, the graduation rate was higher than the Milwaukee public schools.  But what about the 75% who dropped out and/or returned to MPS?  No one knows.”  Every element of that statement is wrong.  Our primary results regarding the higher attainment of the Milwaukee voucher students are not drawn from the students who remained in private schools for all four years.  Our conclusions are based on the graduation rate for all students in the choice program who were in 9^th grade in the fall of 2006, regardless of whether or not they left the program prior to graduation.  Scientific evaluators will recognize this approach as an “intention-to-treat” analysis which corrects for selective attrition from a program over time.  We clearly explain and justify our approach in the actual report and our peer-reviewed publication, neither of which Ravitch appears to have actually read.

Ravitch claims that “No one knows” what happened to the students who left the choice program during high school.  This is another falsehood.  We were able to track all of the students in our study into college (or not) via the National Clearinghouse of College Enrollments, regardless of whether they switched schools or school sectors during high school.  Regarding high school graduation, for the voucher students who switched to MPS later in high school, we know exactly what happened to them, because we had access to MPS enrollment and graduation data.  If they failed to graduate from high school, that fact pulled down the average graduation rate for the voucher program.  If they did graduate, that improved the average graduation rate for the voucher program.  The effect of being a 9^th grader in the MPCP in 2006 was to increase your likelihood of graduating high school, enrolling in college, and persisting in college, regardless of where you were schooled after 9^th grade.  Professional evaluators will recognize that ours is a rigorous and highly conservative estimate of the educational attainment benefits of the MPCP.

Finally, Ravitch states “Not even Wolf’s evaluations have shown any test score advantage for students who get vouchers, whether in DC or Milwaukee.”  Is she right?  The executive summary of the final report in our longitudinal achievement study of the Milwaukee voucher program states:  “The primary finding that emerges from these analyses is that, for the 2010-11 school year, the students in the MPCP sample exhibit larger growth from the base year of 2006 in reading achievement than the matched MPS sample.” Regarding the achievement impacts of the DC program, Ravitch quotes my own words that there was no conclusive evidence that the DC voucher program increased student achievement.  That achievement finding was in contrast to attainment, which clearly improved as a result of the program.  The uncertainty surrounding the achievement effects of the DC voucher program is because we set the high standard of 95% confidence to judge a voucher benefit as “statistically significant”, and we could only be 94% confident that the final-year reading gains from the DC program were statistically significant.

Diane Ravitch’s claim that school voucher programs have failed is based on ignoring much of the scientific evidence of their success, misreporting the facts regarding the studies that she does discuss, and the 1 percent difference between 95% confidence and 94% confidence.  It takes a lot of doing for a person to mislead so many about so much, but apparently Diane Ravitch is up to the job.

-Patrick Wolf

I always viewed this as an experiment representing the best guesses of President George Bush and the U.S. Congress about how to improve national educational performance.  While there was strong bipartisan support, NCLB was tempered as always by the conflicting political forces of interested parties, including the one anachronism about teacher quality that was based on inputs rather than outputs.

As with any one thousand page guess, I also thought the idea of revisiting the law in 2007, the date designated for its re-authorization, was an important part of the underlying wisdom of the act.   Without researching it, I suspect that other Congressional acts have missed their re-authorization date by wider margins.  But given the importance of this act to the hopes, aspirations, and operations of our schools, I am willing to assert that this ranks among the most consequential dropped balls of Congress.

Faced with this, Secretary Duncan did more than just rank historic Congressional missed deadlines.  He established a waiver process that effectively allowed two-thirds of the states to deviate from various requirements of the law – most prominently the requirement that all students be proficient in math and reading by the end of this year.

While waiting to see where this new phase of accountability takes us, I think it is useful to return to the task of 2007 and to judge what might or might not usefully change in NCLB.

NCLB has a fairly simple structure:  states were required to develop learning standards along with consistent assessments of student accomplishment of these standards; schools were required to be on a glide path to get all of their students up to a state-defined proficiency level by 2013; and the federal government established a series of corrective actions – including provision of supplemental services, broad student choice, and reconstitution – that were required of individual schools after continual deviation from this glide path.

NCLB has been a polarizing policy – in large part pitting school personnel against a coalition of civil rights groups, reformers, and, to a large extent, parents.  While it is difficult to assess definitively the impact of NCLB, the best evidence suggests that it has had positive impacts on student performance as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress; it has narrowed some of the wide achievement gaps by race and ethnicity; and it has generally led to much more attention to the importance of student performance.  But, on the other side, it has not brought all students anywhere close to being proficient; it may have narrowed instruction and the curriculum in general; it may have led to triaging of students and schools close to the cutoff while neglecting the rest of the distribution.

In my view, test-based accountability is both unlikely to go away and shouldn’t go away, regardless of the objections currently expressed by school personnel.   Yet, as one who has studied many aspects of NCLB, I also believe that it has serious structural flaws (making its overall beneficial effect on achievement even more remarkable).    Thus, I want to return to the task of 2007.

I can succinctly state what I think needs to change.  First, the structure is backwards.  NCLB has individual states determine “what” is to be accomplished and has the federal government determine “how” that should be done if schools fail to meet these goals.  This allocation of responsibilities should in my opinion be reversed.  Our achievement  goals should be a national decision, not an individual state decision.  The U.S. is really a single labor market that has common demands for skills of the population.  On the other hand, the states (and districts) should be in charge of deciding how we achieve those goals – instead of trying to determine that from Washington.  (The one caveat is having the federal government set goals is likely to be highly politicized, and it is important to find a way of insulating this from pure politics).

Second, the tests need to be improved so that they do not stop at the most basic levels.  Third, accountability should include measures of learning growth across the entire spectrum and not be restricted to the bottom rung of performance.  Fourth, we should retain the objective outcome focus for student performance.  Fifth, subgroup disaggregation should be central, because this has led to some significant equity gains.

We have actually moved reasonably close to these changes in some dimensions, partly because of the standards and testing associated with the common core and partly because of the waiver process.  If the tests being developed can support both enhanced accountability and measures of learning growth, we have the infrastructure in place for change.  The waivers have also brought states into deciding how best to meet goals, albeit with a still excessive involvement of the federal government in process issues and in the “how” of education.

Congress should, in my opinion, move on the full agenda – rationalizing and solidifying the patchwork waiver process and reinforcing the need to improve our schools.   Congress has shied away from making politically difficult educational decisions – but continuing on this course threatens long term damage to our economy and our nation.

-Eric Hanushek

An earlier version of this discussion appeared on the “Bridging Differences” blog of Education Week, along with a response by Deborah Meier.

Call it welfare for the rich. Why? Wealthy businesses and individuals are the folks who get the tax credits for putting up the cash to pay the tuition. Furthermore, the amount of money for tuition made available for tuition by private scholarship organizations often does not actually cover the full cost of attending a private school. Poor families can’t make up the difference. Guess who can.

Fortunately, the reality is almost exactly the opposite. Donors are not benefiting financially at the expense of the poor or anyone. And while it is true that tax-credit scholarships do not always cover the full cost of tuition at private schools, thanks to low-cost options and needs-based tuition breaks, low-income families are the primary beneficiaries of STC programs.

STC Donors Do Not Benefit Financially

It is odd to claim that “wealthy businesses” are financially benefiting by receiving a tax credit for their donations. Even a 100% tax credit means that they are simply no worse off than before. A corporation with a $10,000 tax liability that made a $10,000 donation to a scholarship organization would then owe no state taxes but they would still have $10,000 less than they did before. Whether the $10,000 went to the government or a non-profit is irrelevant to their bottom line.

Moreover, Strauss fails to mention that most state STC programs do not grant 100% credits. In fact, only four of the fourteen STC programs do. The other credits range from 50% to 90%. In these states, corporations would be better off financially if they merely paid their taxes.

STC Programs Benefit Low-Income Students

It is telling that Strauss provides only one example to support her claim that rich people benefit from the scholarships instead of the poor: “[Pennsylvania families] eligible to receive money to pay private tuition can earn more than $72,000…”

The key words in that sentence are “can earn.” The relevant question is how much do the families of scholarship recipients actually earn.  The nonpartisan Pennsylvania Legislative Budget and Finance Committee reported in 2010 that the average scholarship recipient’s family earned only $29,000 annually, less than half what the program allowed at the time.

The available evidence shows that Pennsylvania is not unique. Scholarship recipients in Florida must earn less than 185% of the federal poverty line, which is the income threshold for the federal government’s free and reduced lunch program. Nevertheless, the average annual household income of Floridian scholarship recipients is only $24,250, just 12.3% above the federal poverty line. And though Arizona’s corporate STC program has no means-testing requirement, a 2011 study found that more than two-thirds of scholarship recipients earned less than 185% of the federal poverty line.

There is clear evidence that students benefit by participating in educational choice programs. Numerous randomized-controlled studies have demonstrated that students in choice programs exhibit higher academic performance while additional studies have found higher graduation rates, increased college enrollment, and increased civic-mindedness.

Conclusion

It should be noted that in addition to Strauss’ central arguments, her broadside contained numerous significant inaccuracies. Contrary to Strauss’ assertions, scholarship tax credit programs are not the same as vouchers. They differ greatly in terms of their funding mechanisms and administration. Moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that STC programs use private money not public money. Every state supreme court to address the matter has agreed. Finally, well-designed STC programs such as those in Arizona, Florida, and Pennsylvania actually save states money by decreasing state expenditures more than they decrease state tax revenue.

Under the status quo, wealthy families already have school choice while low-income families do not. Wealthy families can afford to live in districts with high-performing government schools or to send their children to private schools. By contrast, low-income families generally only have one choice: the local assigned government school.

The good news is that scholarship tax credit programs work as intended. As the Washington Post editorial board understands, STC programs expand educational opportunities for low-income families, empowering them to meet the individual needs of their children.

- Jason Bedrick

Jason Bedrick is Visiting Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. He earned his Master’s in Public Policy, with a focus in education policy, from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His thesis, “Choosing to Learn,” assessed the scholarship tax credit programs operating in eight states including their impact of student performance, fiscal impact, program design, and popularity.

This blog entry was written for the Cato @ Liberty blog.

In this video, Eric Smith, Tom Luna, Ulrich Boser and Rick Hess discuss the report card at a forum hosted by the Fordham Institute and moderated by Mike Petrilli.

— Education Next

I won’t forget the book’s emotional grip, but equally influential to my intellectual development was the policy and political back story that explained how the boys’ toxic surroundings came to be.

Nearly two decades later, I’m still chastened by the book’s central lesson: A government policy developed by mostly benevolent leaders hoping to improve the lives of the disadvantaged—in this case, by razing old, low-income, ostensibly decaying neighborhoods in favor of gigantic public-housing skyscrapers—did incalculable harm to those it was designed to help.

This has been on my mind in recent weeks, as the national school-closure conversation has flared. Much of that conversation is familiar, but one assertion made by critics, namely that school closures destabilize entire neighborhoods, raises a question that hasn’t been discussed nearly enough. And though some might wave it away as irrelevant or worse, the lessons of the Kotlowitz book force me to take it seriously:

Can a bad school be good for a neighborhood?

Might there be compelling civic or social reasons for keeping open persistently failing or unsafe inner-city schools?

We know there are reasons to close them. First, school turnarounds seldom work (contra the recent statement from AFT president Randi Weingarten), and closures stop us from continuing to send kids to chronically underperforming schools. (The stickiness of failure is even true in the charter sector.)

Second, closures are a part of a continuous-improvement process known as “portfolio management.” Couple closures with new school launches and replications or expansions and you can move the quality curve to the right. This is the heart of my book, The Urban School System of the Future.

(There was a sophisticated discussion of this matter at the recent Bellwether book event. Kaya Henderson, John White, and Mike Casserly did a nice job of explaining the various forces involved. Emma Brown from the Post captured some the back and forth here.)

Third, as explained by Checker Finn, financial considerations make some closures unavoidable—and the likeliest targets are the district’s lowest performers, both because they’re not serving kids well and because they’ve typically seen their enrollments reduced by, among other things, students leaving in search of better educational options.

The anti-closure camp generally counters with a trio of time-worn and ultimately unpersuasive assertions.

• Their “fix-it-don’t-close-it” case is overwhelmed by empirical evidence.

• Their “closures-are-an-anti-union-strategy” argument can’t explain why reformers are also willing to close non-unionized, low-performing charter schools.

• Their “closures-are-a-civil-rights-violation” argument causes most to reply, “It’s a far greater violation to force low-income African American and Latino children to remain in failing, unsafe schools.”

Hence the camp that favors judicious but firm use of school closures increasingly carries the day.

Yet another argument has been waiting to be made, however—one that stokes the communitarian tendencies of my brand of conservatism. It starts with awareness that good schools are a powerful asset for troubled neighborhoods. Indeed, I’ve argued in many places that the closure of excellent inner-city Catholic schools is terrible for such communities. I’ve made the case that high-performing, high-poverty schools can provide safety, stability, and hope to at-risk kids and their families and that these features have immeasurable value in distressed neighborhoods beset by myriad challenges.

But perhaps my view has been too narrow; maybe I’ve put too much weight on the “high-performing” part. Maybe all urban public schools—perhaps even all schools—deserve a greater degree of deference because of characteristics associated with their “local-ness.”

For example, the school could be the major employer of adults in the area.

Even if educationally dysfunctional, the school likely has its share of caring, educated adults who serve as role models and mentors for needy children.

The school may serve as the community hub for social services or civic activities.

Maybe its athletic teams still serve as a source of community pride.

It could be the neighborhood’s last connection to a happier past. Perhaps this school was once the gem of the school system. It might have been the city’s first desegregated school. Maybe, pre-Brown, though segregated, it succeeded academically in breathtaking fashion. Perhaps it’s named after a revered civil-rights leader.

It might have been among the first employers to practice nondiscrimination, paving a pathway to the middle class for countless minority families.

Maybe the neighborhood sees that school as the last thing that is actually theirs. Other families moved away. Businesses shut down. Churches closed their doors. But their school remains.

It might be the case, then, that in these and other ways, the school—notwithstanding its persistent low academic achievement—acts as an important strand in the invisible web of social connectivity that helps to hold a community together despite all the malign forces trying to pull it apart.

Those who cleared Chicago’s “slums” to make way for new high-rise public-housing towers didn’t realize that they were severing intricate, generations-old social bonds. This loss of connection, when combined with the ills of concentrated poverty and the inherent flaws of the new building complexes, turned these behemoths into modern-day Trojan Horses: marvelous to behold from the outside (at least when they were new) but with danger lurking inside.

Environmental parallels are numerous: misbegotten projects that cleared eyesore swamps and walls of mangroves to make way for highways, waterfront condos, and more. We found out too late that these “messy” wetlands actually served as massive water filters, flood preventers, wildlife protectors, fish incubators, and much more. Profound environmental degradation was the consequence of well-intentioned, if naïve, attempts at progress.

To be sure, there are enormous differences between these examples and thoughtful, surgical school-closure strategies. Unlike quiet wetlands, failing, dangerous schools do real harm and, if their students move into higher-performing and safer schools, their replacements bear no resemblance to Cabrini-Green.

My point is merely that those pursuing school-closure strategies should be mindful that every school, even the lowest-performing, is woven into the fabric of its neighborhood—and tugging on that thread affects the entire cloth.

That doesn’t mean the scale tips to the “no closures” side. I remain a committed proponent of smart school-replacement strategies and portfolio management.

But it does mean that reformers should acknowledge both sides of the scale and recognize that, when the case for closure prevails, the arguments on the other side haven’t been eliminated; they’ve just been outweighed in a particular case.

That approach, I believe, is the responsible way to go about policymaking generally. And in this case, its effect on policy implementation in cities across the nation would matter: we’d see greater prudence in the process of deliberation, improved communication to stakeholders, and more thoughtful and respectful execution of an undesirable but ultimately necessary decision.

—Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog

That’s the miles of daylight between the platitudes about the new standards’ “dramatic,” “transformational” nature and the distressing reality of implementation.

The report’s upside is that we now know more about state-level planning. The downside is that we know nothing more about the quality of that planning—and this is the whole ball of wax.

This might sound like the classic unfair criticism of a research project—point out what you wanted a study to answer and then shame the authors for looking into something else.

I’m succumbing to this temptation because I’m troubled by all of the Common Core cheerleading going on. Apart from a still relatively small band criticizing the standards for stealing fiction and states’ rights, most reformers contend that Common Core is just shy of avert-your-eyes miraculous.

Tom Loveless had the temerity to wonder if the standards would improve achievement, and the response from their incredulous supporters was, said Loveless, “like putting my hand in a hornet’s nest.”

We’ve made the necessary oblations to Common Core, and now it’s time to get serious about the seriousness of implementation. That means no longer marveling at the shiny hubcaps and supple leather interior or, worse, just taking the salesman’s word for it, but opening up the hood and poking around.

It’s this mindset that I bring to the Education First–Editorial Projects in Education study on the results of a Common Core survey. It asked state leaders about implementation in areas like professional development and aligned instructional materials.

The high-level headline is that states are better off than they were last year and things are generally looking pretty good.

For example, 42 states report either having plans or building plans to revise their teacher-evaluation systems to comport with the expectations of Common Core. Thirty states claim to have “fully developed” plans to change their instructional materials to align with the new standards.

Moreover, if you just glance at the report’s Exhibit 1, you’ll see most boxes filled with “Completed.”

A reasonable person would walk away thinking that implementation is going swimmingly.

But things aren’t so rosy.

States do have “plans” in lots of areas; the issue, though, is what these plans amount to.

For example, even the best state departments of education were fretting about the massive challenges associated with overhauling educator evaluation systems before Common Core implementation was front and center. Student achievement data for untested grades and subjects and inter-rater reliability of observations were keeping smart folks up at night when state content standards, teacher professional standards, and assessments were static.

With changes afoot in all of these areas, teacher-evaluation reform has gotten exponentially more difficult. Sure, any SEA can put some ideas on paper and call it a “plan.”

But what if the survey had asked something like, “Are you confident that, when Common Core is fully implemented in 2014–15, your educator evaluation systems will accurately differentiate among educators based on their levels of effectiveness, provide meaningful feedback for teachers, and enable administrators and policymakers to make decisions related to preparation, certification, hiring, tenure, and compensation?”

There is no way that 42 states could, with clear consciences, answer, “Yes.” (Take a look at this recent article: Florida’s state board is raising red flags, and the department of education is creating a “Plan B.”)

The same applies to the optimistic self-reporting about professional development. You should dig into your state’s Common Core PD plan. Be prepared for it to look a lot like the SEA’s current PD plans: same state office, same providers, same higher-ed institutions, same quality monitoring, same number of hours required, etc.

Had the survey, instead, asked about states’ confidence that their plans would enable teachers to prepare students for successful acquisition of the skills and information required by the new standards, then the results would’ve been far less sanguine.

I’ll have much more to say about instructional materials in the weeks to come, but for the time being, I’ll leave it at this: Comparing the navigability of the CC-aligned resources marketplace to the Wild West would be an insult to the Wild West. You might want to check your state’s “fully developed” align resources plan to see how it intends to pilot these rocks.

Finally, the survey didn’t ask states about the area that concerns me most: whether there are any activities underway to improve teacher preparation programs so their graduates are ready for the demands of Common Core. As far as I can tell, most states haven’t even begun working in this area.

So about those vaunted “plans”…

The Prussian General Helmuth von Moltke famously wrote, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” Heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis said, “Everyone’s got a plan until he gets hit.” In other words, there’s a world of difference between what you put on paper and what actually carries you to victory.

When it comes to Common Core implementation, too much of the ed reform world is still acting like it’s at the ceremonial, bragging-as-currency, pre-fight weigh-in.

But the bell has rung. It’s go time.

Unless we stop hyping the crowd and flexing for the cameras and get down to the real business at hand, a whole lot of states, come 2014, are going to find themselves on the mat.

—Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institution’s Common Core Watch blog

As reviewed by Michael McShane

For years, I’ve had a kind of morbid curiosity about conspiracy theories. Maybe that’s because Wikipedia has granted such easy access to descriptions of them. Or maybe it’s because I enjoy watching Mythbusters so much. Perhaps there is some part of me that wants to believe that there is more to the world than meets the eye.

In education policy circles, the “charter schools are a plan by ultra-conservatives to privatize the public school system” is a conspiracy theory that is quite popular. It’s no Chupacabra, but prominent education commentators like Diane Ravitch have publicized such sentiments in some form or fashion for several years now.

Ember Reichgott Junge’s book Zero Chance of Passage: The Pioneering Charter School Story, like Jaime and Adam of Mythbusters, puts that theory to rest. Sorry folks, but the idea of charter schools came from educators and civic leaders of all stripes.

Reichgott Junge, an 18-year Democrat-Farm-Labor (DFL) representative in the Minnesota State Legislature, was the author of America’s first charter school bill. Inspired by a lecture from Albert Shanker, the longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers (whom Reichgott Junge heard describe charter schools as “the best answer so far” to the ills of the American education system) she worked with civic leaders and fellow representatives to draft and implement a bill granting greater autonomy for a subset of the North Star state’s schools.

After Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas at the time, saw what was going on and called charter schools a “New Democrat Idea,” they were off and running. Reichgott Junge’s work has been replicated in states all across the country in a movement that now enrolls more than 2 million students in over 5,600 schools all across America.

For those interested in the politics of charter schools, Reichgott Junge’s description of her fraught relationship with her state’s teachers unions was fascinating. She was and is an unapologetic liberal, but that in no way stopped the local, state, and national wings of teachers unions from attempting to block her plans and opposing her candidacy, first at the state level in 1992, and later in her quest for a congressional seat in 2006.

Reichgott Junge marshals private correspondences, flyers and mail pieces, and conversations with union lobbyists to demonstrate that teachers unions opposed charter schools–and the non-unionized teachers that they could employ–the moment the schools started to become a real threat to the unions’ power. In fact, in a letter she quotes from Shanker to Ted Kolderie, a fellow architect of the charter bill, Shanker complained that “the architects of the bill had [not] worked out the collective bargaining issues with the teachers unions” which he said was “certainly not an approach designed to make friends” (pg. 167-68).  The local chapter of the AFT was even more direct, telling her that they would not support any bill that allowed charter schools to “contract out teaching services to agencies or groups which are not part of the teachers’ bargaining unit” (pg. 114).

Watching a lifetime DFL’er respond to such obstructionism offers an interesting perspective on the cleavages in the generally center-left, Democratic Leadership Council-driven coalition that built support around charter schools.  For a long time, Reichgott Junge genuinely believed that she would be able to get unions on her side and she was shocked each time unions devised a new tactic to oppose the expansion of charter schools.

A grain of salt is called for when reading the account of a highly politicized event through the lens of one of the participants. For all of the upsides of an insider account—the whispered conversations, the exact wording of communiques between key parties, the personal backstories—there is the risk that we are getting a particular slant on the story. For the vast majority of the account, Ms. Reichgott Junge avoids such problems, but it was clear in several parts of the book that she was (and is) a politician.

One such example is an incongruous tirade against school vouchers. Reichgott Junge includes a chapter about two thirds of the way through the book explaining why charter schools are not “vouchers lite.”  This chapter includes the phrase “Chartering gives incentive to strengthen our public schools. Private school vouchers give incentive to abandon them” (pg. 200). For someone who spent so much time excoriating her opponents for giving short shrift to the complexities of the arguments that she was making for charter schools, I was quite surprised to see such a glib denunciation of vouchers. It read like a politician trying to score points.

