In a speech at the Latino Coalition’s Annual Economic Summit, Romney described how how he would tie federal education funds to individual students to help promote school choice.

A key step in establishing a charter-school sector is identifying the institutions that can authorize would-be founders to create these new public schools and grant them charters. Authorizers are charged with evaluating charter applicants, awarding and overseeing charter contracts, assessing whether the school is improving student achievement and fulfilling the goals in its charter contract, renewing charter contracts for schools that perform, and closing schools that do not.

Engler figured that for the chartering strategy to work in Michigan, he could not “just put authorizing in the hands of traditional school districts.” He says, “The superintendents were far more defensive about and married to the status quo than anybody else we were dealing with…” Just as it would be an inherent conflict to put McDonald’s in charge of determining whether or not others should be allowed to open a new restaurant nearby, Engler reasoned that charter school authorizers should be outside the control of the traditional K–12 system. He designed Michigan’s charter-school law to allow community colleges and the state’s 15 public universities to authorize charter schools, along with school districts.

Engler signed Michigan’s charter-school law into effect on January 14, 1994, and in August of that year, Central Michigan University (CMU) became the first university in the nation to authorize a charter school. Ironically, the same day CMU’s board of trustees authorized its first three charter schools, a group spearheaded by the Michigan Education Association, called the Council of Organizations and Others for Education About Parochiaid, along with two members of the state board of education, filed a lawsuit challenging the law’s constitutionality.

Founded in 1892, CMU had a long history of preparing teachers and school administrators. Thus, its decision to authorize charter schools riled many of its alumni who were teaching in traditional public schools across the state. Some of them even notified the university that they would no longer donate to their alma mater because of the leadership role it was playing with charter schools. One now-infamous controversy arose when the superintendent of a school district in southeast Michigan wrote CMU’s president notifying him that his district would no longer accept student teachers from CMU, hire CMU graduates, or recommend their high-school graduates attend CMU.

W. Sidney Smith, who chaired CMU’s board of trustees at the time, recalls that the president was out of town when the letter arrived. Not wanting to let the situation get out of hand, Smith says he “called a ‘war room’ together to strategize a response. We had over 200 CMU alumni attend the district’s board meeting. They were wearing CMU colors and making it very clear that their children should be able to live, work, play and go to school wherever they choose and that the superintendent deserved to be reprimanded.” The strategy worked, and the district and the superintendent soon recanted and apologized for the letter.

This story illustrates the pressure that is brought to bear on those who disrupt the status quo and its existing arrangements, which is exactly what the chartering strategy is supposed to do. This is why alpha authorizers, chartering agencies that operate independently of school districts, are so desperately needed.

The Key to Quality

Click to enlarge

Ten years after Engler’s departure, Michigan is home to more than 250 charter schools educating some 115,000 students or 8 percent of the state’s public-school students. At the start of 2012, CMU served as authorizer to 56 of the schools, which educate about 30,000 students (see Figure 1). The top-performing public school in Michigan for each of the past five years has been a charter school authorized by CMU, and three high schools authorized by CMU have been recognized by U.S. News & World Report as among America’s best. CMU schools have performed extremely well on state exams. Despite serving a substantially greater proportion of students from low-income families and minorities than district schools, a higher percentage of CMU schools (86 percent) made AYP in 2010-11 than did public schools statewide (79 percent). The consistent strength of the charter schools overseen by CMU testifies to the impact of high-quality authorizing.

Early on, the role of charter school authorizers seemed so straightforward that little focus was placed on them, while the politics of chartering and the action surrounding the schools themselves consumed most of the attention. But as the charter schools movement spread across the country, more and more observers began to grow concerned about the wide variances in how charter schools were being approved to open, what quality standards they were measured against, and whether or not those that failed to perform were being held accountable, as promised.

By nature, the chartering strategy is not a prescriptive policy for improving schools. Rather, it is a way for policymakers to challenge the “givens” of the existing system by harnessing the powerful dynamics created by choice, competition, standards, and accountability. But having a strategy and getting it properly implemented are two different things. As the University of Michigan’s David K. Cohen so aptly put it, “Once upon a time, students of American politics believed that policy turned out as intended. But they have recently concluded that intentions are an inconsistent guide to results.”

Since policymakers have empowered authorizers to actually do the chartering, how they perform their role will have a defining impact on how well the chartering strategy is implemented and refined over time.

In 2006, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute brought national attention to the idea that authorizing matters when it released a report called “Trends in Charter School Authorizing.” The report said,

Over the past decade or so, we and others have often claimed that charter schools are the most promising innovations in American education. We were wrong. Charter school authorizing and the act of chartering schools are the most promising contemporary educational innovation. After all, there’s little you can find in the nation’s charter schools that doesn’t also exist somewhere in the vast and varied world of public and private schools. But the process of authorizing new schools—allowing them to open, overseeing their progress, shutting them down if necessary, but not actually running them—is entirely new.

The Fordham Institute’s observation was right on: authorizing matters. In fact, charter school authorizers are now expected to play an even more assertive role in ensuring that charter schools offer parents high-quality choices and not simply more choices for their children’s education. Regrettably, though, too many authorizers lack either the will or the capacity to up their game.

The Case for Alpha Authorizers

If the chartering strategy depends on disrupting the existing arrangements for how public education functions, then most charter laws have a structural flaw that will dramatically limit the ability of charter schools to deliver real change for educators and students. The flaw is relying on school districts to be authorizers. This is happening in far too many parts of the country. For example, the annual report released by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), “The State of Charter School Authorizing 2011,” shows that of the nation’s nearly 1,000 authorizers, more than 850 are school districts. These districts, or LEAs (Local Education Agencies), authorize just over half (52 percent) of all charter schools. With the frequent reports of school districts doing a poor job of fulfilling their authorizing duties and school districts’ authorizing over half of the nation’s charter schools, it is easy to see how the real power of the chartering strategy is being negated.

This structural flaw runs counter to the original idea of chartering, allowing an entity other than the local school district to establish new schools. Further, it is unlikely that district authorizers will move beyond the regulatory-driven, compliance-based accountability systems that are the hallmark of public education or the troubling hit-and-miss formation of new schools that is raising questions about the ability of charter schools to deliver improvement on the scale that our country needs.

Even more concerning is the fact that school-district authorizers may be hostile to the charter idea itself. To understand why, one must understand the strategy Ted Kolderie, an early advocate of charters schools, outlined to lawmakers in a 1990 article titled, “The States Will Have to Withdraw the Exclusive.” Kolderie’s premise was that it was futile for lawmakers to continue trying to “improve existing schools within existing arrangements.” He wrote,

The existing arrangement has been…a checkerboard pattern of districts financed by taxes and appropriations, each with an “exclusive franchise” to offer public education within its boundaries. With customers required by law to use the service and assigned to the organization serving their “district,” such an arrangement effectively guarantees the organizations and the people in them most everything important to their material success: their enrollments, their revenues, their jobs, their incomes—and their existence.

Kolderie argued that this regulated public-utility model had led states to demand improvements and districts to promise improvements, in an endless exchange of money for promises. For this to change, he argued, lawmakers would have to enact policies that would no longer allow districts to take “students for granted.” So he exhorted lawmakers to consider “chartering,” as a way to allow entities other than school districts to establish new public schools that would be open to students regardless of where they lived, thereby beginning to withdraw the monopoly school districts held over the provision of public education.

For the chartering strategy to improve the whole of public education, we need to think strategically about what institutions we want authorizing schools. We need to support the emergence of more alpha authorizers, those who are independent of the K–12 system and have the courage and tenacity to serve as change agents, market makers, and forces for quality, while reliably performing the core functions of authorizing mentioned above.

Build an Education Marketplace

At the start of 2012, CMU served as authorizer to 56 of the 250 Michigan charter schools; the CMU charters educate about 30,000 students.

Alpha authorizers can play a significant role in helping transition the education system into a diverse and dynamic marketplace that fosters academic excellence for all children. Governor Engler believed that he had to establish a critical mass of charter schools before he left office or run the risk of having all his work undone. Mary Kay Shields, who served as Engler’s point person for charter schools, confirms this sense of urgency: “We were relentless in pushing towards progress…. It was about one thing and that was getting this done for the kids, and not about making adults feel comfortable.”

Because political leaders come and go, a long-term strategy like chartering needs people and organizations that have the staying power required to faithfully implement and refine the strategy over a long period of time. This is where alpha authorizers step in. For example, Shields reports that before Engler left office, he convened a meeting of key players, which included officials from CMU, and offered both encouragement and a list of directives aimed at ensuring that the charter strategy would continue to be implemented with fidelity.

In December 2011, after a decade-long political battle, Michigan’s legislature removed the cap restricting the number of charter schools that could be authorized by universities. Functioning as a market maker, CMU played a key role. Over the years, CMU was involved in establishing numerous organizations that would provide the support necessary to expand Michigan’s chartering strategy. For example, in 1996 CMU saw the need for charter schools to have representation in the state capitol and with the media, which led to the founding of the Michigan Association of Public School Academies, which now serves as the unified voice for Michigan’s charter schools and was a major advocate for removing the cap.

Several years later, CMU played a founding role in the establishment of both the Michigan Council of Charter School Authorizers and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. Each organization now publishes oversight and accountability standards that serve as a guide for quality authorizing. On another front, CMU founded the Michigan Resource Center for Charter Schools and in 2001 facilitated its transition to the National Charter Schools Institute so that it could support the development and performance of the entire charter-school sector.

Advance Performance-Based Accountability

Alpha authorizers can lead the way in transitioning the oversight and accountability of charter schools from a compliance- to a performance-based approach. This process begins by fostering a welcoming regulatory environment. It means protecting the integrity of the charter application process by making it competitive, transparent, and merit-based. Alpha authorizers can also develop innovative ways to make it easier for groups with a demonstrable track record of success to replicate and scale their operations by bypassing some of the selection procedures untested applicants must go through. For example, charter applicants that have been previously vetted and operate outstanding schools could be pre-qualified or fast-tracked so that they don’t have to resubmit the same paperwork or follow a pre-established process each time they seek to start a new school. At the same time, alpha authorizers need to conduct sound due diligence and avoid being mesmerized by applicants who have political, financial, or star power, but lack the competencies necessary to open and operate a high-quality school.

Finally, alpha authorizers must ensure the charter contracts they issue are arm’s-length, conflict-free performance agreements that contain clear, meaningful, and measurable academic, financial, and operational standards. For example, although the schools CMU chartered were required by law to administer the state testing system, the Michigan Educational Assessment Program or MEAP, the results were wholly inadequate for making high-stakes decisions like closing schools. To address this situation, CMU required schools to administer a computer adaptive test during a common testing window at the beginning and at the end of the school year. To minimize the burden on schools, CMU paid for the tests using a portion of the 3 percent school oversight fee that funds its authorizing operations.

Share Sustainable Systems

Alpha authorizers can enhance the value of the systems and processes they create by sharing them with school leaders and other authorizers.

Although the tests described above were created to measure the performance of schools, CMU shared with the schools ways in which they could use the data generated to improve teaching and learning. As the schools learned how to interpret this diagnostic information, many began using the system to individualize instruction, assess teachers, and pay for performance. Then, in conjunction with the National Charter Schools Institute, CMU developed a growth-to-standard assessment model, called Elevate360, using the ACT’s definition of college readiness as the standard: students have at least a 50 percent probability of earning a B or better, or a 75 percent probability of earning a C or better in their first-year English, algebra, biology, and social science classes. For students to meet this definition of college readiness, they need to earn the following subject-matter scores when taking the ACT exam: English 18; math 22; reading 21; and science 24.

Sadly, in 2010, of the 1.57 million high-school students who took the ACT, only 24 percent met the definition of college readiness. For African American students, the numbers are alarming. Only 4 percent met the standard in science, 7 percent in math, 14 percent in reading, and 25 percent in English. To begin tackling this problem, CMU backward-mapped from the ACT’s definition of college readiness to establish grade-level achievement targets for grades 2–8 that can be used with Northwest Evaluation Association’s Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) or the Performance Series by Global Scholar. This student growth and achievement system is now available for use by any authorizer or school in the country through the National Charter Schools Institute.

Finally, when CMU designed the Authorizers Oversight Information System (AOIS), the goal was to streamline and automate the regulatory reporting process so the schools could more easily fulfill their compliance obligations, thereby leaving them with more time to spend on their primary mission of serving students. Today, AOIS is being used by authorizers in 11 other states and the District of Columbia to oversee almost 500 schools.

Hard Work Ahead

If the integrity of the chartering strategy is to be upheld, authorizers need to do a better job of closing schools that fail to deliver results for students. Alpha authorizers can show the way by having the courage to tackle the politics associated with closing underperforming schools and knowing how to document the facts in order to prevail in the court of law and public opinion.

Of course, there is a risk that alpha authorizers could turn into overbearing, bureaucratic machines that stifle innovation and entrepreneurship. To guard against this, policymakers should encourage and enable multiple entities to serve as authorizers. Just as choice and competition are good for students and schools, choice and competition are good for authorizers.

James N. Goenner is the president and CEO of the National Charter Schools Institute and a former chairman of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers.

Today, there’s not a single Republican in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, or running for president willing to defend federal accountability mandates. The GOP conversation has shifted to transparency, in line with what we’ve called Reform Realism. What a difference a decade makes.

The thrust of Romney’s speech, however, wasn’t his fresh view of accountability,  but a major proposal on school choice. Romney wants to make Title I and IDEA dollars portable—a form of “backpack funding” from the federal level. (This one’s very much in line with what the Hoover Institution’s K-12 Education Task Force proposed in February. It’s also close kin to what Ronald Reagan and Bill Bennett proposed for Title I back in the late 1980’s.) He said:

As President, I will give the parents of every low-income and special needs student the chance to choose where their child goes to school.  For the first time in history, federal education funds will be linked to a student, so that parents can send their child to any public or charter school, or to a private school, where permitted.  And I will make that choice meaningful by ensuring there are sufficient options to exercise it.
To receive the full complement of federal education dollars, states must provide students with ample school choice.  In addition, digital learning options must not be prohibited.  And charter schools or similar education choices must be scaled up to meet student demand.

There’s a lot to be said for making federal dollars follow disadvantaged children to their schools of choice:

• It provides incentives for good schools to attract needy kids;
• It helps those kids exit dreadful schools;
• It promotes integration by allowing federal funds to flow to schools that are socio-economically-mixed; and
• It encourages states to make their own funding more portable (a la weighted student funding) – with all manner of benefits around equity, choice, and more.

But it’s not without its drawbacks:

• It could move federal funds away from high-poverty schools (which get most Title I dollars today) to low-poverty ones;
• The money ($1,000-2,000 per pupil) isn’t enough to pay for actual private-school tuition, so that part isn’t apt to get much real traction;
• By giving parents “private accounts” to spend on digital learning, tutoring, and the like, it could weaken schools’ larger improvement efforts, which are mostly funded by these federal dollars.

The biggest concern, though, comes with having Uncle Sam try to use his 10 cents on the education dollar to force major changes on the states. We’ve seen how that works (or doesn’t) in the context of accountability; why do we think it will work better in the context of school choice?

See this passage, in particular, from Romney’s education white paper:

To expand the supply of high-performing schools in and around districts serving low-income and special-needs students, states accepting Title I and IDEA funds will be required to take a series of steps to encourage the development of quality options: First, adopt open-enrollment policies that permit eligible students to attend public schools outside of their school district that have the capacity to serve them. Second, provide access to and appropriate funding levels for digital courses and schools, which are increasingly able to offer materials tailored to the capabilities and progress of each student when used with the careful guidance of effective teachers. And third, ensure that charter school programs can expand to meet demand, receive funding under the same formula that applies to all other publicly-supported schools, and access capital funds.

Note especially the phrase, “Will be required.” We’ve been down that road before! And note how far this proposal is from the “let states do whatever they want with their federal dollars” approach of House education committee chairman John Kline.

A better idea might be to take a page from the Obama Administration handbook and make funding portability voluntary. Give states the option to “voucherize” their Title I and IDEA funds. Make them take the steps above in order to participate in that option. Maybe offer a little extra money on top. And see if you get any takers. That’s a way to promote innovation and choice without falling into the same federalism trap that snared No Child Left Behind. And states that opt into it would very likely make their own dollars portable, too.

This plan is a good start. You’ve got 5 ½ months till Election Day, Governor Romney, to make it even better.

-Mike Petrilli

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

Having gotten that out of the way, it’s also worth learning that while some of these state programs (especially Florida’s) are models of sound policy, efficient administration, and careful targeting of available resources, some others appear to be burdened by dubious practices on the part of schools, donors, elected officials, and maybe parents, too.

First, a brief refresher on what these programs are and how they work. Eight states allow individuals or corporations to take a full or partial credit against their state taxes for contributions they make to nonprofit groups that award private school scholarships. Some states, like Florida, award scholarships only to low-income students. Others, such as the programs in Arizona and Georgia, place no income restrictions on eligibility. None excludes participation in religious schooling (and, in fact, the majority of scholarship students attend faith-based schools).

Yes, they are cousins of voucher programs but they don’t involve checks written by the state (or district) to private schools, using money that has already entered the public coffers. The money, in fact, never enters the state treasury. Such programs thus skirt some of the statutory and constitutional obstacles that get in the way of vouchers—and in many cases enjoy smoother political sailing as well.

If Ms. Saul is to be believed, however, some of these programs are vulnerable to various forms of misbehavior, including parents getting cash in their pockets, politicians deciding which schools should benefit, even donors getting tax credits while underwriting particular students.

These programs involve credits against state taxes. Hence a state’s tax code determines what is and isn’t kosher. Certainly some of these alleged practices wouldn’t be acceptable to the Internal Revenue Service. (For example, one cannot make a federally-deductible gift to a college or school that is then used to provide tuition relief to one’s own kid. If that were allowed, nobody would pay tuition to Princeton; they’d make gifts instead—and benefit from the tax deduction.)

Even in Ms. Saul’s telling, it’s evident (from the Florida example) that such programs can be meticulously designed, well-run and close to fool-proof. But it also appears that some are loosey-goosey and vulnerable to chicanery. Which raises the question of whose job is it to set them right on behalf of the kids, parents, educators, and taxpayers who have every reason to expect that?

The state, of course, should do much of this. It’s a state program and the state equivalent of the IRS should be monitoring its collection and distribution of money. State watchdog agencies, too, should ensure that taxpayers are benefitting, as has happened in Florida. The state education department (or local school system) should be ensuring that the kids who benefit from it are attending bona fide schools that satisfy whatever are the applicable requirements for private schools to operate in that jurisdiction. And legislatures should examine the academic impact of these programs, as greater transparency often weeds out schools with shaky credentials and questionable business practices.

But aspects of this go well beyond state government and could well be superior to it. Should the private school “community,” such as it is, be monitoring its own members for their participation in and handling of such aid programs? (What is the Council for American Private Education and its state affiliates for?) How about the accrediting bodies that typically review many aspects of private schools and allow them (if they pass muster) to declare that they are accredited? What about advocacy groups (such as the American Federation for Children) that press for the expansion and replication of such programs and that presumably have an interest in their integrity and reputation? The private foundations (e.g. Friedman, Walton, DeVos) that underwrite such efforts? Why does this sector of school choice have no counterpart to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) to promulgate a code of sound practices and invite membership from organizations that adhere to these?

The more such entities do to ensure sound practices in state-level tax-credit scholarship programs, the less temptation there will be for government agencies to clamp down on them, with likely adverse effects on legitimate schools and needy pupils.

And the less hostile publications like the Times and gotcha journalists like Ms. Saul will have with which to make mischief.

PS: It’s not just “private” and “profit” that she abhors. Her piece on Tuesday was really a model of take-no-prisoners left-wing journalism! She hit at least five hot buttons: privatization, football, evolution, fundamentalism, and fracking! Somehow she missed climate change, phonics, and traditional family units.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Adam Emerson

Ed. note: Adam Emerson previously contributed to policy and public affairs initiatives for Step Up For Students, the scholarship organization responsible for administering the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students.

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

Every few weeks, a group of education reform advocacy organizations (ERAOs) gathers in Washington, D.C., to compare notes and plot strategy in what is (half in jest) referred to as “fight club.” Like the subject of the 1999 David Fincher movie, this fight club sees itself as the underdog in an epic struggle for freedom and equality. While the target of the film’s ire is consumerism, these national ERAOs and their counterparts at the state level are focused on enacting sweeping education policy changes to increase accountability for student achievement, improve teacher quality, turn around failing schools, and expand school choice. As Terry Moe documents in his recent book, Special Interest, for decades the politics of school reform have been dominated by the education establishment, the collection of teachers unions and other school employee associations derisively called the “blob” by reformers. But the past two years have witnessed an unprecedented wave of state education reforms, much of it fiercely opposed by the unions. The ERAOs played an active role in pushing for these changes, and it is clear that they are reshaping the politics of school reform in the United States in important ways. But does the reform blob really stand a chance of defeating the education blob?

What Are the ERAOs?

Interviews with ERAO leaders reveal that the challenges of implementing No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—in particular, states’ efforts to game its accountability, choice, and school restructuring mandates—spawned the creation of policy advocacy organizations that could push for reform in state capitols. As Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) explained, “There was recognition over time that good ideas alone weren’t enough and weren’t going to get us across the finish line in terms of systemic reform. There needed to be a significant investment of time and resources in advocating for political changes that would enable and protect reform.” The largest of the ERAOs (in terms of staff, budget, and reach) are Stand for Children, StudentsFirst, the 50-State Campaign for Achievement Now (50CAN), DFER, and the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), but this remains a relatively decentralized and fragmented movement. Different groups embrace somewhat different policy agendas and tactics, from grassroots mobilization to lobbying policymakers and operating political action committees.

Another way that ERAOs differ is in their scope and where they operate. Groups such as Advance Illinois and the Tennessee State Collaborative on Reforming Education are independent operators that focus explicitly on a single state or city. Stand for Children, 50CAN, DFER, and FEE are national organizations that work in multiple states. Stand for Children currently has affiliates in 9 states, 50CAN operates in 4 states (originating from its flagship ConnCAN, which operates in Connecticut alone), and DFER has 11 state chapters (see sidebar). How do the ERAOs decide what states to operate in? Marc Porter Magee, president and founder of 50CAN, talks about a “vetting process” that centers on figuring out what the “advocacy value-add score” would be in a potential state. Collectively, the ERAO leaders I spoke with identified three critical factors: 1) Is there a void to fill (no existing organization already doing the work)? 2) Is there sufficient local support for reform, and are local champions in place to lead the effort? 3) Is state philanthropic support available to fund the effort and sustain it over time?

While the groups vary considerably in tactics and geographic base, several common elements are apparent. The first is a connection to school choice, and, in particular, to the charter school movement. Many of the ERAOs emerged from the frustration of charter school operators—and their supporters in the business and civil rights communities—at the restrictions placed on charter operations and growth. In addition, ERAOs generally embrace test-based accountability, reforms aimed at improving teacher quality, and aggressive interventions in chronically underperforming schools. One of the most important developments in recent years, in fact, has been the coming together of two previously separate strands of the education reform movement: “system refiners,” who embrace accountability, and “system disrupters,” who advocate choice. Many reform groups are funded by the same foundations, particularly the “big three”—Walton, Gates, and Broad. The support of conservative foundations and the embrace of market-based school reforms have led some observers—and many critics in the education establishment—to label the ERAOs “corporate school reformers.” StudentsFirst CEO Michelle Rhee called this description “bizarre” and noted that she, like many others in these organizations, is a lifelong Democrat with a deep concern for social justice. Suzanne Tacheny Kubach, executive director of the Policy Innovators in Education Network (PIE Network), emphasizes that a focus on partisan orientation or funding sources obscures that “almost all the advocacy groups working in the country were either founded by or are advised by civic boards made up of state leaders concerned about the direction of their public schools.”

The ERAO Playbook

Marc Porter Magee, president and founder of 50CAN

A critical first page in the playbook for reform groups is to increase the amount of information available about school system performance. Virtually all of them support reforms to improve the quality and transparency of state standards and assessments and the creation of state report cards that enable policymakers and parents to view school-level data on student achievement. The increased availability of this information—one of the most important legacies of NCLB—in turn helps the groups to highlight the need for school reform in state capitols and build support among parents and community groups. ERAOs use these data to create a sense of urgency and to craft detailed evidence-based policy recommendations. 50CAN, for example, releases a detailed “State of Public Education” report prior to launching a new state branch. The groups also build momentum for change—and help policymakers make tough political choices—by documenting community support for reform through public opinion polls. In Indiana, for example, Stand for Children hired an independent firm to survey teachers about proposed reforms and was able to report that many reforms had strong teacher support despite the opposition of their union.

There is both a public and private dimension to ERAO work. Behind the scenes the groups work to cultivate relationships and build credibility with governors and state legislators and their professional staff as well as with state education-agency folks. They hold regular briefings for these insiders—often bringing in nationally recognized experts—to make the case for reform and report on how other states have tackled similar challenges. They also wage a very public campaign for the hearts and minds of average citizens by organizing town hall meetings with parents and publishing op-eds in state and local media. They publicize the report cards developed by national research organizations—such as the National Council on Teacher Quality’s “State Teacher Policy Yearbook” and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s “State of State Standards,” which enable comparison of one state’s policies with those in the rest of the country. ERAOs organize phone banks, rallies in state capitols, and online petitions to build momentum behind reform.

While newer reform advocacy organizations often partner with older groups like the Education Trust, they differ in approach and tactics. Older groups have tended to confine their efforts to research and lobbying, while the newer groups are more explicitly political, creating public pressure for reform to make it easier for policymakers to embrace difficult changes and then rewarding those who advance their agenda. Robin Steans, executive director of Advance Illinois, observed that “in the past the SEA [state education agency] was often alone in pushing reform in the state but now we are able to help lead the charge, to bring media attention and change the stakes and get folks to the table.” Central to this effort, as Bruno Manno has noted, is the quest to mobilize parents (see “Not Your Mother’s PTA,” features, Winter 2012). The perception that older parent groups such as the Parent Teacher Association are closely aligned with teachers unions and wedded to the status quo has led to the formation of new reform-oriented parent groups (such as Parent Revolution) and parent advocacy campaigns by groups like Stand for Children. The ERAOs take advantage of data microtargeting capabilities to identify potential supporters and use social media like Twitter and Facebook to regularly inform and mobilize them for advocacy.

A Coordinated Movement?

Suzanne Tacheny Kubach, executive director of the Policy Innovators in Education Network

It is tempting to see the patchwork of state and national school reform organizations as a fully integrated and coordinated movement. Yet, as a January 2012 study from the PIE Network concluded, “The most common thread across these states that enacted reforms was actually a lack of tight coordination among the varied members of these coalitions.” While many ERAOs share goals and move on parallel paths, and coordinate where it makes sense, no one group dominates or is in charge. One reason is the significant variation in political context. The unique policy landscape of each state necessitates that reform coalitions and agendas be built state by state. In Colorado, for example, the coalition that successfully pushed for the “Great Teachers and Leaders Act” comprised 22 different stakeholder groups and 40 different community and business leaders. While many members of state reform coalitions are education-specific groups, others focus on civil rights or business issues. Coalition size and diversity ensure considerable variation in the groups’ education agendas, and often even greater variation in their noneducation agendas. Civil rights and business groups, for example, often find themselves on the same side of school choice debates but on opposite sides of collective bargaining and taxing-and-spending issues. As a result, a standing coalition of ERAOs is difficult to build or sustain across different policy proposals.