Moreover, her criticisms of voucher programs are often off the mark. Her claim that, “private schools neither abide by state regulations nor are required to commit to performance standards or outcomes” (pg. 201) is not true. The three largest non-special needs school voucher programs (Milwaukee, Indiana, and Louisiana) all require participating schools to take the same standardized tests as the public schools.

Similarly, when she says that charter schools are more “inclusive” because private school tuition is higher than most voucher amounts and “families receiving vouchers must still raise the remainder of the tuition” (pg. 202) she incorrectly characterizes almost every voucher program in America. Only the Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Ohio EdChoice scholarships require parents to meet the difference between the voucher amount and tuition, and that only applies to families with incomes more than 200% higher than the federal poverty line.

This foray into voucher-bashing seriously detracts from what otherwise was an informative and engaging read.  Those interested in the origins of charter schooling would be well served to read it.

Michael McShane is a research fellow at AEI and co-author of President Obama and Education Reform: The Personal and the Political.

Born to Rise: A Story of Children and Teachers Reaching Their Highest Potential
by Deborah Kenny
Harper, 2012, $25.99; 256 pages.

Mission Possible: How the Secrets of the Success Academies Can Work in Any School
by Eva Moskowitz and Arin Lavinia
Jossey-Bass, 2012, $27.95; 176 pages.

As reviewed by David Steiner

On page 87 of Mission Possible, the account by Eva Moskowitz and Arin Lavinia of the work of their charter schools, the reader is invited to watch a video of a book discussion in 1st grade. A detour to the included DVD is instructive: in this Harlem-based, lottery-selected public charter school, we see a 1st-grade classroom that challenges any in the country for the intellectual engagement of its students without any reliance on the regimented, direct instruction that the clichéd objections imagine dominate all successful charter schools. Faced with such examples, and the academic record of Moskowitz’s Success Academies, one’s first reaction should simply be applause. Having served (briefly) as a board member for one of the Success Academies, I know that such video clips are not cherry-picked: teachers in every classroom in every Academy school are expected to create such spaces of intense and demanding thinking and learning.

A different but equally positive reaction is evoked by Deborah Kenny’s intensely personal account of the grit, resolve, and courage that led her to take the opportunity offered by the charter school movement and create a model school that her students were immensely lucky to attend. Her passion for bringing out the best in all who worked with her, her disarming throwaways (“it was the first five minutes of our first day, and already I’d made a mistake”), and her candid directness about necessary conditions for her work (“it is impossible to nurture a positive culture without the right to hire and fire at will”) make this an inspiring story.

Sharing boundless drive and self-discipline, and an equal commitment to proving that a child’s past is not her or his predetermined destination, Moskowitz and Kenny take justified pride in being mission-driven realists who, along with their handpicked colleagues, have radically recast the life chances of their students. But they have produced quite different books. Kenny’s more personal memoir does not reach her charter school until late in the narrative, and even then, the focus is squarely on forging a human culture, building a team whose members will go to the wall for their students, and for each other. For her, the disaster of American education is summed up by the line “we got here by disrespecting teachers.”

What Kenny means by respect is creating a culture of accountability for children’s learning that “enables freedom” and a freedom that “unleashes teacher passion.” Kenny explicitly eschews the cookbook vision of school reform: “Schools,” she writes, “are not products to be designed and replicated.” She goes on: “Every school in America has access to the same pedagogical ideas and methods we use. The problem is not lack of information but a lack of motivation engendered by the low accountability/low empowerment culture of our public schools.” Many of her sources of inspiration—Maxime Greene, Peter Drucker, Dennis Littky—are not your typical charter-school heroes. What connects them is not a method but a conviction that successful outcomes are all about people learning together, creating spaces of continual mutual feedback, encouragement, and empowerment. Kenny’s book is not and does not purport to be a how-to manual; it is a moving work about the power of well-placed determination matched to a political opportunity: the freedom through accountability that is the charter school.

Moskowitz and Lavinia set themselves a different task. Theirs is a self-proclaimed “how-to book.” As a result, the bar is in some sense higher: we expect to learn what the secrets are and how they can work. The answers in the book will enlighten readers who have heard about charter schools on the news but want to learn more. Moskowitz and Lavinia write at a relatively high level about effective techniques like the push to challenge students with the most rigorous and demanding material and instruction; the immediacy and constancy of granular feedback; the sharing of best practices; the focus on literacy instruction; the long school day and school year, including summer professional development for teachers; the constant coaching; and the agonizing care taken to choose each teacher from a vast pool of applicants. Each of these practices is standard at high-performing charters including KIPP, Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First, to take just three networks of such schools with which I am somewhat familiar.

What well-read educators and policymakers will want to know, and will not find in this book, is how it is that in New York City, in multiple instances, Success Academies, despite its astonishingly rapid growth as a school network, gets stronger academic results than even the top next-rung charter schools. Is it just that Moskowitz pushes even harder with even more rigor with even better-selected teachers on the good practices that the other charters are engaged in? If there are true secrets to the results from Success Academies, they are not on show here. A useful contrast in this respect is Paul Bambrik-Santoyo’s recently published Leverage Leadership: A Practical Guide to Building Exceptional Schools. The tools he lays out may or may not produce results at the level of the Success Academies, but those tools are in plain sight, in such unsecret forms as his “Observation Tracker.”

At the same time, these books will do nothing to silence the critics. There are, for example, no statistics on the percentage of ELL students in the schools, no numbers on the privately raised funds the schools put to use, and only cursory gestures, in Kenny’s book, to the controversy over students counseled out of or removed from these charter-school classrooms and to their teacher turnover rate.

In the end, the real contribution of these books lies neither in their appeals to the heart nor in the practices they catalogue, but in the moral condemnation each makes of our current education system. When Moskowitz argues that her practices can be adopted in any school, we are immediately tempted to say, Come on! Nine-hour days? Weeks of summer professional development? Responsiveness 24/7 to breakdowns in the classrooms, be it from noisy pipes or a single underwhelming lesson? Show me a public school system that could get there anytime soon.

But then we have to ask, why not? We have seen urban public schools successfully adopt many charter school “secrets,” including the nine-hour school day (e.g., United for Success Academies in Oakland); a rigorous, standard curriculum (e.g., the more than a dozen Chicago public schools that offer the International Baccalaureate); merit pay (e.g., the Washington, D.C., system); and the regular use of teacher video in professional development and evaluation (e.g., the Houston system, which was using video in this way as early as the 1980s).

Why have the results of the best-performing charter schools consistently eluded public school systems? The answer, unsurprisingly, has to do with the structures underlying public K–12 education. To bring to regular public schools the full panoply of successful charter-school practices we would need to rethink our labor practices, funding structures, reluctance to embrace a rigorous and specific curriculum, and all the other bêtes noires the national education conversation avoids or reduces to partisan caricatures.

If, rightly, we want to reject a zero-sum trade-off between our values, if what we need are a highly attractive long-term profession for successful teachers, accountability for student results, and a far more rigorous curriculum driving far higher learning outcomes for our students, are we willing to rethink the system from scratch and put everything on the table? If we cannot build a public school system on heroic individuals (and we surely cannot), how do we remake our school systems to make the standards Kenny and Moskowitz demand, and have largely achieved, the baseline of our public education? These books do not tackle these hard questions.

But no matter. One is left with the indictment and an urgent call to action, captured on page 136 of Kenny’s book: “‘This school’s a blessing!,’ exclaimed Jasmine’s grandmother when she found out they’d won the lottery. We hadn’t even opened our doors yet.”

David Steiner is dean of the School of Education at Hunter College and former commissioner of education for the State of New York.

Now ‘til March is not much time to repair this important, ambitious, but still seriously troubled document. The drafters might be wise to take more.

We at the Fordham Institute have a long history of reviewing state science standards, and last week, we submitted our review, feedback, and comments on NGSS 2.0. A team of nine eminent scientists, mathematicians, and educators, prepared our analysis. You can find the full review here, including team members’ bios on page 8. (We previously reviewed Draft 1.0, and Dr. Paul R. Gross, the distinguished biologist who heads the team, also reviewed the National Research Council “framework” on which NGSS is based.)

If states are going to make rational decisions to replace their own science standards with NGSS, it’s only right to insist that NGSS be stronger—clearer, with better content, more rigorous, and more easily applied by teachers—than the standards that states have come up with on their own.

Fortunately for the NGSS team, that’s a low bar. In our most recent review of state science standards, published just a year ago, the Fordham team determined that the clarity, content, and rigor of most state K–12 science standards were mediocre to awful. The review assigned grades of C or worse to three quarters of the states. (Ten flunked altogether.)

Still and all, science education in America is no wasteland. Our reviewers also awarded “honors” grades (B or better) to a quarter of the states for their K–12 science standards. Tens of thousands of our ablest high school students every year earn high marks on Advanced Placement exams in physics, chemistry, and biology. On the 2011 TIMSS science assessment, among fifty-six jurisdictions participating at the eighth-grade level, just twelve produced stronger results than the United States. Remarkably, three of those were U.S. states! (Massachusetts surpassed Taiwan, Minnesota rivaled Finland, and North Carolina was strong, too.) And, of course, at the post-secondary level, the U.S. continues to house many of the world’s premier institutions of scientific research, and their scholars continue to win an impressive share of Nobel prizes and other key awards in scientific fields.

So while nobody should be satisfied with America’s overall performance in science education, it’s also important to keep in mind that, when one sets out to overhaul that system, it’s possible to make it even worse—particularly if, in our effort to raise standards for all students, we wind up lowering them for our best and brightest.

NGSS 2.0 falls into that trap. But that’s not all that’s wrong with it. If the drafters really want their final product to deserve widespread adoption, they still need to solve eight critical problems:

• In an effort to draft “fewer and clearer” standards to guide curriculum and instruction, NGSS 2.0 (like NGSS 1.0) omits quite a lot of essential content. Among the most egregious omissions are most of chemistry; thermodynamics; electrical circuits; physiology; minerals and rocks; the layered Earth; the essentials of biological chemistry and biochemical genetics; and at least the descriptive elements of developmental biology.

• As in version 1.0, some content that is never explicitly stated for the earlier grades seems to be taken for granted in the standards for later grades—where it won’t likely be found in students’ heads if the early-grade teachers aren’t prompted by the standards to teach it.

• Real science invariably blends content knowledge with core ideas, “crosscutting” concepts, and various practices, activities, or applications. Well and good. But NGSS 2.0 imposes so rigid a format on its standards that the recommended “practices” dominate them. The authors have forced practices on every expectation, even when they confuse more than clarify. For example, high school students are asked to “critically read scientific literature and produce scientific writing and/or oral presentations that communicate how DNA sequences determine the structure and function of proteins, which carry out most of the work of the cell.” Here as elsewhere, the understanding of critical content—which should be the ultimate goal of science education—becomes secondary to arbitrary and peripheral activities such as “critical reading” and “oral presentation.”

• Although the drafters made a commendable effort to integrate “engineering practices” into the science rather than treat engineering as a separate discipline, their insistence on finding such practices in connection with so many standards sometimes leads to inappropriate or banal exercises—and blurs the real meaning of “engineering.”

• The effort to insist on “assessment boundaries”—which narrow the focus of a standard by setting a ceiling on the content that can be assessed—in connection with every standard often leads to a “dumbing down” of what might actually be learned about a topic, seemingly in the interest of “one-size-fits-all” science that won’t be too challenging for students. Given that what gets tested is generally what gets taught, this will invariably limit how far and how deep advanced students (and their teachers) might go. (The vague assertion that the problem can be dealt with via “advanced” high school courses helps almost not at all.)

• A number of key scientific terms (e.g., “model” and “design”) are ill defined and/or inconsistently used.

• Even as the amplitude of new appendices attached to NGSS 2.0 adds welcome explanation of what is and isn’t present and why, it also produces a structure that most users, especially classroom instructors, will find complex and unwieldy. Will a fifth-grade teacher actually make her way to Appendix K to obtain additional (and valuable) information about science-math alignment and some pedagogically useful examples? Will the final version of NGSS omit some of the intervening appendices that have more to do with the philosophical, political, and epistemological leanings of project leaders than with anything of immediate value to real schools?

• Although the “alignment” of NGSS math with Common Core math is improved, the drafters seem to have consciously limited the amount of math-dependent science that students need to learn. This weakens the science and leads, once again, to a worrisome dumbing down, particularly in high school physics—which, as the reviewers remind us, “is inherently mathematical.” It must also be noted that Appendix K, valuable as it is in making the science-math alignment clear for grades K–5, is essentially AWOL from the middle and high school grades, where it is most needed.

Hope springs eternal. The NGSS team made some worthy improvements between drafts one and two (though they ignored most of our advice), and they have an opportunity—a final opportunity, it appears—to make further repairs.

We surely hope that they do so. While we did not review NGSS 2.0 with an eye toward grading it, we intend to evaluate the final version much as we did state standards—and provide states with a side-by-side that they may use in connection with adoption decisions. We sincerely hope that NGSS 3.0 fares well in such a comparison—but to get to that point, some major modifications will need to be made. And we urge the drafters to take as much time as necessary to accomplish that, for the present draft is problematic in more ways than it is strong.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Kathleen Porter-Magee

This blog entry first appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

• Availability to all children

• Tuition-free

• Non-discriminatory

• Preparation for success in career and higher education

But these principles can be operationalized in countless ways. How we bring them to life is up to us.

A good analogy is democracy. That too is a set of principles:

• Suffrage for all adults

• One person, one vote

• Secret ballots

• Fair counting of results

But it can take many forms. In the US, we elect a president and Congress separately. In the UK, the prime minister is part of their legislature.

Every four years, we’re reminded that Iowa has a caucus while New Hampshire has a primary. These, and more, are all legitimate forms of democracy.

The problem with urban public education is that we have been led to believe that there is but one realway to deliver public schooling: the district. In fact, many people believe that “the district” and “public education” are synonymous.

But they are not. The district is just one way to deliver public education.

We can do something different.

Some of you have probably believed that to have a meaningful, lasting influence on urban education, the district had to be your center of attention: The district is now and forever would be the dominant, default deliver system for urban schooling.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. We don’t have to be constrained by these arrangements. The decisions of our predecessors—those who created the district eons ago—need not determine our future.

We can protect the priceless principles of public education while ridding ourselves of this delivery system.

We can preserve the faith while reforming the church.

But it’s more than “can.”

I want you to see that it is “must.”

The traditional urban school district is broken.

It cannot be fixed.

It must be replaced.

The History

The urban district was created more than a century ago. It was the “Progressive Era,” during which many leaders wanted to bring to America’s cities “good government” led by the “best men.”

They had reservations about the waves of immigrants streaming into our cities. They were concerned about local, machine politics. They disliked the messiness of city government. And public schools were poorly organized.

The Progressives were enamored of a new player on the economic scene: the corporation. Corporations of that day were profitable, and they were tidy; they centralized authority; they could standardize the delivery of goods; and when they were vertically integrated, they were highly efficient.

The Progressive brought this organizational thinking to urban schooling.

They created a system that looked like a corporation. A school board would function like a board of directors. The superintendent would function as the CEO.

Its operations would be highly integrated. It would own and operate all public schools in the city. It would control all aspects of those schools—hiring, textbooks, curriculum, facilities, and so on. It would provide a highly standardized education in each of its schools, and a student would be assigned to one via her home address.

(As an aside, recall this history the next time one of today’s establishment-defender derisively calls a change-agent a “corporate reformer”…)

This history alone raises a number of important questions.

Should the “best men” of a hundred years ago control our future?

Do we prioritize centralization, efficiency, and standardization over diversity and choice?

These very issues caused brutal fights a century ago. Many low-income immigrant families felt disempowered by this corporate-like system. The historian David Tyack wrote that though the district is now taken for granted, this system came to be despite heated battles over power and values.

So there were deep cracks in the urban district’s foundation from the very start.

And then there were its results.

The Actions

In the early 1960s, we realized something was terribly wrong with the outcomes of our urban districts.President Johnson made fixing inner-city schools a focal point of the Great Society. “Poverty must not be a bar to learning,” he said, “and learning must offer an escape from poverty.”

The Coleman Report, commissioned in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, found that our urban schools were unable to compensate for out-of-school factors like parental education and poverty—meaning that a child’s demographics were predicting her future.

This of course was unacceptable. The purpose of public education is to take kids, no matter where they come from, and prepare them for a lifetime of success. Yes, it’s true that some public schools will have a tougher task than others. But that doesn’t absolve the system from its responsibility for delivering for kids.

And so for fifty years, we’ve tried to fix the urban district.

We’ve tried increasing funding. Since 1965, Title I has sent about $400 billion to low-income schools. The federal government has also created countless other programs—Head Start, Title II, after-school programs, and much more.

Local districts greatly increased their spending. State legislatures increased funding even more. States mandated even more spending for urban areas. Now many urban districts spend much more per student than the national average. In New Jersey, for example, some urban districts spend $25,000 per student. And depending on who you ask, D.C. spends somewhere between $20–30k per student.

More money came from philanthropic contributions made by businesses, individuals, and foundations—from the national names like Annenberg, Gates, and Ford, to numerous city-based foundations.

We’ve tried accountability. We’ve measured and publicized the performance of urban districts for ages now. Minimum competency testing in the 1970s then standardized states tests in 1980s and 90s. It reached its pinnacle with NCLB in the 2000s. We’ve assessed the learning of our inner-city kids and fully informed parents, taxpayers, and policymakers.

We’ve tried competition via inter-district choice, charters, tax credits, scholarships, and more. In many cities, a quarter, a third, in some approach half of students are choosing non-district schools.

We’ve tried human-capital strategies. As for superintendents, we’ve tried a wide array of career educators. We’ve tried outsiders—business leaders, US Attorneys, generals and admirals. We’ve had Teach for America and TNTP provide new teachers and a wide assortment of supports. We’ve had countless principal training programs, from district-run residencies to nonprofits like New Leaders for New Schools.

We’ve tried interventions. Some states took over urban districts.  More took over failing urban schools.  NCLB forced states to put failing districts on improvement plans. Restructuring forced these districts to seriously intervene in their lowest performing schools. SIG has provided billions to urban districts to implement serious reforms. The list of school interventions is jaw-dropping: needs assessments, staff surveys, conferences, professional development, turnaround specialists, school-improvement committees, training sessions, principal mentors, teacher coaches, leadership facilitators, instructional trainers, subject-matter experts, audits, summer residential academies, tutoring, research-based reform models, reconfigured grade spans, alternative governance models, new curricula, improved use of data—and it goes on.

What do we have to show for fifty years worth of these efforts?

The Results

After a half-century of work, these large urban districts struggle to get 15 or 20 percent of their 8th graders reading proficiently.

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Now some cities like to talk about their gains. But how much progress are they really making? Here are some examples. Since 2003, these cities have progressed from 11 percent to 16 percent proficiency. Not exactly awe-inspiring.

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But there have to be some great urban districts—how about the winners of the prestigious Broad Prize, the award for outstanding urban district performance and improvement?

Let’s look at three that have participated in NAEP TUDA since the start: Boston, Houston, and NYC. This is how they did in 2003. Very poorly. And they’ve barely budged since.

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I’ve added the average “large city” figure to show you how these compare. The best urban districts are maybe a nose better than the average.

But what about this year’s winner, Miami-Dade? It started taking TUDA only in 2009, so we don’t have much historical data. But it’ll look familiar. Very, very low performing. Miniscule progress. The tiniest bit better than other urban districts.

Click to enlarge

When the urban district is your reference point, this is what success looks like. This is deserving of a national award.

I’m not alone in my grim assessment of the urban district.

When Arlene Ackerman recently left as superintendent of Philadelphia’s district, she wrote an op-ed saying the following:

“I’ve come to a sad realization. Real reform will never come from within the system because too many powers that be (the teachers’ union, politicians, consultants, vendors, etc.) have a vested interested in maintaining the status quo that is failing our children. Meaningful education reform must be forced upon the system from outside by giving parents of all income levels real choices about where their children go to school.”

Late last year, when Jean-Claude Brizard left as CEO of Chicago Public Schools he wrote in an op-ed,

“Transformational change will require a radical redefinition of the district…The fact is the public school district is an outdated model.”

Joel Klein tried to break down the district into a “system of schools.” Despite the city’s progress, Mayor Bloomberg wishes they had gone farther.

So what do we know from all of the above?

We know that the district is not synonymous with public education. We can do something different.

We know it was created a century ago for a very different time.

We know that some of its building blocks—distrust of choice, belief in centralization and standardization—run counter to today’s beliefs.

We know that it is dreadfully low performing, even after half a century of effort.

We know that those most familiar with its workings are saying it’s broken.

Is there an alternative? Yes, and it’s at our fingertips.

—Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

John White, Kaya Henderson, and Mike Casserly participated in the panel discussion, which was hosted by Andy Rotherham.

Smarick first wrote about this topic in “Wave of the Future,” which appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Ed Next.

—Education Next

Half those gains are probably an illusion, however. The latest results from the math and science tests administered by the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the respected international testing agency, show gains of only 0.8 percent of a standard deviation yearly between 1995 and 2011. Further, another respected international assessment of student performance, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), found gains of only 0.5 percent of a standard deviation annually for U.S. students over roughly the same time period. (For specifics, see page 19 of our full report, Achievement Growth: International and U.S. State Trends in Student Performance [PEPG, 2012].)

In other words, NAEP has been identifying gains that are somewhere between two and three times as large as those recorded by two respected international testing agencies that do not have a political stake in showing rising levels of student achievement in any particular country.

For some time, analysts have been wondering whether NAEP tests have become easier. Those who construct the main tests that NAEP administers frankly admit that they have adapted questions over time to meet the changing curricula offered by contemporary schools. NAEP has also introduced special accommodations for those who say they are in some way disabled and need additional time or other modifications of the standard testing protocol. Have testing changes and administrative innovations softened tests so that they now indicate higher levels of student achievement than would be the case if older practices had been retained?

It is well known that when measuring economic change it is critical to adjust for inflation so that real growth is not confused with nominal growth in prices. An entire bureau within the U.S. Department of Labor is devoted to measuring the extent to which prices for the same commodities are rising or falling. With that information ready at hand, economists can ascertain whether the economy is actually moving forward or whether nominal growth in the GDP is simply the result of inflation.

Nothing similar exists in education. The U.S. Department of Education does not have an agency that inspects NAEP tests or state tests to ascertain whether questions on the tests have been eased with the passage of time.

It is remotely possible that TIMSS and PISA have revised their tests so that they have become more difficult over time, thereby underestimating U.S. student gains. But few believe that any testing organization in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has actually made its tests more challenging over time. All the social and political pressures operate in the opposite direction.

We do know one thing for certain: U.S. students are not closing the international achievement gap. Our study shows that even when measured by NAEP criteria, the United States stands at the 25th rank among 49 countries in achievement growth. Similarly, the recent TIMSS data show the United States to be the middle-ranked country among the 11 for which the organization could fully track student performance since 1995. U.S. students are making middling gains that are keeping them on par with students in other countries. In comparative terms, the United States is not making any progress at all.

— Paul E. Peterson

The only problem is that the cited commentary says precisely the opposite. Describing Indiana’s heavily regulated voucher program, Schaeffer writes: “Because participating schools will have a significant financial advantage over non-participating schools, lightly regulated [non-participating] schools will face increasing financial pressure to participate.” This captures Schaeffer’s concern as well as my own (which I expressed over a decade ago in the political economy journal Independent Review): The problem is not that private schools won’t participate in heavily regulated school choice programs. The problem is that they will. Hold-outs will be in the minority, and will gradually be driven out of business by their subsidized counterparts due to the uneven fiscal playing field (much as America’s once-dominant private schools were marginalized by the spread of “free” state-run schools).