Many of the groups talk to one another frequently,, through a regular conference call organized by the Education Trust, at meetings organized by funders such as the Walton Family Foundation, and at conferences convened by groups such as the NewSchools Venture Fund. To the degree that there is an organizational home for ERAOs, it seems to be the PIE Network, which held its first meeting in 2007. The PIE Network emerged, according to executive director Kubach, because of “the growing realization that the arena of state policymaking matters a lot for school reform and you can’t just do everything at the federal level. We needed to connect the conversation in Washington with a coalition of different kinds of groups at the state level—business leaders, civic leaders, and grassroots constituents.” The 34 organizations in the network operate in 23 states and Washington, D.C. Network members include affiliates of Stand for Children and 50CAN, business groups like the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, the Oklahoma Business and Education Coalition, and Colorado Succeeds, and civic groups like Advance Illinois and the League of Education Voters (Washington). The PIE Network is also supported by five “policy partners,” which span the ideological spectrum but agree on the network’s reform commitments: Center for American Progress, Center on Reinventing Public Education, Education Sector, National Council on Teacher Quality, and Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Like many ERAOs, PIE Network is funded by the big three (Walton, Gates, and Broad) along with the Joyce and Stuart foundations.

The PIE Network facilitates regular communication among its members: it distributes a bimonthly newsletter, hosts a monthly conference call for leaders of its member groups, and convenes two face-to-face meetings each year—one with about 40 participants for group leaders and another larger, invitation-only meeting designed to bring the advocacy group leaders together with policy experts and policymakers. The organization also uses Twitter to act as an information clearinghouse by retweeting/aggregating all of the posts from its member organizations. Kubach argues that it is extremely difficult for individual state reform organizations to do this work by themselves and that the PIE Network has worked to encourage cross-state collaboration and the “cross-pollination” of reform ideas, and enable the “acceleration of the school reform movement.” One tangible example is that PIE Network members share legislative language for school reform bills (such as to improve teacher evaluation and tenure) that are being pushed in state legislatures, obviating the need for groups to undertake this time-consuming and technical work on their own. Nonetheless, despite the increasing communication among ERAOs, it appears to be too early to speak of them as constituting a coordinated movement, and given some of the challenges and divisions identified below, they may never become one. Indeed, Kubach explained that, at least for the PIE Network, centralized coordination has never been the goal: “There’s a pretty clear understanding across the sector that states are where most of reform policy is made and that local actors concerned about their schools are the most credible voices to lead that change. Our goal is to strengthen those local voices—not to overshadow them with a single-minded, nationally orchestrated campaign.”

ERAO Victories

The ERAO leaders I spoke with praised the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RttT) competitive grant program for creating momentum behind reform at the state level and providing political cover for reformers. Rhee observed that “RttT was a brilliant idea. It really helped us build bipartisan coalitions. Right now Republicans are being more aggressive on education reform than Democrats at the state level, but being able to say that a Democratic president and education secretary were supportive really helped to convince Democrats to do more courageous things.” As Steven Brill noted in Class Warfare (see “Great Teachers in the Classroom?” book reviews, Spring 2012), school reform advocates seized the momentum created by RttT to mobilize and collaborate in advancing their agenda in state legislatures. PIE Network director Kubach observed that it “created urgency, a moment of real comparability across states and pressure to change.” ERAOs helped to facilitate state-to-state comparisons and develop legislative agendas by assessing existing state policies against the RttT criteria. They then lobbied state policymakers and created grassroots campaigns to mobilize support.

It is difficult to precisely gauge their impact, but it is clear that ERAOs are having a large—and increasing—influence on education debates at the state and national levels and that their efforts have contributed significantly to the passage of important legislation. Indiana governor Mitch Daniels recently remarked that he has seen a “tectonic shift” on education in states and that “more legislators are free from the iron grip of the education establishment.” Hari Sevugen, communications director at StudentsFirst, noted that “what we’ve lacked and what those fighting for the status quo had was an organized effort that decision makers had in the back of their mind as they put together education policy. That equation was highly imbalanced, but is now changing.” StudentsFirst claims to have signed up a million members in its first year and to have helped change 50 different state education policies.

The recent wave of teacher quality reforms offers perhaps the best evidence of ERAO impact, as no area of education reform has been more strongly resisted by the unions. Nearly two-thirds of states have changed their teacher evaluation, tenure, and dismissal policies in the past two years: 23 states now require that standardized test results be factored into teacher evaluations, and 14 allow districts to use these data to dismiss ineffective teachers. While in 2009 no state required student performance to be central to the awarding of tenure, today 8 states do. ERAOs have been hailed for playing a pivotal role in the passage of these new laws, with Stand for Children leading the effort in Colorado and Illinois. Former Illinois board of education chairman Jesse Ruiz said that the group was “an instigator, a catalyst, you might say.” In fewer than 100 days, Stand raised about $3.5 million in the state and used $600,000 of that to make contributions to seven House and two Senate campaigns. This kind of hardball political organizing and lobbying has long been employed by the unions to defeat school reform legislation but increasingly is being utilized by the ERAOs to drive change.

Democratic Divides

Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform

While the ERAOs emphasize bipartisanship so that they can work effectively with policymakers on both sides of the aisle, the groups confront two very different challenges related to partisan politics. First, the Democratic Party is divided over school reform—particularly on school choice, test-based accountability, and teacher quality. One of the most important and unresolved issues is how the groups will navigate their complicated relationship with civil rights organizations and teachers unions. Teachers unions are a crucial part of the Democratic Party’s base and yet have long been resistant to the kinds of reforms the ERAOs are advocating. But the unions themselves are also in flux. Harvard’s Susan Moore Johnson has noted the rise of “reform unionism”: support for reform is increasing inside the unions, particularly in the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and among younger teachers. This trend has spawned such pro-reform teacher organizations as Teach Plus and Educators 4 Excellence.

Collectively, civil rights groups have assumed an ambiguous and fluid position in the school reform debates, though with major groups at times supportive of elements of the ERAO agenda. As Jesse Rhodes observed in a 2011 article in Perspectives on Politics, a number of civil rights groups have “played a central role in developing and promoting standards, testing, accountability, and limited school choice policies in order to achieve what they view as fundamentally egalitarian purposes.” Yet these groups have historically been closely aligned politically with the teachers unions and continue to find common ground given the large number of minority teachers, particularly in urban areas. This helps to explain why the NAACP sided with the unions against school closures and charter school expansion in New York City and Newark, for example, even as the group supports the ERAOs’ call for closing achievement gaps. There is also a major generational and racial gap between the leaders of groups like the NAACP and ERAO leaders, who are an overwhelmingly young, elite-schooled, and “white” bunch and as such are often viewed skeptically by people of color. Figuring out how to create state-level alliances with civil rights groups and mobilize urban communities—which are disproportionately minority and poor—remains an ongoing challenge.

The Need for a “RFER”

The second challenge is preserving over time the fairly broad bipartisan consensus on the ERAO agenda. As DFER’s Williams observed, “There are times where we agree with Republicans, but also plenty of times where we disagree—especially at the federal level and about funding.” While ERAOs generally support an active role for the federal government in promoting school reform and accountability, the rise of the Tea Party has highlighted how many conservatives continue to oppose such activism. And while ERAOs have led the charge to reform teacher evaluation and tenure policies, they have generally opposed more fundamental changes to collective bargaining pushed by Republican governors in places like Wisconsin. Similarly, while many Democrats (as well as many of the ERAOs) support the expansion of charter schools and school choice, there is much greater ambivalence over the school voucher proposals that Republicans are pushing in many states.

The creation of DFER has shifted the politics of education inside of the Democratic Party and provided cover for reform-minded Democrats in Congress and state capitols from the more liberal, union-friendly base. But a Republican counterpart to DFER—which insiders jokingly refer to as ReeFER—has yet to emerge. The Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE) serves that role to an extent, but it does not currently lobby or make political contributions. FEE was started by former governor Jeb Bush to help spread the accountability reforms he enacted during his time in office and has been very active in the South and West. The organization hosts an influential summit every year for state policymakers and also sponsors Chiefs for Change, current and former state education superintendents who advocate for school reform. FEE has concentrated its work on six states (Florida, Indiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Arizona) but is active in more than 20.

Winning Battles or the War?

Over the past two years, ERAOs have shown that they can mobilize quickly and effectively on behalf of reform. But as FEE’s Patricia Levesque warns, education reform is a long-term endeavor where “success is incremental” and “progress can be torn down quickly if momentum is stopped.” The recent struggles of the winning Race to the Top states have demonstrated that ensuring that policy reforms are implemented effectively on the ground and sustained over time is crucial, though less “sexy” than winning legislative victories. Major policy victories can quickly be undone by a new governor or legislature or undermined during the rule-making process, what Levesque called “death by a thousand cuts.” Battles over implementation occur in different venues (state boards, task forces, and education agencies), are more technical and less visible, and demand different tactics than legislative fights. ERAOs’ roles must include technical assistance, reporting, and watchdog vis-à-vis state education agencies.

To date, ERAOs have focused on states they consider hospitable to their efforts. There are important limitations to this approach, as it leaves many states unserved; 27 states, for example, are not represented on PIE Network’s membership list. Indeed, this strategy may actually ensure that states most in need of reform advocacy (and perhaps with the worst-performing school systems) will be ignored. The hope among ERAOs is that laggard states will feel pressure to follow reform-oriented states, but there is no guarantee that this will happen. It is also important to keep in mind how new the ERAOs are and how small their staffs are, often just a handful of folks. Sevugen at StudentsFirst remarked that despite ambitious goals, the group is essentially a “start-up” and that “we are trying to fly the plane while we build it.” Clearly, to be successful over the long haul, ERAOs will need to better coordinate their efforts within and across states. Rhee is optimistic on this front, noting that “more critical masses of reform-oriented folks are being built up, and I’m seeing more leaders of education reform organizations saying ‘we need to figure out how we can align our efforts in a more effective and efficient way than in the past.’ It’s not going to happen overnight, but I’m very hopeful that it will happen in the next two to three years.”

Though the groups are still young, the “reform blob” is providing a counterweight to the teachers unions in school reform debates at the state level. The ability of the ERAOs to overcome the unions should not be overestimated, however. The unions’ extensive resources—and large staff—enable them to be present everywhere, and it is unclear whether the ERAOs will be able to match their efforts in every venue. Kubach commented that “in California, there are reform groups like EdVoice, California Business for Education Excellence, and the Education Trust West that among them have maybe 25 employees working in rented office suites. The number of employees working for the teachers unions and administrators associations is much, much larger, and they all own multi-story buildings near the capital. [Even with] StudentsFirst there, that doesn’t come close to tipping the scales. The suggestion that the reform movement is the ‘big money game’ in any state capital is simply laughable.”

Still, the unprecedented state school reform activity of recent years—and, in particular, the enactment of a large number of teacher quality and school choice bills—testifies to the role these groups are playing in mobilizing political support behind reforms that even five years ago faced long odds. Several ERAO leaders recalled how few reform organizations there were, and how few local or state politicians were willing to take up the mantle of reform. Today, it is clear that a new club of reform organizations is itching for a fight and that politicians in both parties are increasingly willing to join them in the ring.

Patrick McGuinn is associate professor of political science and education at Drew University.

There’s still an increment, it turns out, but it’s been shrinking: from two years more schooling (by age thirty) for those born in 1955 down to just eight months more for those born in 1980. The implication, quoth the Journal reporters: “Without better educated Americans, economists say, the U.S. won’t be able to maintain high-wage jobs and rising living standards in a competitive global economy.”

This isn’t exactly news. Nor is the Goldin-Katz analysis the first time we have observed that the U.S. is no longer leading the planet when it comes to the quantity of education that its population receives. But is more education—more hours and days, more years and degrees—the cure for what ails us? Or are we already pigging out on the educational equivalent of fast food—fattening but not nutritious—and will supersizing our portions just make matters worse?

If we accept the Goldin-Katz view of what’s wrong with U.S. education, we will inevitably demand more preschool, more full-day Kindergarten, more high school graduations, more college attendance, more college and postgraduate degrees, etc. Supersizing is the standard American response. Indeed, it’s already on the election-year menu with both parties demanding that student-loan interest rates be made to stay low so that more people can afford more tertiary education. Not much talk about quality, though.

Singapore is one of those places that’s been going a mile a minute in boosting both the quality and the quantity of formal education that its population receives. For example, the proportion of Singaporeans aged twenty-five to thirty-nine that completed secondary school (meaning tenth grade) jumped from 25 percent in 1980 to 96 percent in 2010. At the same time, Singapore students beat almost everyone else in the world on international assessments of math and science knowledge.

To an American, however, it’s surprising how little rush there is to supersize Singaporean education. Kindergarten is optional. (The primary schools start at age six or seven.) And only about one in four young Singaporeans currently qualifies for the “junior colleges” (basically grades eleven and twelve) that are the usual path into the country’s four universities. Government policy is headed toward placing 30 percent of the age cohort in public universities; for now, as many as 40 percent of secondary graduates head into career-oriented “polytechnics” that resemble the best of American community colleges and some 20 percent attend the Institute of Technical Education, which emphasizes “hands-on” training.

There is, to be sure, public pressure to increase the number who can enter Singapore’s universities—and some private and non-Singaporean institutions have opened to accommodate some of that demand. (Other students travel overseas for their tertiary education.) But basically nobody is saying that every young person should go to university. And remember: this in an education-obsessed country with no other resources to speak of save its highly skilled populace.

Nor are they going to take the easy path (as England and Hong Kong have done in recent decades and as the U.S. started to do long ago) and put fancier labels onto existing institutions. They are not, for example, going to pretend that their polytechnics are really universities, as we have done with hundreds of ex-teachers colleges and quondam “normal schools.” They regard that kind of maneuver as both an affront to quality control at the university level and damaging to the real-world job-preparation work that the polytechnics specialize in.

The United States, of course, tends to reject both the benefits and the detriments of Singapore-style central planning in the education space, at least when it comes to planning from Washington. But the new Goldin-Katz data, combined with OECD trend data, make clear that our system (or non-system) isn’t doing a very good job of propelling more people onward to get more education than their parents got. And we know from plenty of other data (TIMSS, PISA, etc.) that the quality of much of what they’re getting isn’t so great, either, especially when viewed in international perspective.

Any number of reform initiatives are seeking to tackle one or the other problem. Some are focused on raising academic standards, others on keeping more people in the education system longer and seeing that they emerge with credentials. Some insist that the two goals are complimentary—and the mantra that “everyone should emerge from high school both college and career-ready” tends to blur the distinction and terminate the discussion.

But what will we do when we face hard trade-offs, such as the likely discovery that higher graduation standards will lead to a higher failure (and dropout) rate? Our track record in this regard leaves much to be desired. Even much-envied Massachusetts, which has done a commendable job of getting almost all who stay in school over the medium-high bar set by MCAS, has worrisome dropout rates, particularly among minority youngsters, and has been loath to raise its high school exit-bar to the level of true college readiness.

Are our presidential candidates crazy to yammer about cheap loans to make college more affordable for all? I understand that nobody (except maybe Rick Santorum) is going to campaign for the White House by urging fewer young Americans to go to college. But if more do in fact go and stay, will they really be getting a good education there? Or just a bigger bag of fries? What if, instead, more of them simply emerged career ready from our secondary schools, which already last two years longer than the norm in Singapore? Wouldn’t a whole lot of time and money be saved and a lot of heartache and dashed aspirations avoided?

I don’t expect these dilemmas to be resolved in Washington—though it would be fascinating to hear them discussed by Messrs. Obama and Romney in an upcoming debate. But it’s something our states had better come to grips with—including how they finance their P-20 education systems. It’s clear that rising tertiary education costs paid by consumers—and heavy debt burdens on many who enter and persist in college—are part of the problem. But only part. Maybe more attention to quality would do greater good.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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

Policymakers and reform advocates alike have rallied around the movement toward a national curriculum, suggesting that this will break the stagnation in achievement of U.S. students.  But there is little evidence that confusion about what we should teach has been a real inhibition to student achievement.  In fact, the existing evidence suggests just the opposite:  there is no relationship between the learning standards of the states and student performance.

To be sure, it is a real problem when students in one state learn very different things than those in other states, and in particular when students from some states lack the skills needed for our modern economy.  We really do have a national labor market, and significant numbers of our population end up living and working in a state different than that where they were born and went to school.  The presumption behind having national standards (whether voluntary or coerced) is that having a clearer and more consistent statement of learning objectives across states would tend to lessen the problem of heterogeneous skills that students bring to the labor market.  Again, however, the fundamental problem is lack of minimal skills and not the heterogeneity of skills per se.

Experience provides little support for the argument that just more clearly declaring what we want children to learn will have much impact.   In arguing for focusing on standards, proponents of national standards conventionally point to Massachusetts:  strong standards and top results.  But it is useful to expand thinking from just Massachusetts to include California, a second state noted for its high learning standards.  Indeed, some have argued that both states would have to lower their standards in order to fit into the structure of the Common Core.  But California balances Massachusetts:  strong standards and bottom results.

In order to see the issue more broadly, it is possible to compare state-by-state measures of learning standards to student outcomes.  There are different independent ratings of the quality of the learning standards currently existing for each state, and these can be combined with assessments of student performance from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).  The most comprehensive rating of state standards is probably that of Education Week.   Education Week developed a comprehensive grading across grade-specific standards, testing, and the accountability that goes with them in each state.  This ranking provides aggregate grades for each state.  (Another widely acknowledged rating of state standards by subject is produced by the Fordham Institute.  These competing rankings are correlated with those of Education Week, though not perfectly, and it really makes no difference for the analysis which we use.)

The figure below shows how the ranking of standards compares to NAEP scores – here the 8^th grade math scores.  (The specific NAEP assessment for grade and subject has no influence on the overall conclusions).

As can be seen, the better the state standards the worse the students tend to do.  But, of course, this does not imply that we should move toward weaker standards.  The real conclusion is that state standards have little to do with student performance.

In other words, what really matters is what is actually taught in the classroom.  Simply setting a different goal – even if backed by intensive professional development, new textbooks, and the like – has not historically had much influence as we look across state outcomes.

There are a number of refinements that one can think about for this analysis, but they do not change the answer.  This conclusion holds even under more sophisticated analysis, as demonstrated quite conclusively by Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution.  Indeed his analysis helps to frame the entire debate.

The continuing emphasis on Common Core standards, including the debates about the legality of them, is often interpreted as indicating that the Common Core is a really big deal in school reform.  The data suggest otherwise.

The one possible complementary gain from the move to national standards is that the assessments of performance might become better.  It is widely recognized that the current tests used to judge outcomes within individual states tend to be quite weak.  (This concern about tests is not leveled at NAEP, which was used in the comparisons above, but instead applies to the tests states use for accountability purposes).  If the new standards lead to better tests – something that might come out of the two testing consortia funded by the U.S. Education Department – we might have the basis for improved school policies.  But that is also not certain and cannot be used as a primary justification for the focus on Common Core standards.

One interpretation of the emphasis on developing the Common Core curriculum is that these debates provide a convenient distraction from potentially more intractable fights over bigger reform ideas like teacher evaluations, expanded school choice, or improved accountability systems.    While I am not against having better learning standards, I believe that we cannot be distracted from more fundamental reform of our schools.  The future economic well-being of the U.S. is dependent on improving the achievement and skills of today’s students.

-Eric Hanushek

While Jerry Brown, Tom Torlakson, and Mike Kirst deserve plenty of criticism for their indifference to education reform—kicking charter supporters off the state board, cozying up to the teacher unions—on this one they deserve nothing but kudos.

In a nine-page request (still in draft form for another month), they ask Arne Duncan to allow California to use its own accountability system, the Academic Performance Index (API), and to scrap AYP. Mimicking language Duncan himself has used, they write:

Unrealistic and ever-increasing performance targets have forced us to label 63 percent of Title I schools and 47 percent of districts receiving Title I funds as needing improvement, and to apply sanctions that do not necessarily lead to improved learning for the students in those schools. This practice has confused the public, demoralized teachers, and tied up funds that could have been more precisely targeted on the schools and districts that are most in need of improvement.

But they refuse to meet one of Duncan’s conditions for such flexibility: Namely, the creation of a statewide teacher evaluation system. From Politics K-12:

Why? The cash-strapped state just doesn’t have the funds to help school districts cover the cost of a new evaluation plan, as state law requires, Kirst said.

“We’re saying we just can’t pay for it,” Kirst said. Other states that have applied for the flexibility “must be rich,” he joked.

And, in Kirst’s view, the waiver request is consistent with what’s actually in the NCLB law. “We do not see anything in the law about state mandates for teacher evaluation,” he said.

Amen, amen, amen! Finally, a state willing to call out the Administration on the illegality of its waiver policy. (And a true-blue state at that!)

Let me be clear: I’m not saying California’s request should automatically be approved. There are legitimate questions about API, and whether it’s demanding enough (and sensitive enough to subgroup performance). As with the other states, Duncan has a right to negotiate over the particulars.

But he doesn’t have a right to demand the creation of a teacher evaluation system not mentioned in the law in return. Part of me hopes he’ll turn down the request anyway so that California can sue—and win.

-Mike Petrilli

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

As impressive and amazing as these results by charter schools may be, it would be wrong to conclude from this that charter schools improve student achievement.  The only way to know with confidence whether charters cause better outcomes is to look at randomized control trials (RCTs) in which students are assigned by lottery to attending a charter school or a traditional public school.  RCTs are like medical experiments where some subjects by chance get the treatment and others by chance do not.  Since the two groups are on average identical, any difference observed in later outcomes can be attributed to the “treatment,” and not to some pre-existing and uncontrolled difference.  We demand this type of evidence before we approve any drug, but the evidence used to justify how our children are educated is usually nowhere near as rigorous.

Happily, we have four RCTs on the effects of charter schools that allow us to know something about the effects of charter schools with high confidence.  Here is what we know:  students in urban areas do significantly better in school if they attend a charter schools than if they attend a traditional public school.  These academic benefits of urban charter schools are quite large. 

In Boston, a team of researchers from MIT, Harvard, Duke, and the University of Michigan, conducted a RCT and found:  “The charter school effects reported here are therefore large enough to reduce the black-white reading gap in middle school by two-thirds.”

A RCT of charter schools in New York City by a Stanford researcher found an even larger effect: “On average, a student who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86 percent of the ‘Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap’ in math and 66 percent of the achievement gap in English.”

The same Stanford researcher conducted an RCT of charter schools in Chicago and found:  “students in charter schools outperformed a comparable group of lotteried-out students who remained in regular Chicago public schools by 5 to 6 percentile points in math and about 5 percentile points in reading…. To put the gains in perspective, it may help to know that 5 to 6 percentile points is just under half of the gap between the average disadvantaged, minority student in Chicago public schools and the average middle-income, nonminority student in a suburban district.”

And the last RCT was a national study conducted by researchers at Mathematica for the US Department of Education.  It found significant gains for disadvantaged students in charter schools but the opposite for wealthy suburban students in charter schools.  They could not determine why the benefits of charters were found only in urban, disadvantaged settings, but their findings are consistent with the three other RCTs that found significant achievement gains for charter students in Boston, Chicago, and New York City.

When you have four RCTs – studies meeting the gold standard of research design – and all four of them agree that charters are of enormous benefit to urban students, you would think everyone would agree that charters should be expanded and supported, at least in urban areas.  If we found the equivalent of halving the black-white test score gap from RCTs from a new cancer drug, everyone would be jumping for joy – even if the benefits were found only for certain types of cancer.

Unfortunately, many people’s views on charter schools are heavily influenced by their political and financial interests rather than the most rigorous evidence.  They don’t want to believe the findings of the four RCTs, so they simply ignore them or cite studies with inferior research designs in which we should have much less confidence.

Progress will be made in our application of research to charter school policies by encouraging everyone to focus on the most rigorous studies, of which we have several.  To do that, supporters of charter schools also have to refrain from citing weaker evidence, which only serves to legitimize the use of inferior studies by charter opponents.  As exciting as the outstanding performance of charter schools is in my own Global Report Card research, that evidence shouldn’t be used to endorse charter schools.  Supporters don’t need to rely on the Global Report Card to make the case for charter schools because they have four gold-standard RCTs on their side.  Opponents of charter schools have no equally rigorous evidence on their side.  And that’s the point we should all be making.

-Jay P. Greene

This blog entry originally appeared on the blog of the George W. Bush Institute for National Charter Schools Week.

Unemployment insurance is supposed to help those unfortunate workers who lose their jobs as the result of an economic contraction or their own company’s need to regroup.  But those who work for the public schools, institutions that only seldom need to retrench and that hardly ever close their doors, have nonetheless found a way to convenient way to collect unemployment benefits.

As those who have followed the school battles in Wisconsin and Indiana know well, school employees enjoy generously funded health-care benefits and handsome defined benefit pension plans that are driving many state and local governments to the edge of bankruptcy.  Now, add still another give-away to the public employees of the nation’s schools—unemployment benefits for those weeks when kids are given their spring break.

I learned all this simply because the number of people seeking unemployment benefits went up last week, which may signal that the U. S. economy is at risk of falling back into another recession.

But, says the Wall Street Journal’s “Marketwatch” (April 19), we can’t be sure these numbers tell us much about the direction of the economy. “The weekly claims data is often hard to decipher in April because of the Easter holiday and spring break,” it reports, “when many school workers such as bus drivers and cafeteria workers are eligible to receive temporary benefits.”

I leave it to you, dear readers, to tell me just how bus drivers and cafeteria workers pull off this scam.  I had always thought the wages and salaries paid to public employees take into account school vacation times as well as the days they are on the job.  I thought the unemployed had to prove they had been fired from their job to get those marvelous (to coin a phrase) unemployment benefits.  How did bus drivers get access to those unemployment funds during holiday week?  Does this also happen in late December?  How about summer time? Who else gets them?

I’ve also heard the rumor that teachers are delighted when they get the spring pink slip in those years when the state legislature has yet to vote state aid for the schools the following fall.   Everyone knows that the legislature will eventually pony up the dollars, but school districts hand out pink slips to teachers anyhow, telling them they are fired, at least for now, because no one knows when the state dollars will flow.

Although sob stories about frightened teachers appear in the local paper, the truth, I’ve been told, is that the slip gives them the right to collect unemployment benefits even if they use the money to take a European tour prior to returning to school in the fall.

That’s the rumor I once heard.  Tell me it’s not so.  Tell me the wages and salaries and benefits that school employees officially receive are all that they get.