We know this because there is extensive evidence to that effect from all over the world and across history. Everywhere that private elementary and secondary schools are eligible for government subsidies, the share of unsubsidized school enrollment falls. The higher the subsidy and the longer it has been in place, the more the unsubsidized sector is generally diminished. The Dutch enacted a heavily regulated nationwide voucher program nearly a century ago. Unsubsidized private schooling remains legal, but has been reduced to a statistical asterisk—now making up less than one percent of enrollment, compared to roughly 70 percent for subsidized private schools.

Our reason for concern over this pattern is also grounded in empirical evidence: it is the least regulated, most market-like private schools that do the best job of serving families. That is the consensus of the worldwide within-country research, which I reviewed and tabulated for a 2009 paper in the Journal of School Choice. The new Fordham paper does not discuss this evidence—nor has any other Fordham paper ever discussed it, to my knowledge.

Despite imputing to Cato scholars the exact opposite of the view we hold, the “Red Herring” paper does include some interesting data. In particular, it offers a new corroboration that voucher programs are more heavily regulated than tax credit programs (a difference whose magnitude and statistical significance was previously established here). This will make it even harder for objective observers to cling to the notion that vouchers and credits are functionally equivalent (though there are of course other important differences beyond this one). And it points the way to a solution to the problem of market-suffocating regulation under school choice programs: pursue school choice through education tax credits rather than vouchers or charter schools.

—Andrew Coulson

This commentary was adapted from one that originally appeared on Cato-at-Liberty.org.

“It was the first time I had ever received a grade lower than a B, and it was upsetting,” admits Mercado, a biochemistry and cell biology major at the University of California, San Diego. The first in her family to attend a four-year college, Mercado was a strong student dating all the way back to her days in middle school at San Diego’s KIPP Adelante Preparatory Academy. Perhaps as a result, she was “a little more cocky than I should have been” when arriving on campus for freshman year. Like many freshmen, Mercado experienced the distraction of being on her own for the first time, which took a toll on her grades. Holding down a job while taking more classes than she could handle didn’t help. “It all came crashing down on top of me,” Mercado says. Freshman year was “a big dose of reality,” she says.

Here’s another one: statistically speaking, Mercado might have been voted “Least Likely to Succeed” at birth. Low-income black and Hispanic students are by far the least likely U.S. students to graduate from high school and attend a four-year college. Those who are accepted to college are least likely to stick around and earn a degree. For each one who earns a bachelor’s degree, 11 fall short somewhere along the line, giving students like Mercado a mere 8 percent chance of graduating from college.

Mercado persists. Reenergized after a summer internship with the KIPP Foundation in Chicago, she is back on campus for the fall semester of 2012. She credits the habits of mind and encouragement she received in middle school, and the contacts she maintains five years later with KIPP teachers and administrators, for propelling her forward. “This year I’m coming in with a clear head. I’m more focused on my classes and what I want to accomplish. I’m going to do better,” she says. Her delivery communicates not hope or aspiration but conviction. “Nothing is going to keep me from graduating,” she insists, adding for emphasis, “nothing.”

Mercado’s story—both her struggle and her determination— will be repeated over the next several years on college campuses across the U.S. At one level, she’s just one more kid trying to pass biology, graduate, and make something of herself. But as the product of a KIPP school, Mercado is at the vanguard of a rapidly growing class of students whose success or failure could make or break the reputation of a closely watched group of charter schools and the sometimes-controversial, muscular brand of education they have pioneered. In 2015, more than 10,000 students from KIPP and other major charter-school highfliers will be on college campuses across the United States.

The Coming KIPP Bubble

You can’t play the ingenue forever.

For much of its brief history, there has been something of a halo over the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). Founded in Houston in 1994 by Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, a pair of Teach For America corps members, KIPP now has more than 100 schools in 20 states and Washington, D.C. It is the largest and best known of a class of charter-management organizations (CMOs) that includes Achievement First, YES Prep, Uncommon Schools, Mastery, Aspire, and others. This group shares a set of familiar characteristics: more and longer school days, with a college preparatory curriculum for all students; strict behavioral and disciplinary codes; and a strong focus on building a common, high-intensity school culture. Classrooms and halls are awash in motivational quotations and college banners, typically from the alma maters of the inevitably young, hard-charging teachers who staff the schools. The signature feature is high behavioral and academic expectations for all students, the vast majority of whom are low-income, urban black and Hispanic kids. It’s this last feature that led KIPP and the others to be branded “No Excuses” schools, a label not universally embraced within the category.

The reputation of the No Excuses model is complicated and often divisive among professional educators. Outside the education bubble in the broader public mind, however, these high-flying charters are much-adored, attractive young upstarts, and the antidote to the dark, dispiriting “dropout factories” of media caricature. For years, a central motif of the feel-good narrative surrounding No Excuses charter schools has been their college acceptance rates. Houston-based YES Prep, for example, has made much of the fact that 100 percent of their graduating seniors have been accepted to college; more than 90 percent are the first in their family to attend a four-year college. The original cohort of KIPP students attended college at more than double the rate of their demographic peers: bracing, affirming, “It’s Being Done” data points to warm the gap-closing hearts of ed reform hawks.

The April 2011 release of KIPP’s College Completion Report changed the No Excuses narrative almost instantly from “college acceptance” to “college completion.” A bold and laudable exercise in transparency, the report gave ammunition to KIPP’s boosters and critics alike. Thirty-three percent of the earliest cohorts of KIPP middle-school students were found to have graduated college within six years, four times the average rate of students from underserved communities and slightly higher than the figure (31 percent) for all U.S. students. It was a clear and unambiguous accomplishment. Yet two out of three former KIPP students were failing to reach the bar, however audacious, that KIPP itself had established as “the essential stepping stone to rewarding work, a steady income, self-sufficiency and success.” The affirming image of smiling, cap-and-gown–bedecked ghetto kids graduating high school and heading off to college and bright horizons beyond lost a bit of its luster.

KIPP has held fast to the idea that college is indispensable. The goal remains to see 75 percent of graduates earn a four-year college degree, comparable to the rate at which top-income-quartile students graduate. The bar has been set not by its critics but by KIPP itself: if KIPP and other No Excuses schools are to fulfill their promise as game changers in American education, and rewrite the script on reaching and teaching underserved kids, their graduates must not merely be accepted to college; they must demonstrate success once they get there.

KIPP has identified a number of factors it believes are critical to raising its students’ college-completion rates, including enhanced academic preparedness; a set of “character strengths,” like “grit,” self-control, and optimism; matching each student with the right college; social and academic integration once they arrive on campus; and college affordability. The organization is making an increasingly aggressive effort to exercise some measure of control over each of these factors through partnerships with at least 20 colleges nationwide designed to create a pipeline to four-year colleges able to offer the greatest possible commitment and support to KIPP alumni.

While there is broad general agreement on what makes “first-generation” college-goers stay in school and take a degree, less clear is what it takes to create those characteristics and conditions in the first place, and how much accountability for college completion should be attributed to a student’s K–12 education, his or her college, and the students themselves. KIPP’s rapidly growing “KIPP Through College” program offers support programs and services stretching from middle school through college and beyond, including high school and college placement, financial literacy, mentorships, college and career advisement, and one-to-one support from some of the 100 full-time KIPP staff doing college counseling and support work throughout its network.

KIPP’s recipe for getting students “to and through college” is about to be put to the test, if not quite at scale then in unprecedented numbers. In the 2012–13 school year, just over 1,000 former KIPP students are in college. Three years from now that figure will explode, with 10,000 KIPP alumni on America’s campuses. KIPP chief executive officer Richard Barth takes care to manage expectations for how this “KIPP bubble” cohort will perform. The 75 percent figure is a “long-term play” and does not apply yet. Fifty percent is “an aspiration.” Regardless, by staking their reputations on college completion, KIPP and other No Excuses schools are rapidly approaching something of a “put up or shut up” moment. The attempt to write the playbook on what it takes to get first-generation low-income black and Hispanic kids into the world with college degrees in hand will offer something of a referendum on KIPP and the No Excuses model.

“All Hands on Deck”

To see KIPP’s effort to steer its alumni to “right match” colleges, visit Pennsylvania’s Franklin & Marshall College (F&M). A private liberal arts college with 2,200 undergraduate students, F&M was the first college to enter into a formal partnership with KIPP aimed at improving college persistence and graduation rates of KIPP alumni. In 2011, the school launched “F&M College Prep” and welcomed 23 KIPP students to the precollege summer-immersion program. The following year, the program tripled in size, adding students from Uncommon Schools, Mastery Charter Schools, Achievement First, and others. The three-week program is intended to give rising seniors from these schools their first taste of college life. Students take two classes a day taught by F&M professors, and attend workshops on college admissions, financial aid, and other topics—all intended to demystify college life.

The students from KIPP and the other schools “leave F&M and go into their senior year thinking, ‘I can go to college. It’s gonna be tough, but it’ll be fine. I know what my resources are. I know how to talk to professors and upperclassmen. I know how to navigate the system,’” says Shawn Jenkins, who runs F&M College Prep as special assistant to the dean of the college for strategic projects.

F&M’s approach to retaining and graduating minority students is modeled directly on the work of the Posse Foundation, a New York City–based nonprofit that sends group of students, a posse, to college together to act as a support system for one another. According to the Education Trust, F&M graduates more than 87 percent of its students within six years, but only 70 percent of its black and Hispanic undergraduates. F&M staff had long observed that students who came to the Lancaster campus through Posse tended to graduate at a much higher rate than other minority students. Jenkins states the challenge succinctly: “How do we create a support structure that can mimic the same outcomes for KIPP students, for Mastery students, for Cristo Rey students?”

Once admitted to F&M, students from KIPP and other “first gens” are placed into a newly created mentoring program, based on the Posse approach. Students meet in groups of 8 to 10 with a campus-based mentor one to two hours each week. The mentor, who is the students’ academic advisor, also meets one-on-one with each student at least every other week.

It is not an easy or natural transition to college for the students urban charters serve. Feeling comfortable enough to go to professors’ office hours and not feeling out of place among other students are challenges to be overcome. “If students become academically integrated and socially integrated, their probabilities of being retained and graduated go up enormously,” observes Kent Trachte, dean of the college.

Jenkins, himself an F&M alum (Class of 2010) and former Posse Scholar, describes the college’s approach as “all hands on deck.” But when it works, it is nearly invisible to the students. Indeed, Jenkins only recently came to see and appreciate “the intentionality” that made possible his own journey from a Harlem public school to a top liberal arts college and a career as a young college administrator. “I had no idea. I didn’t know that when the doors were closed, people were sitting around talking about strategies to engage me to do better. That’s what we’re doing. There are certain students who need a little more attention,” he says.

KIPP’s partnership with Franklin & Marshall has clear benefits to all parties. A high percentage of F&M College Prep participants apply to the school, thus creating a pipeline of highly qualified, diverse students. KIPP sends its graduates to the kind of small private college that is statistically most likely to be successful with first-generation students. The students themselves get a “high-touch” approach from professors and advisors, keeping them in place and on track. F&M president Dan Porterfield knows them by name.

The 20 partnerships KIPP has entered into with colleges, including the University of Houston, Tulane, Morehouse, Spelman, Syracuse, Duke, and New York City’s Hunter College, will improve KIPP’s graduation rates by 7 to 8 percent “even if we did nothing else,” says Barth. In a parallel effort, F&M convened a group of a dozen liberal arts colleges and CMOs that will form “the nucleus for a larger effort to connect some of the leading high performing charters to some of the leading liberal arts colleges,” promises Trachte. Founding members of the coalition include Dickinson, Gettysburg, Bard, and Trinity.

No Excuses 2.0

No Excuses schools as a class have advanced our understanding of what it takes to get kids to college. The unresolved question is whether the students have what it takes to thrive once they get there. That question has some within charter networks openly questioning elements of the No Excuses orthodoxy.

At KIPP, at least part of the answer is more KIPP. “We’ve made a commitment to start earlier with our kids and stay longer,” says Barth. As KIPP has expanded from 2 schools to more than 100, it has broadened its focus to include elementary and high schools. “Fifth to eighth grade, it’s amazing what we’ve done,” he says, “but we see the impact of being able to have them starting in kindergarten.”

As of 2011, KIPP students’ average SAT score was 1426; the average ACT score was 20. For the colleges KIPP is targeting for its alumni, “a 20 ACT ain’t gonna cut it,” Barth candidly admits. Increasing a student’s odds of admission inevitably leads to a hard look at “backward mapping” curriculum and formative experiences from the earliest moment. “This is high stakes,” says Barth. “As a 2nd-grade teacher, you are making this happen. What happens in your year ties to where they’re going to be [in college]…everyone owns this chain. Everyone has a link.”

Within the No Excuses world, a strong case can be made that YES Prep graduates are as academically ready for college as anybody. In 2011, the average SAT combined score for YES Prep African American students in reading, writing, and mathematics was 1556, far above the national average of 1273 for African Americans, and significantly higher than the 1500 national average for all students. Every student is required to take and pass at least one AP class in high school; most take two or more. Less than 5 percent of YES Prep grads require remediation in college. Getting admitted to a four-year college is a graduation requirement at YES Prep, which, like KIPP, has been admirably transparent about its college-completion rate, currently at 41 percent within six years.

“It wasn’t the academic piece that was holding our kids back,” notes senior director of college initiatives at YES Prep Donald Kamentz. “What we found hands down was it was the noncognitive piece—that tenacity, that grit—that allowed kids to harness those skills and persist when they faced difficulty.” Kamentz and Laura Keane of Mastery Charter Schools have been at the center of an effort, along with Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania, to design and test interventions aimed at enhancing student perseverance and improving college enrollment and graduation outcomes. Kamentz cites the work of Stanford University’s Carol Dweck as a key: students must be able to develop a “growth mindset” that creates motivation and productivity rather than seeing intelligence as fixed and immutable. “If they can work through that, their persistence through and graduation from college is off the charts,” he observes.

This is not an entirely new development at No Excuses schools. Nearly fetishized, “grit” is as much a part of the culture of KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, and the rest as the college banners and teachers reminding students to “correct your SLANT” (Sit up straight, Listen, Ask and answer questions, Nod if you understand, and Track the teacher). The idea that character traits like perseverance, zest, and optimism have more to do with long-term success than even academics gained mainstream traction with the recent publication of Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed. Within No Excuses schools, some are starting to question some of their fundamental assumptions about what makes kids successful. When asked, Barth does not disagree with the observation that KIPP is “doubling down on grit.”

“What we’ve found with the ‘whatever it takes’ or ‘no excuses’ mentality is that it was very teacher-driven and less student-driven,” says Kametz, acknowledging this is a controversial line of thought in his own halls. A typical No Excuses approach might involve giving demerits or detention for missed assignments or turning in work that’s not “neat and complete.” Kamentz questions whether this tough-love approach helps create the self-advocacy in students they will need to be successful in college. “It’s the largest gaping hole with our kids in college,” he says. “They will constantly say, ‘You structured my life so much that I had to do very little thinking and structuring myself.’”

“Academic preparation is absolutely foundational,” says Jeremy Chiappetta, executive director of Blackstone Valley Prep in Cumberland, Rhode Island. “But what education looks like, to be truly prepared for college, probably is not the routinized learning that makes many of these schools, including us, really successful on standardized tests. I don’t think that’s the academic rigor that any of us want for college prep. I think it’s much deeper, much bigger,” he says.

Kamentz concedes that much more is known about what successful college students should look like than how to create them. “It’s the inevitable practitioner question,” he says. “I know all this stuff. Now what do I do?” Michael Goldstein, founder of Boston’s Match School agrees. “We don’t really know of many interventions that change grit significantly. It may be harder to change grit than other things like knowledge,” he observes.

In Loco Helicopter Parentis

Not every college is prepared, interested, or has the resources to go the extra mile for low-income kids of color. The idea that once you arrive at college that you’re here and should make your own way and figure it out “is still the dominant culture,” says Barth, who compares colleges to joining a gym: “You get the money, and if the kids leave, they don’t take the money with them.” At present, he believes, the U.S. higher-education system simply isn’t designed for the kinds of students KIPP and other No Excuses charters serve.

There is also at least a bit of cognitive dissonance that must be acknowledged: if KIPP and others are successful in turning out academically prepared, resilient, and optimistic graduates, shouldn’t they need less support, not more, on college campuses? If students need an army of college advisors and KIPP staff to act in loco helicopter parentis, just how gritty can they be?

Barth sees no disconnect. If KIPP kids get “X” support on their journeys to and through college, he says, “middle-class kids get 50X,” much of it simply baked into their lives in the form of educated parents who are not intimidated by college and financial aid applications. College tours, SAT test-prep help, and tutors? Been there, done that. There are siblings, relatives, and even consultants to advise kids on where to apply and what classes to take. The safety net is deep and broad. Perhaps most importantly, there is a baseline expectation among the children of the well-off and well-educated: they grew up simply assuming they would go to college. Middle-class kids, says Barth, get all this “without consciousness of it. It just gets done.”

Back at UC San Diego, Rebecca Mercado acknowledges she was embarrassed to tell anyone she was struggling in school. “I felt that my teachers and even people from KIPP might be disappointed that I had allowed my grades to slip as much as they had.” So just how hard has college been? After some mild prodding, Mercado sheepishly confesses her freshman-year GPA: 2.4. But this year it will be a 3.5 she insists. It’s hard not to be convinced by the self-assured, confident-sounding college sophomore. Her commitment is admirable, earnest, and understandable. Gritty.

And if she struggles, there are any number of people who will be there to lend an ear, give advice, or point to resources. And why not? A lot of people, many of whom she’s never met, have as much riding on Mercado’s success as she does.

Maybe even more.

Robert Pondiscio is a former South Bronx 5th-grade teacher and executive director of CitizenshipFirst.

As you probably know, the teachers of Seattle’s Garfield High School are “boycotting” the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment, which is required by the district. Ostensibly, their protest is about the overuse of tests, the instructional time that those tests devour, and the culture of soulless data-driven instruction that animates today’s brand of school reform.

Yet it’s hard to square their complaints with the actual test they decry, for the MAP is precisely the type of “good” assessment that many educators claim to favor. It’s instructionally useful; it provides instantaneous feedback to teachers and students alike; and it’s not used for high-stakes decisions on issues pertaining to students and schools.

The real reason the Garfield teachers attack the MAP, one must presume, is because it’s a small part of Seattle’s new teacher-evaluation system. (If students show low growth on the MAP for two years in a row, it triggers a “closer look” at their teacher by the principal—pretty benign by national standards.) That’s a smart move on behalf of district officials; because the test is “computer adaptive,” it can pinpoint precisely where students are on the achievement spectrum and can give teachers full credit for any progress they help their charges achieve over the course of the school year. (If a ninth grader moves from the sixth-grade level to the eighth-grade level, the MAP can detect it, while most state assessments cannot.)

What the teachers are really protesting, it seems to me, is the use of student test scores in educator evaluations. And to be sure, there’s a legitimate case to be made that we are rushing too rapidly into such evaluations. But of course, that’ s not what the teachers say they are worried about.

It’s hard not to hear the echoes of this fall’s teacher strike in Chicago, in which educators insisted that the walk-out was about “air conditioning” and “working conditions” when everyone knew it was really about jobs—namely, what would happen to the thousands of tenured teachers whose schools are likely to close in coming years.

I don’t doubt that some Garfield teachers have personal reservations about the overuse of tests in today’s education system. I can also believe that the MAP, on top of the state tests, creates a heavy testing burden on teachers and students alike. And I would never blame teachers for crying foul about evaluation systems designed on the fly.

But how about a little honesty and perspective, people? To compare this episode to Martin Luther King Jr.’s efforts, as the Seattle teachers union president did the other day, is to cheapen the historic battle for true civil rights. This is a skirmish about teacher work protections as our system lurches toward greater accountability. It’s no heroic effort to overcome the forces of evil. And it’s certainly not just a flap about the MAP.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein, in a recent report for the Economic Policy Institute, now tell us that performance is not as bad as you think and that Secretary Duncan should stop making “exaggerated and misleading statements” about the performance of U.S. students.

To arrive at this conclusion and the accompanying one-liner for media consumption, Carnoy and Rothstein begin with the fact that U.S. students are disproportionately disadvantaged when compared to students in a sample of high performing countries (Canada, Finland, and Korea) and in a sample of post-industrial countries (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom).  They then re-weight average PISA test scores in the U.S. and these six countries by the distribution of socio-economic status (measured in their analysis by numbers of books in the home) in an attempt to equalize statistically the distribution of family backgrounds across countries.

Adjusted for books in the home, U.S. students in math still lag behind Canadian, Finnish, Korean, and German students but pull even with those in the U.K. and come close to those in France.  They then repeatedly work to convince us that everything is not as bad as thought and may even be pretty good.

But what is the question that these calculations answer?  The reason that Secretary Duncan and others, including me, are concerned about the performance of U.S. students is that the international achievement scores in math say a great deal about the skills that our students will take to the labor force.  These human capital differences, according to historical data, bear a direct relationship to growth of the national economy.  And the economic implications of mediocre performance are enormous.

The Carnoy and Rothstein calculations simply do not deal with the relevant differences in skills across countries.  We have the population that we have – not the population of Finland.  So their adjustments cannot address the question of how well prepared our future labor force might be.  How well prepared we are depends on the skills of all of our population, not just those that statistically look like Finns.   In fact, as prior analysis by Paul Peterson, Ludger Woessmann, and me shows, looking at just our most advantaged socio-economic subgroup (children of college educated parents) does little to erase the deficits with other countries in advanced math and science performance, which is the preparation for science and engineering careers.

There is a hint – although largely unstated in the report’s 100 pages – that these calculations can be used to answer the question ‘how well are our schools doing?’  Specifically, they might absolve our schools of guilt, because it is the parents of these disadvantaged children that lead to much of the difference in scores, perhaps even all of the difference between scores with the U.K. students.

Even if their adjustment removed all of the measured international skill gap, why should we chide Secretary Duncan for pointing out that our students are less prepared than those of the other six sampled countries?

It might mean that our schools face more difficult educational challenges than found in the other countries, but surely this does not imply that we should “rest on our laurels” (such as they are).  First, most of the international gaps remain after standardization.  Even after adjustment, the U.S. remains at best in a three-way tie for fifth out of seven.  Second, we are past saying that there is nothing we can do to educate our racial and ethnic minorities and our economically disadvantaged; hundreds of schools have proven this wrong.  Third, this is the population that we have.

The U.S. does look somewhat better in comparison if we use international reading assessments.  I personally am skeptical about our ability to obtain valid and reliable reading comparisons across different languages.  It also appears that math and science assessments say more about skills valued in the labor market than reading assessments.  Yet, again, even after adjustment, we know from the international reading assessments that we have a long way to go to compete with the top countries.

Historically, when it comes to economic performance, the U.S. has remained the strongest economy in the world.  A variety of advantages have allowed us to overcome the shortcomings of skills that are exposed by these tests.  This historic economic strength reflects our earlier historical commitment to universal secondary school attainment; our strong and well-developed economic system; our secure property rights and free movement of labor and capital; our world’s best universities that can overcome some of the low entering skills;  and our use of skilled immigrants to bolster our innovative capacity.

Unfortunately, all of these advantages over our economic competitors are going away as many have made great strides in emulating and even surpassing these strengths of the U.S.  In the future, we will simply have to rely just on our skills if we are to sustain our current economic standing – and skills are what are measured by the international assessments.