- Paul E. Peterson

Make no mistake: The “new normal” of tougher budget times—as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan calls it—is here to stay for American K-12 education.

Tight budgets should encourage districts to spend smartly and stretch funds, rather than harm education with shortsighted cuts. Photo by blognd

While that presents plenty of hardships, it also offers local officials a golden opportunity to rethink the way we run schools and to boost productivity and efficiency, a point I make in my new policy brief, “How School Districts Can Stretch the School Dollar.”

How?

Let’s start with a few key principles to keep in mind when weighing cuts:

Solving our budget crisis shouldn’t come at the expense of children. We should do everything we can to protect students’ learning opportunities and boost their achievement.

Nor can it come from teachers’ sacrifice alone. Suppressing teacher salaries forever isn’t a recipe for recruiting bright young people into education—or retaining the excellent teachers we have now.

Quick fixes aren’t a good answer; we need fundamental changes that enhance productivity. The reforms—and investments—with the greatest payoff are those that will maximize student outcomes at lower cost. And since education is overwhelmingly a people business—and most of the system’s costs are in personnel—the most promising reforms are those that rethink our staffing model.

So how can school districts dramatically increase productivity and stretch the school dollar?

Aim for a leaner, more productive, better paid workforce.

In a people business like education, it’s next to impossible to cut costs without letting some people go. But the answer isn’t just to lay off teachers and let class sizes rise (though, in most grades and subjects, modest increases aren’t the end of the world). In the last two decades, school systems have hired all manner of instructional coaches, teachers’ aides, program administrators, support staff, counselors, psychiatrists, specialists, and so forth. Redefining these roles—and those of classroom teachers—provides great opportunities for increased productivity. None of this is easy, but districts should consider:

• Asking classroom teachers to take on additional responsibility in return for greater pay. Can they do without aides? Handle larger classes (or student loads)? Take on mentoring roles along with classroom instruction? Where these additional responsibilities enable the system to operate with fewer staff (even if that means the remaining staff work a longer year), the system can justify higher pay while still realizing savings.
• Eliminating some ancillary positions. Can districts manage with fewer specialists, instructional coaches, teachers’ aides, support staff, and the like? If classroom teachers can take on some of these jobs, not only will this save on salaries (some of which could be reallocated to bonuses or salary enhancements for teachers), it will save dramatically on benefits.
• Redesigning their approach to special education. Many of the specialists that districts have hired in recent decades serve special populations—mostly students with disabilities but also English language learners. Districts should consider whether their approaches to educating these high-need students are as cost-effective as they could be. (That doesn’t mean cheap—it means effective, at a reasonable cost.) For example, if a district uses a “co-teaching” model with regular teacher and a special education teacher in the same classroom—which is hugely expensive—could it try a pull-out approach instead? Or if the best model has these students staying in the classroom, could the extra services be provided over the summer, or after school?  

Pay for productivity. The best way to increase productivity is to ask fewer people to do more work in order to get better results. And they should be compensated fairly for it. Here’s how:

• A more aggressive salary schedule. Teachers improve dramatically in their first few years on the job, and their salaries should rise dramatically along with their effectiveness—reaching the maximum base salary much sooner than is now the case. This would help with retention of young teachers—a huge opportunity for saving money (on training, recruitment, etc.)—and with raising student achievement, while eliminating the spiked pay at the end of a career that drives up pension obligations.






To learn more, download the full policy brief, How Districts Can Stretch the School Dollar.

• Prioritize salaries over benefits. It’s no secret: School districts have to get their health care costs under control. Every dollar going into health insurance is a dollar that can’t go into higher salaries. Plans should be redesigned so that employees have more skin in the game—and incentives to keep their own healthcare costs down. Co-pays, employee premiums, out-of-network fees, and the rest should be brought into line with what workers in the private sector expect.

Integrate technology thoughtfully. Online and “blended” school models—where students spend all or part of the day learning online—are coming to K-12 education. These can be catalysts for greater pupil engagement, individualization, and achievement. If organized right, they can also be opportunities for cost-cutting. Why couldn’t students learn foreign languages via Rosetta Stone, for example, instead of in a traditional classroom?

Rather than hope for revenue increases that are unlikely to materialize, smart leaders can turn the present budget crisis into an opportunity. Most of the school dollar goes toward instructional staff and the people who manage them. Rethinking whom we hire, what they do, how we pay them, and how to incorporate technology—that’s where the big payoff is. Local officials need to reconsider the core business of schooling—and get key stakeholders to buy into a new, more cost-effective, more productive vision. That’s no small thing. Are they up to the challenge?

-Michael Petrilli

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper Blog

Then came the meteoric shock of consequential accountability, and student test scores (on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and state exams, too) started to take off. For some subgroups of students, math and reading skills improved by two or three grade levels since just the mid 1990s.

Yet we all know the downsides of the narrow focus on reading and math scores in grades three through eight and once in high school. This regimen puts enormous pressure on schools to ignore or exclude other important subjects (art, music, history, even science). It penalizes schools with an educational strategy that succeeds in the long term but doesn’t produce sky-high scores now. (I’m thinking of Waldorf schools, for instance, such as the preschool my son attends.) And it undervalues other important contributions that schools make, such as to students’ character development and social skills.

When it comes to evaluating teachers, there’s wide agreement that we need to look at student achievement results—but not exclusively. Teaching is a very human act; evaluating good teaching takes human judgment—and the teacher’s role in the school’s life, and her students’ lives, goes beyond measurable academic gains. Thus the interest in regular observations by principals and/or master teachers. These folks can pick up on nuances missed by the value-added data—plus can provide actionable feedback to instructors so that they can improve their craft. (Harrison School District Two in Colorado has one of the best plans in this regard.)

So why do we assume, when it comes to evaluating schools, that we must look at numbers alone? Sure, there have been calls to build additional indicators, beyond test scores, into school grading systems. These might include graduation rates, student or teacher attendance rates, results from student surveys, AP course-taking or exam-passing rates, etc. Our own recent paper on model state accountability systems offers quite a few ideas along these lines. This is all well and good.

But it’s not enough. It still assumes that we can take discrete bits of data and spit out a credible assessment of organizations as complex as schools. That’s not the way it works in businesses, famous for their “bottom lines.” Fund managers don’t just look at the profit and loss statements for the companies in which they invest. They send analysts to go visit with the team, hear about their strategy, kick the tires, talk to insiders, find out what’s really going on. Their assessment starts with the numbers, but it doesn’t end there.

So it should be with school accountability systems. The best ones today take various data points and turn them into user-friendly letter grades, easily understandable by educators, parents, and taxpayers alike. So far so good. Why not add a human component to the process, via school inspectors like those in England? (See this excellent Education Sector paper, by my friend Craig Jerald, for background on how that works.)

Imagine: At least once a year (more would be better) a group of inspectors visits a school. (These would be professionals on contract with the state department of education—typically retired teachers and principals. In the case of charter schools, authorizers would be involved, too.) They would mostly look for two things:

• Evidence that the school is achieving important outcomes that may not be captured by the state accountability system. For example, the school’s administrators might show them test score data from a computer adaptive exam like NWEA’s that demonstrates progress for individual kids (especially those well above or below grade level) that isn’t picked up by the less-sensitive state test. Or perhaps a high school has compelling data about its graduates’ college matriculation and graduation rates that put its mediocre test scores in a different light.
• Indications that the school’s culture and instructional program are inculcating valuable attributes in their students. This is to guard against the “testing factory” phenomenon. Is the school offering a well-balanced curriculum (and extra-curriculars), or engaging in test-prep for weeks on end? Is it focused on teaching “non-cognitive” skills and attributes, such leadership, perseverance, and teamwork? Character traits like empathy, honesty, and courage?

The school visits should not be exercises in excuse-making. This isn’t about lowering expectations because of difficulties particular communities face, or delaying needed changes because the school’s educators appear to be “trying hard.” Rather, it’s a chance to round out the picture generated by the state’s (inevitably) incomplete accountability report.

So here’s how it would work: The state would develop school grades based on a variety of indicators, as it does now. Then those grades could be raised or lowered based on the findings of the school inspectors. (Generally just a letter-grade, but sometimes more.) Grades would go up because of evidence of strong outcomes not captured by the state accountability system; grades would go down because of evidence of unhealthy curricular narrowing.

Such a system would remain imperfect. Human judgment would introduce subjectivity and error into the process. Inspectors might face pressure (maybe even bribes) to raise schools’ grades. And it would be expensive—at least as compared to the testing-and-accountability systems we have now. These issues would need to be addressed.

Still, it’s worth it. To the extent that school grades (and consequences linked to them) drive policy and behavior, we ought to make sure that those grades are informed by more than just numbers. The correct response to the unintended consequences of accountability isn’t to end accountability, but to make it work better. That could have positive consequences for many years to come.

-Michael Petrilli

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

Neal McCluskey of the CATO Institute does not think the comparison should be made—on the grounds that the data are “too blunt to tell us much about a single administration’s policies.”  Perhaps, but the same can be said for the growth of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the growth in the number of Americans who are employed. Both are gross, blunt numbers, affected by many factors other than presidential decisions, but the public holds presidents accountable for what happens under their watch. For that very reason, Obama is doing everything he can to pump GDP upward, and the White House staff seized up last Friday when employment figures revealed that the gains were only half what had been anticipated.

The public is right to insist that basic numbers on the ground move in the right direction, no matter how distant from direct presidential control they seem to be. When presidents know they are being held accountable for economic performance, they act more responsibly—or suffer the consequences. If presidents come to learn that they are also being held accountable for the nation’s educational performance, they will think more carefully about the consequences of their actions for students, not job holders.

But, says McCluskey, presidents can’t do much about education in any short period of time. Neither Bush nor Obama should not be given credit or blame for events that happen early in their term of office.   That wave of the hand allows him to slice and dice the numbers to suit his convenience.

But such hand-waving ignores one of Teddy Roosevelt’s keenest insights: The bully pulpit is the most powerful weapon in a president’s arsenal. True about governing in general, it’s of particular significance when it comes to education. For learning to take place, teachers, students, administrators, parents and neighbors must all be committed to the enterprise.

To mobilize broad movement toward a common goal is a job for presidents.  They are the ones best placed to energize a nation, and some presidents have done just that.

Ronald Reagan reversed the downward trend in SAT scores almost overnight when his National Commission on Educational Excellence galvanized the nation to take the educational crisis seriously. At the time Congress passed no law, and no pile of money was added to the pot, but the White House message had a major impact nonetheless.  (For details, see chapter 8 in my book, Saving Schools).

Similarly, George W. Bush, both in his 2000 campaign and immediately upon assuming office, insistently called for accountability reforms that would lead to No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  It was not the law’s rules and regulations but the national attention that had the impact.  Schools, students, and teachers were put on notice that more was expected.  NAEP scores jumped noticeably—from the very beginning of the Bush term.

Though presidents usually enjoy the biggest bully pulpit, Martin Luther King proved no less influential.  When he called for equal educational opportunity in the South, the test scores of African American students in southern states rose dramatically. The biggest gains were among the high school students most susceptible to the calls of the civil rights movement.

The U. S. Department of Education has encouraged a certain amount of reform with its convoluted Race to the Top initiative.  But President Obama’s first—and most powerful— education message to all Americans came with his stimulus package. He urged its passage not so that children might learn but in order that teachers might keep their jobs. That was precisely the wrong signal, and it is not surprising that NAEP gains slowed to a virtual halt.  The stimulus package did little for the nation’s GDP, and it has had a negative impact on its education GDP.

-Paul Peterson

Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems

As reviewed by Jay P. Greene

“Best practices” is the worst practice. The idea that we should examine successful organizations and then imitate what they do if we also want to be successful is something that first took hold in the business world but has now unfortunately spread to the field of education. If imitation were the path to excellence, art museums would be filled with paint-by-number works.

The fundamental flaw of a “best practices” approach, as any student in a half-decent research-design course would know, is that it suffers from what is called “selection on the dependent variable.” If you only look at successful organizations, then you have no variation in the dependent variable: they all have good outcomes. When you look at the things that successful organizations are doing, you have no idea whether each one of those things caused the good outcomes, had no effect on success, or was actually an impediment that held organizations back from being even more successful. An appropriate research design would have variation in the dependent variable; some have good outcomes and some have bad ones. To identify factors that contribute to good outcomes, you would, at a minimum, want to see those factors more likely to be present where there was success and less so where there was not.

“Best practices” lacks scientific credibility, but it has been a proven path to fame and fortune for pop-management gurus like Tom Peters, with In Search of Excellence, and Jim Collins, with Good to Great. The fact that many of the “best” companies they featured subsequently went belly-up—like Atari and Wang Computers, lauded by Peters, and Circuit City and Fannie Mae, by Collins—has done nothing to impede their high-fee lecture tours. Sometimes people just want to hear a confident person with shiny teeth tell them appealing stories about the secrets to success.

With Surpassing Shanghai, Marc Tucker hopes to join the ranks of the “best practices” gurus. He, along with a few of his colleagues at the National Center on Education and the Economy, has examined the education systems in some other countries with successful outcomes so that the U.S. can become similarly successful. Tucker coauthors the chapter on Japan, as well as an introductory and two concluding chapters. Tucker’s collaborators write chapters featuring Shanghai, Finland, Singapore, and Canada. Their approach to greatness in American education, as Linda Darling-Hammond phrases it in the foreword, is to ensure that “our strategies must emulate the best of what has been accomplished in public education both from here and abroad.”

But how do we know what those best practices are? The chapters on high-achieving countries describe some of what those countries are doing, but the characteristics they feature may have nothing to do with success or may even be a hindrance to greater success. Since the authors must pick and choose what characteristics they highlight, it is also quite possible that countries have successful education systems because of factors not mentioned at all. Since there is no scientific method to identifying the critical features of success in the best-practices approach, we simply have to trust the authority of the authors that they have correctly identified the relevant factors and have properly perceived the causal relationships.

But Surpassing Shanghai is even worse than the typical best-practices work, because Tucker’s concluding chapters, in which he summarizes the common best practices and draws policy recommendations, have almost no connection to the preceding chapters on each country. That is, the case studies of Shanghai, Finland, Japan, Singapore, and Canada attempt to identify the secrets to success in each country, a dubious-enough enterprise, and then Tucker promptly ignores all of the other chapters when making his general recommendations.

Tucker does claim to be drawing on the insights of his coauthors, but he never actually references the other chapters in detail. He never names his coauthors or specifically draws on them for his conclusions. In fact, much of what Tucker claims as common lessons of what his coauthors have observed from successful countries is contradicted in chapters that appear earlier in the book. And some of the common lessons they do identify, Tucker chooses to ignore.

For example, every country case study in Surpassing Shanghai, with the exception of the one on Japan coauthored by Marc Tucker, emphasizes the importance of decentralization in producing success. In Shanghai the local school system “received permission to create its own higher education entrance examination. This heralded a trend of exam decentralization, which was key to localized curricula.” The chapter on Finland describes the importance of the decision “to devolve increasing levels of authority and responsibility for education from the Ministry of Education to municipalities and schools…. [T]here were no central initiatives that the government was trying to push through the system.” Singapore is similarly described: “Moving away from the centralized top-down system of control, schools were organized into geographic clusters and given more autonomy…. It was felt that no single accountability model could fit all schools. Each school therefore set its own goals and annually assesses its progress toward meeting them…” And the chapter on Canada teaches us that “the most striking feature of the Canadian system is its decentralization.”

Tucker makes no mention of this common decentralization theme in his conclusions and recommendations. Instead, he claims the opposite as the common lesson of successful countries: “students must all meet a common basic education standard aligned to a national or provincial curriculum… Further, in these countries, the materials prepared by textbook publishers and the publishers of supplementary materials are aligned with the national curriculum framework.” And “every high-performing country…has a unit of government that is clearly in charge of elementary and secondary education…In such countries, the ministry has an obligation to concern itself with the design of the system as a whole…”

Conversely, Tucker emphasizes that “the dominant elements of the American education reform agenda” are noticeably absent from high-performing countries, including “the use of market mechanisms, such as charter schools and vouchers….” But if Tucker had read the chapter on Shanghai, he would have found a description of a system by which “students choose schools in other neighborhoods by paying a sponsorship fee. It is the Chinese version of school choice, a hot issue in the United States.” And although the chapter on Canada fails to make any mention of it, Canada has an extensive system of school choice, offering options that vary by language and religious denomination. According to recently published research by David Card, Martin Dooley, and Abigail Payne, competition among these options is a significant contributor to academic achievement in Canada.

There is a reason that promoters of best-practices approaches are called “gurus.” Their expertise must be derived from a mystical sphere, because it cannot be based on a scientific appraisal of the evidence. Marc Tucker makes no apology for his nonscientific approach. In fact, he denounces “the clinical research model used in medical research” when assessing education policies. The problem, he explains, is that no country would consent to “randomly assigning entire national populations to the education systems of another country or to certain features of the education system of another country.” On the contrary, countries, states, and localities can and do randomly assign “certain features of the education system,” and we have learned quite a lot from that scientific process. In the international arena, Tucker may want to familiarize himself with the excellent work being done by Michael Kremer and Karthik Muralidharan utilizing random assignment around the globe.

In addition, social scientists have developed practices to observe and control for differences in the absence of random assignment that have allowed extensive and productive analyses of the effectiveness of educational practices in different countries. In particular, the recent work of Ludger Woessmann, Martin West, and Eric Hanushek has utilized the PISA and TIMSS international test results that Tucker finds so valuable, but they have done so with the scientific methods that Tucker rejects. Even well-constructed case study research, like that done by Charles Glenn, can draw useful lessons across countries. The problem with the best-practices approach is not entirely that it depends on case studies, but that by avoiding variation in the dependent variable it prevents any scientific identification of causation.

Tucker’s hostility to scientific approaches is more understandable, given that his graduate training was in theater rather than a social science. Perhaps that is also why Tucker’s book reminds me so much of The Music Man. Tucker is like “Professor” Harold Hill come to town to sell us a bill of goods. His expertise is self-appointed, and his method, the equivalent of “the think system,” is obvious quackery. And the Gates Foundation, which has for some reason backed Tucker and his organization with millions of dollars, must be playing the residents of River City, because they have bought this pitch and are pouring their savings into a band that can never play music except in a fantasy finale.

Best practices really are the worst.

Jay P. Greene is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute.

The overall idea of weighted student funding—that some students require more resources than others because they require extra educational services—makes sense intuitively and provides a sensible way for states to think about pieces of their school finance systems. The usual categories of students requiring “weights” are those in special education, disadvantaged students as generally defined by family income, and English-language learners.

Indeed, every state in the union currently uses some version of weighted funding, either through explicit inclusion in its funding formula or through allocations using “weighted students” instead of actual students. The federal government’s most significant K-12 spending programs target disadvantaged students (through Title I) and students with disabilities (via the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act).

Given that, why is weighted student funding such a common element of reform? The prevailing idea that drives the somewhat surprising alliance of right and left goes beyond simply funding districts according to assessments of needs based on poverty status, special education, language deficiencies, and the like. The reform envisioned is not so much about providing differential dollars based on student needs, but about changing who makes funding decisions. The supporters also importantly call for dollars to go directly to individual schools based on these categorizations of student needs, with individual budget decisions being made at the school level. The unstated goal is to bypass any decisionmaking at the district level—where each group sees intractably bad political outcomes.

But hoping that a new distribution of funding that goes directly to the school level—call it school-based weighted funding—will create the right incentives appears both misguided and possibly harmful.

Let’s dig deeper here. Liberals like the concept of school-based weighted funding because they believe it would push money to schools that serve more-disadvantaged populations, and they tend to focus most on funding variations within urban districts. The highest-poverty schools in urban areas traditionally have received less funding than more-advantaged schools, not because of programmatic disparities, but largely because they employ more rookie teachers who come with lower salaries than more-senior educators.

These liberals ignore the fact that local schools have no control over teacher salaries or, for the most part, over the choice of teachers. Thus, the added dollars from the weighted student funding seldom empower them to make choices that improve the quality of teachers. As a result, the benefit of additional funding in a world where the quality of teachers is unrelated to the salary of individual teachers is murky at best.

By contrast, conservatives like the idea because, in their vision, it would push funding to charter schools that traditionally have received less-than-equal shares of federal, state, and local aid. Conservatives focused largely on the federal and state dollars ignore the fact that local funding would not necessarily flow with the child to the charter school under a weighted system. Redirecting the revenue stream would not achieve the parity they seek for charter schools without altering significantly the varied arrangements nationwide for state and local school finance.

At their heart, both positions rely upon an untested view of politics: If only the actual flow of dollars were more transparent, political forces would be inescapably set in motion that would in turn eliminate the current shackles on schools and allow them to make the decisions needed to improve achievement.

We should have absolutely no reason to believe that such a vision will come to fruition. For one, for the vision to hold, we must ignore any questions about decisionmaking capacities at the school level.

The underlying motivation for weighted student funding is built on a presumption that districts are making patently bad decisions, either because of a lack of capacity or distorted incentives. Is it the case that these problems appear just at the district level, but not the school level? Why do we believe that school-level personnel—without any prior training and experience—will become better stewards of resources or better judges of personnel, curricula, or instructional techniques?

“The reform envisioned is not so much about providing differential dollars based on student needs, but about changing who makes funding decisions.”

Additionally, we must believe that public pressure set in motion by this formulaic funding of schools will sweep away the rigidities of contracts, the desire to insulate the system from competitive pressures, and the interests of current personnel, and will lead to better solutions. Neither of these underlying presumptions appears plausible. What appears to be happening is that we are attempting to produce fresh approaches to regulating the process of education, only at a different level of governance.

Liberals and conservatives both want improved achievement of all students, but achieving that seems much more likely through rewarding success, rather than relying on the hope that a naive model of political reaction would work better. In simplest terms, weighted student funding does little or nothing to alter incentives for performance in the schools unless the vague hopes behind these ideas are realized.

A contrasting perspective can be seen in funding ideas that change incentives, developed in a book by Alfred Lindseth and me, Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses. Provide funding to districts that adjusts the base amount for each student—disadvantaged students, English-language learners, or special education students—to reflect differences in education needs. But, having provided funding that recognizes different needs, reward districts that promote greater student achievement. And, don’t reward schools and districts where students fail to improve their performance. In other words, provide incentives for greater achievement, and do not reward failure. The different levels of funding compensate districts and schools for different demands on them, but the hopes for improved achievement come from providing incentives directly related to student achievement.

One premise of this alternative is that it is necessary to be clear about what outcomes need to be, but to allow districts to decide how to achieve those goals. Districts may find it useful in their management to employ some sort of weighted student funding for individual schools, but they might alternatively rely on strong district leadership and more-centralized funding decisions. It simply doesn’t make sense to try to dictate management rules from the state or national capital.

Schools will not improve until there are greater incentives for improving student achievement. Redistributing funds across schools or increasing the funding to schools by themselves will not magically put us on this path.

-Eric Hanushek

This commentary also appeared in Education Week.

In this video, members of the VIVA Project Chicago Teachers Writing Collaborative talk about the empowering experience of working together and having their voices heard by the massive Chicago Public Schools system. CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard says The VIVA Project, as a neutral third party, made it possible for him to hear from teachers, the real experts on how to use time in school to better serve students.

The VIVA (Voices, Ideas, Vision, Action) Project brought Chicago teachers into the education policy discussion by providing not only a platform to share their ideas, but also guidance to build on each other’s ideas and create a report of recommendations that was ultimately shared with the Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard.

You can find out more about The Viva Project here.

Miller put forward his own bills, which most of the self-same groups quickly endorsed, and which, Miller argues, “eliminates inflexible and outdated provisions of No Child Left Behind and requires states and [districts] to adopt strong but flexible and achievable standards, assessments, and accountability reforms.”

So let’s see how Miller and company do at “eliminating inflexible and outdated provisions of NCLB” and requiring “strong but flexible” accountability systems. The package…

1. Requires states to expect “all” students to reach college and career readiness eventually. (Didn’t we learn from NCLB that calling for “universal proficiency” merely pushes states to lower the bar?)

2. Tightens the screws on NCLB’s “subgroup accountability,” requiring schools to hit targets on dozens of indicators in order to avoid stigmas and sanctions. (Why not let states develop new ways to ensure that vulnerable kids don’t get overlooked—but without all the complexity?)

3. Makes failure even more likely by adding student growth and graduation rates to the mix (along with proficiency rates).

4. Potentially subjects a high number of schools to federally prescribed interventions. Rather than restrict the proportion of schools that must face the strictest sanctions to 5 or 10 percent, as Lamar Alexander’s legislative package and the Administration’s own Blueprint do, the sky is once again the limit under the Miller approach.

5. Micromanages the way that state accountability systems include students with disabilities, setting inflexible rules about how many students can take alternate assessments.

6. Establishes an enormous unfunded mandate by requiring states to translate examinations for every language group of 10,000 students or more. In larger states, this could mean the development of dozens of new assessment formats.

7. Penalizes school districts for doing more with less by keeping intact the “maintenance of effort” requirement—which substitutes Congress’s priorities over state legislatures’ and county councils’ when it comes to spending limited state/local resources.

8. Mandates that states and districts redistribute “effective” teachers from middle class to poor schools, even though recent research indicates that the “teacher effectiveness gap” may not exist.

9. Keeps in place the “Highly Qualified Teachers” mandate, even though its focus on paper credentials has been completely discredited.

10. Creates or reinstates myriad pet programs that Congress has already defunded, often with support from the Obama Administration.

So if Republicans are “radical,” Miller and his allies must be “conservative” because they essentially want No Child Left Behind to stay the same.

Deming found that high-risk middle- and high-school students who attend a school of choice are less likely to be arrested and spend less time incarcerated.

Please read “Does School Choice Reduce Crime: Evidence from North Carolina” in the Spring 2012 issue of Ed Next.

• Its content-and-skill expectations for grades K-12 in English and math are, by almost everyone’s reckoning, about as rigorous as the best state-specific academic standards and superior to most.
• It was developed outside the federal government, voluntarily by states, using private dollars. (The related assessments are another matter.) And both standards and assessments remain voluntary for states.
• It opens the way, for the first time, to comparing student, school and district performance across the land on a credible, common metric—and gauging their achievement against that of youngsters in other countries on our shrinking and ever-more-competitive planet.
• Besides comparability, it brings the possibility that families moving around our highly mobile society will be able to enroll their kids seamlessly in schools that are teaching the same things at the same grade levels.

Ever since it landed, however, the Common Core has been the object of ceaseless attacks from multiple directions. The number of zealous assailants is small and, for a time, it all looked like a tempest in a highly visible teapot. That may yet turn out to be the case. But the attacks are growing fiercer; some recent recruits to the attack squad are people who tend to get taken seriously; and anything can happen in an election year. Remember the classic Peter Sellers movie, The Mouse That Roared? The Duchy of Grand Fenwick ended up triumphing over the United States of America. As you may recall, that happened in large part because the U.S. government contributed to its own defeat. In the present case, something similar could well transpire. Please read on.

Before examining the assaults, however, let’s remind ourselves what the Common Core is not. It is no guarantee of stronger student achievement or school performance. Huge challenges await any (serious) academic standards on the implementation, assessment and accountability fronts. To get traction in classrooms, states that adopt these standards (and all but four say they’re doing so) must take pains with curriculum, teacher preparation, assessment, accountability and more. To yield real rigor (and comparability), the currently-under-development assessments must avoid numerous pitfalls and incorporate hard-to-achieve consensus on genuinely challenging issues (such as where to set the “cut score”).

In and of themselves, academic standards merely describe the end point to be reached and the major stops en route. They don’t get you there. But it’s far better to have an education destination worth reaching, i.e. rigorous standards set forth with sufficient specificity, clarity, and rich content to provide real guidance to curriculum designers, classroom teachers, test developers and more. Few states have managed to do that on their own.

To be sure, other states could simply copy the best of those that already exist. But that’s more or less what the Common Core is: an amalgam of good standards put together by people who know a lot—and care a lot—about both content and skills.

So why the nonstop attacks against it? As best I can tell, they arise from six objections and fears.

First, a few earnest critics are convinced that the standards are substantively flawed, that the algebra sequence (or grade level) is wrong, the English standards don’t contain enough literature, the emphasis on “math facts” isn’t as strong as it should be, etc. This sort of thing has accompanied every past set of standards of every sort, and it’s perfectly legitimate. Insofar as such criticisms are warranted, the Common Core can be revised, states can add standards of their own, and jurisdictions that find the common version truly unsatisfactory can change their minds about using it at all.

Second, the Common Core will be difficult and expensive to implement. Many organizations are working hard to help states surmount these genuine challenges. Many philanthropists are kicking money into the effort. And some groups (Fordham included) are trying to cost it all out. Nobody denies that doing this right will be hard and costly (though some of those costs are already embedded in state and district budgets.) Of course, those who think the country is doing OK today have every reason to shirk that challenge and stick with what they’re used to.

Third, the Common Core won’t make any difference in student achievement—but may cause a politically-unacceptable level of student failure. As noted above, standards per se do not boost achievement. (Of course, standards per se don’t carry costs or failure rates, either. They don’t, by themselves, do much of anything!) And failure rates will worsen only if (a) the new assessments are truly rigorous and (b) schools neglect preparing their pupils to pass them.

Fourth, states have done as well, or better, on their own, and switching over to the Common Core will just mess them up. This criticism mostly emanates from Massachusetts, which has done a commendable job on its own and where the decision to adopt the Common Core was truly conflicted. Other states that prefer to go it alone, mostly notably Texas and Virginia, have simply declined to adopt the Common Core. Others are free to exit from it (though doing so would, for some, violate commitments they made in their Race to the Top proposals.)

Fifth, “national” is not the right way to do anything in American education. We retain a deep (if, in my view, unwarranted) affection for “local control” in this realm and constitutional responsibility for education is undeniably vested in the states. Some folks dread the prospect of a “national curriculum.” (Some simply mistrust the Gates Foundation, which has bankrolled much of this work.) Others are incapable (perhaps willfully so) of seeing any distinction between “national” and “federal”, though we seem to have no difficulty making that distinction elsewhere in education. (E.g. National Governors Association, S.A.T., A.P., ACT.)

Sixth, and closely related to the blurring of national with federal is the expectation that Uncle Sam won’t be able to keep his hands off the Common Core—which means the whole enterprise will be politicized, corrupted and turned from national/voluntary into federal/coercive. This is probably the strongest objection to the Common Core and, alas, it’s probably the most valid, thanks in large measure to our over-zealous Education Secretary and the President he serves.

Let’s face it. Three major actions by the Obama administration have tended to envelop the Common Core in a cozy federal embrace, as have some ill-advised (but probably intentional) remarks by Messrs. Duncan and Obama that imply greater coziness to follow.

There was the fiscal “incentive” in Race to the Top for states to adopt the Common Core as evidence of their seriousness about raising academic standards.

Then there’s today’s “incentive,” built into the NCLB waiver process, for states to adopt the Common Core as exactly the same sort of evidence.

(In both cases, strictly speaking, states could supply other evidence. But there’s a lot of winking going on.)

The third federal entanglement was the Education Department’s grants to two consortia of states to develop new Common Core-aligned assessments, which came with various requirements and strings set by Secretary Duncan’s team.

This trifecta of actual events is problematic in its own right, not because the federal government is evil but because Washington has become so partisan and politicized and because of angst and suspicion that linger from failed efforts during the 1990’s to generate national standards and tests via federal action.

What’s truly energized the Common Core’s enemies, however, has been a series of ex cathedra comments by President Obama and Secretary Duncan. Most recently, the Education Secretary excoriated South Carolina for even contemplating a withdrawal from the Common Core. Previously, the President indicated that state eligibility for Title I dollars, post-ESEA reauthorization, would hinge on adoption of the Common Core. Talking with the governors about NCLB waivers earlier this week, he stated that “if you’re willing to set, higher, more honest standards then we will give you more flexibility to meet those standards.” I don’t know whether he winked. But everybody knew what standards he was talking about.

It will, of course, be ironic as well as unfortunate if the Common Core ends up in the dustbin of history as a result of actions and comments by its supporters. But in March 2012 there can be little doubt that the strongest weapons in the arsenal of its enemies are those that they have supplied.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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

He has more to say about a larger strategy for boosting teacher quality in “An Effective Teacher in Every Classroom,” which appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of Ed Next.

He also authored “Valuing Teachers: How Much is a Good Teacher Worth?” which appeared in the Summer 2011 issue of Ed Next.

On Friday, March 2 from 9:00-10:30 am we’ll be watching a live webcast of the Fordham Institute’s forum on No Child Left Behind, starring Michele McNeil, Carmel Martin, Jeremy Ayers, Michael Petrilli, and moderated by Checker Finn. As described on the event page:

After a decade of living with the No Child Left Behind Act, there is wide, bipartisan consensus that this law governing so much of the federal role in education needs to change. With reauthorization still stalled in Congress, however, the Obama Administration offered states a deal—freedom from some of NCLB’s prescriptions in return for alignment with the Education Department’s current reform priorities. Already this month, eleven states were freed from some of the strictures of NCLB; dozens more must decide by February 28 whether the benefits of Duncan-style ESEA flexibility are worth it. You’re invited to join us at the Fordham Institute on March 2 as experts with varying perspectives on this issue weigh the merits of NCLB waivers, whether the Administration struck a sound balance between “flexibility” and “reform,” and what this all means for federal education policy going forward.

More information about the event and the panelists can be found on the Fordham Institute website.

Critics of voucher programs often argue that private schools do exclude most disabled students, and the matter occasionally has been the subject of litigation. Yet accurate information on students with disabilities served by private schools is notable for its absence.

The main reason for the lack of accurate information is that private schools do not operate under the provisions of the federal law that furnishes aid to the states for students identified as needing special education. Public schools expend considerable resources identifying children eligible for special services, both because they are under an obligation to provide those services and because they receive additional funds from federal and state governments if a child is identified as having a disability that affects their learning. Those obligations, rights, and funding support do not apply if parents choose to place their children in private schools with the help of a voucher. By and large, private schools have not developed the capacity to identify children with disabilities, and many of them are reluctant to do so, as they believe it leads to stigmatization of the children.

In other words, a child who may be classified as in need of special education in a public school may not be classified as such if his or her family chooses a private school, using a voucher to defray the cost. As a result, any official statistics on the prevalence of students with disabilities in public and private schools can be highly misleading.

We have not been able to surmount all of the obstacles to identifying the percentage of students in private schools who would have been identified as in need of special education in public schools, but we believe we have fairly accurate information on this question for the country’s largest and longest-running school-voucher program. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), first established in 1990 and steadily expanded to include more private schools and more students in subsequent years, now serves more than 23,000 students who attend 107 different private schools. The annual voucher a school receives for each MPCP student is approximately $6,000. MPCP thus provides an excellent context for detecting the admission policies of private schools when a modest-value voucher program for low-income students is operating at scale.

In 2006, the State of Wisconsin authorized our research team to conduct a five-year evaluation of MPCP. Through the course of that study, we collected a wealth of data about the students in the voucher program and in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) that permit us to estimate what proportion of the voucher student population would qualify for special education if the students were enrolled in public schools instead.

Drawing on different sources of data and various analytic methods, we estimate that anywhere between 7.5 and 14.6 percent of voucher students have disabilities that would land reported by the Wisconsin State Department of Public Instruction (DPI), a figure that gave rise to a lawsuit alleging discrimination by the MPCP program.

Following is a discussion of the procedures we followed to obtain our estimates and an explanation for the disparity between our estimates and the ones DPI has provided.

Structure of Special Education

As mentioned previously, receiving a special education designation brings with it certain legal rights for services or accommodations in the public educational sphere, as provided by the federal law known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Once so designated, public school students are entitled to receive a free and appropriate public education (FAPE), to include special education services in the least restrictive environment possible and according to an individualized education program (IEP). A student’s IEP is drawn up by a committee that includes the student’s parents or guardians, local public-school officials, and relevant medical or psychological diagnosticians and care providers. The resulting special services and accommodations are funded through a combination of federal, state, and local monies based on formulas established in law. In Wisconsin, the federal government pays about 11 percent of the extra cost of educating each special-education student, with the state paying 26 percent and the local public-school district covering the remaining 63 percent.

The legal and funding structure surrounding students with disabilities in the private sector differs greatly from the situation in the public sector. Unless a public school district itself places a special education student in a private school, the IEP and additional funding associated with a student with a disability in the public sector does not transfer with the student if the child enrolls in a private school. The point is made in an August 2011 DPI memo on the subject:

Students with disabilities attending voucher schools as part of the MPCP are considered parentally placed private school students and as such, DPI treats them in the same fashion as students attending private non-voucher schools. Under [state law] parentally placed private school students are…not entitled to a Free and Appropriate Public Education.

If a parent enrolls a student with special needs in a private school, that student must surrender her legal rights to special educational services. Private schools are not required by federal law to enroll students with special needs, and they are not entitled to any additional resources from the state if they do so. Private schools can either accommodate the student themselves, using whatever resources they have, or negotiate with public school officials regarding the provision of special services to the student by the public school system with additional public funds (a process called “equitable services”).

Maintaining a count of those thought to be in need of special services also varies by sector. In the public sector, careful record keeping is stressed because disability status has major implications for the kinds of instructional and other services students will receive. In the private sector, special education tends to be handled much less formally, inasmuch as schools are ordinarily not required to follow formal procedures in diagnosing or serving students with special educational needs.

Given the contrasts between how special education is governed and managed in the public and private education sectors, we hypothesize the following:

1. The same student will have a higher likelihood of being identified as in need of special education if in a public school than if in a private school.

2. Given the funding available for extra services for disabled children attending public schools, a higher proportion of students with disabilities than those without disabilities will choose to remain in the public sector rather than use a voucher.

3. Any data that rely on official reports of disability will under-count the percentage of students in private schools who would have been identified as in need of special education had they attended public schools.

To test these hypotheses, we used two alternative methods to estimate the actual percentage of students in private schools who would have been identified as in need of special education in public school had they selected that sector.

Method I: Same Student, Different Sector

The better of our two methods relies on information from those students who attended schools in both the public and the private sectors during the course of our study. During the five years of our evaluation, 20.1 percent or 1,475 of the 7,338 students in our MPCP and MPS study panels switched from one school sector to the other, in some cases multiple times.

We received enrollment files from MPS each year that included information on the special education status of each MPS student. We also collected enrollment lists from every private school in MPCP and asked school officials to indicate if students had disabilities that qualified them for special education. For students who switched school sectors during the study period, we can determine whether those who were identified as needing special education in the public sector were similarly identified when they attended private schools, and vice versa. In other words, we can use each student in our study as his or her own control group to learn whether disability designations vary by sector.

Our analysis indicates that Milwaukee students who switched between the public and private school sectors were much more likely to be identified as in need of special education when they were in the public sector. On average, controlling for factors such as year and student grade, those who attended schools in both sectors were classified as in need of special education at the rate of 9.1 percent when attending private schools but at a rate of 14.6 percent when attending Milwaukee’s public schools. If we assume that a student’s need for special education did not change at the time the student switched sectors, this suggests that 5.5 percent of students attending private schools were not identified as in need of special education but would have been had they been attending public school. In other words, the identification rate in the public schools appears to be 60 percent higher (the 5.5 percent increment divided by 9.1 percent) than in the private schools. The identification rate was higher when students were in MPS both because many students who switched from MPCP to MPS received special education designations in MPS and because many students with special education designations in MPS shed them when they enrolled in MPCP schools.

The 14.6 percent MPCP disability rate is based only on students who switched sectors (35 percent of MPCP students). Those students appear to have higher rates of disability than those who did not switch. Based on principal surveys, for the 65 percent of MPCP students who did not switch, the disability rate was 3.75 percent. To get an overall rate for MPCP students, we compute a weighted average for the two groups of 7.5 percent. We suspect that this rate is conservative, since several voucher school principals told us they resist labeling students in such a way. Combining this conservative estimate with the estimate from our analysis of only students who switched sectors yields a range of 7.5 to 14.6 percent, which we think captures the likely student disability rate in MPCP.

Click to enlarge

Method II: Parental Estimates of Disability Rates

Our second estimate of the student disability rate in MPCP comes from interviews with parents. In 2007 we interviewed a random sample of parents of MPCP students in grades 3–8, all the parents of MPCP 9th graders, and a sample of parents of MPS students who were matched to the sample of MPCP students based on their grade in school, neighborhood of residence, ethnicity, test-score performance, and other characteristics. We expanded this sample with additional parents of 3rd-grade students similarly chosen in 2007 and 2008. Altogether, we interviewed a majority of the parents of 3,669 students in MPCP and 3,669 students in MPS.

The survey included the following questions:

• Does [child’s name] have any physical disabilities?

• Does [child’s name] have any learning disabilities?

If a parent answered yes to the learning disabilities question, we further asked,

• How well do the facilities at [child’s name] school attend to his/her particular needs?

According to parental responses to the first two of these questions, 2.5 percent of students in MPCP have a physical disability and 9.8 percent have a learning disability (see Figure 1). The corresponding rates reported by parents of MPS students were 4.1 percent and 18.5 percent for physical and learning disabilities, respectively. Combining the categories and eliminating overlapping cases, it is estimated that the disability rate in the MPCP sector is 11.4 percent, as compared to 20.4 percent for the MPS sector.

There is every reason to believe that these parental responses are consistent and fairly accurate indicators of what the parents are told by school officials and what they themselves know about their children. The official MPS rate for this time period is between 18 and 19 percent, just slightly less than the 20.4 percent reported by our MPS parents. The 11.4 percent disability rate for MPCP students based on our survey is midway between the 7.5 percent rate for all students in MPCP based on school staff designations and the 14.6 percent rate based on observing some of the students in both school sectors.

It is interesting that within a scaled-up, long-standing voucher program, parental satisfaction with services for students with disabilities achieves a balance across sectors. Similar levels of satisfaction with special education services are reported, regardless of whether the student was in MPCP or MPS (see Figure 2). Presumably, the choice of sectors and schools allowed parents to obtain an educational setting they view as appropriate for their child.

Discussion

Our estimates of the prevalence of MPCP students who have a disability range from 7.5 to 14.6 percent. The 14.6 percent estimate is based on the identification by public schools of the need for special services for those students who attended school in both sectors, while parental reports peg the rate at 11 percent, and the combination of MPCP and MPS school personnel suggest it is 7.5 percent.

All of these estimates are higher than the one provided, on March 29, 2011, by DPI, which said that “the private schools [participating in MPCP] reported about 1.6 percent of choice students have a disability.” That statement provoked a lawsuit by disability rights groups against DPI, which administers MPCP, based on the charge that the program discriminates in admissions against students with disabilities.

The estimate provided by DPI was based on the percentage of MPCP students who were given test accommodations on the 2010 state accountability exams. Only a fraction of students with disabilities receive accommodations on exams, and accommodations are only permitted if an IEP committee of school personnel requests them. Since few students with disabilities in private schools have IEP committees, the student-testing accommodation rate for MPCP may bear little relationship to the actual student-disability rate in the program. In fact, using administrative data we collected from the MPCP schools, we were able to determine that only one-quarter of the MPCP students judged by their school to have a disability were actually given any accommodation for last year’s test.

Using multiple measures of student disability, each of which is more valid and reliable than testing accommodation statistics, the estimates we produced indicate a 7.5 to 14.6 percent participation rate for students with disabilities in the voucher schools in comparison to the 17 to 19 percent participation rate reported for students with disabilities by the public schools. The difference could be due to discrimination against disabled students, as has been alleged, but the evidence is not sufficient to draw any such conclusions. Where disabilities are severe, private schools may not have the necessary facilities, and even in less severe instances, parents may prefer the legal entitlements and the greater range of funded services in the public sector.

What we do know, with considerable certainty, is that while the percentage of students in the voucher schools with disabilities is substantially lower than the disability rate in the public schools, it is at least four times higher than public officials have claimed. These statistical findings reinforce our views that the sectors cannot be easily compared to one another on this particular metric, because they operate under different legal obligations, financial incentives, and cultural norms. Special education is special in very different ways in public schools and in voucher programs.

Patrick J. Wolf is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas. John F. Witte is professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. David J. Fleming is assistant professor of political science at Furman University.

Rather, I think the reluctance to contribute [to a debate in support of Common Core] is due to hubris, impatience to focus on implementation, political naivete, and disdain for what they see as mean-spirited carping….

There are long rows of argument and persuasion still to be hoed. And, if you’re eager to overhaul what gets taught in forty-odd states serving forty million or more students, that’s probably as it should be. If Common Core-ites don’t have the patience or stomach for that task, they should let us know now–and save everyone a whole lot of grief.

The notion that Common Core proponents needn’t make their case is an affront to democratic values.

Well, Ed Next managed to find someone to argue for and against the quality of Common Core standards, producing a really excellent and illuminating exchange.  W. Stephen Wilson took the pro side and Ze’ev Wurman was on the con side.  I would encourage you to read the entire debate yourself, but here is my takeaway:  They were mostly in agreement about the quality of Common Core.  Both seemed to agree that Common Core was better than the standards previously in place in most states but worse than in a non-trivial number of other states.  They also agreed that Common Core standards are significantly weaker than the ones in most high-achieving countries.

So if they agree that Common Core is sort of mediocre, why does Wilson support them while Wurman oppose them?  Wilson sees the improvement on the standards of 30 or more states to be substantial progress.  He sees this as a first step toward developing stronger national standards that would be comparable to those of our overseas competitors and better than all previously existing state standards.

Wurman sees Common Core as significantly lowering the bar relative to several previously existing state standards, including very large states like California.  More importantly, he sees Common Core as the end of progress in improving standards rather than the beginning.  Once put in place, he sees no incentive for anyone to toughen national standards since no state will be competing to offer a more rigorous education in order to attract residents and businesses.  He also sees national standards as more easily captured and dummied-down by teachers unions and other entrenched interests who would prefer to have their members (and students) jump over a lower bar.

-Jay P. Greene

UPDATE — Stephen Wilson contacted me over at the Jay P. Greene blog to object to the description of his views as supporting the adoption of Common Core. He thinks Common Core math standards are much better than those that previously existed in 30 states but still lagging those in other states and high achieving countries. And he generally has no opinion on whether universal adoption of Common Core would represent progress or not or is desirable or not.

It appears that I was wrong. The Ed Next forum was more a discussion among critics than a debate between a supporter and opponent.

So we are back to Rick’s original complaint. We still don’t have anyone who was willing to debate in favor of the national adoption of Common Core based on the quality of the standards.

It’s pretty pathetic that supporters of Common Core couldn’t produce anyone to take the “pro” side of this debate. And it’s even more pathetic that supporters are determined to cram Common Core down our throats without feeling the need to intellectually defend it.

In this study, I investigate whether the opportunity to attend a school other than a student’s assigned neighborhood school reduces criminal activity, especially among disadvantaged youth. Many of the schools chosen by the students were “better” on traditional indicators, such as student test scores and teacher characteristics. All of them, however, were preferred by the applicant over the default option. The analysis therefore sheds light on whether efforts to expand school choice can be an effective crime-prevention strategy, particularly when disadvantaged students can gain access to “better” schools.

We know that criminal offenders often have low levels of education: only 35 percent of inmates in U.S. correctional facilities have earned a high school diploma, compared to 82 percent of the general population. Criminal activity is concentrated among minority males; it begins in early adolescence and peaks when most youth should still be enrolled in secondary school. The schools these young men would attend are typically in high-poverty urban neighborhoods, have high rates of violence and school dropout, and struggle to retain effective teachers. Such schools may be a particularly fertile environment for the onset of criminal behavior. Yet little research has been conducted to determine the effect of school quality on crime.

In this study I explore this question using data from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (North Carolina) school district (CMS) to measure the impact of school quality on arrest and incarceration rates. I take advantage of the CMS districtwide open-enrollment school-choice plan, which until recently let students choose where they wanted to go to school and employed lotteries to admit students to oversubscribed schools. I compare the criminal activity of students who won the lottery to attend their first-choice school to that of students who lost the lottery.

I find consistent evidence that attending a better school reduces crime among those age 16 and older, across various schools, and for both middle and high school students. The effect is largest for African American males and youth who are at highest risk for criminal involvement. In general, high-risk male youth commit about 50 percent less crime as a result of winning the school-choice lottery. They are also more likely to remain enrolled in school, and they show modest improvements on measures of behavior such as absences and suspensions. Yet there is no detectable impact on test scores for any youth in the sample.

School Choice in CMS

With more than 150,000 students enrolled in 2008–09, Charlotte-Mecklenburg is the 20th largest school district in the nation. The CMS attendance area encompasses all of Mecklenburg County, including Charlotte and several surrounding cities. Overall, CMS is racially and demographically diverse. About 45 percent of the students in CMS middle and high schools in 2003 were African American, less than 10 percent were Hispanic (although the Hispanic population was growing rapidly over this period), and about 50 percent were eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. Individual CMS schools vary widely in demographic composition: CMS high schools in 2003 ranged from less than 10 percent to close to 90 percent nonwhite, and were also dissimilar in average test scores and rates of high school graduation.

From 1971 until 2001, CMS schools were forcibly desegregated under a court order. Students were bused all around the district to preserve racial balance in schools. After several years of legal challenges, the court order was overturned, and CMS was instructed that it could no longer determine student assignments based on race. In December 2001, the CMS school board instituted a policy of districtwide open enrollment for the 2002–03 school year. School boundaries were redrawn as contiguous neighborhood zones, and children who lived in each zone were guaranteed access to their neighborhood school. Under busing, schools were racially balanced, but the surrounding neighborhoods remained highly segregated. Thus the redrawing of school boundaries led to concentrations of minority students in some schools.

The first open-enrollment lottery took place in the spring of 2002. CMS conducted an extensive outreach campaign to ensure that choice was broad-based, and 95 percent of parents submitted at least one preferred school; parents could submit up to three (not including their neighborhood school). Admission for all students from outside the neighborhood zone was subject to grade-specific limits. The lottery process for oversubscribed grades gave preference first to students who previously attended the school and their siblings, then to low-income students applying to schools that previously did not have a majority of low-income students, and finally to students applying to a school within their “choice zone” (which would guarantee them access to district-provided transportation). I study the effects of winning a seat at a preferred school in the 2002 lotteries on student outcomes through 2009, seven years after the lotteries were conducted.

Because nearly all rising 12th graders received their first choice, I restrict my study to students in grades 6 through 11. I also exclude the 5 percent of students who were not enrolled in any CMS school in the previous year. About 60 percent of the remaining students chose (and were automatically admitted to) their neighborhood school. About 75 percent of applicants to nonguaranteed schools were in lottery priority groups in which the probability of admission was either zero or one. Even though these students chose a nonguaranteed school, there is no randomness in whether they were admitted, so I do not use them in the study. The resulting sample consists of 1,891 high-school students (grades 9–11) and 2,320 middle-school students (grades 6–8). Compared to all students in CMS, these students were more likely to be African American and eligible for free lunch; they also had lower test scores and higher rates of absence and out-of-school suspensions (see Figure 1).

Data

Since the mid-1990s, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) has required all districts to submit data that include demographic information, attendance rates, and behavioral outcomes, yearly test scores in math and reading for grades 3 through 8, and subject-specific tests for higher grades. I used these data, along with internal CMS files that contain student-identifying information such as name, date of birth, and exact address in every year. This information enabled me to match CMS students to arrest records from the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office, which include all arrests of adults (age 16 and over in North Carolina) that occurred in the county.

I measure crime severity in two ways, both of which are intended to capture the idea that not all crimes are equal. First, I use estimates that economists have developed of the social cost of crimes, which include tangible costs, such as lost productivity and medical care, as well as intangible costs, such as impact on quality of life; these estimates are extremely high for fatal crimes. (The estimated social cost of murder is $4.3 million in 2009 dollars. The next costliest crime is rape, which is estimated at $125,000.) To avoid the results being driven entirely by a few murders, in my main analysis I limit the cost of murder to twice the cost of rape. The second measure of severity weighs crimes by the expected punishment resulting from a successful conviction. Neither measure accounts for justice system costs such as police or prisons.

Methodology

If the school lottery is truly random, the winners and losers will on average have identical observed and unobserved characteristics. With a large enough sample, a simple comparison of outcomes between winners and losers would identify the causal effect of winning the lottery. In reality, CMS conducted many lotteries (for each school and grade). The number of students in each lottery is relatively small, so my analysis combines data from all of the middle-school and all of the high-school lotteries. My results reflect the average difference in outcomes between winners and losers across all of the lotteries conducted at each level.

The result is the “intent-to-treat” effect of winning a lottery; it is an intent because students offered a place in their first-choice school did not always take it (for example, they may have moved out of the district). Students who won the lottery are more than 55 percentage points more likely than losers to attend their first-choice school in the first year, and on average spend an additional 1 to 1.5 years enrolled in that school overall. One can therefore obtain a rough estimate of the effect of actually attending the first-choice school (as a result of winning the lottery) by doubling the results presented below.

I examine the impact of winning the lottery on crime separately for groups of students with different propensities to commit crimes, with a focus on the highest-risk group. Because students with adult arrest records can be tracked all the way back to kindergarten in some cases, I use all of the potential predictors of criminal behavior—test scores, demographics, behavior, and neighborhood characteristics—to calculate an index of crime risk. The students in the top 20 percent of this crime-risk index are disproportionately African American males and eligible for free lunch (see Figure 1a). Their test scores are on average one standard deviation below the North Carolina state average, and they are absent and suspended many more days than the average student (see Figure 1b). Because high-risk students are overwhelmingly male, I exclude females from all of the analyses. The results comprise a final sample of 1,014 high-school students and 1,081 middle-school students.