In sum, we cannot paper over the fact that a large number of other countries have shown that it is possible to develop considerably higher skills in their youth than we are doing.  Our future depends on the skills of our population, and it is time to recognize that we are lagging.  Secretary Duncan is neither exaggerating nor misleading about this.

Eric Hanushek is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and a member of its Koret Task Force on K-12 Education.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that school district costs for teachers’ health insurance rose at an average annual rate of 4 percent above inflation from 2004 to 2012. In 2004, health insurance costs tacked 11.4 percent onto teacher earnings; in 2012, they added 15.5 percent. At roughly $560 per pupil per year, the national average masks wide variation across states, as districts in some states have relatively low insurance costs while costs borne by districts in other states are quite high. The data do not include health costs for other school employees and retirees, which can be quite substantial.

In this study, we examine BLS data to compare the costs to districts for teacher health insurance with similar costs to private-sector employers. We find that insurance costs for teachers are 26 percent higher than they are for private-sector professionals, and this is partly explained by greater unionization in the public sector. We also examine data newly available from Wisconsin to quantify the impact of that state’s recent change in collective bargaining law: we find a reduction in district costs of 13 to 19 percent, the result of lower-cost policies and higher teacher contributions.

Comparing Employer Costs

We begin with a basic, high-level question: How do employer health care costs for teachers compare with those for private-sector professionals? The most comprehensive national data published on employer costs, the BLS National Compensation Survey (NCS), provide estimates of employer insurance costs on a “per-hour-worked” basis for 180 groups of employees, broken down by occupational groups, industries, ownership (private industry or state and local government), and other characteristics. These data do not separate health from other insurance costs (life and disability) for teachers, but these other components are small (approximately 5 percent of the total), so this does not significantly affect our results.

We focus our comparisons on K–12 teachers and private-sector professionals. Using unpublished data provided to us by the BLS, we multiply the hourly employer insurance costs by the number of hours worked to obtain annual costs for each group of workers. Some 97 percent of K–12 teachers work full-time, while 83 percent of private-sector professionals do so. Because part-time workers are less likely than full-time workers to have health insurance from their employers, we adjust the private-sector comparison data to match the percentage of teachers who work full time.

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We estimate from these data that the national average of annual employer insurance costs in 2012 was $8,559 for K–12 teachers, and $6,803 for private-sector professionals. The difference between the figures has increased since 2004. Annual employer insurance costs for K–12 teachers rose 67 percent, compared to 49 percent for private professionals. The gap between employer costs was just 12 percent in 2004 but rose to 26 percent by 2012 (see Figure 1).

Our estimates for employer insurance costs average the expenditures across those employees who are covered by an employer’s plan and those who are not. Employees may not be covered either because no plan is offered (an issue for part-time employees in particular) or because the employee chooses not to participate (e.g., because coverage is available through a spouse’s employer). According to the NCS Employee Benefit Survey (EBS), 87 percent of K–12 teachers participate in a health insurance plan (medical, dental, vision, or prescription drug) through their employer, compared to 80 percent of private-sector professionals (our estimate, adjusting for the part-time percentage). Consequently, the difference between teachers and private-sector workers in employer health cost per participating employee is 16 percent ($9,838 vs. $8,492).

The EBS also collects data on premiums for medical insurance (a slightly narrower category than health insurance). The medical premiums are broken out by single and family coverage, so these data allow us to examine the cost of comparable policies. We find that for single coverage, employer costs for private-sector professionals are 82 percent of those for teachers ($4,496 vs. $5,494), but for family coverage, private-sector costs are 104 percent of those for districts ($11,116 vs. $10,728), slightly higher. This is a notable shift in the last few years. As recently as 2009, the employer cost for single coverage was $1,361 higher for teachers than for private-sector professionals, compared to $998 today, and for family coverage it was $29 higher for teachers instead of $388 lower. This suggests that some school districts have begun to adjust their policies toward private-sector norms.

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Employee Contributions and Total Premiums

The EBS data on medical insurance also include information on employee contributions. Together with employer costs, these data indicate that, for both single and family plans, total premiums are higher for teachers than they are for private-sector professionals. For single coverage, teachers pay a smaller share (13 percent) than do private professionals (19 percent). For family coverage, teachers contribute more (34 vs. 29 percent), which is enough to cover the higher cost of their plan. In other words, the total premium for teachers’ family coverage is more expensive than it is for private-sector professionals, but the share coming from teachers more than covers the difference (see Figure 2).

In addition to premiums, employees incur out-of-pocket costs, such as deductibles and co-payments. The EBS data indicate that one reason teachers’ insurance plans are more expensive is that features of the plans (such as lower deductibles) reduce out-of-pocket costs. Although it is accurate to say that teachers pay more to get more in the way of family coverage, it is more precise to state that they pay more up front in premiums and then pay less out-of-pocket.

Union vs. Nonunion Employees

The NCS data allow us to compare medical insurance coverage and premiums for union vs. nonunion workers, where union status is defined by whether the employee belongs to a collective bargaining unit. These breakouts are not available for K–12 teachers or private-sector professionals, but they are available for the state and local government (public) sector and the private sector. The comparisons are still informative because teachers’ health care costs track those of the public sector to some extent.

These data indicate that about 95 percent of union workers have access to employer-provided medical insurance in both the public and private sectors, and their participation rate is essentially the same in both sectors (78 to 79 percent). Nonunion workers are less likely than union workers to participate in a medical plan through their employer, in large part because their employer is less likely to offer them one. The difference from union workers is smaller in the public sector, however, where the nonunion participation rate is 68 percent, compared to 48 percent in the private sector.

In the public and private sectors, for both single and family coverage, the employer cost is higher for union workers than for nonunion workers. The total premium is significantly higher in all cases except for family coverage in the private sector, where it is about the same for union and nonunion workers. Finally, employee contributions are lower for union workers, except for single coverage in the public sector.

These patterns are the same for the state and local government sector vs. the private sector, with union and nonunion combined: higher employer costs, higher total premiums, and lower employee contributions, for both types of coverage. The unionization rate is higher for the public sector than for the private sector (50 percent vs. 14 percent in the EBS data), suggesting that unionization explains some portion of each of these patterns (see Figure 3).

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But these are not the patterns we observed between K–12 teachers and private-sector professionals: they are similar for single coverage but not for family coverage. Whatever impact unionization may have, there are other factors at play.

There is one state in which we have a seemingly natural experiment in changing teacher union strength: Wisconsin. If union strength results in higher employer costs, higher total premiums, and smaller employee contributions, then the removal of teacher health benefits from collective bargaining in Wisconsin might be expected to have the opposite effect: lower employer costs, lower total premiums, and larger employee contributions. This is exactly what happened.

Wisconsin Before and After Act 10

Wisconsin was the first state in the nation with public-sector collective bargaining and has long had one of the nation’s strongest teachers unions. It has also long been a state with very expensive teacher medical insurance. Average district costs in 2011 were $8,311 and $19,356 for single and family coverage, respectively. These costs were about 50 percent and 80 percent higher than the 2011 national averages for teachers, which were $5,500 and $10,723. Although Wisconsin is in a region with higher-than-average medical premiums, this geographic factor accounts for only a minor part of the gap between Wisconsin’s district costs and the national average.

Wisconsin’s high district costs reflected both the choice of expensive plans and low teacher contributions. In 2011, teachers made no contribution at all for single coverage in 43 percent of the state’s districts, nor for family coverage in 31 percent. By comparison, the noncontributory rates in 2011 among teachers in the national data discussed above were 39 percent and 16 percent, respectively. Among private-sector professional employees, the noncontributory rates for single and family plans were lower yet, 17 percent and 9 percent.

Act 10, proposed by Governor Walker and enacted by the legislature in 2011, removed benefits from local collective bargaining, thereby giving districts greater freedom to shop for less-expensive plans and to negotiate premiums. The law also allowed districts to establish higher employee contributions. Among the provisions of Act 10 was a 12 percent floor on the employee contribution rate, which applied directly only to the state-administered plan, but now serves as a benchmark that many school districts have followed.

These changes were intended to achieve savings on district benefit costs, through adoption of plans with lower premiums and increased teacher contributions. We examine the change in medical insurance costs for the school year ending in 2012, the first to be affected by Act 10, using data from the Wisconsin Association of School Boards (WASB). These results may not represent the total impact, as not all districts have renegotiated insurance contracts. Some are under contracts with insurers predating Act 10, including those with pre–Act 10 collective bargaining agreements that have not yet expired.

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We calculate estimates of yearly changes using only districts for which data are available in consecutive years. The main finding from the WASB data is a sharp drop in employer costs in 2012 after years of steady growth. District payments for their employees’ medical care increased every year from 2003 to 2011. But from 2011 to 2012, average district costs for family coverage fell by an estimated $2,010, while district costs for single coverage declined by $1,042 (see Figure 4).

These figures underestimate the district savings attributable to Act 10, since premiums were steadily rising prior to Act 10 and were expected to continue doing so. When we account for this expected growth (using average growth from 2007 to 2011), we estimate savings of $2,614 for family coverage and $1,304 for single coverage. These estimates represent declines of 13 to 19 percent from the projected district costs for 2012.

Districts saved on teacher medical insurance costs in 2012 for two reasons: reductions in total premiums and increases in the portion paid by teachers. As discussed above, Act 10 did not directly raise teacher contributions, but the 12 percent minimum it established for the state plan set a standard that districts were now free to follow. For single coverage, between 2003 and 2011 the average share of medical insurance paid by teachers drifted up slightly, from about 3 to 4 percent, followed by a jump to more than 10 percent in 2012. Similarly, for family coverage, the average teacher contribution drifted up slightly over the period, to about 5 1/2 percent, and then jumped in 2012 to more than 10 percent. These figures now place Wisconsin in the vicinity of the national average contribution rate for teachers with single coverage of 13 percent, but still far below the average for family coverage of 34 percent.

In dollar terms, teacher contributions for family coverage rose by $939 in 2012, relative to the previous trend, while total premiums for family coverage declined by $1,674. Our estimate of $2,614 for the impact of Act 10 on district costs reflects these changes. The estimated impact on total premiums accounted for two-thirds of the reduction in district costs, and the act’s impact on employee contributions comprised the other third. We find a similar breakdown for single coverage.

These data have two important limitations. First, they likely understate the share of district savings attributable to higher employee costs because some (maybe most) of the reduction in total premiums is due to a rise in employee out-of-pocket payments (such as higher deductibles). Second, these data do not tell us anything about the quantity and quality of health care provided. Efficiency may have been enhanced as employees paid more of the cost and as employers became free to shop around, but we have no hard data on this.

As a check on the WASB data, we examined data from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) on districts’ fringe benefit costs for teachers. Unlike the WASB data, these data are available for all districts but do not separate out health benefits from other fringe benefits, including retirement contributions, Social Security, and life insurance. The impact of Act 10 captured by these data will therefore include not only the effect on health insurance, but also the shift of about one-half of retirement contributions from employer to employee as mandated by Act 10.

The DPI data show a steady rise in fringe benefit costs from 1998 to 2011, in both dollar amounts and as a percentage of teacher salary, with the latter measure rising from 34 percent to 51 percent over the period. After Act 10, the average benefit rate dropped 8 percentage points to 43 percent. This is still quite high by comparison with the private sector, but markedly reduced. It is likely that at least one-half and perhaps two-thirds of the $4,500  drop in district fringe-benefit costs reflects the shift in retirement contributions, but virtually all of the remainder represents the reduction in district health-benefit costs. Thus the DPI data suggest a drop of $1,500 to $2,200 in average annual district health costs per teacher.

The DPI and WASB estimates show broadly consistent evidence of a large first-year impact of Act 10 on district costs for teacher health insurance, but we can only speculate on what the future effect will be. As mentioned above, some districts have not yet been able to use their new powers because of unexpired collective bargaining contracts or insurance policies, so there are more savings to be had. Many of the underlying drivers of rising health-care costs are independent of Act 10, and over the long term these will push Wisconsin employer costs back up, but from a significantly lower starting point. Moreover, as districts gain more experience in the open health care market, unfettered by collective bargaining, it is possible that they will be able to lower the rate of growth.

It is important to note that even with the dramatic savings from Act 10, district costs and total premiums in Wisconsin are still well above the national average for teachers. Indeed, by some estimates, prior to Act 10, a number of Wisconsin districts had insurance plans that were set to trigger the federal tax on “Cadillac plans” under the Affordable Care Act of 2010, scheduled to begin for 2018. This may still be true. Thus, there will be continuing pressure to reduce costs toward the national average, especially if and when the luxury tax is implemented.

Conclusion

The national data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that annual employer insurance costs are 26 percent higher for teachers than for private-sector professionals; adjusting for higher participation rates among teachers reduces the difference to 16 percent. Direct estimates of employer costs for medical plans present a mixed picture: higher employer costs for single coverage but not for family coverage. For both categories, total medical premiums are higher for teachers than they are for private-sector professionals, but for family coverage the teachers incur the extra expenditures themselves.

Unionization is associated with higher total premiums, higher employer costs, and lower employee contributions in both the public and private sectors. This suggests that the high unionization rate among teachers plays an important role in their employers’ higher average cost. Equally important, differences in teacher union strength across states help explain the wide variation in employer and employee health-insurance costs. In some nonunion states, teacher medical benefits are not particularly generous, owing to either low-cost plans (e.g., those with high deductibles) or high teacher contributions. In Arkansas, teachers typically pay 65 or 70 percent of the premiums for family coverage (the national average is 34 percent). In other states, with strong unions, such as Wisconsin, district insurance costs can be very expensive. It is in those states that the opportunities for district cost reduction are most promising, as data from Wisconsin so clearly show.

District cost reduction would ideally derive from changes that enhance efficiency, such as greater competition for health insurance. There should be no illusions that such efficiencies will come easily. In all likelihood, a great deal of any district cost reduction will take the form of higher teacher payments toward their health care through higher contributions and increased out-of-pocket expenses. This raises the question of the role of teacher health benefits in the total compensation package. The overall size of the package will continue to be the subject of debate. It is worth briefly commenting, however, on the importance of the structure of the package.

There are three reasons that efficiency might be enhanced by reallocating some of the compensation package from employer-paid health benefits to salary. First, efficiency in health-care expenditures is more likely enhanced when employees pay for services, since price signals provide the consumer with appropriate incentives. Second, shifting compensation back to salary (in the aggregate) provides greater opportunity for districts to use salary differentials to retain and recruit higher-quality teachers. Finally, as a matter of consumer choice, not all employees may want their employers to devote, say, $20,000 out of a $70,000 compensation package to medical insurance. Take-up rates well below 100 percent suggest that many teachers ascribe less value to the medical benefits offered than they cost. Thus, both efficiency (in attracting recruits) and equity (toward non-participants) might be enhanced by such a shift. Employers can offer greater choice among health plans of varying cost, with lower subsidies, fixed in size, and higher salaries that allow employees to choose how much they want to spend on higher-cost plans. As districts under fiscal distress increasingly turn to cost-cutting measures, such potential efficiency enhancements will become all the more important.

Robert Costrell is professor of education reform and economics at the University of Arkansas and fellow at the George W. Bush Institute. Jeffery Dean is distinguished doctoral fellow at the University of Arkansas. This paper is drawn from a chapter in A Bigger Bang for Education’s Bucks (George W. Bush Institute, forthcoming).

In the following essays, we identify some of the key findings from the sixth annual Education Next-PEPG Survey, a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens interviewed during April and May of 2012 (for survey methodology, see sidebar). Highlights include

• the Republican tilt of the education views of independents

• the especially high marks that Hispanics give their public schools

• strong support among the general public for using test-score information to hold teachers accountable

• lower confidence in teachers than has previously been reported

• the public’s (and teachers’) growing uneasiness with teachers unions

• the shaky foundations of public support for increased spending

• majority support for a broad range of school choice initiatives.

In addition to the views of the public as a whole, in this year’s survey special attention is paid to Hispanics, African Americans, parents, and teachers, all of whom were oversampled in order to obtain a sufficient number of observations. And in an effort to assess the sensitivity of respondents’ opinions to information and question wording, we embedded in this survey, as we have done in previous ones, various experiments. Responses to all questions are posted on our website, educationnext.org.

Independents lean Republican in their views of teachers unions and school spending—and support private school choice.

With Barack Obama and Mitt Romney running neck and neck, the nation’s eyes are trained on independent voters, who will likely decide the presidential election. And in the days leading up to the national conventions, education policy, though hardly at the top of the public agenda, did assume a more prominent role in both campaigns. Which candidate is best positioned to use education to bring undecided voters into the fold? The answer may be surprising.

Just one-third of independents report that President Obama has done an “excellent” or “good” job of handling education issues, while the rest assign him a “fair” or “poor” rating. And on the education policy issues that most clearly divide the parties—the role of teachers unions and support for school spending—the views of independents hew closer to those of Republicans than of Democrats. Moreover, independents are more supportive than members of either party of expanding private school choice for disadvantaged students, the centerpiece of Governor Romney’s proposals for K–12 education reform.

Whereas 25 percent of respondents to the EdNext-PEPG survey report that they are Republicans and 34 percent say that they are Democrats, fully 41 percent claim no affiliation with either major party. Of this group, 52 percent claim that they lean Democratic, while just 40 percent lean Republican. On key education issues, however, these independents express views that better align with Republicans.

No single education issue divides Republicans and Democrats more sharply than the role of teachers unions (see Figure 1). Seventy-one percent of Republicans report that the teachers unions have a generally negative effect on schools, as compared to just 29 percent of Democrats. Though independents come down in between, a majority of them (56 percent) agree with Republicans that unions have a negative effect.

Republican and Democratic voters also diverge in their preferences on school spending and teacher salaries. Figure 2 shows that when not provided with information about current spending levels, 79 percent of Democrats say that spending on public schools in their local district should increase, as compared with 50 percent of Republicans. Among independents, 57 percent support increased spending, again placing them closer to Republicans in their view of the issue. And when respondents are informed about current spending levels, the gap between Republicans and independents vanishes: 39 percent of both groups support spending increases, compared to just 51 percent of Democrats.

The same pattern holds for teacher salaries: when respondents are not provided with information about current salary levels, 60 percent of independents support increasing teacher salaries, placing them closer to Republicans (54 percent of whom support increases) than to Democrats (75 percent). Providing information on current teacher salaries in their state reduces support for salary increases among independents to 34 percent—exactly the same as among Republicans. Information also shrinks the share of Democrats supporting salary increases to 41 percent.

Governor Romney has made the expansion of school choice for disadvantaged students central to his campaign, calling for the expansion of the Washington, D.C., voucher program and for allowing low-income and special education students to use federal funds to enroll in private schools. It is perhaps surprising, then, to find that Republicans are less supportive of this concept than are Democrats (see Figure 3). Just 42 percent of Republicans express support for the idea, compared to 52 percent of Democrats. Voucher support among independents appears to be as high as (or greater than) it is among Democrats, at 54 percent.

Hispanics like public schools but not all union demands in contract negotiations.

Increasingly, both the Republican and Democratic parties have sought ways to court Hispanics. Though they lean Democratic—63 percent of Hispanic adults approve of the way President Barack Obama is handling his job as president—they are not as blue as is the African American community, 92 percent of whom give Obama a thumbs-up.

Those seeking the Hispanic vote in 2012 should know that education is an issue that resonates with the Latino community. Almost 60 percent of those we surveyed say they are “very” or “quite a bit” interested in education issues, as compared to less than 40 percent of African American and white voters.

On many topics—including school vouchers, charter schools, digital learning, student and school accountability, common core standards, and teacher recruitment and retention policies—the views of Hispanic adults do not differ noticeably from those of either whites or African Americans.

But in certain domains—estimates of school costs and school quality, support for teachers unions, teacher tenure, and teacher pensions—the views of Hispanics differ rather substantially. Their judgment of the American school is generous, perhaps because they compare public schools in the United States to much less effective institutions in Mexico, Cuba, and other parts of Latin America. They also underestimate the costs of running public schools, though they revise their thinking rather substantially about the merits of spending increases once they learn the facts. They are less supportive of unions and union demands than are African Americans.

Nearly 40 percent of Hispanic adults give the nation’s public schools a grade of an “A” or a “B” on the traditional scale used to evaluate schools (see Figure 4). When asked about the public schools in their community, no less than 55 percent give such favorable assessments. By comparison, whites and African Americans express significantly less enthusiasm about the nation’s schools. Less than 20 percent of whites and African Americans accord the nation’s schools an “A” or a “B,” and only around 40 percent give the schools in their community one of these two top grades.

Hispanic respondents think American students perform better academically than is actually the case. American 15-year-olds ranked no better than 25th among the 34 developed democracies participating in the latest round of international tests. Yet nearly 45 percent of Hispanics say student math performance in the United States ranks among the top 15 countries in the world in math. Only 30 percent of white and African American respondents place the United States that high.

Hispanic respondents also think the public schools cost a lot less than they actually do. While annual per-pupil expenditures run around $12,500, Hispanics, on average, estimate their cost at less than $5,000. Whites and African Americans estimate the costs to be more than $7,000.

The same goes for teacher salaries, which average about $56,000 a year. On average, Hispanics think teachers are paid little more than $25,000 a year; blacks, on average, think they are paid around $30,000 a year; and whites estimate salaries at $35,000.

When told just how much schools cost, however, Hispanic respondents adjust their thinking quite dramatically. When informed about actual per-pupil expenditures, Hispanics’ support for higher taxes to fund spending increases drops from 46 percent to 25 percent. When given the actual amount teachers receive, their support for higher salaries plummets nearly in half—from over 60 percent to little more than 30 percent.

Although learning the truth about costs and salaries has a similar impact on white opinion, African Americans remain more committed to higher spending. Thirty-seven percent of African Americans favor higher taxes, even when told how much is currently being spent, only a slight dip from the 42 percent favorable when that information is withheld. When given the facts about teacher salaries, African American support for higher salaries drops 20 percentage points—from 74 percent to 54 percent.

Like other ethnic groups, Hispanics do not appear especially sympathetic to teachers union demands in collective bargaining negotiations. Sixty-two percent of Hispanic adults think teachers should pay 20 percent of their pension and health care costs, as do 56 percent of African Americans.

By an overwhelming margin (87 percent), Hispanic respondents favor proposals to condition teacher tenure on their students’ making adequate progress on state tests. Whites and African Americans also favor such proposals but not to the same degree (75 percent and 80 percent, respectively). When it comes to whether teachers unions are playing a more positive or a more negative role in their local community, Hispanic adults come out in the middle—at 59 percent in support, they are more supportive than whites (45 percent) but less supportive than African Americans (75 percent).

Use test scores for evaluations, says the public (but not the teachers).

Teachers have long been paid primarily on the basis of their academic credentials and years of experience, creating in most parts of the country a lockstep pay scale that does not account for a teacher’s classroom performance. This approach is often justified on the grounds that it precludes favoritism on the part of principals, school board members, and other administrative officials.

As teacher effectiveness has become an increasingly visible policy issue, standard approaches to salary and tenure decisions are undergoing substantial change. More than 20 states now require that student test-score gains be used in key personnel decisions, often including tenure and salary determinations. Four states go so far as to prohibit a teacher from receiving a top rating if students do not exceed a certain level of accomplishment, while another 10 require that achievement gains constitute at least 50 percent of each teacher’s evaluation.

Is the public onboard with these changes? And what do teachers think about them? To find out, we randomly divided those interviewed into two groups (see Figure 5). The first group was given a stark choice: How much weight should be given to test scores and how much should be given to principal recommendations?

Given this simple dichotomy, the public says test-score gains should be given more than half the weight (62 percent) in making salary and tenure decisions. Teachers, by contrast, are prepared to place only a quarter of the weight (24 percent) on this information, with the other three-fourths of the weight being given to principal recommendations.

The second half of the sample was asked a more complex question, which required giving weights to test scores and evaluations from four different sources: principals, parents, students, and fellow teachers.

When the question was posed this way, the public and the teachers once again disagree. The public would place about one-third of the weight (32 percent) on test scores, but teachers would assign them less than one-fifth (19 percent). Conversely, teachers would give principal recommendations nearly half the weight (44 percent), while the public would give their recommendations less than one-quarter (23 percent).

Perhaps surprisingly, teachers are unenthusiastic about being evaluated by their fellow teachers. Like the rest of the public, they divide up the remaining weight more or less equally among the three remaining sources of evidence (students, parents, and fellow teachers).

An even bigger gap between teachers and the public emerges on the desirability of releasing information about teacher performance to the public at large. In both New York City and Los Angeles, newspapers have published such information, provoking an outcry among teachers, who felt their privacy had been invaded. When we asked respondents about this as a general practice, 78 percent of the public expresses support, compared to just 33 percent of teachers (see Figure 6).

When given the option of expressing neutrality on the issue (as another randomly chosen half of the sample was), 60 percent of the public still says it supports the publication of information about teacher performance, while only 13 percent is opposed, the remaining 27 percent taking the neutral position. Teacher opinion is almost the mirror image. Fifty-four percent oppose making information on test-score impacts publicly available, 30 percent express support, with the remaining 16 percent not taking a clear position either way.

Are teachers unions undermining teacher popularity?

Teachers have long held a cherished place in American popular culture. In such films as Blackboard Jungle, Stand and Deliver, and Dead Poets Society, Hollywood has highlighted the power of teachers to utterly transform the lives of their students.

But is this now changing? Are Waiting for Superman, Bad Teacher, and Won’t Back Down (forthcoming “A Takeover Tale,” cultured, Winter 2013) harbingers of a new, more skeptical depiction of teachers? At first, it would seem that public trust in teachers is widespread. When we asked half of the respondents in our survey whether they “have trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in the public schools,” no less than 72 percent say “yes” (see Figure 7). This is almost exactly what Phi Delta Kappan (PDK), a publication sympathetic to teachers unions, found in its 2012 poll and about the same as in PDK polls in previous years.

When we expand the possible response categories, however, a somewhat different picture emerges. Only 4 percent of the American public has “complete” trust and confidence in teachers, and just 38 percent has “a lot” of trust and confidence in them. Meanwhile, 49 percent has “some” trust and confidence, and 9 percent has “little” trust and confidence. In other words, 58 percent of those surveyed express less than “a lot of trust and confidence” in the teaching force.

Since this is the first time the public has been asked to break its assessment of teachers into four categories, we cannot document any trends over time. But we do know that public opinion toward teachers unions—and teachers’ opinions of them, too—has turned in a negative direction. The portion who thinks that teachers unions have had a positive effect on their local schools has dropped by 7 percentage points over the past year. Among teachers, the downward shift is no less than 16 percentage points.

In this year’s survey, as we have done in the past, we asked the following question: “Some people say teachers unions are a stumbling block to school reform. Others say that unions fight for better schools and better teachers. What is your opinion? Do you think teachers unions have a generally positive view on your local schools, or do you think they have a generally negative effect?” Respondents could choose among five options: very positive, somewhat positive, neither positive nor negative, somewhat negative, and very negative.

In our polls from 2009 to 2011, we saw little change in public opinion. Around 40 percent of respondents took the neutral position, saying that unions had neither a positive nor a negative impact. The remainder were divided almost evenly, with the negative share just barely exceeding the positive.

This year, however, the teachers unions lost ground. While 41 percent of the public still takes the neutral position, the portion with a positive view of unions dropped 7 percentage points in the last year, from 29 percent to 22 percent.

The drop is even greater, in both magnitude and significance, among our nationally representative sample of teachers. At a time when, according to education journalist and union watchdog Mike Antonucci, the National Education Association has lost 150,000 members over the past two years, and projects to lose 200,000 more members by 2014, teacher discontent appears to be rising. Whereas 58 percent of teachers had a positive view of unions in 2011, only 43 percent do so in 2012. Meanwhile, the percentage of teachers holding negative views of unions nearly doubled during this period, from 17 percent to 32 percent.

But when that same question was posed in either/or terms to the public as a whole, respondents split down the middle: 51 percent say unions had a negative impact, while 49 percent say their effect was positive. Teachers, meanwhile, offered a more positive assessment. When forced to choose between just two options, 71 percent of teachers claim that unions are a force for good, whereas 29 percent see them as a stumbling block to reform.

Support for school spending is shaky.

With the U.S. economy trying to crawl back to recovery, an unemployment rate above 8 percent, and state and local governments facing the prospect of insolvency, many school districts have found it necessary to cut expenditures and personnel. In California, the cities of Stockton and San Bernardino have declared bankruptcy. In Michigan, the financially bankrupt Muskegon schools have been handed over to a for-profit charter organization. Cuts in arts programs and extracurricular activities are becoming commonplace. Nationwide, the number of school employees has drifted downward by as much as 5 percent in the past few years.

Still, the American public continues to support increasing spending on local public schools. Or at least it appears to do so (see Figure 8). Sixty-three percent of the general public says it prefers an increase in school expenditures in the local district, well up from levels in 2007 when only 51 percent of the public called for expenditure increases. Not surprisingly, teachers are even more enthusiastic about increasing expenditures, 68 percent of whom like the idea.

When one investigates the issue just a bit further, however, fractures can be detected in the public’s willingness to spend more on public schools. Though most Americans still offer their support for spending increases in the abstract, their enthusiasm ebbs rather substantially when the taxes needed to pay for the increased expenditures are broached and when information about actual expenditures and salaries is provided.

Part of the explanation for this is the widespread ignorance on the part of the general public about just how much already is spent on public schools. When asked to estimate per-pupil expenditure in their district, Americans guess that expenditures are about $6,500 annually, when in fact they are around $12,500. That is only a slightly better set of estimates than the ones given in 2009, when Americans thought $4,231 was being spent per pupil and the reality was closer to $10,000 (see “Educating the Public,” features, Summer 2009).

When respondents are told the correct figure, support for spending on public schools shifts sharply downward. Support for increased spending on our standard question drops by 20 percentage points, a much bigger drop than what was observed in 2009, when support for increased spending fell only 8 percentage points (from 46 percent to 38 percent).

In another sign of less-than-wholehearted support for an education spending spree, only 35 percent of the public says taxes should increase to fund the schools. Support drops by another 11 percentage points—to just 24 percent—when those interviewed were first told how much was currently being spent.

Teachers, who stand to benefit from increased expenditure, remain committed to more spending when told the realities of the expenditure situation in their district. Their support slips only 8 percentage points from the high of 68 percent when no information is supplied about current expenditures. But even teachers are 17 percentage points less likely to support higher taxes to fund increases in education spending.

When the subject turns from per-pupil expenditures to teacher salaries, the same pattern emerges (see Figure 9). When asked without any accompanying information, nearly two out of three Americans think that teacher salaries should go up. Among teachers, support for a salary boost registers at no less than 85 percent.

As they do on per-pupil expenditures, however, Americans hold markedly inaccurate views about actual teacher salaries. When asked to hazard a guess, Americans estimate that public school teachers in their states receive, on average, about $36,000 in salary annually. The true figure, even without accounting for benefits, pensions, and the like, sits at about $56,000 nationwide.

Support for higher salaries plummets, however, when Americans are told how much teachers actually make in their states. Of those given the facts, only 36 percent favor an increase, which amounts to a whopping 28-percentage-point decline from the 64 percent favoring an increase when no information is supplied.

When teachers were given accurate information about salary levels in their state, their support slips by only 10 percentage points, probably because they are thinking about their own paycheck. Also, they have a better sense of teacher salaries in their state than the public has, estimating them to be about $44,000 annually.

Is public support for charters really that much higher than for vouchers and tax credits?

As a policy reform, school choice shows no signs of slowing. The number of states with school-voucher and tax-credit programs has escalated since 2010, the number of students attending charter schools climbs steadily year by year, and new technologies for online learning are being promoted by a cascade of new entrepreneurs.

The contours of elite debate about school choice, however, are not replicated in the larger public. While charter schools and digital learning are thought to be the safest choice options for political elites to promote, tax credits are even more popular than charters, and vouchers, the most controversial proposal, also command the support of half the population when the idea is posed in an inviting way.

Vouchers and tax credits. When it comes to school vouchers, apparent levels of public support turn on the wording of the question. For the past two years, PDK has asked whether respondents “favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense.” Even with the rather loaded “at public expense” phrasing, PDK reported that support shifted upward from 34 percent to 44 percent between 2011 and 2012.

If one asks the question in a more inviting manner, as we have, support jumps further still (see Figure 10). Told about a proposal “that would give low-income families with children in public schools a wider choice, by allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition,” 50 percent of the American public comes out in support and 50 percent expresses opposition.

Still, support for vouchers does not match public willingness to back tax credits, even though most economists think the difference between vouchers and tax credits more a matter of style than substance. Nearly three-fourths (72 percent) of the public favors a “tax credit for individual and corporate donations that pay for scholarships to help low-income parents send their children to private schools.” We find little evidence that support for tax credits has changed significantly since 2011.

Charters. Figure 11 shows that when given a choice of supporting or opposing charter schools, 62 percent of the public says it favors ”the formation of charter schools,” nearly identical to what PDK finds (66 percent favoring ”the idea of charter schools”). Support for charters, however, is softer than it might seem. When respondents are given the opportunity to take a neutral position that neither supports nor opposes charters, no less than 41 percent choose that option. Among the remainder, the split is nearly three to one in favor of charters.

Meanwhile, public knowledge about charters remains as impoverished as ever. As our survey did two years ago, we asked respondents a variety of factual questions: whether charter schools can hold religious services, charge tuition, receive more or less per-pupil funding than traditional public schools, and are legally obligated to admit students randomly when oversubscribed. We found little change in the level of public information over the past two years. Large percentages of respondents still say they don’t know the answers to these questions. Among those who hazard a guess, they are as likely to give the wrong answer as the correct one. Although teachers do a better job of accurately identifying the characteristics of charter schools, even a majority of teachers get many of the answers wrong or say they don’t know.

Online education. As major universities—Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and others—are joining community colleges and state universities in a nationwide dash toward online learning in higher education, many states are exploring ways of incorporating new digital technologies into secondary schools.

A substantial share of both the public and the teaching force seems ready to consider the expansion of online learning. When asked if high school students should be allowed to take “approved classes either online or in school,” opinion splits down the middle, with a bare majority (53 percent to 47 percent) favoring the idea. Teachers are more enthusiastic, among whom no less than 61 percent feel students should be given an online option.

The public, however, is not equally enthusiastic about all uses of the online tool, nor is support for the idea gaining strength. The most popular uses are for rural education and advanced course taking. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed think students in rural areas should have online opportunities, with only 14 percent opposing the idea. That is down modestly from the 64 percent who supported this use in 2008. Similar percentages of support and opposition are expressed for advanced courses taken online for college credit. But once again, levels of support have slipped since 2008 (from 68 percent to 57 percent in 2012).

Less popular are online courses for dropouts and home schoolers. Only 44 percent favor, and 30 percent oppose, using public funding to help dropouts take courses online. Many home schoolers find online courses to be a valuable tool, but the public remains dubious. Only 28 percent favors public funding for such uses, and 38 percent opposes it. Those percentages have not changed materially since 2008.

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.

The Educrats claim this is fair and equitable; children from at-risk populations are often far behind their more affluent peers, and expecting all children to meet the same high standards is unfair, even mean-spirited.  And D.C. school officials are not alone in this effort.  Educrats all over the country have begun to persuade federal education officials to grant waivers from NCLB, adopting the position that it is unfair to label schools as failing when the performance gaps between ethnic groups are so wide and when minority children lag so far behind their White, more affluent peers.  According to a recent article in the Washington Post, twenty-seven of thirty-three states that won waivers from NCLB have established different performance targets for different groups of students.  A recent Education Week analysis of waiver requests from thirty-four states found that only eight states—Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, and Oregon –set the same target for all students.

Further, the Educrats assert that the new policy of lower standards actually raises performance expectations for minority children because they will have to progress at a faster rate over the same span of time.  For example, over the next five years in Maryland, African American students need to increase their proficiency in reading from 76 to 88 percent (a 12 percent increase over 5 years), while White students need only increase from 92 to 96 percent (a 4 percent increase) over that same period.  Furthermore, the waivers permit schools within the same district to establish different student performance targets, again on the logic that school-to-school differences exist even within the same subgroup of students.

Do you think former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee would have permitted the schools to lower their standards and expectations for children of color?  Certainly not.  Whatever anyone may think of her tenure as D.C. school’s chief, and she had many detractors, she would most certainly have never allowed standards to vary by ethnicity.  Some minority parents agree, asserting that lower standards for their children is a form of prejudice, the “soft bigotry of low expectations” as former President George W. Bush called it.  In a recent article in the Washington Post, Alicia Rucker, a single mother of six, called the new policy “disgraceful.  It’s ridiculous to even believe that if you expect less from someone, you’re going to get more.”  She continued, “We need to have as high expectations for any child in Ward 2 as Ward 7, for any child in Ward 3 as Ward 8.  There should be no difference.”  She is right on at least two points.

First, lowering standards equates to lowering expectations.  There is no industry, profession, or athletic sport in which lowering standards does not lead to lower expectations. While standards and expectations may mean different things in theory, in practice, the two are often used synonymously. Decades of research on effective schools conclusively demonstrates that setting high standards and expectations for all children, but especially those most at-risk of academic failure, creates a more positive, inclusive school culture and raises their level of achievement.  The best teachers and school leaders recognize this and make this part of their daily practice.  Unfortunately, this is often the exception rather than the rule.

Second, let’s not pretend that lowering performance expectations is in the best interests of children.  Although they sometimes don’t demonstrate it on standardized tests, kids are smart, specifically, as it pertains to understanding adults.  Kids know which educators truly care about them and which do not.  And they will pick up in an instant the lowered performance targets and expectations the adults in the system have for them.  In reaction to criticism of the policy, Cate Swinburn, head of data and accountability in the D.C. school system, stated, “In no way does DCPS hold our students to different expectations based on their skin color or language ability or special learning needs”.

Perhaps she is right – the new policy isn’t about the kids.  This new system of different performance targets is all about the adults in the schools, not the children.  For proof, one need only ask, “Who stands most to gain from these new performance targets?”  Teachers will benefit, because by lowering the bar of student achievement, they will rate better on performance evaluations.  School leaders will similarly benefit.  It will certainly improve the morale of teachers and school leaders; after all, who would want to work in a system where the majority of children do not perform at a minimum level of proficiency?  This new policy will help the adults feel better about themselves and their performance.  And having significantly lower numbers of failing schools means that state officials, including some mayors and governors, will not be embarrassed with large numbers of failing schools.  After all, it is difficult to win reelection as the education governor (or state superintendent or mayor) if many of your schools fail to effectively educate all children.

So, if children enter school behind, the new policy essentially recognizes that they will leave school at different levels as well.  If teachers and school leaders cannot eliminate the achievement gap within a decade (as NCLB originally intended, since that was woefully unrealistic), perhaps these relaxed, lower standards will enable those working in schools to bring everyone up to proficiency gradually, over time—perhaps in a generation or two.  I can see how such a policy would be attractive to adults working in the system.

Who are the losers in this new system?  The largest group is those children who will look to their teachers and principals and recognize that they have lower expectations for them than they do for other children.  And, because far fewer schools will be labeled as failing, fewer children and their families will be given at least the opportunity to transfer to a higher performing public school in the district.  This is a win-win situation for school leaders who really don’t want those kids transferring into their schools anyway.  So, this new policy makes it easier for adults working in the system.  Adults win; poor, minority students lose.  Again.

NCLB did set unrealistic goals for student achievement; most everyone knew it at the time.  But that wasn’t important.  What was important is that for the first time, policymakers pushed school leaders to focus explicitly on the achievement gap.  The “no excuses” mindset is what was important; the question of whether it was realistically feasible to do so in a decade was less so.  Words and symbolism matter—a lot.  In the movie Second Hand Lions, Hub, played by Robert Duvall, makes an impassioned plea to his nephew: “Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most…Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.”  Setting high standards and expectations for all students, and expecting everyone in the schools—students, teachers, counselors, principals, and parents—to work hard with a laser-like focus to achieve those expectations, are important words and symbolism.  They convey a clear message about the core values and beliefs of the school system.

More importantly, it establishes a school culture of high standards and expectations today, not at some future point generations distant.  Establishing different standards of success (and of evaluating the adults who educate them) based on the color of children’s skin or on the wealth of their parents is the wrong message to send. Supporters of the new policy can play all the semantic games they want (and they are apparently playing them quite successfully and persuasively with federal education officials), the new standards will slow progress towards closing the achievement gap.  Seriously, does anyone expect the new standards to speed that progress up?  Sandy Kress, a former education aide to President Bush who helped craft NCLB, asked a very commonsense question that the Educrats have not answered: “Why, after 12-plus years, can’t we expect virtually all of our children to achieve at a basic level?” And these most basic standards of proficiency, as Mr. Kress pointed out, are not all that high.  Unfortunately, this belief about setting high standards and expectations for poor children and children of color, upon which decades of research is based, is being systematically discarded by Educrats throughout the country to make the system more fair to the adults working in schools.

Ms. Rucker observed that lowering expectations (making them more realistic) may help mask what are often profound needs in schools in the district.  Her trenchant observation gets at the heart of one major failure of federal and state education policy: the unwillingness or inability of public officials to invest more resources (fiscal, political, and entrepreneurial) into failing schools.  Talk is important but cheap and must be backed up with specific, concrete action plans for improvement.  All too often, state and federal education officials have been unwilling to make such investments, particularly in tight economic times, partly because they often adopt a myopic view of education’s (and educational programs’) return on investment.  Absent targeted reforms backed with human and fiscal capital, even the best efforts to push all students to proficiency and beyond will meet with uneven success.

NCLB shined a light on an all-too-often ignored problem that seemed insurmountable and thus wasn’t discussed in public.  That light is dimmer now, and at-risk children throughout the country will find it even more difficult to find their way in an increasingly competitive, international world.  I suspect Alicia Rucker, that single mother of six who sent her oldest child to (and through) Georgetown, knows more about improving the education of minority children than all the Educrats in D.C. combined.

- Lance Fusarelli

Lance D. Fusarelli is Professor in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Adult & Higher Education at North Carolina State University.

But what is comprehensive implementation? True, we’ve heard much palaver about what the Common Core portends for assessment, for teachers’ professional development, and for curricular/instructional materials. All true, all crucial, and all probably the most urgent. But these issues are also just the tip of the CCSS iceberg, most of which remains invisible under water. What I haven’t seen yet is clear recognition that the Common Core, taken seriously, eventually changes everything in American education and that implementation, done right, must be comprehensive.

Which means what? Start with a substantial analogy: World War II. A new book profiles General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who was assigned by General Marshall to the Army’s “War Plans Department” as the conflict loomed and (I quote the Wall Street Journal’s book review) “tasked…with reducing America’s mobilization requirements to a single document.” Then FDR asked Wedemeyer’s team to turn it “into a blueprint on how to defeat America’s likely enemies in a future war.” The book explains:

Completed in an astonishing 90 days, this plan laid down all the critical politico-military-industrial assumptions for the looming conflict, correctly identifying America’s adversaries and where the main fighting would take place and estimating the industrial capacity needed to feed the war machines of China, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States and how much war materiel could be spared to allies. Wedemeyer proposed overrunning Germany and Japan with an army of nearly nine million draftees, a number that he concluded would leave sufficient factory workers and farmers back home to feed the troops and keep the tanks, bombers and artillery shells rolling off assembly lines. He also called for an invasion of Europe in 1943, before Germany could strengthen its defenses.

The Wedemeyer plan was carried out only in part. (Churchill was convinced that an early invasion of the European continent would end disastrously.) But, dramatic though this may seem, full-on Common Core implementation will demand a plan a plan of similar comprehensiveness and vision. I don’t know who will play the role of Albert Wedemeyer, but maybe we can accelerate the process by offering a provisional table of contents.

Here’s my list of  topics that the plan should include, submitted  with some humility, as I’ve surely overlooked important items (bring ‘em on!), and with some trepidation, as understanding these implications may cause Common Core skeptics to stiffen their resistance.

Curriculum

1. Curriculum guides for teachers

The Common Core sets forth what students needs to have learned by the end of each year. It doesn’t help teachers with “scope and sequence,” much less lesson planning. Not all teachers want such help—and there’s much shrieking about “national curriculum”—but some will welcome guidance. (Keep it voluntary!)

2. Textbooks that are truly aligned
Every big ELA- and math-textbook publisher has already declared that its products are “aligned” with the Common Core, but mostly that’s not true. Who is going to apply the excellent publishers’ guidelines produced by Student Achievement Partners and actually rate the textbooks (and fast-proliferating digital resources) on how well they’re aligned?

3. Additional instructional materials

Traditional U.S. textbooks and “reading programs”—bulky, lumbering, and linear—aren’t going to work very well with the instructional demands of the Common Core. Teachers will need to be able to muster instructional resources from many sources, including electronic ones. (Some excellent nonprofit groups are already at work on materials that will end up being freely available, which also portends a radical transformation of the textbook market!)

4. Curriculum narrowing

How do we keep K-12 education from being whittled down to the two subjects in the Common Core? Yes, “next generation” science standards are in the works. But what about history, geography, civics, languages, and the arts? Health and phys ed? Where do they fit? What standards will apply? How will they be taught and assessed?

Staff

5. Professional development

Hundreds of thousands of current teachers need to update, alter, and amplify their own knowledge base and pedagogical arsenal if they’re to succeed in imparting the Common Core to their pupils.

6. Teacher (and principal) preparation

Pretty nearly every teacher-preparation program in the land, whether university-based or “alternative,” will need to revamp its own standards and curriculum if it’s to prepare tomorrow’s instructors to impart the Common Core to their students. Ditto for those who purport to train school leaders. A lot of professors will need to change their ways, too!

7. Evaluations

These will change, too, with implications for everything that is attached to them (tenure decisions, merit pay, layoffs, and more). Will it get harder or easier to make “value-added” calculations at the classroom level once Common Core assessments kick in? What about rubrics for teacher observations? (And how well trained will those observers be in what to look for in a Common Core classroom?)

Schools

8. The day and year

I wager that today’s standard school day and year will prove insufficient for many kids to master the Common Core plus everything else that they need to learn. Can instructional time be individualized, too, in school or online? What are the budget implications?

9. Promotion and graduation requirements

Some states have third-grade “reading guarantees,” but what about the rest of the K-12 sequence? Will going from sixth grade to seventh hinge on a student having mastered the Common Core standards for sixth? What about entering high school? Earning a diploma? Will this continue to be based on Carnegie units and course credits or on actual mastery? (And what about subjects outside ELA and math?) What does Common Core portend for the two dozen or so states with high-school-graduation tests that are pegged to yesterday’s ninth- or tenth-grade expectations?