High-school lottery winners attend schools that are demographically very similar to the schools attended by lottery losers, while middle-school winners attend schools that are less African American and higher income on average. All lottery winners travel farther to attend their first-choice school, but the distance is greater for high school students than for middle school students.

High-school lottery winners in the high-risk group and all middle-school lottery winners experience modest increases in standard measures of school quality. Their peers’ average test scores are about 0.15 standard deviations higher, and the new schools have higher-quality teachers, measured in terms of the fraction of teachers with less than three years’ experience, the fraction that are new to the school that year, the percentage of teachers with an advanced degree, and the share of teachers who attended a “highly competitive” college as defined by the Barron’s rankings. For youth in the high-risk group, the gain as measured by these quality indicators is roughly equivalent to moving from one of the lowest-ranked schools to one around the district average.

Results

I find that winning a lottery for admission to a preferred school at the high school level reduces the total number of felony arrests and the social cost of crime. Among middle school students, winning a school-choice lottery reduces the social cost of crime and the number of days incarcerated. Importantly, I find that these overall reductions in criminal activity are concentrated among students in the highest-risk group. Indeed, I find little impact either positive or negative of winning a school-choice lottery on criminal activity for the 80 percent of students outside of this group.

Consider first the results for high school students in the high-risk group. Among these students, winning admission to a preferred school reduces the average number of felony arrests over the study period from 0.77 to 0.43, a pattern driven largely by a reduction of 0.23 in the average number of arrests for drug felonies (see Figure 2). The average social cost of the crimes committed by high-risk lottery winners (after adjusting the cost of murders downward) is $3,916 lower than for lottery losers, a decrease of more than 35 percent. (Without adjusting for the cost of murder, I estimate the reduction in the social cost of crimes committed by lottery winners at $14,106.) High-risk lottery winners on average commit crimes with a total expected sentence of 35 months, compared to 59 months among lottery losers.

Among high-risk middle-school students, I find no effect of winning a school-choice lottery on the average number of felony arrests. Although the number arrests for violent felonies falls, this is offset by an increase in the number of property arrests. Because violent crimes carry greater social costs, however, winning a school-choice lottery reduces the average social cost of the crimes committed by middle school students by $7,843, or 63 percent. It also reduces the total expected sentence of crimes committed by each student by 31 months (64 percent).

An important limitation of this analysis is that I do not have access to data on juvenile crime. Especially for students in the middle school sample, this could mask big differences in juvenile offending in the early years after the lotteries were conducted. As an alternative, I examine the effect of winning the lottery on school disciplinary outcomes such as absences and suspensions, as well as on test scores. Among the high-risk group, lottery winners are absent slightly less than the lottery losers are. The effect on high school suspensions in 2003 is relatively large, but the other school discipline effects are small and statistically insignificant.

In contrast to the results for crime and disciplinary outcomes, I find no evidence that winning admission to a preferred school leads to test-score gains. But I do find some impacts on enrollment, grade progression, and grade attainment for high-risk youth. For example, high-risk middle-school lottery winners are 18 percentage points more likely than lottery losers to be enrolled in CMS in their 10th-grade year. The effect on 11th-grade enrollment is about half the size (9 percentage points), and there is no impact on persistence into 12th grade.

Despite the impacts on enrollment and progression, there is no detectable increase in high school graduation rates. Because I am limited to CMS administrative data, it is difficult to distinguish dropouts from subsequent GED recipients or transfers who may have graduated elsewhere. Administrative records are particularly problematic for high-risk youth, who sometimes disappear from CMS well before they are old enough to do so legally. The graduation rate is only about 25 percent among high-risk high-school students, and currently only about 10 percent among high-risk middle-school students, although some who are still enrolled may yet graduate. Additionally, a bit less than 10 percent of the high-risk middle-school sample never appears in any high school grade but subsequently appears in the arrest data. Because any intervention aimed at high school students would miss this group altogether, this suggests that high school might be too late for the youth at highest risk of criminal activity.

Explanations and Policy Implications

Overall, I find that winning the lottery to attend a first-choice school has a large impact on crime for high-risk youth. High-risk lottery winners experienced roughly a 50 percent reduction in the measures of criminal activity that weight crimes by their severity.

I consider four possible explanations for the reduction in crime among high-risk lottery winners. The first is incapacitation, which advances that winning the lottery entails longer bus rides to and from school, thus occupying youth during high-crime hours. The second is contagion, in which winning the lottery prevents crime by removing high-risk youth from crime-prone peers or neighborhoods, thereby reducing contemporaneous exposure of high-risk youth to criminogenic influences. These first two explanations would predict a strong initial effect that fades over time. If, for example, drug-market activity is concentrated within a few schools, we might expect large differences in criminality in the high school years that diminish as enrollment in the chosen school ends and lottery winners and losers return to the same neighborhoods. When I examine the effect of winning a school lottery separately at different points in time after the lotteries were conducted, however, I find larger effects in later years. I therefore conclude that there is little support for the incapacitation and contagion explanations since they do not fit the pattern of results over time.

A third possibility is that the reduction in crime comes from the skills students gain by attending a higher-quality school. If the schools attended by lottery winners do a better of job of teaching skills that increase students’ ability to find employment, they will stay enrolled in school longer, delaying the onset of criminality through the peak period of offending behaviors. Moreover, youth with more and better schooling will gain access to more and better opportunities for paid work, making crime less attractive. Based on a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the relationship between enrollment and criminal activity in my sample, I estimate that the effects of winning a school lottery on enrollment could potentially explain about 45 percent of the impact on criminal activity in the high school sample, but only about 10 percent in the middle school sample.

Alternatively, peer networks formed in middle or high school could have a persistent influence on adult criminality without affecting skills directly. In my own data, I find relatively little evidence that the propensity of a student’s peers to engage in criminal activity influences the degree to which he commits violent crimes. This may be due in part to the high rate of early dropout among violent felons. However, having crime-prone peers in middle school substantially increases the likelihood of committing a violent crime, especially for youth in the high-risk group. Based on this relationship, I estimate that changes in peers can explain roughly 9 percent of the impact on violent arrests in the middle school sample.

Regardless of the mechanisms by which admittance to a preferred school influences criminal activity, the fact that these impacts are concentrated among high-risk students has important implications for the design of school-choice programs. It may make sense for oversubscribed schools of choice to give preferential admission to students at greatest risk of criminal activity. To illustrate this point, I use my results to evaluate the consequences of two different types of lotteries: 1) those giving priority to the highest-risk students and 2) a simple lottery similar to those virtually all charter schools nationwide are required to use to admit students when the schools are oversubscribed. The actual CMS lottery system gave preferences to low-income students who applied to schools with a low fraction of low-income students. As a consequence, many poor (and high-crime risk) students were automatically admitted to schools while other students had to win the lottery.

If slots in oversubscribed schools were systematically allocated to the highest-risk students, the social cost of crime would fall by an additional 27 percent relative to the actual CMS assignment mechanism. A more realistic form of targeting is the method actually pursued by CMS, giving preference to low-income students within the lottery system. I estimate that this policy choice lowered the social cost of crime by about 12 percent, relative to a simple charter-style lottery with no preferential treatment. Although this analysis does not consider the possibility that a greater concentration of high-risk students could have adverse effects on other students, it nonetheless highlights the likely beneficial consequences of giving preference to disadvantaged students in the admissions process for oversubscribed schools.

Conclusion

In this study, I find that winning a lottery for admission to the school of choice greatly reduces criminal activity, and that the greatest reduction occurs among youth at the highest risk for committing crimes. The impacts persist beyond the initial years of school enrollment, seven years after the school-choice lottery was held. The findings suggest that schools may be an opportune setting for the prevention of future crime. Many high-risk youth drop out of school at a young age and are incarcerated for serious crimes prior to the age of high school graduation. For these youth, who are on the margins of society, public schools may present the best opportunity for intervention.

The end of busing and the implementation of open enrollment in CMS was a significant policy change. The four neighborhood high schools to which most of the lottery applicants were assigned lost more than 20 percent of their enrollment in a single year. In subsequent years, two of these schools were restructured as magnet schools offering specialized programs in a small school setting. Two middle schools that lost significant numbers of students were subsequently closed. The open enrollment policy thus sent a strong signal of parental demand to CMS that may have resulted in the shutting down or restructuring of low-performing schools. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 included a provision that allowed parents to transfer students from “persistently dangerous” public schools, but many states have set the legal threshold so high that very few schools qualify. The results here suggest that, to the extent that low-quality schools are also persistently dangerous, allowing students to leave them might benefit individual students as well as society as a whole.

David J. Deming is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This article is adapted from a study in the November 2011 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

This would be a big change in a short period. Through most of 2011, the Obama Administration reaped accolades for its intention to allow states to take a new course vis-à-vis the Elementary and Secondary Education act (a.k.a. NCLB). In September, the President got wall-to-wall coverage of the official announcement of his plan to offer waivers to the states to give them “more flexibility to meet high standards.”

Keep in mind, the change we’re making is not lowering standards; we’re saying we’re going to give you more flexibility to meet high standards. We’re going to let states, schools and teachers come up with innovative ways to give our children the skills they need to compete for the jobs of the future. Because what works in Rhode Island may not be the same thing that works in Tennessee—but every student should have the same opportunity to learn and grow, no matter what state they live in.

Set aside the debate about the conditions he attached to those standards. Set aside the small matter of Constitutionality and separation of powers. On the issue of flexibility itself, virtually everyone seemed to be in agreement (at least in theory): The 10-year-old law is broken and it’s time to fix it. In particular, Adequate Yearly Progress needs to go the way of the dinosaurs and be replaced by something very different. Even on Capitol Hill, for all the misgivings about Duncan’s unilateralism, there was broad consensus that states should be given much greater leeway to design next-generation accountability systems. (Leeway that both Republican and Democratic governors asked for in an NGA policy statement released last week.)

The idea of flexibility is so popular, in fact, that the President reiterated it in his State of the Union address:

Let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. And in return, grant schools flexibility: to teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn. That’s a bargain worth making.

So far so good. It certainly appeared from the rhetoric that the Administration would make every effort to approve reasonable proposals from states, including the 11 that applied in November for the first round of waivers (the round for which results are now imminent). The era of “Washington knows best” in education would come to an end.

But no. Thanks to excellent reporting by Associated Press correspondent Christine Armario, we now have access to letters the U.S. Department of Education sent to these states in December. Which document that federal micromanagement is still the order of the day.

Consider the missive sent to Massachusetts—the first-place finisher in the Race to the Top, the state with the highest achievement in the land, the one that has seen dramatic gains across all subgroups of students, a strong supporter (for better or worse) of the Common Core standards. One might assume that the Bay State would be given the benefit of the doubt. But no.

Here’s an excerpt from the Department’s response to the Massachusetts waiver request:

Please address concerns identified by peers regarding subgroup accountability, including:

• • Without sufficient safeguards to ensure attention and action when an individual subgroup is struggling over a number of years, the use of the “high needs” combined subgroup could lead to individual subgroups not meeting their goals even when the “high needs” combined subgroup is moving forward, and therefore undermine the goal of improved achievement for all students.
  • Massachusetts’s current n-size for subgroups is too high and should be reduced.
  • Schools with high English Learner populations may not be receiving appropriate, targeted interventions.

And another:

• • Please address concern that without differentiating schools within Level 2, there are insufficient incentives to improve achievement for all groups of students. In particular, please address the concern that annual measurable objectives (AMOs) are not used along with other measures to provide incentives and supports to other Title I schools that are not making progress in improving student achievement and narrowing achievement gaps.

(That’s just the tip of the iceberg; read the whole thing yourself.)

All of these issues can be debated ad nauseum by policy wonks. For example, when creating an A to F rating system, what should qualify a school for an A? Strong achievement? Strong growth over time? If the school misses an achievement or growth target for one subgroup (say, special education kids) should that disqualify it for an A? What if all subgroups are doing well but there’s still a big achievement gap?

Whatever your view on these arcane matters, the real issue at stake is whether the feds, or the states, should make such calls. How can the President promise a state like Massachusetts “flexibility to meet high standards” and then second-guess its attempt to rationalize its accountability system?

So how will this go down?

• The Department of Education will announce that most of the 11 states that applied were approved for flexibility. At first, this will lead to a Kumbaya moment.
• Upon closer inspection, observers will notice that the amount of flexibility granted on accountability is tiny. Approved plans will amount to minor changes away from the AYP system we’ve got today.
• The number of states planning to apply for waivers by February 21 will drop precipitously, as they realize that it’s just not worth the effort.
• All of this will embolden members of Congress to talk (again) about the urgency of fixing No Child Left Behind for real (though nothing will come of it this year).

-Mike Petrilli

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

Founders of charter schools sign contracts (or “charters”) with an authorizer, such as a school district or higher-education institution, that stipulate the rules and regulations from which charters are exempted in exchange for accountability for results. In other words, a charter school can be closed if it does not meet certain reporting requirements and student achievement goals.

For years, South Carolina charters struggled mightily after their launch. Far fewer charters are now in operation in South Carolina than in some of the other states that were early adopters (South Carolina has 44, while California, Arizona, and Florida each has hundreds of charters), and charter students make up only 2 percent of the state’s public-school enrollment. Undoubtedly, some of these differences can be attributed to geography and population, but a recurring set of obstacles has also plagued the movement in South Carolina since its inception.

In 1996, then governor David Beasley signed South Carolina’s charter law, but few schools had opened by the turn of the century. This is surprising, considering the state’s record of low student achievement. According to commonly accepted performance indicators, South Carolina’s public schools are among the nation’s worst. Persistently low graduation rates, dismal SAT results, and low NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores, especially in reading, have long been the norm. In a historically red state with low-performing schools, a free-market education reform such as charters should be in demand and find strong support from lawmakers. What happened?

Fits and Starts

While South Carolina did indeed pass a charter school law in 1996, a combination of public-school establishment resistance and legislative reticence delayed the law’s maturation. As originally enacted, the law only allowed local school districts to authorize charters. When the first decade of South Carolina’s charter history concluded in 2006, there was little to show. Twenty-nine charter schools were operating, and few of these had a track record of success. Some 14 others had opened and closed. The average life span of the closed schools was 2.7 years, with most not even completing a second year. As is the case nationally, many of the closures were the result of financial problems or poor planning at the outset. While the state board of education addressed the planning concerns through regulation, other policy issues emerged, as certain districts developed a reputation for stonewalling reform efforts. For example, Greenville and Charleston, home districts for two early charter success stories, Greenville Tech and James Island, respectively, are the two largest districts in South Carolina, and each developed an adversarial stance toward charters.

The prolonged period of fits and starts forced charter advocates and their allies in the statehouse to seek a separate peace with their opponents in well-entrenched teacher, superintendent, and school-board associations. In responding, legislators created an alternative authorizer, the South Carolina Public Charter School District (SCPCSD, here CSD), with a plan to commence operations in 2008 under the leadership of an appointed board representing the governor’s office, House and Senate leadership, and various state associations. The new authorizing district proposed to relieve pressure on local districts as the only avenue for a charter. This, plus the authorizing district’s spartan funding provision, helped quell opposition—for a time.

Allison Reaves, principal at South Carolina Connections Academy, a virtual school and one of the first the CSD authorized, was surprised that so little effort had been made to prepare the public system for the new district. “I realized [charters] were still such a novel idea in South Carolina. Local districts have had little to no education on the charter movement,” she says.

With the creation of the CSD, charters could be authorized to operate anywhere in the state, under the auspices of an agency that had no responsibility for traditional public schools. This new state agency/school district hybrid would be a logical alternative for charter hopefuls, especially those in local districts with an anticharter reputation.

The CSD opened in 2008 with five schools, including Connections Academy and two other virtual charter schools, the first of their kind in the state. By the end of the 2008–09 school year, though, one school’s charter had been revoked, two others had asked for loans to make payroll, the district office was operating with barely enough on the balance sheet to make it month to month, and the hybrid administrative concept had been abandoned in favor of a more traditional district model. Further complicating matters, leadership changed, as the inaugural superintendent, Tim Daniels, and board chair, Terrye Seckinger, were replaced at the end of the year. What began as a hopeful new charter authorizer for South Carolina teetered on the brink of oblivion after only one year.

Money Problems

CSD schools immediately found themselves forced to defend their very existence, a common position for charters. Nationally, charters embrace this challenge by vowing to do more with less, but there is a distinct difference between whether a school can stock an additional computer lab or barely pay the electric bill. From the beginning, the South Carolina Charter School Act provided CSD schools with little more than the Base Student Cost (BSE), which varies from year to year depending on the state budget. The most significant source of funds for South Carolina’s traditional public schools—as well as for charters authorized by a local district—is the municipality in which the school is located. CSD schools do not have a local tax base and thus must operate without these funds. “The funding part was totally misleading—there was no way. Anybody with any understanding of finance and schools would realize that the bill created a situation that was not going to be long term,” says current CSD superintendent Wayne Brazell. Principal Reaves says the charter management company behind her school knew the difficulties it would face in South Carolina, but pressed on. “Connections realized they were taking a risk,” she says, “but they also knew there was a need for us in the state.”

In 2008–09, the BSE was $2,476 per student, while the average per-pupil expenditure for traditional public schools in South Carolina totaled $9,162. Some other state funding was available to CSD schools, and they relied substantially on Title I dollars in the district’s first year. But even when federal Title I funding was added to the mix, the CSD per-pupil average was below $4,000, less than half the state average for traditional schools. And this figure varied according to grade level, as high school students and disabled students are weighted more heavily by the state finance office.

“It [the charter school allotment] was certainly inadequate,” says current CSD board chair Don McLaurin, an entrepreneur whose private-sector experience enabled him to recognize immediately the CSD’s precarious financial situation. McLaurin joined the board halfway through the 2008–09 school year and has already been voted chairman twice. “It just wasn’t enough money to run a school. I think we can do things at a more reasonable price than traditional public schools, but the mechanism that was in place in the beginning didn’t allow for the realities of the world.”

Understanding the policy shortcomings in CSD’s creation, legislators added a $700 per-student proviso to the 2009–10 state budget to aid the district. But the proviso, Title I funding, and federal IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) funding failed to offset worsening financial conditions in 2009–10. The $700 proviso survived reauthorization in spring 2010 and was available to the district for the 2010–11 school year, but its benefit evaporated when BSE was cut to $1,757 per pupil. Statewide, general-fund revenue collections—for all state services, including education—dropped by nearly 25 percent between 2007 and 2010. The state faced a budget shortfall of $560.9 million in 2010–11, projected to reach $1.4 billion in 2012–13 unless spending was cut. In July 2010, midyear cuts slashed the BSE even further, to $1,630. Superintendent Brazell knew the proviso could only be considered a short-term solution. “My thoughts were that this was done just to get our foot in the door and other funding would become available later,” he says.

Having built annual budgets on significantly higher per-pupil allotments than they were receiving, CSD schools struggled to survive, and the threat of closure loomed. Compounding the problem, CSD schools experienced significant student turnover in their first two years, making enrollment unstable. “The funding level was so low and the opposition from so many traditional public-school groups was so fierce that many potential parents took a ‘wait and see’ stance. The growth in the district was mainly in the virtual schools and that student population was very transient,” says Brazell.

In an effort to save newly opened charter schools, the CSD extended loans to two of its five schools in 2008, but only one of the loans was repaid. This caused consternation among the authorizing district’s board members, especially as new requests for loans came in, and led to a swift reversal of district policy. “We violated what many of us thought we should have been doing as an authorizer, but we had to either help the schools or watch them all close,” says Brazell. With the damage done, the district and its schools were convinced that a funding scheme relying on BSE and Title I funding was untenable. For the next fiscal year (2009–10) the CSD aggressively cut costs, trimming office accounting fees and downgrading budget lines set aside for a legal retainer. As the district rebuilt its depleted reserves, schools again asked for short-term loans. Having learned a hard lesson, the district helped schools make payroll by advancing funds equal in amount to dollars due from the state. When the state funds arrived (typically at the end of the month), the district simply deducted monies already provided to the schools.

These actions were difficult for those board members with a background in education to come to grips with, says board chair McLaurin. But just as a start-up business has to be creative, he knew the new district had to be so as well. “The district either had to be flexible or not survive,” he says. “It was more difficult for educators than entrepreneurs to understand this—and that’s not a slight to educators, it’s just a different perspective.”

These unorthodox measures kept the district afloat while legislators moved to revise the funding scheme. Rep. Phil Owens of Pickens County, chair of the House Education and Public Works Committee, introduced a bill in 2010 aimed at establishing a more sustainable funding scheme for the district, but opposition from members of the education establishment stalled the legislation in committee. McLaurin says, “That we did become one of the largest districts in the state [after two years] was proof-of-concept to the legislature.” District enrollment more than doubled from 2,464 students in 2008–09 to 6,086 in 2009–10. “We proved that people want this; they signed up in droves, and that put a lot of pressure on the legislature to find more money for us,” he says.

Nevertheless, as the 2010 session ended, the CSD anticipated another year of uncertainty and prepared for more legislative battles in 2011.

The Schizophrenic District

From the outset, the CSD encountered another obstacle to progress, further exposing its policy-created vulnerability: it served as both authorizer and support office. Since charters struggled for more than a decade prior to the creation of the CSD, the district was not going to win public or legislative support by allowing new schools to evaporate into the ether due to lack of funds or ignorance of procedures, such as how to report accurate enrollment counts. CSD school officials labored to navigate the state reporting system, as the state shifted software providers between 2009 and 2011. At the same time, the CSD needed to uphold its mission of accountability to create, sustain, and retain high-quality charter schools.

“There is a lot of confusion, and there are a lot of roles and responsibilities [for the CSD],” says Reaves. “The district has to change personalities based on what it encounters in any given day or even any given hour.” Simple operational procedures, which existing traditional schools had mastered, were an enigma to CSD charters. How do they order textbooks? How can they order diplomas? “Student attendance and discipline questions were very common those first two years,” says Brazell, a 30-year veteran of public-school leadership in South Carolina. “I answered the same type of questions as when I was a superintendent in a traditional district.” The CSD desperately wanted to prove that charters could succeed under its auspices, so the district stretched beyond its authorizing role to help the new schools navigate the system.

In fall 2009, the CSD added three new schools, including a virtual high school that enrolled more than 1,000 students, and these schools needed the same guidance and services as the schools that had opened one year earlier. Two challenges faced the district office as it tried to distinguish itself as a charter authorizer and not just a traditional school district.

First, the CSD struggled to implement a comprehensive accountability scheme based on student performance on state assessments. The state department embargoes test scores for months after receipt, so the public does not have access to the results. District staff, parents, and teachers knew test scores, but schoolwide and districtwide averages could not be reported to the CSD board or its school boards because that would become public information. Without these data, school leaders did not have the current achievement information necessary to isolate areas of need and propose interventions. For charter schools, accountability for results is critical. By the time results were made public, the next school year had already begun.

Second, CSD staff continued to provide guidance to existing schools while simultaneously helping to launch new ones. With high staff turnover at existing schools (two of the five principals were replaced between the first and second year, not to mention numerous changes among assistant principals and teachers) and the addition of new schools, school officials needed training in critical procedures. Student information-system management and reports to the state, along with the means for implementing new curricula and distinguishing which state policies charters were exempt from and which they were not, were a mystery to many.

All of these issues converged as schools performed their primary purpose of educating students, frustrating progress on both fronts (operations and accountability). The financial circus kept school budgets in flux, making it difficult to prepare for additional student services, hire teachers, and develop strategic plans.

To make matters worse, the S. C. Charter School Act requires board elections at each charter school annually, resulting in the loss of institutional knowledge every year. “Folks operating charter schools were very naive for the most part, simply because they had never done it before,” says Brazell. Sometimes these new boards wanted to change course and replaced the principal, even after a school’s first year. In other cases, a principal was hired and then replaced before a new school ever opened its doors. At every turn, the CSD was forced to use hasty, temporary measures to help resolve problems that could be traced to the state policies in place. What resulted was a haphazard set of practices, inconsistently applied, with plenty of doubt to go around. “All of this put the district in a really compromising position,” says Connections Academy principal Reaves.

Hope for the Future

Fortunately, the story does not end there. Today, the CSD oversees 13 schools that serve more than 10,000 students. In 2010–11, Superintendent Brazell finished his second school year with the district and has filled key staff positions with knowledgeable personnel, many with a history at the South Carolina Department of Education. CSD staff experience has proved invaluable to the new charter operators. “Staff with experience in operations has helped to get a school’s questions answered quickly, and it’s allowed us to start talking about what a good district should be,” says Brazell. Only one charter has been revoked, so despite a roller coaster of financial adjustments and procedural changes, the schools are stabilizing. In addition, the 2011–12 state budget included a funding increase for CSD schools. Virtual schools received an additional $1,750 per student, while brick-and-mortar charters received an additional $3,250. Although the amount depends on a student’s category (grade level, special needs, etc.), the average CSD student is funded at approximately $5,000, still much lower than the average traditional school student but better than prior levels.

What took South Carolina’s charter movement so long? First, advocacy from key leadership positions had been missing. Brazell had no choice but to handle operational and administrative duties while also explaining the charter concept to legislators in the statehouse. The 2010 elections propelled a strong charter supporter into the state superintendent’s office. Dr. Mick Zais expressed support for charters in his campaign and made the 2011 charter legislation one of his first priorities. “That was a game changer,” acknowledged board chair McLaurin. “I’ve got to believe that we are creating a change in the culture, and he bought into that. He’s genuinely a believer in competition. Our whole relationship with the state department [of education] has changed.”

Second, authorizers with varied commitments to the reform effort slowed the growth of new schools. The statewide authorizer allowed a set of schools located in different areas around the state to coalesce as a group with a common outlook on education reform. All agreed that charters can succeed only if the initial political and administrative obstacles are overcome.

South Carolina’s statewide authorizer is less schizophrenic these days, though the concern coming to the fore is greater focus on support and administration than was intended. Brazell is looking to change that. With less uncertainty as to whether the schools will actually survive, the CSD can concentrate more on school quality and achievement. “The district board is freeing our office to concentrate on oversight and accountability instead of authorization,” says Brazell, which helps to narrow the focus for district staff. “I’ve told the schools that the expectations are higher now, and we are going to be focusing efforts on compliance. We’ve come a long way.”

“In any start-up that I’ve ever seen succeed, five years out from the start the business is never exactly like the business plan said it would be,” says McLaurin. “You’ve got this view of how the world is, but then you get out there and start interacting with the world and things change. I think that process was inevitable.”

Should these problems be solved, the fact remains that so long as the CSD continues to authorize schools, the district will have to train new school leadership and staff on compliance with state standards, while also holding all schools accountable for performance. In August 2011, the CSD approved seven charter-school applicants to open in the 2012–13 school year. Perhaps the strong leadership in the state and district superintendents’ offices, along with more experience among district and school staff, will result in more effective operations and better student outcomes in the future.

Jonathan Butcher is education director for the Goldwater Institute and served as the CSD’s director of accountability from 2009 to April 2011. Joel Medley is the director of the North Carolina Office of Charter Schools and was the director of the Charter School Office at the South Carolina Department of Education from 2008 to 2010.