10. Internal organization of schools

Though the Common Core is built around grade levels, kids don’t learn at the same speed—and individualization of instruction grows ever more important. What about moving kids forward as they master stuff rather than through lock-step progressions? Why can’t one be in third grade for ELA, say, and fourth or fifth for math? How about those who will need five years rather than four to master the challenges of high school? (Today they’re counted as “drop outs” in most states’ statistics!) And since we can no longer afford to individualize by shrinking class size further, we’ll need to rely more on technology—which the new assessments also need—and on more flexible ways of organizing school itself.

11. Preschooling

Remind yourself what the Common Core expects Kindergartners to learn (review page ten of the ELA standards or page eleven of math standards). Then ask yourself what must a child know and be able to do upon entry into Kindergarten to maximize the odds that she will be ready to succeed there. Then ponder how few of today’s preschool programs (Head Start included) have standards, curricula, and staff that are up to this challenge? And how many of today’s needy pre-Kindergartners don’t even have access to those programs?

12. Technology

This stuff is evolving at warp speed, with profound implications for schooling and for kids’ lives. Much of it’s about communication and entertainment, but as those realms overlap more with formal education—for good and ill—and as more kids gain 24/7 access to all of them, what will this mean for K-12 schooling? How much of it will actually take place in school? How much will require flesh-and-blood instructors—and of what sorts? And what’s to become of libraries, book rooms, backpacks, and the rest? Picture every school kid with her own iPad in hand…

Assessment and accountability

13. Tests

New Common Core assessments are under development for deployment in 2014-15—and let’s hope they turn out well—but for states and districts to make good use of them means rethinking their entire approach to student assessment, right down to the classroom level. How will the end of a “six-week unit,” for example, be assessed? What about those end-of-week vocabulary reviews? Weekly reports to parents on what was and wasn’t learned?

14. Accountability systems

Most state accountability systems incorporate multiple factors, including but not limited to student test scores, which are geared to current state standards and tests. Every state does it differently—and those differences are apt to widen as federal NCLB prescriptions ease with recent waivers and (maybe someday) ESEA reauthorization. States that embrace the Common Core will need to reconstruct their accountability systems, as will districts that have their own.

15. Alternate assessments

Then there’s the GED and other ways of gauging “equivalency” for those who don’t earn a conventional on-schedule diploma. Big changes are afoot there, but will the new tests equate to the Common Core—and redress the long-standing problem of the GED: namely that people possessing it don’t fare much better in life than dropouts?

The reception

16. Graduation rates

What happens, politically, when graduation rates plummet and dropout rates soar, at least for a few years? Are states and communities ready for this? Nobody ever is. But does that mean we’ll “phase in” the more rigorous graduation expectations? How long will that take?

17. Higher education

Once Common Core rigor takes hold (if ever) of high-school-exit expectations, will our universities actually accept that diploma as proof of college readiness? Will it yield automatic admission and placement into credit-bearing college courses? If not, why should K-12 students (and parents and taxpayers) take it seriously? If it does, what happens to faculty members who have been teaching remedial courses? What happens to collegiate English and math classes if entering students are truly prepared? Will that compulsory first-year writing course still be needed?

18. Career education

The Common Core claims to be geared to college and career readiness. We know that not everyone is headed to (or belongs in) college, at least not the four-year kind. But what exactly are the implications for employer expectations, hiring practices, and on-the-job training? (How about the armed forces as a major employer?) How about secondary-level technical-vocational education? Will Common Core expectations make it into those institutions, too? That will likely mean major-league curricular and instructional alteration.

19. NCLB and other federal policy

Everybody knows this but it needs underscoring: When Congress gets around to reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—and other programs such as IDEA, Head Start and TRIO—it must contend with the changed expectations that most states will have for their students and the implications of those changes for the special populations, additional services, and so forth that Uncle Sam focuses on. And it must do so without turning the Common Core itself into a federal mandate. (Remember, four states want no part of it—and at least a few more are apt to back out along the way.)

20. NAEP

The role of the Nation’s Report Card will evolve, too. If most states end up using new English language arts and math assessments, calibrated to Common Core standards, at the individual, building, district, and state levels, there will be less cause to press for NAEP (and PISA, TIMSS, etc.) to be administered to everybody. But NAEP will remain the crucial external auditor for Common Core states and those that do their own thing. At the same time, the curricular frameworks that determine what NAEP assesses may need to be re-examined.

Yikes. It’s sort of scary. Daunting. Politically and organizationally challenging. Expensive in a time of tight budgets. Disruptive to myriad entrenched institutions and practices. But if we don’t wrap our minds around the totality of it, we may not win this war. Are you listening, General Wedemeyer?

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

The National Education Policy Center has just released a critique of our study by Sara Goldrick-Rab of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Several of the issues raised by Goldrick-Rab have no merit and none undermine the primary conclusion of our study: The voucher intervention in New York City increased the college enrollment rates of African-American students.  Below are responses to the primary criticisms raised in the review:

1. The review questions the equivalence of the treatment and control groups by pointing to a modest difference between the treatment and control groups in the share of African-American students’ parents who completed a bachelor’s degree.  This difference is only marginally statistically significant and, as the review notes, there are other differences that favor the control group.  For example, control group families are less likely to have a father absent.  Because chance differences can appear for any one characteristic, statisticians have developed a test that uses information on all background characteristics to ascertain whether two groups are equivalent.  The overall treatment and control groups and the African-American and Hispanic subgroups all survive this test.

2. The review says that an interpretation of the results for African-American students is not appropriate because they do not differ significantly from those observed for Hispanic students. As stated in our report, it is true that the effects for African Americans and Hispanics are both positive and do not differ from one another by an amount that is statistically significant.  But we can confidently say that the effect for African-American students is positive (i.e. greater than zero), whereas we cannot say the same for Hispanic students.

3. The review asks for an interpretation of the results for the small number of white and Asian students.  But the treatment and control groups for this small number of students do not survive the equivalence test mentioned in item one; interpreting the results is therefore inappropriate.

4. The review raises a technical issue related to measurement error that is incorrect.  It is correct that our college attendance measure is not perfect because the process used to match students to college enrollment records is not precise.  But those errors appear as part of the standard error currently reported and no further adjustment is appropriate.

5. The review makes an error in its interpretation of a null finding.  It concludes that our report “convincingly demonstrates that in New York City a private voucher program failed to increase the college enrollment rates of students from low-income families.”  That statement is false.  The overall impact estimate is not estimated with enough precision to conclude that the voucher intervention had no effect.  The overall impact is not statistically significant from zero, but it is also not statistically significant from a negative impact of 3 percentage points or a positive impact of 4 percentage points.

6. The one result that can be reached with confidence is that the impact of vouchers for African Americans was positive.  None of the issues raised in this commentary compromise that conclusion.

- Matthew M. Chingos and Paul E. Peterson

Many charter schools tout attributes similar to those offered by the church’s schools, such as disciplined environments, an emphasis on personal responsibility and character development, and distinctive instructional and curricular approaches.

And Buddin, whose report is more broadly aimed at measuring the impact of charters on all private schools, says,

[C]harter schools are pulling large numbers of students from the private education market and present a potentially dev­astating impact on the private education market, as well as a serious increase in the financial burden on taxpayers.

As both Adam Emerson and Kathleen Porter-Magee have already pointed out, Catholic schools were in decline long before charters came on the scene. Between 1960, when Catholics educated one out of every eight American school-age children (5.2 million) and 1990, when charter schools first came on the scene, 30 percent of the 13,000 Catholic schools in the U.S. closed (with enrollment plummeting to 2.5 million). In fact, since the pace of the enrollment decline has slackened in the charter era (2,000 of 9,000 schools—22 percent—have closed in the last 20 years) one might argue that charters have served as a wakeup call for Catholics. As Fordham’s 2008 report on Catholic schools showed, the nation’s largest religious denomination was taking steps to slow the decline; borrowing many of the tricks of the trade from charters, religious orders were forming the equivalent of CMOs, operating networks of schools, and doing sophisticated fundraising. And, as Cavanagh points out, the jury is still out on the benefits of voucher programs to Catholic schools.

As a Catholic, a former seminarian, and a journalist who has written about Catholic schools (here, here, and here), I must admit to being of two minds on the question of whether Catholic schools can be saved and whether their fate should be a public-policy issue. As to the latter, the argument that the public benefits from private schools by educating students that the taxpayer doesn’t have to is compelling. Lackman estimates that Catholic students moving to publicly financed charters in New York cost taxpayers an extra $320 million a year. Buddin says that, nationwide, the exodus costs $1.8 billion. Those are significant numbers. Does that mean the public should be subsidizing Catholic schools? Vouchers offer the cleaner—and Constitutional—public-policy option.

The question of what really ails Catholic schools is the one I would hope Catholics themselves continue to consider. Here, I would offer a couple avenues worth exploring. First, there’s the pedagogical and curricular problem. Here, John Dewey, no fan of the Catholics or their schools, which he pronounced “inimical to democracy,” may have had the last laugh: Once known for their rigorous academic and organizational structure, Catholic schools now implement many of the instructional theories and practices that predominate in Dewey-inspired progressive-education schools (the dominant principle of our public schools for most of the last fifty years). The other irony, as Tony Bryck and the co-authors of the now-classic 1992 study, Catholic Schools and the Common Good, discovered, is that by virtue of their rigor Catholic schools (once) did a better job educating ordinary kids, including the poor, than did public schools. As I wrote in my 2008 Ed Next story (referenced above),

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.”

Thus, Catholic schools are simply not the academic hothouses they once were.

And Catholic schools may not be so Catholic anymore either. We know that the nuns, on whose back the system was built, according to Bryck et al, are largely gone, taking with them not just their free labor, but a zealous loyalty to “the faith.” The God gene has been modified. I recall an interview with a teacher at a Chicago charter school, started and run by the Christian Brothers, an ancient Catholic order, during which the teacher complained that the school’s problem was that it could not teach about God. He had a point. The seven pillars of character that hang from pretty banners in the hallway just don’t have the same resonance as the image of Moses coming down from the mountain with the ten commandments that God had just etched in stone tablets. (There is the old Catholic joke about the delinquent public school kid whose father transferred him to a Catholic school, where his misbehavior ceased. “I got there and saw this guy hanging from a tree with nails in his hands and feet,” the boy told his father, “and I figured they meant business.”)

The point is not that charters, which are public schools of course, need more religion—it’s that Catholic schools do. In their struggle to survive, parochial schools have opened their doors to students of all faiths and have, not surprisingly, watered down their evangelism. And while this has helped stem the tide of decline—as well as reinvigorate the church’s missionary zeal (the famous line from Cardinal Hickey of Washington, quoted by Kathleen, “we don’t education [urban] students because THEY are Catholic, but because WE are”)—it has also dampened the Church’s once-powerful religious belief system. It’s now hard to tell whether Church’s new ecumenical bent caused the decline in its schools or if the secularizing of the Catholic schools has made them less relevant—and less competitive. It may not be the Catholic school system that is in trouble, but the Church.

It may be well to ponder some history here and recall that the same 1884 conclave of Bishops (in Baltimore) that gave American Catholics a detailed “catechism” of belief was the same one that ordered each parish to build a school and each Catholic kid to attend it. Is it time for another such meeting?

-Peter Meyer

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View blog.

I appreciate the intuitive appeal of Rotherham’s argument; it was a similar concern about backing away from NCLB’s lofty goals that led me to attack an earlier set of tweaks way back in 2005. But on this one, Andy’s got it wrong, and Virginia officials have it right. As David Foster, the president of Virginia’s state board of education told the Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton, “If you just set an arbitrary target without regard for what’s achievable and where they’re starting from, you’re just shooting in the dark. That was the whole problem with No Child Left Behind. It made no sense to say that by an arbitrary year. . . every child everywhere in this vast country would pass every math and reading test. We made a joke of the process that way.”

In other words, No Child Left Behind’s aspirational aims were more effective as rhetoric than as an accountability regime. As Rick Hess has argued persuasively, if the law’s objectives, carrots, and sticks are to actually motivate educators, and not just demoralize them, they must been seen as achievable. So why is it so “stunning” that Virginia wouldn’t expect the achievement gap to evaporate in just five years?

To be sure, even Virginia officials have agreed that the goals put into their ESEA application weren’t ambitious enough; they will come back later this month with more challenging targets for their poor and minority students. That’s fair; groups that are further behind should be expected to make greater progress over time.

But to follow Rotherham’s advice and demand “common targets” is to doom the next phase of NCLB implementation to the same fate as the last: It will fail, because it will lose credibility with the very people expected to make it succeed—the educators.

America’s schools aren’t doing nearly well enough, especially for our neediest children. We need accountability systems that create urgency and push for significant gains every year. Ideological arguments and utopian objectives don’t help.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

You can read the study here.

A Wall Street Journal op-ed on the study is here.

And a blog entry about how the study came about is here.

“The United States’ failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country’s ability to thrive in a global economy.” Such was the dire warning issued recently by an education task force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. Chaired by former New York City schools chancellor Joel I. Klein and former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, the task force said the country “will not be able to keep pace—much less lead—globally unless it moves to fix the problems it has allowed to fester for too long.” Along much the same lines, President Barack Obama, in his 2011 State of the Union address, declared, “We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.”

Although these proclamations are only the latest in a long series of exhortations to restore America’s school system to a leading position in the world, the U.S. position remains problematic. In a report issued in 2010, we found only 6 percent of U.S. students performing at the advanced level in mathematics, a percentage lower than those attained by 30 other countries. And the problem isn’t limited to top-performing students. In 2011, we showed that just 32 percent of 8th graders in the United States were proficient in mathematics, placing the U.S. 32nd when ranked among the participating international jurisdictions (see “Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” features, Fall 2011).

Admittedly, American governments at every level have taken actions that would seem to be highly promising. Federal, state, and local governments spent 35 percent more per pupil—in real-dollar terms—in 2009 than they had in 1990. States began holding schools accountable for student performance in the 1990s, and the federal government developed its own nationwide school-accountability program in 2002.

And, in fact, U.S. students in elementary school do seem to be performing considerably better than they were a couple of decades ago. Most notably, the performance of 4th-grade students on math tests rose steeply between the mid-1990s and 2011. Perhaps, then, after a half century of concern and efforts, the United States may finally be taking the steps needed to catch up.

To find out whether the United States is narrowing the international education gap, we provide in this report estimates of learning gains over the period between 1995 and 2009 for 49 countries from most of the developed and some of the newly developing parts of the world. We also examine changes in student performance in 41 states within the United States, allowing us to compare these states with each other as well as with the 48 other countries.

Data and Analytic Approach

Data availability varies from one international jurisdiction to another, but for many countries enough information is available to provide estimates of change for the 14-year period between 1995 and 2009. For 41 U.S. states, one can estimate the improvement trend for a 19-year period—from 1992 to 2011. Those time frames are extensive enough to provide a reasonable estimate of the pace at which student test-score performance is improving in countries across the globe and within the United States. To facilitate a comparison between the United States as a whole and other nations, the aggregate U.S. trend is estimated for that 14-year period and each U.S. test is weighted to take into account the specific years that international tests were administered. (Because of the difference in length and because international tests are not administered in exactly the same years as the NAEP tests, the results for each state are not perfectly calibrated to the international tests, and each state appears to be doing slightly better internationally than would be the case if the calibration were exact. The differences are marginal, however, and the comparative ranking of states is not affected by this discrepancy.)

Our findings come from assessments of performance in math, science, and reading of representative samples in particular political jurisdictions of students who at the time of testing were in 4th or 8th grade or were roughly ages 9‒10 or 14‒15. The political jurisdictions may be nations or states. The data come from one series of U.S. tests and three series of tests administered by international organizations. Using the equating method described in the methodology sidebar, it is possible to link states’ performance on the U.S. tests to countries’ performance on the international tests, because representative samples of U.S. students have taken all four series of tests.

Comparisons across Countries

In absolute terms, the performance of U.S. students in 4th and 8th grade on the NAEP in math, reading, and science improved noticeably between 1995 and 2009. Using information from all administrations of NAEP tests to students in all three subjects over this time period, we observe that student achievement in the United States is estimated to have increased by 1.6 percent of a standard deviation per year, on average. Over the 14 years, these gains equate to 22 percent of a standard deviation. When interpreted in years of schooling, these gains are notable. On most measures of student performance, student growth is typically about 1 full standard deviation on standardized tests between 4th and 8th grade, or about 25 percent of a standard deviation from one grade to the next. Taking that as the benchmark, we can say that the rate of gain over the 14 years has been just short of the equivalent of one additional year’s worth of learning among students in their middle years of schooling.

Yet when compared to gains made by students in other countries, progress within the United States is middling, not stellar (see Figure 1). While 24 countries trail the U.S. rate of improvement, another 24 countries appear to be improving at a faster rate. Nor is U.S. progress sufficiently rapid to allow it to catch up with the leaders of the industrialized world.

Students in three countries—Latvia, Chile, and Brazil—improved at an annual rate of 4 percent of a standard deviation, and students in another eight countries—Portugal, Hong Kong, Germany, Poland, Liechtenstein, Slovenia, Colombia, and Lithuania—were making gains at twice the rate of students in the United States. By the previous rule of thumb, gains made by students in these 11 countries are estimated to be at least two years’ worth of learning. Another 13 countries also appeared to be doing better than the U.S., although the differences between the average improvements of their students and those of U.S. students are marginal.

Student performance in nine countries declined over the same 14-year time period. Test-score declines were registered in Sweden, Bulgaria, Thailand, the Slovak and Czech Republics, Romania, Norway, Ireland, and France. The remaining 15 countries were showing rates of improvement that were somewhat slower than those of the United States.

In sum, the gains posted by the United States in recent years are hardly remarkable by world standards. Although the U.S. is not among the 9 countries that were losing ground over this period of time, 11 other countries were moving forward at better than twice the pace of the United States, and all the other participating countries were changing at a rate similar enough to the United States to be within a range too close to be identified as clearly different.

Which States Are the Big Gainers?

Progress was far from uniform across the United States. Indeed, the variation across states was about as large as the variation among the countries of the world. Maryland won the gold medal by having the steepest overall growth trend. Coming close behind, Florida won the silver medal and Delaware the bronze. The other seven states that rank among the top-10 improvers, all of which outpaced the United States as a whole, are Massachusetts, Louisiana, South Carolina, New Jersey, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Virginia. See Figure 2 for an ordering of the 41 states by rate of improvement.

Iowa shows the slowest rate of improvement. The other four states whose gains were clearly less than those of the United States as a whole are Maine, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Nebraska. Note, however, that because of nonparticipation in the early NAEP assessments, we cannot estimate an improvement trend for the 1992‒2011 time period for nine states—Alaska, Illinois, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont, and Washington.

Cumulative growth rates vary widely. Average student gains over the 19-year period in Maryland, Florida, Delaware, and Massachusetts, with annual growth rates of 3.1 to 3.3 percent of a standard deviation, were some 59 percent to 63 percent of a standard deviation over the time period, or better than two years of learning. Meanwhile, annual gains in the states with the weakest growth rates—Iowa, Maine, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin—varied between 0.7 percent and 1.0 percent of a standard deviation, which translate over the 19-year period into learning gains of one-half to three-quarters of a year. In other words, the states making the largest gains are improving at a rate two to three times the rate in states with the smallest gains.

Had all students throughout the United States made the same average gains as did those in the four leading states, the U.S. would have been making progress roughly comparable to the rate of improvement in Germany and the United Kingdom, bringing the United States reasonably close to the top-performing countries in the world.

Is the South Rising Again?

Some regional concentration is evident within the United States. Five of the top-10 states were in the South, while no southern states were among the 18 with the slowest growth. The strong showing of the South may be related to energetic political efforts to enhance school quality in that region. During the 1990s, governors of several southern states—Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, and Arkansas—provided much of the national leadership for the school accountability effort, as there was a widespread sentiment in the wake of the civil rights movement that steps had to be taken to equalize educational opportunity across racial groups. The results of our study suggest those efforts were at least partially successful.

Meanwhile, students in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and Indiana were among those making the fewest average gains between 1992 and 2011. Once again, the larger political climate may have affected the progress on the ground. Unlike in the South, the reform movement has made little headway within midwestern states, at least until very recently. Many of the midwestern states had proud education histories symbolized by internationally acclaimed land-grant universities, which have become the pride of East Lansing, Michigan; Madison, Wisconsin; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Lafayette, Indiana. Satisfaction with past accomplishments may have dampened interest in the school reform agenda sweeping through southern, border, and some western states.

Are Gains Simply Catch-ups?

According to a perspective we shall label “catch-up theory,” growth in student performance is easier for those political jurisdictions originally performing at a low level than for those originally performing at higher levels. Lower-performing systems may be able to copy existing approaches at lower cost than higher-performing systems can innovate. This would lead to a convergence in performance over time. An opposing perspective—which we shall label “building-on-strength theory”—posits that high-performing school systems find it relatively easy to build on their past achievements, while low-performing systems may struggle to acquire the human capital needed to improve. If that is generally the case, then the education gap among nations and among states should steadily widen over time.

Neither theory seems able to predict the international test-score changes that we have observed, as nations with rapid gains can be identified among countries that had high initial scores and countries that had low ones. Latvia, Chile, and Brazil, for example—were relatively low-ranking countries in 1995 that made rapid gains, a pattern that supports catch-up theory. But consistent with building-on-strength theory, a number of countries that have advanced relatively rapidly were already high-performing in 1995—Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, for example. Overall, there is no significant pattern between original performance and changes in performance across countries.

But if neither theory accounts for differences across countries, catch-up theory may help to explain variation among the U.S. states. The correlation between initial performance and rate of growth is a negative 0.58, which indicates that states with lower initial scores had larger gains. For example, students in Mississippi and Louisiana, originally among the lowest scoring, showed some of the most striking improvement.  Meanwhile, Iowa and Maine, two of the highest-performing entities in 1992, were among the laggards in subsequent years (see Figure 3). In other words, catch-up theory partially explains the pattern of change within the United States, probably because the barriers to the adoption of existing technologies are much lower within a single country than across national boundaries.

Catch-up theory nonetheless explains only about one-quarter of the total state variation in achievement growth. Notice in Figure 3 that some states are well below the line (e.g., Iowa and Maine) while others are well above  (e.g., Maryland and Massachusetts). Note also that Iowa, Maine, Wisconsin, and Nebraska rank well below that line. Closing the interstate gap does not happen automatically.

What about Spending Increases?

According to another popular theory, additional spending on education will yield gains in test scores. To see whether expenditure theory can account for the interstate variation, we plotted test-score gains against increments in spending between 1990 and 2009. As can be seen from the scattering of states into all parts of Figure 4, the data offer precious little support for the theory. Just about as many high-spending states showed relatively small gains as showed large ones. Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey enjoyed substantial gains in student performance after committing substantial new fiscal resources. But other states with large spending increments—New York, Wyoming, and West Virginia, for example—had only marginal test-score gains to show for all that additional expenditure. And many states defied the theory by showing gains even when they did not commit much in the way of additional resources. It is true that on average, an additional $1000 in per-pupil spending is associated with an annual gain in achievement of one-tenth of 1 percent of a standard deviation. But that trivial amount is of no statistical or substantive significance. Overall, the 0.12 correlation between new expenditure and test-score gain is just barely positive.

Who Spends Incremental Funds Wisely?

Some states received more educational bang for their additional expenditure buck than others. To ascertain which states were receiving the most from their incremental dollars, we ranked states on a “points per added dollar” basis. Michigan, Indiana, Idaho, North Carolina, Colorado, and Florida made the most achievement gains for every incremental dollar spent over the past two decades. At the other end of the spectrum are the states that received little back in terms of improved test-score performance from increments in per-pupil expenditure—Maine, Wyoming, Iowa, New York, and Nebraska.