Call this the test score hypothesis. It explains reformers’ enthusiasm for test-based accountability; for “college and career-ready standards”; for teacher evaluations based, in significant part, on student outcomes; for “data-based instruction”; and for much of the rest of the modern-day reform agenda. After all, if reading, math, and science knowledge and skills are so directly linked to the life chances of individual kids, and of the livelihood of the country as a whole, why not get the education system focused like a laser on them?

But is this hypothesis correct? Is stronger academic performance related to better life outcomes for kids and better economic outcomes for nations?

In a word: yes. As Kevin Carey noted recently, the big Chetty et al study didn’t just demonstrate the importance of teacher effectiveness. It also offered strong support for the Test Score Hypothesis.

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.

Then there’s the international evidence. As Eric Hanushek has been arguing vociferously for years, there’s a direct link between academic achievement (as measured by math and science tests) and a country’s economic growth.

The level of cognitive skills of a nation’s students has a large effect on its subsequent economic growth rate. Increasing the average number of years of schooling attained by the labor force boosts the economy only when increased levels of school attainment also boost cognitive skills. In other words, it is not enough simply to spend more time in school; something has to be learned there.

Hanushek further argues that the only way to solve our country’s long term fiscal challenge is to grow our way out of it. If we could indeed boost the cognitive skills of our students, even by a little, our structural deficit would go away.

So student achievement matters a lot. But does it matter the most? It’s hard to make the case anymore that test scores are irrelevant. But what remains unknown is whether reading, math, and science are the most important things that schools could be teaching. As Dana Goldstein noted back in December,

I’ve been struck again and again by the newness of the idea that schooling is primarily a matter of academic achievement…. It is only really since “A Nation at Risk” that we’ve had a national dialogue about academic excellence for every child. This is a much-needed development in American culture, but its discontents are numerous: A lack of attention paid to the civic, social, and artistic benefits of schooling, and the ways in which children are (ideally) shaped as moral, cultured, socially-responsible people by their teachers and school communities. 

We might all want schools to walk and chew gum at the same time—to boost “academic achievement” while also developing “moral, cultured, socially-responsible people.” But our policies—especially school-level accountability and test-based teacher evaluations—focus on academic achievement alone.

The nagging question then—the “known unknown”—is whether other stuff matters more—both to kids’ life chances and to the country’s economic success. What if, for instance, “social and emotional intelligence”—knowing how to relate to others—is more important than many reformers have been willing to acknowledge? What if these interpersonal skills are what help lift poor kids out of poverty and enable economies to succeed? Or other “soft skills” and attributes like grit, perseverance, industriousness, the ability to delay gratification, and so forth?

In that case, is it smart to push Head Start centers to focus overwhelmingly on pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills (as many of us have)? Is it wise to cut time for recess, to trim extracurriculars, or to push for the maximum amount of homework, to be completed by solitary would-be scholars? Does it make sense to ask teachers to obsess about student achievement over everything else?

The private school sector, which many reformers admire, is not so conflicted. Every high-end school boasts about its commitment to the “whole child,” to kids’ intellectual, emotional, social, and physical development. These schools would never consider their graduates to be well-educated without an appreciation for the arts, participation in sports, a commitment to community service, and the development of strong character. And judging by the admissions policies of the nation’s great universities, our elite higher education institutions hold this holistic view, too. Are these non-academic attributes just “extras”—luxuries that schools serving poor or working class kids just can’t afford? Or are they as essential as academics, for everyone?

Reading, math, and science matter a lot, but they are almost certainly not enough. That is why we must tread carefully when designing next-generation school accountability and teacher evaluation systems. If we accidentally create incentives for schools and teachers to focus solely on academic achievement and ignore the rest, we could be making our children and our nation less competitive, not more so. Let us proceed with care.

-Mike Petrilli

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

Behind the Headline
The Case for Special EducationVouchers
Education Next | Winter 2010

Former State Assemblyman Michael Benjamin makes the case for special ed vouchers in New York City in an op-ed appearing in today’s Post. Jay Greene and Stuart Buck explained how special ed vouchers work and dispelled myths about the vouchers in an article appearing in the Winter 2010 issue of Ed Next.

“[Y]ou simply cannot fix America’s schools by `scaling’ charter schools. It won’t work. Charters schools offer proof of the concept that great teaching is a huge difference-maker, but charters can only absorb a tiny fraction of the nation’s 50 million public schoolchildren. Real reform has to go beyond charters – and it has to include the unions. That’s what Brill figured out.”

Wrong. Like many education establishmentarians, Nocera makes the mistake of confusing pedagogy and governance. The former—e.g. great teaching—is a hard nut to crack and Nocera is right to suggest, as does Brill, that there perhaps aren’t enough great teachers in the pipeline (or in charter schools) to educate all 50 million public school students.

But there is certainly no such impediment to `scaling’ charters. Every public school in America could be a charter school tomorrow if policymakers would allow it. Would that “fix” America’s schools? Not necessarily. But it would help.

The other problem with the scaling argument is that it assumes that big is beautiful—that no matter how successful you are, if you can’t replicate your methods of success, then your model won’t be useful to the American public school system. That is true only if you assume a governance structure like the one we now have: a system managed from above. The monolith that we now call public education is dominated by special interests, including unions, that are able to dictate education policy by keeping their hands on a few levers of control (mainly on Capitol Hill and in state capitals).

It is not so much that “reform has to go beyond charters” as it is that real reform must embrace choice—choice at the individual level. In fact, scaling up is really about scaling down.

The new MDRC study of New York City’s small schools seems to make the point perfectly. To quote from the document,

During the past decade, New York City undertook a district-wide high school reform that is perhaps unprecedented in its scope, scale, and pace. Between fall 2002 and fall 2008, the school district closed 23 large failing high schools (with graduation rates below 45 percent), opened 216 new small high schools (with different missions, structures, and student selection criteria), and implemented a centralized high school admissions process that assigns over 90 percent of the roughly 80,000 incoming ninth-graders each year based on their school preferences.

At the heart of this reform are 123 small, academically nonselective, public high schools. Each with approximately 100 students per grade in grades 9 through 12, these schools were created to serve some of the district’s most disadvantaged students and are located mainly in neighborhoods where large failing high schools had been closed. MDRC researchers call them “small schools of choice” (SSCs) because of their small size and the fact that they do not screen students based on their academic backgrounds.

And, according to MDRC, these schools worked. Graduation rates were nearly 10 points higher in the small schools. And the positive effects were spread out to all subgroups, including minorities and the poor.

“Are these small schools perfect?” writes Joe Williams in a New York Post op-ed. “Of course not. In fact, the MDRC report adds to the growing evidence that, while New York City is graduating students at a higher rate than a decade ago, most of these kids are still not ready for college…. Bloomberg and his would-be successors should read the MRDC report from the vantage point of those whose job it is to drive change.”

Williams is right to call out “those whose job it is to drive change.” But that change, as the dramatic restructuring of the system that MDRC studied in New York City shows, must be bold. And it suggests that the question we must ask is “How do you `scale up’ small?”

- Peter Meyer

This post was originally published on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View

Or so they say, until push comes to shove. And then many of the players discover that they don’t like flexibility after all. They want to change federal policy in theory but not in reality.

It’s not just the President’s bizarre State of the Union request that states raise their compulsory attendance age to 18. (Perhaps that would help to trim the dropout rate, though the studies suggesting so rely on 40-year-old data.) I’m assuming that he was merely using the bully pulpit to promote a pet idea, not suggesting a new federal mandate.

No, I’m referring to the Army of the Potomac’s reaction to John Kline’s ESEA proposal and to Chairman Tom Harkin’s and Rep. George Miller’s response to the waiver requests put forward by several states.

In both cases, we hear somber leaders express concern that the moves will “undermine the core American value of equality of opportunity in education” and move away from “the critically important gains for our students’ civil rights and educational equity that NCLB achieved.”

So what’s the beef? See this from Harkin’s and Miller’s letter to Arne Duncan about the waiver requests:

In its analysis of the eleven waiver applications, the Center on Education Policy found that nine state applicants will base almost all accountability decisions on the achievement of only two students groups; i.e., all students and a “disadvantaged” student group or “super subgroup.” We fear that putting students with disabilities, English language learners and minority students into one “super subgroup” will mask the individual needs of these distinct student subgroups and will prevent schools from tailoring interventions appropriately. Therefore, we urge you to consider each applicant’s subgroup performance measures as significant and coherent components of overall accountability and require applicants to articulate meaningful and effective interventions for schools that are low performing or have subgroups that fail to progress.”

There’s a name for what Harkin and Miller are calling for: the Adequate Yearly Progress system. This is exactly what we’ve got now! So they seem to be saying: “We favor flexibility, as long as nothing really changes.”

There are two debates going on here. One is over the policy specifics; for example, are “super subgroups” a good idea? The second is over power and control: Who should get to decide if super subgroups are a reasonable way forward? If your answer to the second question is “Uncle Sam” then you’re not really a proponent of state flexibility after all. Lefty reformers, civil rights groups, Chairman Harkin, and Representative Miller: I’m talking about you.

-Mike Petrilli

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

In the first round, the state supreme court in 2004 struck down a statewide voucher program enacted by the legislature for the benefit of students in low-performing districts. The plaintiffs alleged, and the court narrowly concurred, that the program violated a provision of the state constitution that school boards “shall have control of instruction in the public schools of their respective districts.” The court held that to require school districts to turn over some locally raised money to private schools, as the law did, offended that provision.

This seemed to suggest that a program adopted by a local school board might survive, and a test recently emerged. Suburban areas with high-performing school districts have shown little support for vouchers, so it was surprising to have the first locally enacted voucher program come from Douglas County, a Denver suburb with one of the highest median incomes in the country. School choice advocates, however, had targeted the district in school board elections. As a result, the normally nonpartisan elections turned partisan in 2009, when the Republican Party endorsed a slate of four candidates and handily defeated candidates endorsed by the teachers union.

Those efforts bore fruit in March 2011 when Douglas County’s school board unanimously approved the Pilot Choice Scholarship Program. Through this plan, any student who had been enrolled in district schools for at least one year could apply for a voucher of approximately $4,600, equal to 75 percent of state per-pupil funding, to attend a “partner” private school, with the school district keeping the other 25 percent. Religious schools would not have to waive admission requirements to participate, but would have to offer an exemption for voucher students who wished to be excused from religious services. Of the 19 initial partner schools, 14 were sectarian. The school board capped the program at 500 students but expected it to expand. As the third-largest district in the state, Douglas County serves more than 61,000 students.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), along with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, sued, citing a host of constitutional offenses, including violating the ban on support for private schools and churches (the state’s Blaine Amendment), the ban on religious tests, the guarantee of religious freedom, the uniformity requirement in the education clause, the prohibition on support for private institutions, and, for good measure, the guarantee of local control. After a three-day hearing in August, state district court judge Michael Martinez granted the ACLU’s request for a permanent injunction. Clearly alarmed by the religious instruction that would occur at religious schools—“not only is the risk of religion intruding into the secular educational function great, that risk is inevitable and unavoidable due to the very structure of the Scholarship Program”—Judge Martinez accepted nearly all of the ACLU’s claims.

Voucher supporters lined up to assist Douglas County in defending the program. The Daniels Fund, a well-regarded and influential foundation in the Rocky Mountain region, pledged $530,000 for legal expenses. In addition, the libertarian Institute for Justice filed an appeal on behalf of several families whose children were granted vouchers.

While the ACLU obviously has a grab bag of provisions at its disposal going forward, one risk is its reliance on the state Blaine Amendment. If state courts rule that the amendment requires that religious students and institutions be treated differently than secular ones, as Martinez’s ruling seems to imply, it could potentially raise a federal challenge under both the First and Fourteenth Amendments as a violation of free exercise and equal protection. The most promising outcome for Douglas County would be for Mickey Mouse to meet the U.S. Constitution.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

Yes, answers Roland Fryer in an amazing study released this month.  Based on earlier work, he identified 5 features of charter schools that helped them produce strong results: “increased time, better human capital, more student-level differentiation, frequent use of data to inform instruction, and a culture of high expectations.”  Fryer then somehow convinced the superintendent and school board in Houston to pursue these five reforms in a serious way in 9 struggling traditional public schools. (CORRECTION — the Houston folks report that they were eager to pursue some promising reforms and required no convincing.  They should be commended for that.) Here, in brief, is what they did:

To increase time on task, the school day was lengthened one hour and the school year was lengthened ten days. This amounts to 21 percent more school than students in these schools obtained in the year pre-treatment and roughly the same as successful charter schools in New York City. In addition, students were strongly encouraged and even incentivized to attend classes on Saturday. In an effort to significantly alter the human capital in the nine schools, 100 percent of principals, 30 percent of other administrators, and 52 percent of teachers were removed and replaced with individuals who possessed the values and beliefs consistent with an achievement-driven mantra and, wherever possible, a demonstrated record of achievement. To enhance student-level differentiation, we supplied all sixth and ninth graders with a math tutor in a two-on-one setting and provided an extra dose of reading or math instruction to students in other grades who had previously performed below grade level. This model was adapted from the MATCH school in Boston – a charter school that largely adheres to the methods described in Dobbie and Fryer (2011b). In order to help teachers use interim data on student performance to guide and inform instructional practice, we required schools to administer interim assessments every three to four weeks and provided schools with three cumulative benchmarks assessments, as well as assistance in analyzing and presenting student performance on these assessments. Finally, to instill a culture of high expectations and college access for all students, we started by setting clear expectations for school leadership. Schools were provided with a rubric for the school and classroom environment and were expected to implement school-parent-student contracts. Specific student performance goals were set for each school and the principal was held accountable for these goals.

And the result:

In the grade/subject areas in which we implemented all five policies described in Dobbie and Fryer (2011b) – sixth and ninth grade math – the increase in student achievement is dramatic. Relative to students who attended comparison schools, sixth grade math scores increased 0.484σ (.097) in one year. In seventh and eighth grades, the treatment effect in math is 0.125σ (.065) and is statistically significant. A very similar pattern emerges in high school math: large effects in ninth grade and a more modest but statistically significant effect in tenth and eleventh grade, which suggest that two-on-one tutoring is particularly effective. The results in reading exhibit a different pattern. If anything, the reading scores demonstrate a slight decrease in middle school, though not statistically significant, and a modest increase in high school. Impacts on attendance – which are positive and statistically insignificant – are difficult to interpret given the longer school day and longer school year.

Strikingly, both the magnitude of the increase in math and the muted effect for reading are consistent with the results of successful charter schools. Taking the treatment effects at face value, treatment schools in Houston would rank third out of twelve in math and fifth out of twelve in reading among charter schools in NYC with statistically significant positive results in the sample analyzed in Dobbie and Fryer (2011b).

Using data from the National Student Clearinghouse, we investigate treatment effects on two college outcomes: whether a student enrolled in any college (extensive margin) and whether they chose a four-year college, conditional on enrolling in any college (intensive margin). Calculated at the mean, students are 6.2 percentage points less likely to attend college, though the effect is not statistically significant. Conditional on attending college, however, treatment students are 17.7 percentage points more likely to enroll in a four-year institution, relative to a mean of 46% in comparison schools – a 40% increase.

Traditional public schools can get results like a KIPP school without having to actually become KIPP schools. They just have to imitate a few of the key features employed by KIPP and other successful charter schools. This is incredibly encouraging news. It means that traditional public schools are really capable of making significant progress if only they become more open to learning from successful charter schools. They can make that progress without having to cure poverty and all other social ills (although I’m sure that would be nice too).

Of course, there are serious concerns about bringing these reforms to scale, which Fryer considers in his conclusion. He dismisses union opposition as a serious obstacle based on the fact that the unionized school system in Denver is pursuing a similar reform strategy. I’m not so easily convinced that unions nationwide will jump aboard a plan that involves huge turnover in staffing and significantly more hours and days per year. Cost is another barrier to bringing this reform strategy to scale, but he notes that the marginal cost is only $1,837 per student and the rate of return on that investment would be roughly 20%.

But the most serious concerns seem to be fidelity to implementation and shortages of quality labor. We could all be heart surgeons if we just did what heart surgeons do. But there are only so many people capable of doing that work and not every office building can be re-organized as a hospital. Then again, successful teaching isn’t exactly heart surgery (although it can be just about as important), so perhaps there is real hope of bringing this to scale. We won’t know until we try it in more places with more schools.

- Jay Greene

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

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

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

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

We need a fundamentally new approach.

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

A New Framework

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

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

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

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

A Role for Washington

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charter Schools

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

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

Cybercharters and Other Choice Schools

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving Forward

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

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

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

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

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

• It worked!

As Mark Schneider shows in his recent paper for Fordham—and as Eric Hanushek and others demonstrated before him—poor, minority, and low-achieving students made huge progress in math, and sizable progress in reading, during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their most recent scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate all-time highs for most grades and subjects. These students are typically performing two grade levels ahead of where their peers were fifteen years ago in math, and are reading at least one grade level higher. So how to explain these historic gains? While we can’t draw causal conclusions from NAEP, we can make educated guesses. What’s clear is that states that adopted “consequential accountability” in the nineties saw big test-score jumps, and the late-adopter states saw similar progress once No Child Left Behind kicked into action. So, while other factors could have been in play, too (such as efforts to reduce class size or the cessation of the crack-cocaine epidemic), there’s a pretty good case that testing and accountability succeeded in spurring higher student achievement, at least at the bottom of the performance spectrum.

• But it couldn’t work forever. As Schneider argues, the test-score gains sparked by NCLB-style accountability appear to have hit a plateau. We’re back to anemic progress in most grades and subjects, particularly in the states (like Texas) that embraced testing and accountability first. That shouldn’t be too surprising. While the initial pressure (and shame) provided by consequential accountability appears to have changed behavior at the district and school level, after a while being called a “failing school” loses its sting. Furthermore, holding “schools” accountable has rarely equaled holding individuals accountable—real-live teachers and principals who might lose their jobs. Once it became clear that NCLB was all bark and no bite, schools could return to the status quo ante.
• The trade-offs are real. The good news is that we’ve seen enormous progress for our lowest-achieving students. The bad news is that we’ve seen languid progress for our highest achievers. The good news is that math scores are way up and, to a lesser degree, reading scores are up, too (especially for poor and minority kids). The bad news is that history and science have been squeezed out of the elementary school curriculum, particularly in high-poverty schools. Whether these trade-offs were worth it depends on your point of view. Personally, I’d prefer a policy that aims for more balance: achievement gains across the performance spectrum, not just at the bottom; and a more holistic view of what it means for students to be well educated. Literacy and numeracy are (obviously) not enough.
• Pet ideas from both parties crashed and burned. The Democrats gave the country the “white elephant” gift of the “highly qualified teachers” mandate, a policy that succeeded in turning the nation’s teachers against NCLB from the very beginning; managed to tie up myriad schools (including charters) in all manner of red tape; and gravely threatened Teach For America, one of the most promising reforms of the NCLB era. From the Republicans we got “supplemental educational services,” a.k.a. free tutoring. This was more of an impulse than a fleshed-out idea. It was never clear whether SES was meant to be a sanction for failing districts (if you don’t improve your test scores, we’ll take some of your Title I money away from you); a serious effort at parental choice; or a way to “extend” learning time for needy kids. Regardless, its entire design was predicated on cooperation from school districts, which were responsible for facilitating the flow of funds away from their coffers and into the hands of nonprofit and for-profit providers. As my Italian grandmother would have said, “Fatta chance.
• It’s time for something new. On this point, virtually everybody agrees. But what should the next phase of education reform entail? The contours are now taking shape. First, there’s agreement that, for accountability to be real, it has to be placed upon real-live people, not just amorphous “schools.” That means, first and foremost, holding teachers accountable for their performance. Thus the interest in: more sophisticated teacher-evaluation systems, tenure reform, performance pay, and all the rest. Second, there’s broad consensus that we need to balance the “tough love” approach of accountability with the “helping hand” of capacity-building: Providing teachers with tools like a coherent curriculum—linked to the new Common Core standards—so they don’t have to make it all up on their own. And third, we can all glimpse the promise of digital learning, if technology can be harnessed effectively and if the political and governance roadblocks can be removed. But what’s the appropriate (and politically feasible) federal role in all of this? In all of these reforms, Uncle Sam’s involvement will be—and should be—minimal. The political thirst for aggressive federal involvement in education has been quenched, and the dollars to fund it spent. Plus these “next wave” reforms require nuance, care, and thoughtfulness to get them right—attributes not associated with Uncle Sam. In other words, reform will continue, but the federal government will lead from behind. As well it should.

Happy birthday, No Child Left Behind. And here’s hoping that you don’t make it to eleven.

-Michael Petrilli

This post also appeared on Flypaper.

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

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

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

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

The Case of Texas

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

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

The Remarkable Growth in NAEP Math Scores

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

Fourth-Grade Mathematics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eighth-Grade Mathematics

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

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

High-Performing Students

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

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

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

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

The Disappointing Case of Reading Scores

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

Accountability and NCLB Were a Success, But…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So argues Mark Schneider, a scholar, analyst, and friend whom we once affectionately (and appropriately) named “Statstud.” Schneider, a political scientist, served as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics from 2005 to 2008, and is now affiliated with the American Institutes for Research and the American Enterprise Institute. In his new analysis, he digs into twenty years of trends on the National Assessment of Educational Progress—the “Nation’s Report Card.”

We originally asked Schneider to investigate the achievement record of the great state of Texas. At the time—it feels like just yesterday—Lone Star Governor Rick Perry was riding high in the polls, making an issue of education, and taking flak from Secretary Arne Duncan for running an inadequate school system. We wondered: Was Duncan right to feel “very, very badly” for the children of Texas? Had the state’s schools—once darlings of the standards movement and prototypes for NCLB—really slipped into decline since Perry took office? What do the NAEP data really show?

Schneider agreed to take on the project but quickly concluded that there’s a larger and more interesting story to tell than simply the saga of Texas. It was true, he noted, that Texas’s achievement slowed during the Perry years, particularly as compared to the rest of the country. But rather than pin that development on the governor, Schneider saw a more likely explanation: As an early adopter of standards, testing, and accountability, Texas got a head start on big achievement gains, most of which it realized in the 1990s when George W. Bush was governor—and also a head start on flat-lining thereafter, during Rick Perry’s tenure.

Indeed, the Lone Star State made Texas-sized gains from the early- to mid-1990s, as its accountability system got traction. But as other states followed suit, they too hit the achievement fast-track, leading to sizable national gains from 1998 to 2003. Since then, however, Texas’s progress has cooled, and the same is now happening to the country as a whole. It’s not that Perry was a worse “education governor” than Bush (or, for that matter, Ann Richards) before him, but that he presided over an accountability strategy that was running out of steam.

It’s an intriguing argument, and one that deserves serious consideration, even more so as the U.S. marks the tenth anniversary of the enactment of NCLB and tries to figure out what the next version of that law should entail. If school-level accountability, as currently practiced, is no longer an effective lever for raising student achievement, then what is? If we need another “meteor” to disrupt the system, where should we look? Mark suggests that the Common Core and rigorous teacher evaluations have potential. We also see promise in the digital-learning revolution. But other shocks to the system might work even better. What are they?

-Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Michael Petrilli

Personally, I’m most interested in the states’ plans around accountability. Partly that’s because this is the only part of this waiver process that I find legitimate and legal; the Department of Education has no business demanding that states adopt and implement the Common Core standards or rigorous teacher evaluations. But if it’s going to allow states to opt-out of the law’s Adequate Yearly Progress system, it certainly has the right to set boundaries around the alternatives. And partly it’s because the major sticking point in the current negotiations over ESEA reauthorization comes down to accountability, and how much leeway to give the states.

So what do these 11 states want to do differently on the accountability front? Particularly when it comes to identifying schools that should be subject to some sort of sanctions or interventions? Here’s what the future holds if the Department of Education gives its assent:

1. A deadline for getting all kids to “proficiency” will go the way of the dinosaur. None of the states opted to set a deadline for universal proficiency. A few agreed to reduce the number of not-yet-proficient students by 50 percent over the next six years, but most developed their own twist on “annual measurable objectives.”

2. A focus on growth will eclipse the need for “subgroup accountability.” Models such as the one proposed by Colorado would set “annual measurable objectives” at the kid-level. Schools would be expected to help all students make enough progress to get them to a college-and-career ready standard by high school. (For high achieving students who are already approaching this standard, schools would be held accountable for making sure they grow at least a year’s worth of learning every year.) This is exactly the right concept–have a real-live standard (college readiness) and ask schools to aim at getting all kids to it by graduation. That will require making the most rapid progress for the students who are furthest behind. Since those kids are more likely to be poor and from minority groups, it makes subgroup accountability per se unnecessary. (Though the Administration’s guidelines still require it.)

3. Subjects beyond reading and math will count again. Seven of the states are taking the opportunity to expand the subjects included in their accountability systems. Colorado will look at writing, science, and ACT results; Florida will add writing and science; Georgia will include science and social studies for grades 3-8 and a whole suite of exit exams for high school; Kentucky and Oklahoma add science, social studies, and writing; and Massachusetts and Tennessee will both add science to the mix. This should be helpful in counteracting the narrowing of the curriculum.

In other words, the states are presenting sensible alternatives to the antiquated Adequate Yearly Progress model. That doesn’t prove that “states are good” and “the feds are bad.” On the contrary, it just shows that our thinking and technology around accountability have improved over the ten years since NCLB was enacted. But it does lay down a challenge to Arne Duncan, his peer reviewers, and his team: Say yes to these proposals or be  accused of a “Washington knows best” mentality.

-Mike Petrilli

This post also appears on Flypaper.

Martha Derthick: When the framers of the United States Constitution wrote that it is a duty of the chief executive to “take care” that the laws be faithfully executed, they can hardly have imagined a law so freighted with perverse and destructive consequences as No Child Left Behind. And if they had imagined any such thing, they would likely have assumed that the legislature would be quick to correct its work.

But that is not the case in our time, and the Obama administration, confronted with a train wreck, has responded with an offer to waive the most onerous provisions of the law. The offer is conditioned, however, on the state governments’ acceptance of a set of “principles” put forth in a document titled “ESEA Flexibility.” Flexibility is the new watchword at the Department of Education (ED), though the administration promises that it implies no sacrifice of “accountability,” which has been the watchword for roughly two decades.

Martha Derthick

It is hard to see what else the administration could have done, given the failure of Congress to make corrections itself, the manifest impossibility of carrying on with the law as written, and the protest that would have come from Democrats in Congress and the army of education reformers if the administration had simply settled for waivers. It enjoys broad waiver authority under the law, and waiver provisions in federal law have repeatedly been upheld in court. On the other hand, nothing in the law authorizes it to craft new conditions—in effect, to attempt making law itself—even if the new conditions are not called law or rules or conditions or standards, but merely “principles.”

Forty years ago, in regard to public assistance rather than education, I wrote as follows of intergovernmental relations in the United States:

Federal enforcement is a diplomatic process. It is as if the terms of a treaty, an agreement of mutual interest to the two governmental parties, were more or less continuously being negotiated…. The function of intergovernmental diplomacy in a federal system, like that of international diplomacy, is to facilitate communication and amicable relations between governments that are pretending to be equals by obscuring the question of whether one is more equal than the other…. That this be done is important primarily to the federal government, for it is the aggressive, the states the defensive, actor in intergovernmental relations. It has the greater interest in seeing that change is facilitated. But perhaps the principal advantage of a diplomatic style to federal administrators … is that this mode of behavior makes the best possible use of the technique of withholding funds. It enables federal officials to exploit, without actually using, this basic resource.

—from The influence of federal grants: public assistance in Massachusetts (Harvard University Press, 1970)

Much of what I wrote about federalism 40 years ago needs revision, but I think there is still truth in this passage. And what strikes me in reviewing intergovernmental relations in education is that the federal government has had a very hard time getting the hang of it. It has wavered (that is not meant to be a pun) between administrative passivity, as with the Clinton administration’s prolific granting of waivers following the Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA, the 1994 version of the Elementary and Second Education Act), and the deeply intrusive, get-tough, and grant-no-waivers initial approach adopted by Congress and the Bush administration in 2001–02.

The Clinton-era approach perhaps made due recognition of the fact that the origins of the accountability movement lay in the states. Federal law, after all, typically builds, as the IASA did, on state precedents. But the successor regime of Bush, in an overcorrection, reacted sharply against the perceived fecklessness of federal education policy, was indifferent to what the states had in place, and demanded impossibilities. Just how this happened has always puzzled me. How could an elected legislature, traditionally thought to be locally oriented, err so grievously by attempting to improve the public schools by punishing their teachers and administrators? The short answer lies, I think, in the hubris typical of a freshly elected president, the passionate commitment of the liberal lions Kennedy and Miller to social justice (that is, closing the achievement gap), and the pride that John Boehner took in collaborating with these titans. Others who should have known better went along in ignorance of the consequences. Eugene Hickok’s account in Schoolhouse of Cards mentions Senator Judd Gregg, “who harbored serious misgivings about the whole enterprise, having for years argued for local control in education …” but who wanted to help a new Republican president and presumed that the new federal initiative would not have much of an impact in his state of New Hampshire, which he believed to have very good schools. Little did he know.

Now the Obama administration is on the rebound from its predecessor, attempting its own correction and searching for what I take to be a diplomatic middle ground. State intergovernmental cooperation is made the foundation for the promise of flexibility and better federal-state cooperation. But after one gets beyond the lofty principles, which begin with “college- and career-ready expectations for all students,” there is a lot of prescription woven in among the principles.

In announcing the new plan to chief state school officers (CSSOs), Secretary Arne Duncan points out that 44 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core standards prepared under the auspices of the National Governors Association with financial support from the Gates Foundation. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia are “developing high-quality assessments aligned with these standards.” According to Duncan, “Over 40 states are developing next-generation accountability and support systems,” guided by the CSSOs, and “many states are moving forward with reforms in teacher and principal evaluation and support, turning around low-performing schools, and expanding access to high-quality schools.” As happened early in the Progressive Era, the expansion of national government activity has prompted states to work more closely together, but that effort is not all embracing. Six states, including Virginia and Texas, have yet to adopt the Common Core standards.

Given the uncertain legal ground on which its new regime of not-quite-regulation rests, the department could face some unusual dilemmas if it attempts to bring federal power to bear against dissenters. Most states will undoubtedly apply for waivers, but what if some just stop complying with NCLB and drag their feet on the waivers? If some of the half dozen or so “outliers” apply but offer much less in the way of conforming principles than ED would like, what then? Withholding funds is never easy, and the legal ambiguities present in this new démarche will not make it any easier. Yet in the absence of a penalty against a state, withholding presumably, no court is likely to be engaged in a legal resolution. The Congressional Research Service (CRS), asked by a House committee for a legal analysis, replied that the secretary of education has broad authority to grant waivers, but hedged on the question of whether these waivers could be made conditional. “Given the novelty of the question,” it said, “it is unclear how a reviewing court would rule on such an issue.” Courts have been applying a “clear statement” rule for federal grant-in-aid conditions: a federal agency cannot withhold funds unless states have been told their obligations in plain language. If that were the test, the Department of Education would be heading into court with a weak hand.

The case raises a concern that extends well beyond the field of education. Just how far is the United States going to take government-by-waiver? Waivers began to make a significant appearance in public policymaking in the 1980s and 1990s, when they were the precursors of welfare reform and the instruments for major revisions of Medicaid. These waivers had a foundation in law, and after a great deal of experimentation and intergovernmental negotiation conducted by executive officials in the two levels of government, they resulted in new law. The CRS memo cites court cases involving waiver provisions in the Real ID Act of 2005 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Undoubtedly, there are many others. Perhaps to its credit, Congress recognizes with waiver provisions the limitations of its own ability to tailor national laws to the needs of a huge, diverse, and constantly changing society. For it to include waiver authority in law is just a realistic acknowledgment that it is in over its head.

But waivers threaten to get out of hand, and to undermine the rule of law. What the Obama administration just did with education would be a mild case, in which waivers are combined with new requirements lacking a basis in law, but the more serious case is the Affordable Care Act, under which, without any warrant that I have been able to find in the law itself, the administration granted more than 1,400 waivers to labor unions and small businesses that were offering less insurance coverage than the law requires. If Mitt Romney is to be believed and is elected, he will abolish the whole law by waiver, as if a president has the right to do any such thing.

Andy Rotherham: It is impossible to discuss the Obama administration’s waiver plan without also discussing and understanding the general political and governmental dysfunction plaguing Washington. The administration is proposing to use waivers to give states, school districts, and schools flexibility under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, not because waivers are President Obama’s or Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s favored way to make policy, but rather because they are the policymaking tool of last resort.

Andy Rotherham

Even casual observers of government have probably noticed that little gets done in Washington these days. The budget process has become an ongoing game of political brinkmanship, with government shutdowns regularly threatened. Legislation moves in fits and starts and often only under special expedited rules. In education, the flurry of policymaking since 2009 has come exclusively under special circumstances and not through the regular legislative process. Race to the Top, i3 (Investing in Innovation fund), and School Improvement Grants, for example, were all folded into the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The administration’s victory on student loans came courtesy of special legislative rules related to the health-care bill. Its “gainful employment” rule for for-profit colleges and universities came through the regulatory process.

This dysfunction matters because when NCLB was passed in 2001, no one involved imagined the law would run for at least a decade without a congressional overhaul. On the contrary, longtime Washington hands were surprised that it took until 2001 to reauthorize the 1994 version of the law. And the 1994 law was not as complex or timetable-laden as the current version. Notwithstanding a few waiver programs and some clever waivers states managed to secure for themselves, the core of the law remains intact almost 10 years after President George W. Bush, Senator Ted Kennedy, and Congressmen George Miller and John Boehner barnstormed the country to celebrate its overwhelmingly bipartisan passage in the House and Senate.

That’s why hardly anyone argues with Secretary Duncan’s decision to grant waivers as a way of modifying the policies. Congress tried—and failed—to overhaul the law in 2007, and current efforts to do so still seem a long shot. Yet revisions are long overdue, and the secretary of education’s authority to grant waivers is clearly spelled out in the law. Previous secretaries have issued a variety of waivers. The criticism of the secretary’s plan, which he and the president rolled out September 23 at the White House, stems from two issues: 1) the secretary’s strategy of making receipt of the waivers conditional on states agreeing to maintain or adopt a series of reforms, and 2) the effect of the waivers on efforts to hold schools accountable for results.

Let’s take the two concerns in order.

Waivers are a common strategy for policymaking. After all, with 50 states and urban, suburban, and rural communities covered by the same laws, it is almost impossible to craft laws that fit every situation without some mechanism for modification. We see waivers on a variety of policy issues to accommodate implementation challenges, state-specific statutes or constitutional requirements, or to encourage innovation and new ideas.

Yet in September in its regular monthly survey, consulting firm Whiteboard Advisors asked a bipartisan group of policy and political insiders whether they thought Secretary Duncan’s waiver plan would be challenged in court, and 63 percent said yes. I am copublisher of that survey, and the figure reflects the substantial discontent on the political right and left with Secretary Duncan’s specific strategy in this case. On the left, groups like the United Farm Workers challenged the secretary’s authority to issue waivers that would curtail parental rights. Other special-interest groups felt the waivers should be unconditional and not predicated on any specific reforms or commitments. On the right, conservatives complained that the administration was not merely waiving aspects of the law but rewriting it unilaterally.

Actually, waivers with conditions attached are also a common practice. A cabinet agency can require that a state be in compliance with various laws and regulations to be eligible for a waiver. Or an agency can sponsor pilots and let states propose their own ideas and conditions. The Department of Education has issued waivers under both of these scenarios in recent years.

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, for instance, conditioned waivers in her “growth model” pilot on state plans to ensure student growth to proficiency on state tests within three years. Such a requirement did not exist in federal law, and many of the same individuals and organizations now apoplectic about Secretary Duncan’s waiver plan raised no objections to Spellings’s approach at the time.

Where Secretary Duncan’s waivers get complicated is the hodgepodge of laws, regulations, and initiatives that comprise federal education policy today, again because of congressional inaction. The federal goals of improving teacher evaluations, adopting college- and career-ready standards, and turning around low-performing schools trace their legislative provenance to congressional authorizations permitting the secretary of education to allocate federal funds based on priorities he determines rather than specific laws passed by Congress.

Politically, the secretary is on firm ground citing the precedent of his predecessors’ waivers, and his critics’ temporal concerns about executive power and federalism seem to owe more to which party controls the Oval Office than any underlying theory of government. But the courts will care less about political precedent than statutory precedent, and could read the law and the secretary’s authority more narrowly.

Unfortunately, all the attention to the legality of these waivers (as well as a lot of questionable rhetoric about NCLB itself) has obscured the second question: While the need for revisions to the law and its timetables is inarguable, are these specific waivers a good idea?

There are a number of sensible (and often broadly supported) provisions in the administration’s waiver package, but there are problems, too. Who could argue with getting rid of NCLB’s “highly qualified teacher” rules? States have gamed them to the point of meaninglessness. Flexibility for rural local education agencies is sensible policy as well. However, the lead-up to the announcement of the waivers was unsettling to supporters of a strong federal role in school accountability. In spring 2011, the president visited a suburban school (with notable achievement gaps) to argue that without substantial changes more than 80 percent of the nation’s schools would not meet NCLB performance targets this year. In fact, the actual figures are much lower. But more to the point, given our dismal educational outcomes, why should we be surprised that an accountability system would find a lot of schools underperforming?

Meanwhile, some states proposed, and in some cases were approved for, wholesale departures from efforts to hold schools accountable. Virginia, for instance, sought to retroactively set its accountability targets, and until the proposal became public the administration seemed to be onboard. Idaho and Montana demanded flexibility while announcing that they would not enforce the law, and the administration acquiesced to some changes.

The waiver proposal itself opens the door for suburban schools with achievement gaps to evade accountability. The plan commits states to concentrate on the poorest-performing 15 percent of schools in exchange for flexibility in setting school accountability targets. Yet data clearly show that some groups of students, poor and minority students in particular, do not fare appreciably better in schools that are higher performing overall. In those schools, such challenges are often lost in seemingly respectable averages. Whether the administration can maintain real accountability for all schools remains to be seen. In that same Whiteboard Advisors survey, 75 percent of policy insiders did not think that the administration could maintain a high degree of accountability throughout the process.

The No Child Left Behind law changed the unit of analysis for educational performance and accountability from schools to students. What happens to students within schools, not only differences between schools, became the focal point. This was a major policy shift and reflected the obvious truth that different students can have very different educational experiences in the same school. Laying that reality bare discomfited comfortable suburban communities and upset the traditional education establishment. Complaints about “labeling” schools drowned out hard conversations about the reality of educational performance today.

So while the law clearly needs fixes and updates to a variety of its policies, it does not need a rollback of this bright and often uncomfortable light. The 1994 predecessor to No Child Left Behind had a muted effect in most states precisely because of this issue. Data and transparency alone do not move public policy in a sector like education, which has powerful special interests and unclear outcome goals.

That’s why, assuming that Congress fails to act to reauthorize the law, in the end the same problem that has vexed the law since 2001 seems likely to plague the waiver process as it grinds on over time: how to give states flexibility yet ensure that they hold schools accountable for results. The federal government is not good at the former, and despite a few compelling state examples to the contrary, there is plenty of history to make one worry about the latter. Forget the first few states that have a solid commitment to reform, strong leadership, and will be approved while everyone is watching the peer review process. It’s the ones that come onboard later where a rollback is most likely.

Bottom line: As with No Child Left Behind (and most broad federal legislation), execution and implementation matter as much as the letter of law and regulations. The administration is betting that the education conversation and education politics have changed enough that rollback is politically untenable. Given the track record and the way the past decade unfolded in terms of the conversation about NCLB, that seems like a bad bet, whether a judge ultimately upholds or strikes down this waiver plan.

Checked by Eric A. Hanushek

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) was scheduled for reauthorization in 2007, and its future has in recent months garnered renewed attention. Yet so far, Congress has found it impossible to reach sufficient consensus to update the legislation, as competing groups want to a) keep all the essential features of the current law as a way of maintaining the pressure on schools to teach all students, b) modify the federal law by moving to a value-added or some alternative testing and accountability system, or c) eliminate federal testing and accountability requirements altogether, reverting to the days when the compensatory education law was simply a framework for distributing federal funds to school districts. Critics of NCLB’s testing and accountability requirements have a litany of complaints: The tests are inaccurate, schools and teachers should not be responsible for the test performance of unprepared or unmotivated students, the measure of school inadequacy used under NCLB is misleading, the tests narrow the curriculum to what is being tested, and burdens imposed upon teachers and administrators are excessively onerous.

But in all the acrimonious discussion surrounding NCLB, surprisingly little attention has been given to the actual impact of that legislation and other accountability systems on student performance. Now a reputable body, a committee set up by the National Research Council (NRC), the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, has reached a conclusion on this matter. In its report, Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education, the committee says that NCLB and state accountability systems have been so ineffective at lifting student achievement that accountability as we know it should probably be dropped by federal and state governments alike. Further, the committee objects to state laws that require students to pass an examination for a high school diploma. There is no evidence that such tests boost student achievement, the committee says, and some students, about 2 percent, are not getting their diplomas because they can’t—or think they can’t—pass the test. The headline of the May 2011 NRC press release is frank and bold in the way committee reports seldom are: “Current test-based incentive programs have not consistently raised student achievement in U.S.; Improved approaches should be developed and evaluated.”

Needless to say, the report can be expected to play an important role in the continuing debate over NCLB. Upon its initial release, the report captured top billing, appearing on Education Week’s front page. Certainly, the NRC intends for the report to influence the NCLB conversation, rushing a draft version to the media five months before the completed report was available to the public.

Unfortunately, the NRC’s strongly worded conclusions are only weakly supported by scientific evidence, despite the fact that NRC’s stated mission is “to improve government decision making and public policy, increase public understanding, and promote the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge.”

The Report

Reports from the NRC are generally treated as highly credible. The NRC convenes panels of outside experts who volunteer their time to provide consensus opinions on issues of policy significance. And this particular panel includes a number of especially qualified researchers (see sidebar). The committee chair, Michael Hout, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences; 7 of the 17 panel members have named professorships; 2 are deans (of law and education schools); and a majority have published articles about testing, accountability, or incentives.

When it comes to gathering together the general literature, both theoretical and empirical, on the use of incentives in various contexts, the committee’s work is solidly constructed. But this strong scientific discussion of theory and empirical analysis of incentives and accountability breaks down when it comes to the committee’s core purpose: evaluating accountability regimes in education that employ incentives and tests.

The report comes to two policy conclusions: NCLB and state accountability systems have proven ineffective and state-required high-school exams are counterproductive. The unequivocal presentation of the conclusions is clearly designed to leave little doubt in the minds of policymakers. When the underlying evidence is examined, however, it becomes apparent that neither conclusion is warranted. Instead of weighing the full evidence before it in the neutral manner expected of an NRC committee, the panel selectively uses available evidence and then twists it into bizarre, one might say biased, conclusions.

Selecting Evidence

To get a grasp of the bias that motivated the report’s authors, consider how its first conclusion is phrased:

Test-based incentive programs, as designed and implemented in the programs that have been carefully studied, have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest achieving countries.

Note especially that the conclusion does not say that there is no evidence that testing and accountability work. It says that testing and accountability, by themselves, cannot lift the United States to the level of accomplishment reached by the world’s highest-achieving countries, an extraordinary standard for evaluating a policy innovation. To catch up to the leading countries would require gains of at least half of a standard deviation, or roughly two years of learning (see “Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” features, Fall 2011). No individual reform on the public agenda—neither merit pay, class size reduction, salary jumps for teachers, nor Race to the Top—can claim or even hope for anything close to that level of impact. The appropriate question is not whether testing and accountability is a panacea, but whether it has proven worthwhile.

By that more appropriate standard of judgment, the committee’s own data indicate that testing and accountability have proven effective, if not quite the spectacular success promised by those who enacted NCLB into law. The committee report tells us that the average estimated impact of these interventions is 0.08 standard deviations of student achievement. In other words, the average student in a state without accountability would have performed at the 53rd percentile of achievement had that student been in a state with an accountability system, all other things being equal.

That estimate may well be too low. The report states that “our literature review is limited to studies that allow us to draw causal conclusions about the overall effects of incentive policies and programs,” and then it goes on to describe several types of studies that would be excluded by this criterion. Where does the 0.08 come from? The committee considers a review from 2008 of 14 studies, and 4 studies conducted after that review. The review presents an average impact of 0.08. The NRC committee apparently felt no need to look any further and ignored the fact that a majority of the 14 studies would not come close to meeting its standard of enabling a “causal conclusion.” The committee determines that one of the more recent studies also supports an estimate of 0.08, although that study’s authors prefer estimates that are much higher. The 14 earlier studies and the 4 later ones produce a wide distribution of estimated impacts, but the committee makes no attempt to investigate whether the unusual estimates suggest circumstances under which accountability seems particularly effective (or ineffective). The committee chooses to emphasize the studies with negative findings (10 percent) while downplaying a number of those that have positive findings (90 percent). Thus the NRC mantra, repeated with slightly different wording throughout the report: “Despite using them for several decades, policymakers and educators do not yet know how to use test-based incentives to consistently generate positive effects on achievement and to improve education.” Apparently, the inconsistent results heralded in the press release reflect the 10 percent of studies that differed from the overwhelming majority.

Small Gains Add Up

Let us put this concern aside and consider the increment in student performance of 0.08 standard deviations of individual achievement that the committee presents as its best estimate. Is that so small an effect that it cannot justify continuation of testing and accountability? Consider that this is the average effect of a program that has been implemented on a national scale, affecting students across the country. We are hard pressed to come up with any other education program working at scale that has produced such results. Moreover, these average gains are the result of accountability systems that many people believe have important flaws. Even larger gains might be expected if those flaws could be corrected, as many experts, though not the NRC panel, have suggested.

The estimated benefits from a 0.08 standard deviation gain in student performance vastly outweigh its estimated costs. The cost of designing, administering, grading, and reporting the results from statewide examinations have been estimated at between $20 and $50 per pupil, a trivial sum considering that per-pupil education expenditures in the United States run above $12,000 annually. Most reforms—including class size reduction, merit pay, across-the-board raises for teachers, in-service training programs, or the scaling up of charter schools—would cost many, many times as much. For these innovations to have the same kick for every dollar invested, results would have to be improbably large.

The NRC, instead of considering these actual costs, suggests that implicit costs in the form of narrowed curricula are the most important, but it provides no evidence for its view.

What might the economic impact of a 0.08 standard deviation improvement in average achievement nationwide be? Along with University of Munich professor Ludger Woessmann, I have estimated the impact on U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of higher levels of student achievement. These estimates project the historical pattern of growth to determine the result of gains in student achievement, calculate the additions to GDP over the next 80 years, and discount them back to today so that they are comparable to other current investments. A 0.08 improvement has a present value of some $14 trillion, very close to the current $15 trillion level of our entire GDP, and equivalent to $45,000 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. today. In other words, an inexpensive program that affects every student nationwide can, over the long run, have a very large impact, even if its average effect seems at first glance to be quite small. Indeed, if we figured testing cost $100 per student each year for the next 80 years and we tested all students rather than the limited grades tested now, the rate of return on the investment would be 9,189 percent. Google investors would be envious.

Several omissions from the report are also noteworthy. The report gives only passing attention to the positive impact of NCLB on the education of the most disadvantaged students, a consequence of the requirement to report performance by specific subgroups (e.g., racial and ethnic groups and the economically disadvantaged). The NRC report’s main reference to this feature of current accountability systems is that consideration of subgroup performance has added analytical difficulties because of the smaller samples.

Perhaps more telling, this panel of experts on testing and incentives makes absolutely no effort to describe how accountability programs could be improved. Being good researchers themselves, they do favor continued research on testing, however, and provide recommendations on what research should be done, which not surprisingly matches their own interests and expertise.

Lower the Bar?

The report also addresses a second, widely used accountability policy: high-school exit exams that hold students responsible for meeting a set of content standards. The report’s second conclusion reads,

The evidence we have reviewed suggests that high school exit exam programs, as currently implemented in the United States, decrease the rate of high school graduation without increasing achievement.

The panel strongly suggests that states that impose an exit exam should repeal this requirement. To understand this conclusion, it is necessary to understand the exams themselves and to evaluate the evidence behind the committee’s conclusion.

Currently, more than half of the states require that students pass a test of some sort to obtain a normal diploma (see Figure 1), and virtually all of these current requirements have been put in place since 2000. The tests almost always cover English and math, but many states add science and history. Test difficulty varies by state, but the modal level is grade 10. Although that standard may seem low, it is considerably more stringent than the standards that existed prior to 1990, when no state had a test reaching even the 9th-grade level. The current tests are not as high a barrier to high school graduation as they are often alleged to be, as a student may generally take the exam multiple times in order to achieve a passing score. And in all but three states (South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas), students can either appeal the test result, if they feel the score misrepresents their accomplishments, or obtain a diploma by some alternative path.

The motivations for administering exit exams are to create incentives for students to apply themselves to the task of learning and to set uniform (minimum) quality standards for the state’s schools. Such content standards provide guidelines to schools about what to teach. They also indicate to colleges and universities what knowledge and abilities a graduate can be expected to possess. And they give similar information to prospective employers.

According to the best available evidence (discussed below), perhaps 2 percent of students are induced to drop out of school either because of failure to pass the exam or because of fear of not being able to pass the exam. Implicitly, the committee assumes this consequence does considerable harm to the affected students, given the substantial economic rewards that accrue, on average, from receiving a high school diploma. But average effects do not necessarily apply to the 2 percent on the border line between graduating and failing to graduate from high school. The impact for this particular group of students is likely to be much less, unless you make the bizarre assumption that it is only the diploma—not what the student learns—that affects job prospects and future income. The people who are induced to drop out because they cannot pass a 10th-grade exam would most likely be near the bottom of the earnings distribution of graduates were they to be handed a diploma. The economic impact on these students will be much lower than the average difference between graduate and dropout.

Perhaps the best argument against exit exams is simple: If a student shows up for school for 12-plus years and cannot pass a 10th-grade exam, it must be the school’s fault, and it would be unfair to hold the student responsible. This argument, interestingly enough, is the precise opposite of one of the primary arguments against the testing and accountability provisions of NCLB: We should not hold schools responsible for low achievement, because achievement is affected by student motivation and family background characteristics beyond the school’s control. Taken together, the arguments embedded in the committee’s two conclusions imply that nobody—not schools, not teachers, not even students themselves—bears responsibility for low student achievement.

Interestingly, the committee’s conclusion with respect to exit exams does not pick up on the full report’s emphasis on the importance of the design features of incentive systems, which include warnings that tests aimed at ensuring minimum competency may lower expectations, and concerns about both the potential narrowing of the curriculum and the tendency for score inflation on a known test. Instead, the presumed problem is the inherent unfairness of denying a diploma to a student who has met the attendance and course distribution requirements for a diploma.

If the main objective is to maximize high school graduation, there are many ways to do that. We could eliminate all exams, even those administered by teachers. We could loosen up course requirements. We could offer the diploma after 10 or 11 years of schooling, instead of 12. Of course, nobody is willing to take such steps, even though class exams, course requirements, and the inclusion of the 12th grade of schooling all have negative impacts on graduation rates. So why then does the NRC promote the idea of eliminating a 10th-grade-level examination as a requirement for high school graduation on the narrow basis that a few students will, as a result, not earn the degree? Is the NRC also against the movement of many states toward increasing the required amount of math or moving to college and career-ready standards?

The Data Shuffle

Let’s examine the evidence the committee supplies for its exit exam conclusion. The report marshals three studies that explore the issue: two on dropouts and one on achievement. Evaluating the impact of exit exams on achievement is inherently difficult. Because the exams apply to everybody in a state at the same time, it is not possible to compare students of the same age within the same state to find out the impact of exams. It is possible, however, to look at different cohorts of students, for example, those who attended school before the exam was in place and those who attended after, and to compare these to similar cohorts in other states where no such change in policy took place. In conducting this type of study, one must rule out other differences, such as those in family background or those in state education policies that might also affect student performance over time. Even when these challenges are met, one cannot be entirely sure of the results, as exit exams may influence student and school performance even before they come into effect, if teachers and students know that they will soon be introduced, which is usually the case.

The committee tosses out every exit-exam study (save three) that has ever been conducted on the grounds that it is not possible “to draw causal conclusions about the overall effects of test-based incentives” (that is, the very same criteria the committee ignored in considering school-level accountability). Some of the excluded studies use the well-regarded quasi-experimental technique known as regression discontinuity analysis. In the committee’s view, “Such regression discontinuity studies provide interesting causal information about the effect of being above or below the threshold, but they do not provide information about the overall effect of implementing an incentives program.” That criticism is odd, since the impact of an exit examination is of special interest for exactly those students on the cusp of adequate levels of achievement. While these excluded studies are not really appropriate for studying achievement, they tend to show little impact of exit exams on dropout behavior or graduation outcomes.

The committee relies for its conclusion regarding exit examinations exclusively on a 2009 study by Eric Grodsky, John Robert Warren, and Demetra Kalogrides. Because of the significance of this piece of research for the committee project as a whole, it is worth considering in some depth. The Grodsky team identified trends in student achievement in each state that administers an exit examination by drawing on data provided by the long-term trend assessments of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The long-term NAEP, begun in the late-1960s and continued with testing every few years, was designed to provide consistent score information to judge achievement of the nation as a whole. It was not designed to be used to evaluate the schools of any particular state or district. As a result, NAEP never collected in its long-term trend assessment a representative sample of students for any specific state, and the median number of tested students in each state was very small.