We do not know, however, which kinds of expenditures prove to be the most productive or whether there are other factors that could explain variation in productivity among the states.

Causes of Change

There is some hint that those parts of the United States that took school reform the most seriously—Florida and North Carolina, for example—have shown stronger rates of improvement, while states that have steadfastly resisted many school reforms (Iowa and Wisconsin, for instance), are among the nation’s test-score laggards. But the connection between reforms and gains adduced thus far is only anecdotal, not definitive. Although changes among states within the United States appear to be explained in part by catch-up theory, we cannot pinpoint the specific factors that underlie this. We are also unable to find significant evidence that increased school expenditure, by itself, makes much of a difference. Changes in test-score performance could be due to broader patterns of economic growth or varying rates of in-migration among states and countries. Of course, none of these propositions has been tested rigorously, so any conclusions regarding the sources of educational gains must remain speculative.

Have We Painted Too Rosy a Portrait?

Even the extent of the gains that have been made are uncertain. We have estimated gains of 1.6 percent of a standard deviation each year for the United States as a whole, or a total gain of 22 percent of a standard deviation over 14 years, a forward movement that has lifted performance by nearly a full year’s worth of learning over the entire time period. A similar rate of gain is estimated for students in the industrialized world as a whole (as measured by students residing in the 49 participating countries). Such a rate of improvement is plausible, given the increased wealth in the industrialized world and the higher percentages of educated parents than in prior generations.

However, it is possible to construct a gloomier picture of the rate of the actual progress that both the United States and the industrialized world as a whole have made. All estimations are normed against student performances on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 4th and 8th grades in 2000.  Had we estimated gains from student performance in 8th grade only on the grounds that 4th-grade gains are meaningless unless they are observed for the same cohort four years later, our results would have shown annual gains in the United States of only 1 percent of a standard deviation. The relative ranking of the United States remains essentially unchanged, however, as the estimated growth rates for 8th graders in other countries is also lower than for estimates that include students in 4th grade (see the unabridged report, Appendix B, Figure B1).

A much reduced rate of progress for the United States emerges when we norm the trends on the PISA 2003 test rather than the 2000 NAEP test. In this case, we would have estimated annual growth rate for the United States of only one-half of 1 percent of a standard deviation. A lower annual growth rate for other countries would also have been estimated, and again the relative ranking of the United States would remain unchanged (see the unabridged report, Appendix B, Figure B2).

An even darker picture emerges if one turns to the results for U.S. students at age 17, for whom only minimal gains can be detected over the past two decades. We have not reported the results for 17-year-old students, because the test administered to them does not provide information on the performance of students within individual states, and no international comparisons are possible for this age group.

Students themselves and the United States as a whole benefit from improved performance in the early grades only if that translates into measurably higher skills at the end of school. The fact that none of the gains observed in earlier years translate into improved high-school performance leaves one to wonder whether high schools are effectively building on the gains achieved in earlier years. And while some scholars dismiss the results for 17-year-old students on the grounds that high-school students do not take the test seriously, others believe that the data indicate that the American high school has become a highly problematic educational institution. Amidst any uncertainties one fact remains clear, however: the measurable gains in achievement accomplished by more recent cohorts of students within the United States are being outstripped by gains made by students in about half of the other 48 participating countries.

Politics and Results

The failure of the United States to close the international test-score gap, despite assiduous public assertions that every effort would be undertaken to produce that objective, raises questions about the nation’s overall reform strategy. Education goal setting in the United States has often been  utopian rather than realistic. In 1990, the president and the nation’s governors announced the goal that all American students should graduate from high school, but two decades later only 75 percent of 9th graders received their diploma within four years after entering high school. In 2002, Congress passed a law that declared that all students in all grades shall be proficient in math, reading, and science by 2014, but in 2012 most observers found that goal utterly beyond reach. Currently, the U.S. Department of Education has committed itself to ensuring that all students shall be college- or career-ready as they cross the stage on their high-school graduation day, another overly ambitious goal. Perhaps the least realistic goal was that of the governors in 1990 when they called for the U.S. to be first in the world in math and science by 2000. As this study shows, the United States is neither first nor catching up.

Consider a more realistic set of objectives for education policymakers, one that is based on experiences from within the United States itself. If all U.S. states could increase their performance at the same rate as the highest-growth states—Maryland, Florida, Delaware, and Massachusetts—the U.S. improvement rate would be lifted by 1.5 percentage points of a standard deviation annually above the current trend line. Since student performance can improve at that rate in some countries and in some states, then, in principle, such gains can be made more generally. Those gains might seem small but when viewed over two decades they accumulate to 30 percent of a standard deviation, enough to bring the United States within the range of, or to at least keep pace with, the world’s leaders.

Eric A. Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Paul E. Peterson is director of the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance. Ludger Woessmann is head of the Department of Human Capital and Innovation at the Ifo Institute at the University of Munich. An unabridged version of this report is available at hks.harvard.edu/pepg/

Florida’s gains in reading and math achievement, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress

Among the 50 states, Florida’s gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) between 1992 and 2011 ranked second only to Maryland’s (see “Is the U.S. Catching Up?” features, Fall 2012). Florida’s progress has been particularly impressive in the early grades. In 1998, Florida scored about one grade level below the national average on the 4th-grade NAEP reading test, but it was scoring above that average by 2003, and made further gains in subsequent years (see Figure 1). Scores on Florida’s own state examinations revealed an equally dramatic upward trend.

Many have cited the series of accountability and choice reforms that Florida adopted between 1998 and 2006, under the leadership of Governor Jeb Bush, as the driving force behind the large and rapid improvement in student achievement (see “Advice for Education Reformers: Be Bold!” features, Fall 2012). Others have insisted that Florida’s NAEP scores do not represent true improvements in student reading achievement. Boston College professor Walter Haney, for example, argues that the scores are “dubious” and “highly misleading.” He contends that it is “abundantly clear” that Florida’s aggregate test-score improvements are a mirage caused by changes in the students enrolled in the 4th grade after the state began holding back a large number of 3rd-grade students in 2004 (all school years are reported by the year in which they ended). His argument has been touted by other researchers, most notably by some at the National Education Policy Center, and it has been cited in testimony presented before state legislatures considering the adoption of Florida-style reforms.

It is certainly true, as Haney has said, that one of the Florida reforms was to curtail social promotion of underachieving students from 3rd to 4th grade. In most school districts, students who do not warrant promotion on academic grounds move on to the next grade regardless, because many educators believe that keeping students with their peer group is desirable. But in Florida, those students who completed 3rd grade in the spring of 2003 and since have had to meet a minimum threshold on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) reading examination in order to be promoted to the 4th grade, unless they receive a special waiver. As a result, the percentage of students retained in 3rd grade increased substantially. In the two years prior to the policy change, only 2.9 percent of 3rd-grade students were retained, while in the two years following the policy’s implementation, 11.7 percent of Florida’s 3rd-grade students were told they had to remain in the same grade for the coming year.

Haney and others have concluded that this policy change artificially drove up 4th-grade test scores, because it removed from the cohort of students tested those who were retained in 3rd grade, the very students most likely to score the lowest on standardized tests. Although the point would seem to be well worth considering, it has not been subjected to serious empirical analysis. Does the holding back of the lowest-performing students in 3rd grade explain all the 4th-grade gains in Florida, as Haney contends? Does it explain some of the gains? Or none at all? The best way to answer the question is to look at changes in student test-score performance among those in 3rd grade for the first time, as their test scores are unaffected by the retention policy. If the gains observed for 4th graders were a function of differences in the type of students entering that grade due to the retention policy, then the performance of those entering 3rd grade should look essentially the same after 2002 as it did before the retention policy was put into place.

Drawing on information on student performance available from the Florida Department of Education, I was able to analyze test-score trends of students enrolled in the 3rd grade for the first time. I find that the gains among initial 3rd graders were not as dramatic as those shown on the 4th-grade NAEP, thereby suggesting that the 4th-grade scores did create the appearance of steeper achievement growth than actually took place. Nonetheless, the gains among initial 3rd graders were very substantial, about 0.36 standard deviations between 1998 and 2009, and more than enough to justify Florida’s claims that its gains have outpaced those in most other states.

Reading Test Scores for 3rd Graders

I first analyze changes over time in the FCAT test scores of students in their initial 3rd-grade year in order to discern the extent to which Florida’s elementary-school students made true achievement gains during the period in question. Because the state has not yet identified students for retention, the test scores of students the first time they are in the 3rd grade are not affected by any change in the student cohort resulting from the retention policy.

The administrative data set for the State of Florida contains individual test scores and demographic information for the universe of test-taking students in grades 3 through 10 in Florida from 2001 through 2009. The data set includes a unique student identifier, which allows me to follow the progress of each student over time and to determine which students have been retained.

Figure 2 shows the changes since 2001 in the performance of students at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles in their initial 3rd-grade year. The figure documents clear positive movement across the test-score distribution for the first cohort of students that needed to reach a minimal score on the FCAT exam in order to be promoted from the 3rd to the 4th grade (2003). The achievement distribution makes another leap forward the following year (2004), which was the first year that began with a sizable number of retained students due to implementation of the policy. Student achievement continued to grow in subsequent years.

The test-score improvements shown on the figure are substantial. By 2009, the median reading test score of students in their initial 3rd-grade year had improved by more than one-third of a standard deviation since 2001, as had nearly all points on the distribution. A gain of this magnitude amounts to roughly a full year of academic progress for students in the early elementary grades. The test-score gains among the state’s lowest-performing students were even more impressive; for instance, students at the 10th percentile improved by more than half a standard deviation. The gains made by initial 3rd-grade students on the math exam are even larger than the gains in reading at all points on the distribution.

The results do suggest, however, that the aggregate test scores on the 4th-grade NAEP could well be inflated by the retention policy. The improvement in the median reading score for those students entering 3rd grade is smaller than the NAEP increase for 4th graders over the same time period. Even so, the 3rd-grade gains remain noteworthy enough to substantiate the basic claims of those who praise the Florida track record.

Rescaling NAEP Reading Scores

To assess how well Florida performed relative to the rest of the nation, one can use the results for initial 3rd-grade students on the FCAT to rescale the state’s 4th-grade scores on the NAEP reading exam. The rescaling assumes that test-score improvements on the FCAT for cohorts in their initial year as 3rd graders are a good proxy for gains in reading achievement made by Florida’s students in the next elementary grade. Though imperfect, this assumption is justified to the extent that most consider 4th-grade NAEP scores to be an assessment of overall elementary-school performance.

Because Florida did not participate in the NAEP in 2000, I use as the state’s baseline score its median score on the 4th-grade NAEP reading exam in 1998. Thus, I also assume that the state made no meaningful gains in 4th-grade reading between 1998 and 2000 that would have shown up on NAEP, which squares with the scores on the state’s own reading assessment. I then use the improvements of the median reading test score for initial 3rd-grade students on the FCAT since 2001 in order to rescale the state’s mean NAEP test score in the spring of the same year.

In addition to providing the originally reported NAEP score trend in median scores between 1998 and 2009 for Florida and the United States as a whole, Figure 1 shows the rescaled trend in Florida after making the adjustment described above. The first class affected by the retention policy entered the 4th grade during the 2004 school year, and thus the first NAEP score that could have been influenced by the exclusion of low-performing students from the 4th-grade NAEP sample was the spring 2005 administration.

The figure shows that Florida’s reading gains prior to the introduction of the policy were actually larger on the NAEP than on the FCAT. Such a difference cannot be explained by the retention policy, because students had not yet been retained. After introduction of the policy, Florida’s achievement on the state exam after accounting for sample selection increased between 2003 and 2005 in a way that did not show up on the NAEP scores. But the state’s NAEP scores quickly caught up to the FCAT performance. Adjusting the state’s NAEP scores for sample selection in 2007 and 2009 leads to a decrease in the state’s performance of about 0.07 and 0.08 standard deviations, respectively. However, Florida’s adjusted median score remains above the median score for all U.S. public-school students, and it continues to show substantial improvements relative to the prior decade.

Even after the adjustment, Florida’s students still made larger gains in reading than did the rest of the nation. The national gain, at 7 points (or about 0.19 standard deviations), was only slightly larger than half Florida’s rate. Prior to the adjustment, only Washington, D.C., made larger gains on the 4th-grade NAEP reading exam during this period. After the adjustment, only D.C. and Delaware made a larger test-score improvement.

What Reforms Might Have Produced the Reading Gains?

Putting a finger on exactly which policy changes produced the test-score improvements is remarkably difficult, because the state adopted a wide array of policies that may have had a beneficial effect. It is possible, however, to rule out some potential candidates.

For example, some have noted the state’s participation in the federal Reading First program, in which public schools received grant money to implement instructional and assessment tools. Florida also supplemented the Reading First grants with its own financing of reading coaches for schools across the state. The data clearly show, however, that any additional test-score gains made by schools that participated in Reading First or had reading coaches were far too small to explain the substantial improvements observed on both the NAEP and the FCAT.

Others have found it tempting to argue that the state’s constitutional amendments to reduce class size and provide universal pre-kindergarten services—both of which could have a sustained positive effect on young kids—are the most likely driver of the gains. Perhaps those reforms will prove effective. The 3rd-grade class of 2003, for which the large gains begin, however, was subject to neither policy.

Current research findings for the accountability and choice reforms adopted by Florida during this time period also appear insufficient to explain such large test-score improvements. Florida assigned letter grades—A, B, C, D, and F—to schools based on their performance on the FCAT. It put into place a school voucher program for students who were attending schools that received the grade of F twice in a row. A tax credit provided scholarships for low-income students. Studies of all these programs have shown that each had a positive effect. And studies have also shown that the retention policy has a positive impact on the performance of students who were retained. Though each of these policies has been tied to student test-score improvements, either the effect size was too small or the policy affected too few students to alone account for the substantial test-score improvements seen on the NAEP and FCAT.

Conclusion

The evidence presented here shows that Florida’s elementary-school students did in fact make large improvements in reading proficiency in the 2000s. As critics contend, the state’s aggregate test-score improvements on the 4th-grade FCAT reading exam—and likely on the NAEP exam as well—are inflated by the change in the number of students who were retained in 3rd grade in accordance with the state’s new test-based promotion policy. Large test-score improvements are also observed, however, among students whose scores were not influenced by changes in the sample selected.

Though somewhat smaller than what is apparent on the NAEP test, the portion of Florida’s reading test-score improvements during this time period that cannot be attributed to changes in the sample of students tested due to the retention policy is nonetheless substantial. Identifying the causes of these improvements remains an important task for future research.

Marcus A. Winters is senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for State and Local Leadership and assistant professor at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs.

Behind the Headline
How Vouchers Came to D.C.
Education Next | Fall 2004

Nearly three hundred new students have been awarded vouchers in D.C. as part of a controversial federally-funded program. As Emma Brown notes in the Washington Post, the Obama administration has repeatedly tried to shut down the voucher program, while House Majority Leader John Boehner has fought to maintain the program “as a beachhead in the school-choice movement.”

Spencer Hsu wrote about the origins of the D.C. voucher program in “How Vouchers Came to D.C.: The Inside Story,” which appeared in the Fall 2004 issue of Education Next.

In the Fall 2009 issue of Ed Next, Patrick Wolf described the battles over the program and looked at evidence that students who participated in the program were outperforming peers who did not receive vouchers.

-Education Next

Two authors of that report, Paul Peterson and Eric Hanushek, discuss their findings in this video. “Doing well on these tests is not a matter we should be indifferent to,” explains Hanushek. If American students were making gains as large as those made by students in Germany, he notes, our country would experience much greater GDP growth over the next decades.

-Education Next

Not all relevant financial figures are available yet, but reasoned extrapolations from private- and public-sector employment data suggest that U.S. schooling may be on a historic glide path toward lower per-pupil resources and significant labor-force reductions. If not thoughtfully considered, budget-balancing decisions could damage learning opportunities for schoolchildren.

Education managers are typically inexperienced in and often reluctant to initiate cost-savings actions. Budget cuts may be poorly targeted, and students, particularly economically disadvantaged students, are swept up in the process as collateral damage.

In California and Washington, bad budget cutting has already begun. Governors in these two states have acquiesced to employee demands and have protected educator jobs at the expense of students’ time to learn.

The greatest risk of all is to the past quarter century of efforts to render America’s schools more effective. Unless means are identified for making schools more productive, that is, doing better with less, reform momentum is in serious jeopardy.

Evolving Context

Many members of the general public and the policy community believe that school districts are going bankrupt, teachers are underpaid, and educator layoffs are rampant (see “The Compensation Question,” forum, Fall 2012, forthcoming). Inaccurate media reporting, naive celebrity comments, education-advocate laments, social-media babble, and talk-show dialogue reinforce this view.

What are the facts? Total K–12 public-school spending approaches $700 billion annually. Inflation-adjusted per-pupil school spending has increased over the last century by, on average, 2.3 percent per year. There have been a few plateau years during recessions, but never a significant decline (see Figure 1).

As a consequence, the United States now spends more money on K–12 schooling than any other nation in the world. More is spent by the United States, in the aggregate, than by hugely populous nations such as China and India. Spending per pupil is higher in the U.S. than in every country except Switzerland.

Achievement levels in the U.S. are not commensurate with spending, however. Many nations exceed the United States in science and math test scores, for example.

Spending increases have been directed overwhelmingly toward adding school employees. Professional-to-pupil ratios have become ever more favorable. Whereas 30 years ago there was one professional educator employed for every 18.6 public school students, the equivalent figure today is one for every 15.4 students. When other personnel are added to the mix—cafeteria workers, custodians, clerks, and so forth—the ratio falls to one employee for every 7 students.

School productivity, measured as educational outcomes divided by labor or financial inputs, has declined dramatically. Indeed, relative to sectors such as communication, finance, manufacturing, and agriculture, the public schools are highly labor-intensive. The productivity picture is made worse by the resistance of schools to augment teachers’ efforts with new instructional technologies.

Why School Productivity Matters

A new normal of public-sector fiscal austerity is emerging.

Forty-two states and the District of Columbia face budget shortfalls. (Only a few fossil fuel–rich or agricultural states are able to sidestep the issue.) Although federal tax revenues are far short of anticipated spending, the federal government is not about to step in with still another stimulus package. Congress and the president are deadlocked over a path to economic recovery. Eurozone economies are in disarray and have had their credit ratings lowered, which jeopardizes U.S. exports.

Through deep and painful experience with cyclical growth and recession, U.S. private-sector firms have learned to deal with contraction. There have been nine recessions in the United States since 1955. During each of these, employment in the private sector declined. Employment subsequently turned up, but conventional private-sector response to recession has been workforce contraction. Private-sector managers know how to hone their labor force to balance cost cutting with the retention of scarce skilled talent and how to invest in labor-saving technology. These dynamics render the private sector ever more efficient, sustaining the production of goods and services with lower labor costs.

Here is an example of just how productive the private sector has become during the most recent recession: By the final quarter of 2011, gross domestic product (GDP) had returned to its 2008 prerecession level. It did so, however, with 5 million fewer private-sector employees.

School districts demonstrate the flip side of this dynamic. Cost-saving actions in public education, such as layoffs, school closures, salary freezes, benefit reductions, and decreasing school days, are possible but unusual. Taking such uncomfortable steps is legally cumbersome and politically treacherous. Cutbacks frequently fail to generate anticipated savings and can trigger hard-to-heal labor-management wounds. In recent recessions, when the private-sector workforce was contracting, school-district hiring continued apace.

It is important to note that much of the employment decline in the private sector during recessions is the result of firms going out of business. In difficult economic times, private firms must either become more efficient or fail. The public-school sector faces no such threat, which may be why schools have historically added jobs, regardless of economic conditions.

Figure 2 depicts growth in private-sector and public-school employment. Here one can see that from 1955 to the start of the most recent recession, the private sector experienced nine labor-market contractions—on average, one downturn per decade. Conversely, until the current recession, employment in public schools had only one downturn, in 1982–83.

The downturn in public-school employment in the early 1980s came on the heels of two recessions, one that stretched from January to July 1980 and the other from July 1981 to November 1982. The fact that teaching jobs were shed after these recessions were officially over should not be surprising, given that school budgets are set, teacher contracts are made, and federal and state funding are allocated ahead of time, causing the public-school sector to respond to tough economic times more slowly than the private sector.

The same condition prevailed in the wake of the most recent recession. Following 2009, when the private sector began adding wage earners, the public schools began to shed teachers. Figure 3 shows this in greater detail.

From June 2008 to March 2012, public schools shed more than 250,000 jobs, 3 percent of their total workforce. It is of particular note that this shrinkage in the public-education workforce took place in spite of the added revenues from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which were intended to prevent such a decline.

Nonetheless, as Figure 3 also indicates, a larger share of school employees who were working in 2008 were still on the job in 2012 than the share of workers still employed in the private sector in 2012.

Impact of Revenue Decline

There is no overstating the painful consequences of organizational downsizing, be it private or public. Closing a manufacturing plant, shutting down a large distribution center, and curtailing hours at a backroom financial operation trigger layoffs, and, depending on the context of the contraction, can imperil an entire community. Individuals, parents, children, and even a geographic region can be hurt.

Serious and sustained school revenue declines are at least as bad and in some ways worse. Layoffs almost always involve the least experienced or most recently employed teachers and other staff. If the financial situation necessitates the closure of one or more schools, then the pain spreads wider and may threaten the survival of a community.

School cutbacks may also disproportionately affect low-income students. As mentioned previously, California and Washington have reacted to budget shortfalls in ways that harm students: reducing the length of the school year and the number of days that schools operate. While this saves money and jobs, as teacher salaries are reduced and layoffs avoided, time in school is most important for disadvantaged students. Middle-class families can compensate for the loss of school hours with enrichment activities such as trips to museums and libraries. Low-income students are seldom so insulated from schooling adversity.

If the entire public-education system could be rendered more productive, that is, if higher levels of achievement could be coaxed from existing resource levels, some of the pain could be avoided or at least mitigated.

Improving Productivity

Several integrated strategies offer the prospect of protecting, possibly promoting, education reform in the face of a new fiscal austerity. These strategies involve 1) accurately informing the general public and the policy community regarding the condition of schools, that is, their financing, their achievement, and the relationship between the two; 2) conducting empirical research aimed at understanding issues of productivity in education; 3) informing policymakers and school managers regarding means by which budget cuts can be made without eviscerating instructional effectiveness; and 4) solving challenges to wider adoption of instructional technologies.

Federal and state governments have expended hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure that local schools have Internet access and plentiful computing hardware. Grants have also been available for purchase of software and teacher training.

These efforts have seldom proved sufficient to transform America’s public schools. Instruction continues to rely almost exclusively on labor-intensive practices. Government policies have ignored the savings that private firms have shown can result from technological innovation. Put bluntly, why should a tenured classroom teacher go to the effort of altering her long-standing instructional protocols to adopt new technologies when her pay, professional status, and job security are only remotely related to improving her effectiveness or her clients’ satisfaction?

Strategies must be constructed that will attract classroom teachers to the use of technology to enhance their effectiveness. Whatever strategy emerges in this regard is likely to have to involve teacher and school performance evaluations linked to student achievement gains. If teachers, principals, and entire schools see that their professional status and remuneration are becoming more tightly linked to student achievement, then they will be more open to seeking technologies that will enhance instructional effectiveness.

There are those who contend that online learning will simply bypass schools, that conventional school classes will be disrupted by new digital models that operate outside the brick-and-mortar school. But there is only a modest chance of this happening. A state initiative in Florida, the Florida Virtual School, is promising in this regard. So is the spectrum of well-constructed subject-matter units that can be found at the Khan Academy web site. But the obstacles are almost too numerous to mention. Among them are the monopolistic nature of many public-school systems, the custodial function entrusted to schools by law, and the attractiveness to students of the social interactions that take place in school. If in fact conventional schools are to be disrupted by technology, it is unlikely to happen soon.

While waiting for technologies to augment the work of a teacher, what can be done by state and district officials to wring the maximum effect out of every dollar they have?

First, states and districts can discontinue costly practices that have not been shown to enhance student achievement, including paying educators for out-of-field master’s degrees and salary premiums for experience; following “last in, first out” personnel provisions; relying on regular classroom instructional aides; and adhering to mandated limits on class size. Regulations that mandate inefficiency, such as legislatively precluding outsourcing, requiring intergovernmental grants to “supplement not supplant” existing spending, and prohibiting end-of-budget year surplus carryover, can also be revised to encourage smarter spending.

In place of the practices above, states and districts can adopt strategies that foster efficiency at both the school and district level, such as adopting “activity-based cost” (ABC) accounting; empowering principals as school-level CEOs; adopting performance-based dollar distribution formulas and school-level financial budgeting; centralizing health insurance at the state level; and outsourcing operational services where proven to save money. By adopting these practices, districts and states may be able to ease the burden of the transition to the coming period of fiscal austerity and increase long-term efficiency in schooling.

James W. Guthrie, currently superintendent of public instruction in Nevada, is senior fellow and former director of education policy studies at the George W. Bush Institute, where Elizabeth Ettema is research associate in education policy.

Those assertions are still compelling, but they have their limitations. Namely: What about kids who aren’t poor; attend schools that aren’t failing; and live in school districts that, by some measures at least, aren’t in dire need of improvement? I’m talking, of course, about our affluent, leafy suburbs. Do their residents deserve school choice too?

Set aside, for a moment, the fact that many suburban communities are diversifying, with low-income and otherwise disadvantaged children moving into them in greater numbers than ever before. Forget, too, that even our best suburban districts are no great shakes when judged by international comparison. Focus just on the most affluent, high-achieving, homogeneous communities you can picture: Say, Scarsdale (New York) or Bethesda (Maryland) or McLean (Virginia) or most of Marin County (California). Does school choice also have a place in these “super zip codes”?

Many people believe it doesn’t—witness recent debates about suburban charter schools in New Jersey, Tennessee, and the Washington, D.C.-metro area. If people in those bedroom communities want choice, goes the argument, they can purchase it via the private-school market.

Perhaps. But as Andy Rotherham points out, forcing people to “go private” in order to get a customized education for their kids is not a great political strategy for building broad support for the public schools. When school levies come up for a vote, don’t districts want as many taxpayers as possible to have a direct stake in the outcome?

And “customization” is the real issue. Even in upper-middle-class communities, not all parents want the same things for their kids. From my own personal experience (Fordham is working on collecting more rigorous, non-anecdotal data—stay tuned for that), affluent parents break down into at least three groups:

Tiger Moms (and Dads), who want their kids pushed, pulled, and stretched in order to get into top colleges. They want gifted-and-talented programs in elementary school, lots of “honors” and Advanced Placement options in secondary school, and high-octane enrichment activities like orchestra, debate club, and chess teams. These folks have no patience for warm-and-fuzzy edu-babble; they want teachers who themselves attended elite schools and can help their charges attain the pinnacle of academic achievement.

Koala Dads (and Moms), who want school to be a joyful experience for their kids, big and little. They want lots of time for creativity, personal expression, social-emotional development, and relationship-building. Models like Montessori and Waldorf are catnip to these folks; they want teachers who can role-model a kind, soulful, tolerant, mindful way of living in the world—a sort of wisdom that goes beyond mere knowledge. They, too, aspire for their children to attend great colleges—but probably the liberal artsy/crunchy types.

The Cosmopolitans, who want their children prepared to compete in a multicultural, multilingual world. They want a language immersion program for their tots (ideally Mandarin, though they’ll settle for Spanish); International Baccalaureate (IB) starting in middle school at the latest; and at least one, if not several, overseas experiences in high school. They want multicultural, multilingual teachers—and aspire for their children to either run, or save, the world. (Yes, these are close relatives of the Tiger Moms—Madres Tigres you could call them.)

Now imagine you’re the superintendent of schools in an affluent community that contains members of all three groups. How are you going to satisfy their differing demands? Elementary school is particularly challenging; does everyone do “Mandarin immersion”? Doubtful. Does everyone do a Waldorf-style “don’t read till your adult teeth come in” program? Double-doubtful. Instead, you provide a standard-issue curriculum, perhaps with a gifted-and-talented option, and maybe Mandarin and Spanish electives at select campuses. The Tiger Parents are relatively satisfied; the Cosmopolitans and Koala Dads, less so.

The challenges continue in middle school and high school, though the smorgasbord nature of the latter makes customization a little more feasible. The Tiger Parents get honors and AP tracks for their kids (plus orchestra, etc.); the Cosmopolitans get bona fide foreign-language programs and maybe IB; the Koala Dads get…well, some sympathetic hippy art teachers, perhaps.

Is this the best we can do? Maybe taxpayers footing the bill, many of them without school-age kids of their own, don’t much care if the district fails to satisfy the whims of every parent; what good is a warm-and-fuzzy Waldorf kid to the economy, anyway? What the public wants is likely more practical: Young people who will go on to make a good living, be good citizens, and not be a permanent drain on the public fisc. If parents want more than that for their kids, they can pay for it themselves! Public education is a public good, not just a private good. If parents want a niche education, they can spend their own damn money.

Understood and in its way understandable. There are limits on what the public should be asked to support financially; schools that don’t help students reach basic proficiency in math and reading, in particular, don’t deserve public subsidies.

But in the leafy suburbs, where children come to Kindergarten with all manner of advantages, schools could teach yoga all day and their students would still probably ace the state tests. There’s more margin for error there—and arguably more room for innovation and experimentation. The stakes just aren’t as high as they are in the urban core, where education is a matter of life or death.

Perhaps the best case for customization and choice in the ‘burbs is that it will result in better schools—those that are more vibrant and effective because they are allowed to be true communities with clear values, places that don’t have to be all things to all people. If one-size-fits-all doesn’t work in the city, why does it work in the suburbs?

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

There is some evidence that this kind of race to the bottom has been occurring.  Rick Hess and Paul Peterson, for example, have compared state cut scores for proficiency on their state tests to results on the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to show that the level of achievement required to be declared proficient in many states has been dropping over the last decade. In his recent review of the Maranto and McShane book on Obama’s education policies, Nathan Glazer described how advocates for national standards see them as a fix for this race to the bottom:

in Race to the Top, “the Obama administration tacitly gave its approval to a set of ‘Common Core Standards’ developed by a consortium of state school officers and tied Race to the Top dollars to participation in the program.” This may be a path to finally getting a set of national standards and overriding the standards the states set, which have in many states been pushed lower. This “race to the bottom” has made it easier to show adequate yearly progress (AYP) and avoid triggering measures required for schools that do not show AYP.

So does competition among states and localities really produce a race to the bottom or does competition motivate improvement and spark continual improvements?  The answer depends on what states and localities are competing for.  If states and localities are competing to receive federal funds and/or avoid federal sanctions, as Glazer describes states seeking to make AYP, then competition will produce a race to the bottom.  In competing for bureaucratic approval from the feds, states only have to appear good (satisfy the bureaucratic requirements), but they don’t have to actually be good.  Competing for the bureaucratic approval of the federal government turns education into a redistributive policy where the goal is to get a larger share of the federal largess.

But if states and localities are competing for residents and businesses to increase their tax base, then the incentive from competition is to increase standards and quality.  Millions of individuals are not so easily fooled and can distinguish between phony claims of progress created by lowering the bar and real progress.  Clever bureaucrats can also tell the difference but they are bound by the rules for dispersing rewards and sanctions and so are forced into encouraging a race to the bottom.  Individual face no similar constraints.  They want to move to the areas with the best schools to help their kids, enhance their property values, and have access to a quality labor force.  Individuals may make mistakes or have bad taste, but in aggregate they reward real educational progress not fake, race to the bottom, manipulation.

The history of U.S. education is filled with evidence of how this competition for residents and tax base has spurred improvements in quality and increases in rigor.  The economic historian, William Fischel, carefully documents how the development and spread of high school education in the United States was driven by localities seeking to compete for residents demanding a more rigorous education.  And the standards required for graduating high school have steadily increased over time.  Graduation requires more college-prep coursework.  In almost half of the states students now have to pass a state test to receive a standard diploma.  And 37 states instituted their own testing and accountability systems before NCLB was adopted.  The result of these state and local efforts was not always a rigorous education, but they clearly show a trend toward higher standards and quality in response to consumer demand.  Competition produces a race to the top as long as it is competition for individual taxpayers and business instead of competition for federal government handouts.

So, if a race to the bottom is fueled by the desire to satisfy federal bureaucratic rules, why would we think the solution is in the adoption of more federal bureaucratic rules?  National standards will just create a new regime of gaming, manipulation, and the appearance of progress without the actuality of it.  Expanding choice and competition for individuals is the solution to a race to the bottom, not more centralized control that stifles that competition.

-Jay Greene

When students decide to take a course online, should all the state funding for the course go to the organization that offers the course, or should some funding also go to local school districts to help defray other school costs?

(polls)

Read our top favorite online learning and technology related posts here.

Read the outcome of last week’s EdNext Reader Poll here.

So I was amazed, befuddled, dumbstruck, bemused (choose your own adjective) to learn that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has rejected a request from Iowa for flexibility under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. What political courage! What political suicide! Did Duncan and the White House politicos not understand that he’s handing Mitt Romney a handy campaign issue in up-for-grabs Iowa?

What’s most remarkable is the reason the Administration is turning down Iowa’s waiver request: Because the state legislature refuses to enact a statewide teacher evaluation plan. As you may recall, such evaluations were one of the mandates (er, conditions) placed on states that want flexibility from ESEA’s broken accountability requirements. And as many of us have argued, such conditions are patently illegal. There’s nothing in the ESEA that indicates that the Secretary has the authority to demand such conditions be met in order for waiver requests to be approved.

Iowa’s state superintendent, Jason Glass, was discouraged but polite as he took his marbles and went home—putting the blame on Iowa’s state legislators. “We’ve been negotiating with the U.S. Department of Education to try to find a way through this. It’s just not possible. We are very disappointed that our state is [still] under the onerous shame and blame policies of NCLB for another year.”

Republican Governor Terry Branstad blamed his own legislators, too, saying in a statement that “Responsibility for the denial of this request lies squarely at the feet of the Iowa Legislature, which did too little to improve our schools despite repeated warnings. The education reform plan Lt. Gov. (Kim) Reynolds and I proposed would have ensured a waiver from the onerous federal No Child Left Behind law.”

Don’t be shocked, however, if Branstad, who was just named co-chairman of Romney’s Iowa campaign, changes his tune, and starts to point at least one finger at the President. I wouldn’t be surprised if he calls for a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education, forcing it to defend its decision and its questionable conditions.

As for Governor Romney, expect him to talk up this issue the next time he’s in the Hawkeye State, as yet another example of executive overreach and federal micromanagement. Iowans love their schools and their teachers; it’s not going to be hard to paint this as a classic case of Washington bureaucrats gone wild.

Who said that education wouldn’t play a role in the election?

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

“Disruptive innovation” is his seminal insight, perhaps better summarized in Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile than in the education book itself. “How was it,” he started wondering, “that big, rich companies, admired and emulated by everyone, could one year be at the peak of their power and, just a few years later, be struggling in the middle of the pack or just plain gone?”

He figured it out by closely observing the steel industry. The huge American steel firms (U.S. Steel, Bethlehem, etc.) were challenged and gradually undone by small, nimble producers that Christensen calls “mini mills,” which began by producing low-end products (“rebar”) that the big companies were glad to quit making because they weren’t very profitable anyway. Now bear with this long quote from the profile.

In the world of steel, the “mini mills” were the disruptive innovation that transformed the industry—and put many of the big old firms out of business. (Once-mighty Bethlehem Steel, for example, went bankrupt in 2001.)

Christensen tells similar tales of transistor radios sinking Zenith and RCA, of low-price Toyotas nearly doing the same to GM, Ford, and Chrysler, and many more. The disruptive innovator was able to do things that, at the time, didn’t make sense to the traditional operator—and eventually stole its market.

Back to our K-12 education system. Christensen and colleagues don’t suggest that it’s going out of business but they do say it will be transformed by a pair of disruptive innovations: technology (online learning, in particular) and a shift to “student-centric” learning.

You can already see this starting to happen, if perhaps a bit more slowly than they forecast, and it’s mostly a good thing (though some of today’s online products are shoddy and being used in questionable ways).

But something else is happening, too, that is apt to be just as profound, and it’s something that Christensen sort of pooh-poohed. It’s the emergence of K-12’s own version of mini mills in the form of independent public schools of choice. These could turn out to be as disruptive, and ultimately as devastating, to traditional education systems as those crummy little Sony radios turned out to be to the vacuum-tube behemoths and as Honda was to Detroit. These upstarts may not put the districts out of business but they’re definitely capturing market share and, in some places, hollowing out the enrollments (and revenues) of the “legacy” operators.

Charter schools (5,000-strong and growing) are the most obvious examples but they’re not the whole story. Think, too, of STEM schools. “Outsourced” schools within “portfolio” districts. Parent-trigger schools. The more radical forms of site-managed schools. Technical-vocational schools. Lab schools. Sometimes alternative and magnet schools. The list can be extended.

They’re no longer just one-offs, either. They’re networking—CMOs, EMOs, “recovery school districts,” “chancellor’s districts”—and they’re being systematically replicated by a growing number of organizations, both local and national. A dozen or more cities already find the aggregate enrollment of these education mini mills nearing (or even exceeding) that of the traditional school system. (Think of D.C., New Orleans, Albany, Dayton…)

The authors of Disrupting Class were well aware of this phenomenon and saw it as useful but not central to the key innovations they had identified. “As we approached the study of education through the lenses of our research on innovation,” they wrote, “our instinct was to frame chartered schools as disruptive innovations, but upon reflection that was not correct.” Rather, they said, charters are “sustaining” innovations, in that they may do things somewhat differently but “their intent is to do a better job educating the same students that districts educate.”

It’s not clear to me why this disqualified them as disruptive innovators, particularly if they’re successfully invading the markets of traditional providers and capturing more and more customers (and usually doing it at lower cost to the taxpayer, though this also makes their job harder). If, in essence, they’re functioning much as mini mills did within the steel industry.

They have another similarity, too: they started with “rebar,” i.e., mostly with the kids that the traditional providers (education’s “big steel”) weren’t much profiting from—poor and minority kids, hard-to-educate kids, fussy kids, dropouts and would-be dropouts, kids with low scores on state proficiency tests, sometimes youngsters with special needs. And while the districts weren’t exactly glad to see those students leave—they took money with them and eventually cost jobs—they were somewhat relieved, too. In places with fast-growing enrollments, the independent public schools also eased pressure on facilities and capital budgets.

That’s not to say the traditional providers welcomed competition. They (and their employee groups) much preferred quasi-monopolies and almost everywhere did all they could to make life difficult for these new rivals. Sometimes, however, they were shrewd enough to compete back, trying to offer their clients the kinds of programs the innovators were offering, and in a few cases (e.g., Joel Klein’s New York, Tom Boasberg’s Denver) even endeavoring to harness the power of this disruptive model to prod their own systems to do a better job of serving their customers.

Education’s mini mills haven’t always done a great job. Lots of charters, for example, need to improve their services and their products—and, if they do, they will almost certainly go “up-market,” too. The implications for education’s “big steel” could be profound.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry originally appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

It was no small task. The headline cried “vouchers”  even while acknowledging that the word was unspoken: “Vouchers Unspoken, Romney Hails School Choice.”The first word of the story was “voucher” but followed with an acknowledgment that Governor Romney never actually uses the word. Rhetorically the damage was already done. Readers knew right up front the Romney plan must somehow be all about this polarizing idea. The story went on to explain the Romney proposal for school choice in some detail. But by the end, it casually labeled federal funding for disadvantaged and disabled students, “vouchers.”

The story is a disservice. The nation needs both presidential candidates to step up to the challenge of improving education achievement, especially for our most disadvantaged students. Neither candidate has given the issue the attention it deserves. In the long run, education is the key to our troubled economy. But, if new ideas are immediately subject to caricature and politicization, we won’t be hearing many of them.

For some time I have been part of a group of education scholars assembled by the Hoover Institution, which issued a detailed analysis of federal education policy last February. We concluded, among other things, that the federal government’s role in education needed to be rethought. Not because we have some Tea Party inspired aversion to federal power, but because we believe the last decade has revealed the limits of the ability of Washington to fix failing schools, from a distance. In this recommendation, we are not far from the Obama administration, which has offered the states waivers from NCLB to experiment with their own methods of school improvement, among other encouraged innovations.

Our analysis goes on to highlight a long tradition in formal economics, known as fiscal federalism. That body of work has established the theoretical and actual benefits of competition among states and cities in the delivery of certain public services. Research provides considerable evidence that such effects are significant in public education—among small public school districts, between public schools and Catholic schools, and between traditional public schools and charter schools.

Our analysis also examines and endorses portable student-weighted funding, more popularly known as “backpack” funding, and already being implemented in some major school districts. The surest way to have students receive the education services to which they are entitled is to have every dollar of funding provided for them go wherever they go to school. For example, a disadvantaged student who enrolls in a more advantaged school should bring with him the money policymakers intended to serve him.

Fiscal federalism and backpack funding are just two examples of ideas with deep research traditions—not political motivations—discussed in our analysis.

The Romney proposal (to which I had some input as an initial member of his education advisory team, but in which I have no investment today, having stepped aside to avoid any appearance of analytical bias) is hardly identical to the work that my colleagues and I produced at Hoover. It does not, for example, include testing requirements that we considered crucial.

The Romney proposal does include ideas that would be genuinely new for federal education policy—like portable student-weighted funding. The proposal has little to say about private schools, and adds that private school participation would be a state option, not a federal mandate. In the end, it is a proposal about giving our neediest students more choice among public schools.

Whatever its other virtues or defects, the plan should be debated on the basis of what it actually proposes—and not a politically-colored version thereof. The nation desperately needs fresh thinking in education. It will never happen if new ideas cannot receive impartial hearings.

-John Chubb

This post originally appeared on The Quick and the Ed

Behind the Headline
Is Desegregation Dead?
Education Next | Fall 2010

In an article that appeared in Sunday’s New York Times, Liz Robbins looks at what’s happening in four Brooklyn elementary schools that won a federal grant to promote desegregation. The schools are located in Williamsburg, a rapidly gentrifying part of Brooklyn. The grant requires that the schools reduce the percentage of Hispanic students by attracting white, Asian, and black students from outside of the neighborhood.

Robbins sums up, “Today, as the Williamsburg schools show, integration is an uneven process at best, hampered by geography, legal limits and, critics say, a lack of ideological commitment from the city.” (Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott says “I am focused on having high-quality schools in all neighborhoods. That’s the ultimate civil rights policy.”)

In a forum that was published in the Fall 2010 issue of Ed Next, “Is Desegregation Dead?” Susan Eaton and Steven Rivkin discuss the state of the desegregation movement and what it has accomplished.

In the Spring 2005 issue of Ed Next, Christina Rossel wondered what ever happened to magnet schools.

The U.S. is in the throes of developing new standards and new tests of student performance, actions that reflect a general dissatisfaction with the level of student achievement.  Much of this movement is hooked to a focus on better preparing students for college and work – a focus partly emanating from the consensus opinion that we must improve our human capital if we are to be internationally competitive.

But the available (and prospective) information on student performance is extraordinarily hard to interpret.  The states can get some information about student performance through the NAEP tests, and local districts can find out how they are doing relative to other districts in the state through state accountability measures.  And, while states or localities that perform relatively low on their specific tests know that they could improve, higher performing districts or higher performing states often develop a complacency that has serious side effects.

This general complacency about performance is quite unwarranted when information from international competitors is added.  Students from Massachusetts, our best performing state, place 17^th in international league tables for advanced math skills.  And, by Jay Greene’s calculations, even the best districts tend to lag the international competition.  Yet, none of this has made it far into the public consciousness or into the policy makers focus.

Consider now giving a sample of students in a district or in a state the PISA examination – the international examination given throughout the developed world.  The primary advantage of this exercise is comparing student performance to “what is possible.”  As such, it personalizes and makes more understandable the educational challenges we face.  And, it likely helps in developing a broader constituency for improvement.

Most educational standard setting, performance assessment, and judgments about appropriate levels of achievement today are based on history and custom with a little bit of “professional dreaming.”  The process generally lacks any context of what our international competitors are doing.

Why do local benchmarking?

The overall performance challenges to U.S. students can of course be seen from the national statistics for PISA or TIMSS, the regular international assessments.  But, states and localities, with their own tests and outcomes, can simultaneously retain their own views of performance that is not anchored in the reality of other locales, particularly the international competition.   Ultimately, it is easy to discount or ignore any deficits.

The local testing makes it clear what can be done and what needs to be done in order to compete with other nations.  It is an unambiguous statement of the level of performance.  The state and local assessments can also provide localities with some idea of how improving their labor force might affect future economic growth.  The national implications of improved schooling are both clear and large.  While local areas must worry more about the migration of skilled labor to other areas, the long run impact of improved schools cannot be ignored.  And, as such better information can foster and reinforce pressure for improvement from local and state groups that see the need to reform the schools.

From a national perspective it is likewise very important that states and districts understand this challenge of international competition – because of the primacy of states and districts in education policy and implementation.  Improvement will come from the actions of the states, and these actions are not readily dictated from the national level.

What benchmarking does not do?

It would be wrong, however, to use the international tests to design a local curriculum.  Test design is often linked to a starting point of clear standards, and curricula define how learning and instruction can achieve the goals imbedded in the standards.  The opposite is not the case.  One would not want to take the international assessments – which are attempts to develop tests that are not dependent on specific national curricula – and then try to reverse engineer standards or curricula.

The presumption of the international assessments is that achieving high performance on the local and national standards will also produce high scores on PISA or TIMSS.   The international tests give a direct measure of what high performance means.

What’s at stake for the nation?

While approaching the level of a cliché, it is simply the case that competition is not just with others in the same city or same state with the internationalization of the world economy.  International trade moves the location of economic activity to the place that has a comparative advantage in production.  Historically, the U.S. has dominated the world in high-skill, high-value-added production, in large part because its workers have had more human capital when compared to workers in other countries.

This dominance in worker skills appears to be ending, as evidenced by performance on PISA exams that is below the average for developed countries.  This skill gap forces us to rely on other national advantages if we are to continue as the world economic leader.  We do have the best economic institutions – free and open labor and capital markets, secure property rights, and limited governmental intrusion.  We also have strong colleges and universities, and we have been open to accepting immigrants with high skills.  But, each of these advantages is fading and is unlikely to carry us in the future, as other countries are moving to address these issues themselves.

A future in which the U.S. is no longer the high-skill country and in which other countries increasingly are the innovators does not mean that U.S. workers will be unemployed or that they will do only menial jobs.  It does imply slower economic growth in the U.S. and a resultant stagnation in incomes.  It also implies a noticeable change in the locus of world economic activities and leadership.

-Eric Hanushek