Grodsky et al. pretend that the NAEP provides them with just that: a representative sample of students for each state. They assume that the average performance of students in each state on the long-term NAEP provides an accurate measure of the average performance of students in that state, thereby violating the first principle of statistical sampling.

They then merge the information with information on the timing of the adoption of an exit exam by a state between 1971 and 2004. The study includes observations of math and reading achievement at 9 and 10 different points in time, respectively. The researchers report results for achievement of 13-year-olds and 17-year-olds separately, acknowledging that there are limitations to using either cohort. Thirteen-year-olds may be too young to detect the impact of exit exams, while the sample of 17-year-olds suffers from the noninclusion of school dropouts.

The Grodsky analysis encounters a further difficulty. For the most part, the researchers consider only the very early years, when exit exams were first introduced, a time when the exams were set at a very low level of difficulty, below that of a 9th-grade student. Only 1 percent of the observations included in their analysis are for states that had an exit exam rated at the 9th-grade level or higher, as most current examinations are.

Not only does the Grodsky team rely on inadequate data, but the analysis itself is flawed. Any attempt to see the effects of state tests should compare the changes that occur in the states that introduce them with changes in the states that do not. But the Grodsky study effectively tosses out all the information available for the 27 states that do not have an exit examination before 2004. As important, the analysis does not consider any measures of state policies except for exit exams, implying that any other policy changes for the three decades between 1971 and 2004 are either irrelevant for student performance or are not correlated with the introduction and use of exit exams.

The central finding is that exit exams do not have a statistically significant effect on test scores. But this insignificance could arise because of any or all of the above-mentioned problems rather than the absence of an effect of exit exams, as the NRC committee wants us to presume.

The committee’s estimate of the effects of exit exams on school dropout rates is less controversial. It relies on two quite reliable studies, although they are not without limitations: they study the effects of specific exit exams, which may not generalize to other arrangements. The studies indicate that perhaps 2 percent of potential high-school graduates would have received the diploma had it not been for the exit exams.

The committee touts the possibility of alternative incentives to exit exams: “Several experiments with providing incentives for graduation in the form of rewards, while keeping graduation standards constant, suggest that such incentives might be used to increase high school completion.” The key of course is just what the phrase “while keeping graduation standards constant” means. The idea behind exit exams is to ensure a minimum level of quality, as distinct from meeting the course completion requirements. Moreover, the report never makes the case that exit exams and other potential incentive programs are mutually exclusive. In principle, nobody would argue against employing other incentive programs as long as they were worth the expense and, as the committee says elsewhere, do not introduce perverse incentives of one kind or another.

The Takeaway

The NRC clearly wants to enter into the current debate about the reauthorization of NCLB. And the NRC has an unmistakable opinion: its report concludes that current test-based incentive programs that hold schools and students accountable should be abandoned. The report committee then offers three recommendations: more research, more research, and more research. But if one looks at the evidence and science behind the NRC conclusions, it becomes clear that the nation would be ill advised to give credence to the implications for either NCLB or high-school exit exams that are highlighted in the press release issued along with this report.

The framing of policy in the NRC report is simple: “The small or nonexistent benefits that have been demonstrated to date suggest that incentives need to be carefully designed and combined with other elements of the educational system to be effective.” Nobody would oppose careful design of incentives. Nobody would oppose evaluating the intended and unintended outcomes of incentives. And nobody would oppose combining carefully designed incentives with “other elements of the educational system to [make them] effective.”

The NRC is careful to offer no guidance on how NCLB or state exit exams might be modified to make them more effective. And the NRC is very careful not to offer any guidance on “other elements of the educational system.” The message that comes through is clear: keep working on test development, but never use tests for any incentive or policy purposes.

A better takeaway message might be, “Never rely on the conclusions of this NRC report for any policy purpose.”

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

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

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

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

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

The Example of Beverly Hills

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

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

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

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

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

Results from Affluent Suburbs Nationwide

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

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

Pockets of Excellence

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

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

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

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

Pools of Failure

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

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

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

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

Previous Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Refuge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LAUSD is being sued by a group that includes Alice Callaghan, a member of the Episcopalian clergy and the manager of Las Familias del Pueblo, a community center for the poor and homeless in downtown Los Angeles. Back in 1996, Callaghan organized 70 Spanish-speaking immigrant parents, who boycotted the Ninth Street Elementary School — calling for an end to failed bilingual-education methods and instead demanding that the school system teach the children of immigrant garment workers academic English as soon as possible.

Callaghan and this different group of parents are suing to enforce the Stull Act. The law goes back four decades and says that the board of trustees of each school district shall evaluate teachers, at least in part, by their student’s performance on the state’s standards-based tests. The law says “shall,” not “may.” It is mandatory that each district do this.

(The law is named for its sponsor, now-deceased Republican Assemblyman John Stull of San Diego, who received bipartisan support at the time for this statutory requirement that teachers be held accountable for the academic achievement of their pupils.)

The attorneys for the plaintiffs are Kyle Kirwan, a prominent Los Angeles litigator, and Scott Witlin, both partners at the law firm of Barnes & Thornburg. Their request for a court order was drafted in consultation with EdVoice, a Sacramento-based education-advocacy group. Before going to court, the plaintiffs sent a letter on Oct. 26 asking the district to comply. The letter stresses that for years the district has engaged in wanton lawlessness. In the letter, the plaintiffs’ attorneys say that the district “refuses to implement the Stull Act in complete abdication of its responsibility to its students, their parents, and the taxpayers of the district.”

The letter says that the district has never evaluated the teachers using student test scores, and, as a consequence, has never told teachers where they stood and counseled them on how to improve in terms of increasing their students’ learning – all of which are required by the law. “In short, the district has never complied with the Stull Act.”

The letter also points to the involvement of the teachers’ union United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) in this lawbreaking. Compliance with the law, the letter says, has been “deliberately evaded” through a series of “complicitous” collective-bargaining agreements between the LAUSD and UTLA, at the expense of students — who deserve effective teachers.

Specifically, the district has been pretending that it can avoid compliance with the Stull Act by making collective-bargaining agreements with the teachers’ union that overrule a statute (the Stull Act) passed by the state legislature. It doesn’t work that way. Valid contracts are written under and within the law, not in violation of the law. The lawsuit seeks to end this make-believe in the service of lawbreaking.

In their Nov. 1 petition for a court order, the plaintiffs’ attorneys say that the UTLA has treated the public school system in Los Angeles as “a taxpayer-funded jobs and entitlement program” for adults, even when a teacher‘s performance would be considered “demonstrably unsatisfactory” when judged by pupil results.

The petition described how the teachers’ union adopted a strategy of “stonewalling” when it came to putting the Stull Act into effect. “In collusion with the District‘s governing boards and superintendents,” the petition says, the teachers’ union has blocked lawful evaluation of teachers and the “corrective action” needed to ensure that students get effective teachers.

As a consequence, “the adults‘ collective employment and political interests” are turning the children’s opportunity for learning while in school “on its head” and instead the system is providing job guarantees to teachers as well as “preserving the political power of the Board and the Superintendent.” All of this comes at the expense of children — particularly the “socio-economically disadvantaged.”

These shenanigans by the district and the union have been presented to the public in a way that is designed to pull the wool over people’s eyes: “The result has been a perversion of the evaluation system and a knowing effort to deceive the public using educational jargon.”

Witlin, one of the attorneys, told education policy analyst and blogger RiShawn Biddle: “The school district is supposed to exist for the benefit of the children and not for the adults.”

The teacher evaluation program that is in place in Los Angeles, according to the petition, “does not comply with the Stull Act” and “perpetuates a fraud on the community” by letting teachers get high evaluation ratings whether or not their students are learning the material listed in the curriculum-content standards.

The petition cites damning statements from LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy in which he condemns his own evaluation program for teachers. For example, he recently said: “I would argue that nobody has told me that the current system of evaluation, which is performance review, helps anybody. It is fundamentally useless. It does not actually help you get better at [your] work and it doesn‘t tell you how well you’re doing.”

Superintendent Deasy also stated: “One would have to argue: ‘So … there are schools where 3 percent of the students are proficient at math and 100 percent of the teachers are at the top rating performance.’ That doesn‘t make sense to me whatsoever. And it doesn‘t make sense because the rating performance does not actually help teachers get better.”

In terms of what actually happens, the district is condemned out its own mouth.

Back on March 13, 2011, retired Los Angeles school district teacher Doug Lasken and I wrote an opinion column for the San Francisco Chronicle about non-compliance with the Stull Act in Los Angeles and other California districts – so I could not be happier about this lawsuit, which may finally bring some justice for Los Angeles schoolchildren after years of the district’s deliberate dodging of the law. Success in Los Angeles will mean that districts across California will have to begin evaluating teachers properly and getting struggling employees the extra help they need to become effective teachers.

LAUSD has been negotiating with UTLA to try to put in place a pilot program with three percent of district teachers, who would be evaluated in part on student performance on the state’s standards-based tests. But these negotiations are deadlocked because of the refusal of UTLA to even study the idea of complying with the law.

The plaintiffs in this case reject the proposed pilot program, which has no guarantee of ever having meaningful evaluations that actually count, even for the volunteer participants in the pilot. They point out that LAUSD has a record of “years of non-compliance” with the Stull Act and that there is no reason to believe that the pilot would even expand to the other 97 percent of teachers. “Sadly, the District has abdicated its duty to the children.” The plaintiffs demand instead that LAUSD comply with the Stull Act as soon as practically possible “in its entirety.”

-Bill Evers

Addressing these challenges is the focus of three new white papers a Public Impact team led by Lucy Steiner recently produced with the support of the National Charter School Resource Center and the U.S. Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program. The papers in this series, co-authored by Steiner, Daniela Doyle and Joe Ableidinger, offer practical ways for city-based organizations to support creation of high-quality charter schools, foster development of talent pipelines, and guide prospective investors. Here’s a quick synopsis of all three papers.

Growing the best charter schools is one strategy Public Impact has previously addressed.  But starting excellent new schools is essential, too. Incubating High-Quality Charter Schools: Innovations in City-Based Organizations explores how the members of a national network of city-based organizations—the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust—are using one promising approach to creating high-quality school options: incubating charter school leaders.

These are the major lessons learned by CEE-Trust member organizations:

• Attract and develop effective school or CMO leaders by building local and national recruitment pipelines, while also removing candidates who fall short.
• Partner strategically to help leaders open and operate high-quality charter schools and CMOs by delegating some training and support responsibilities to external partners and pooling resources and tools such as application materials with other incubators.
• Champion school leaders in the community both by introducing leaders to communities in advance of school opening and recruiting exceptional board members.
• Coordinate advocacy to support new charter leaders by enlisting partners to push for supportive policies, building relationships with local districts and authorizers, and publicizing success.

Developing Education Talent Pipelines for Charter Schools: A Citywide Approach explores how New Orleans and Indianapolis are developing robust talent pipelines to expand the supply of effective charter school teachers and leaders in their cities. The paper highlights the indicators of a robust talent pipeline so that charter supporters of all kinds can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their own efforts.  The six indicators include:

• A facilitator who focuses specifically on the talent pipeline
• Local and national talent providers
• High-performing charter schools (because they become magnets for talent)
• Philanthropic funding for education talent initiatives
• Political support
• A favorable state policy environment

Developing City-Based Funding Strategies: Investments to Create a Robust Charter Sector outlines five lessons learned from veteran charter school investors:

• Address market failures by targeting a bottleneck in the sector that others are unwilling to fund or have not yet identified. School leaders and facilities are common examples.
• Have a laser focus on quality. Charter schools’ credibility and transformative powers rest in their quality.
• Scale what works. The charter sector has produced some remarkable proof points.  Yet the best charter schools serve just a tiny fraction of the students who need them, causing demand to far outstrip supply.
• Leverage investments by funding fewer projects more deeply.
• Identify opportunities for district collaboration. One of the best ways to maximize each dollar is to invest in efforts that not only improve the charter sector in a city, but the district school system as well.

While federal support and state-level legislative changes are crucial to wide-scale excellence in the charter sector, city leaders need not sit on the sidelines. Indeed, city-based organizations can take charge to attract and grow excellent charter schools using these strategies.

Last night was fun for the kids, but today is every education wonk’s favorite holiday: NAEP release day! Kevin Carey is already out with some savvy analysis; let me add some thoughts on the trends in reading.

The big news is that we finally eked out some statistically significant progress in 8th-grade reading. This goal has eluded us before, and has led commentators such as E.D. Hirsch to note that we’re not doing enough to build kids’ content knowledge and vocabulary. Initiatives like Reading First might have helped our youngsters to decode, goes the argument, but that’s not enough to create strong readers, especially as kids get older.

That’s still true, I think, but the NAEP results might indicate that those decoding skills are nothing to scoff at. The middle schoolers who took the NAEP last spring were in first grade in 2004–the heyday of Reading First implementation. It’s possible that scientifically-based reading instruction got them off to a better start as readers, and that head-start has been maintained through elementary and middle school. I can’t prove it (it’s NAEP–no one can prove anything!) but it’s a hypothesis worth exploring. Furthermore, the 8th graders who made the greatest progress since the early 2000s were the lowest-achievers–the very population Reading First was designed to help.

What’s disappointing is that 4th-grade reading results have held steady since 2007–after a big bump up (across all achievement levels) from 2005-2007. This one-time bump might be credited to Reading First (again, stress on “might”). But only a few states have continued making progress; in the last two years only Alabama, Hawaii, Maryland, and Massachusetts have done so. I can’t quite explain Maryland and Hawaii (OK, maybe they DO deserve Race to the Top funds, after all) but Alabama and Massachusetts have some of the most aggressive policies in place to promote research-based reading instruction. And it shows.

Again, these are just guesses. The big question going forward, it seems to me, is whether any of our reform efforts are like to lead to another big bump in test scores anytime soon. Large-scale initiatives like “accountability” and “parental choice” set the context for improvement, but they have rather indirect impacts on achievement. More focused instructional and teacher quality strategies–like implementing the Common Core standards or improving teaching through better evaluation systems–are more likely to result in big gains, it seems to me. Neither of those will be in full force until around 2013 or 2014. So I would expect more steady-state on NAEP scores for the time being, with our next big chance for major gains coming in 2015.

Those are my thoughts. What about you?

-Mike Petrilli

This post also appeared on Flypaper.

1. This is a big deal, folks. The ESEA reauthorization process hasn’t gotten this far since–well, ever. In 2007 the House education committee floated a draft bill which then died an ignominious death. The Senate HELP committee has never produced a bill . So to have a comprehensive bill marked up and sent to the floor represents a significant milestone.

2. President Obama and Secretary Duncan deserve credit for spurring the Senate into action. It’s not a coincidence that a bill emerged and a mark-up was held just weeks after the announcement of the Administration’s waiver package. And the discussion over the past few days makes it clear that Senators on both sides of the aisle are motivated to get their job done to stave off the waivers from taking effect. So while I’m not a fan of conditional waivers as a policy, I must admit that it was an effective tool for waking the Senate out of its slumber.

3. Republicans are in the driver’s seat. Yesterday’s unanimous Democratic vote might have been a display of party unity, but it also demonstrated a willingness to vote for almost anything. The Democrats want to send a bill to the President, and they will need Republican votes in order to do that. So expect GOP senators like Lamar Alexander to make their support contingent on key changes to the bill–and to get a lot of what they want. Meanwhile, the House bills (which are being put together in pieces) will surely come out to the right of the Senate. If Democrats want to get something across the finish line, they are going to have to accept something that looks a lot more like Alexander-Burr than Harkin-Enzi.

4. The civil rights groups and lefty reformers are getting rolled. What became clear from the mark-up is that there’s very little support in Congress for federal oversight of state accountability systems. Except for Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, nobody seemed interested in getting “annual objectives” or achievement-gap-closing metrics back into the bill. And where do the aggrieved lefty groups go from here? They won’t be able to get an accountability amendment passed on the Senate floor. There’s no way a House bill will include it. So then what? Try again in 2013? Why would anyone think the politics will be any better? (Same goes for federal intrusion into teacher evaluation.) The bottom line is that federal accountability hawks have lost this argument. It’s time to move on.

5. Let’s admit it: Harkin-Enzi is better than current law. I’ve still got a lot of beefs with it (especially around its high school interventions and inclusion of the highly-qualified teachers mandate). But for Reform Realists, it represents several steps in the right direction. It focuses the federal role on transparency instead of accountability. It encourages a look at student growth instead of a one-time snapshot. Thanks to Lamar Alexander’s work over the past week, it shows a willingness to let states take the lead on key issues like teacher evaluation and school turnarounds. Assuming that the  House bills will be even better, I would claim that reauthorization is finally heading in a hopeful direction.

-Mike Petrilli

No, that bill, authored by education-committee chairman Tom Harkin and ranking member Mike Enzi, is a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas that should alarm folks on the right and the left.

And sure enough, progressives have already made their opinions clear on why the bill should be stopped dead in its tracks. But it should offend conservatives (including the Reform Realists among us) too, though for very different reasons. Such conservatives should back the aforementioned proposal put forward by Senators Alexander, Burr, and others, instead.

Here are the Harkin-Enzi bill’s major offenses:

• An expansive new reach into high schools. While the legislation deserves credit for handing many accountability decisions back to the states, it would launch a whole new series of federal interventions in the nation’s worst high schools. Targeting “dropout factories” might sound like a good idea until you consider the Department of Education’s capacity (or lack thereof) for tackling something so complicated and complex from Washington.

• Maintaining the onerous “highly qualified teachers” mandate. One of No Child Left Behind’s most hated provisions is the requirement that teachers earn designation as “highly qualified.” Not only did this get the feds into the position of micromanaging teacher qualifications, it also did so in a clumsy way, focusing on paper credentials. The Administration’s waiver package moves to a policy of “non-enforcement” around this provision, signaling that it’s time to move on. And the Alexander proposal scraps it entirely. Meanwhile, Harkin-Enzi keeps the “highly qualified” rules in place for newly hired teachers.

• Rather than eliminating or consolidating wasteful programs, it adds new ones. As far as I can tell, few major programs are put on the chopping block, and several more are created, including a new initiatives for high schools, STEM, literacy, and “safe and healthy schools.” As the country is running a historic deficit, this is the best we can do?

Leading Republicans, including ranking member Enzi and Senator Lamar Alexander, have already signaled that they will vote to get the bill out of committee but can’t support “sending it to the president” in its current form. Here’s hoping that somewhere along the road to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (House of Representatives, we’re looking at you!), these onerous provisions fall by the wayside.

Otherwise, Republicans would be wise to scrap the bill and start over—with Senator Alexander’s proposal as the jumping-off point. It’s a much stronger bill, closer in many ways to the Administration’s own Blueprint, and much more serious about re-calibrating the federal role in education. And if Democrats won’t go for that—well, wait for a more favorable environment in 2013.

-Mike Petrilli

This article first appeared in the Education Gadfly.

I must admit to a bias: I am a strong advocate of national standards, was intimately involved with their first iteration in the 1980s, and am delighted to witness their partial resurrection in a new guise.  As Robert Rothman observes, the new Common Core standards in English language arts and mathematics are not top-down driven reforms (one of the difficulties of the first national standards initiatives) or bottom-up efforts, which have suffered in the past when the states, with the singular exception of Massachusetts, tended to water down their individual attempts to the detriment, rather than the amelioration, of American public education.

The Common Core standards, to quote directly from the book’s introduction, “set expectations for student learning at every grade level,” and the book “describes the development process, the states’ adoption decisions, and early steps by states to implement them.”  Most important, the book explains in depth the content of the standards, what they expect of students, and how the assessment of student results is going to be carried out.

While all of this activity, strenuous and complex as it is, may seem to the educational neophyte to be more theoretical than practical, the fact of the matter is that within six months of the standards being issued in 2010, 43 states and the District of Columbia had adopted them.  Furthermore, they are designed to be “all or nothing.”  (It is difficult if not impossible to adopt some of them.)  They are written with every student in mind, rather than for the gifted few.  Their potential for transforming what is taught and raising the level of academic achievement nationally is truly extraordinary.

Why am I guilty of such unbridled optimism?  First of all, a great deal was learned from the pre-Common Core efforts. The first version of the national standards in the 1980s was vastly too ambitious.  Second, current federal education policy is very favorably disposed towards the common core initiative. Third, international comparisons with other highly developed countries, once shunned, are now fashionable.  They reveal that, no matter how the tests are framed, America is in the middle of the pack, well behind the likes of Finland, Singapore and Japan, in what we traditionally expect of our high school graduates. Fourth, other organizations are in the process of developing common core standards in science (to be released in 2012).  Assuming that they are of the same high quality as their 2010 counterparts, people may be emboldened to do the same for the other basic subjects, and thus escape from the current tendency to narrow the curriculum to the point of no return, a concern of particular moment to Diane Ravitch.  Fifth, unlike the situation in the 1980s, the charter school movement has matured to the point that its growth can provide a nationwide institutional context to pilot the teaching strategies appropriate to implementing the common core strategies.

Finally, there is a significant movement to align teacher education with these new standards.  Ross Perot once said to me “All teacher colleges ought to be torched.”  Such single-minded excoriation may be over the top, but there is no question that the new three R’s of teacher recruitment, retention and renewal are integral to any genuine education renaissance, and are indispensable to the implementation of the common core standards. Let’s hope that all of this really happens.  Robert Rothman certainly thinks there is a good chance it will.  After all, all these favorable circumstances are referenced in this informative volume.

-A. Graham Down

More book reviews by Graham Down can be found here.

For nearly a decade, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has focused the attention of policymakers and researchers squarely on the achievement of low-performing students, with some apparent success. The math and reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress of the nation’s lowest-achieving 10 percent of 4th and 8th graders have risen sharply since 2000, continuing a trend that began in the 1990s. Yet some may wonder about the potential cost of this focus on higher-achieving students, for whom improvements over the same time period have been modest. Among the questions related to this debate is whether additional programs and resources should be devoted to students on the higher end of the spectrum, those considered gifted.

Three million students in the United States are classified as gifted, yet little is known about the effectiveness of traditional gifted and talented (G&T) programs. In theory, G&T programs might help high-achieving students because they group them with other high achievers and typically offer specially trained teachers and a more advanced curriculum. While previous research indicates that ability grouping is in fact correlated with higher achievement, these findings could be misleading if students placed in high-ability classrooms were likely to be successful for reasons that researchers are unable to measure, such as stronger motivation. To our knowledge, no existing studies offer convincing evidence on the causal effect of G&T programs on student achievement.

Our research begins to fill this gap with two studies of the G&T programs available to high-achieving middle-school students in a large urban school district in the southwestern United States which, to preserve anonymity we shall refer to as LUSD. Since 2007, all 5th-grade students in LUSD have been evaluated to determine eligibility for gifted and talented programs starting in 6th grade. Those students who are deemed eligible often are grouped in classes with other gifted students. They are also permitted to apply for admission to two middle schools that have oversubscribed magnet G&T programs.

The two studies use different methods to ask distinct but closely related questions. The first exploits the fact that eligibility for G&T programming in LUSD is determined by a well-defined cutoff in students’ evaluation scores. By comparing students who score just above the cutoff to those who score just below, the study provides evidence on the effect of enrollment in a G&T program on achievement for those students on the margin of eligibility. The second study takes advantage of the randomized lotteries that determine admission to the district’s two premier magnet G&T programs. By comparing students who win the lottery and attend the magnet G&T schools to those who lose the lottery and attend other “neighborhood” programs, the research provides evidence on whether the magnet G&T programs provide any additional benefits.

The results of both studies will be discouraging for those hopeful that current G&T programs provide a means to accelerate the progress of our most capable students. The first shows that barely eligible students who participated in LUSD’s G&T curriculum for all of 6th grade and half of 7th grade exhibit no significant improvement in test scores across a range of subjects, despite their being surrounded by higher-achieving peers and taking more advanced courses. The lottery study corroborates these results, as students admitted to the G&T magnet schools show little improvement in test scores by 7th grade, despite having higher-achieving peers and being taught by more effective teachers. The lone exception is in science, where students admitted to G&T magnet schools performed at substantially higher levels.

It is difficult to know what accounts for these puzzling results. Our best guess, which we discuss in detail below, is that being placed with higher-achieving peers is not all that it is cracked up to be. Students admitted to both types of G&T programs suffer a large drop in their relative rank in terms of grades within their classes, which could have adverse consequences that offset any benefits of improvements in their educational environment. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s first take a closer look at the programs and the evidence on their effects.

Gifted Students in LUSD

LUSD is a large school district, with more than 200,000 students. The district is heavily minority and very low income; the minority population is more heavily Hispanic than African American. All LUSD students are evaluated for placement in middle-school G&T programs during 5th grade, including those who participated in the district’s G&T program in elementary school. In order to be deemed eligible for the middle school G&T program, a student must meet the eligibility criteria set forth in the “gifted and talented identification matrix.” The matrix converts scores on standardized tests—the Stanford Achievement Test for English-speaking students and the Aprenda exam for Spanish-speaking students with limited English proficiency—scores on the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test (NNAT), average course grades, teacher recommendations, and indicators for socioeconomic status into an overall index score.

While all students who meet these requirements qualify for the G&T program, not all end up being classified as G&T, because parents are allowed to opt out. Some students also enroll in the program initially but later withdraw. Schools in LUSD have a monetary incentive for attracting gifted students, as LUSD provides a funding boost of 12 percent over the average allotment for a regular student.

Gifted students in LUSD are far less likely to be economically disadvantaged and more likely to be white or Asian than other students in the district. They also perform at far higher levels on the Stanford Achievement Tests, which the district administers annually in five subjects: math, reading, language, social science, and science. Their advantage in math and reading test scores in 5th grade is roughly 0.7 of a standard deviation, which amounts to well over two years of academic progress (see Figure 1). By the time the same students have reached 7th grade, these gaps have widened to 1.5 standard deviations in math and 1.25 standard deviations in reading. While this pattern suggests that the students enrolled in the district’s G&T programs learn at a faster rate between 5th and 7th grade, it does not necessarily mean that the G&T programs are the cause. It is to that question we now turn.

Effects on Barely Eligible Students

Our first study examines the effects of participation in a G&T program on students who were just barely eligible to participate based on their overall index scores. We focus on students who were evaluated for G&T eligibility as 5th graders in the spring of 2008 for whom we are able to observe outcomes as 7th graders in the 2009–10 school year. Our outcome measures include Stanford Achievement Test scores and attendance rates, both of which are drawn from administrative data provided by the district. After restricting the sample to students near the G&T eligibility cutoff, we are able to examine these outcomes for roughly 2,600 students.

The method used in the study, known as regression discontinuity analysis, takes advantage of the fact that the district uses a strict numerical cutoff in the index score assigned to students as 5th graders in order to determine their eligibility to participate in the G&T program the following year. Because the students are unable to precisely manipulate their index scores, those scoring just below the eligibility cutoff should be very similar to those scoring just above the cutoff. We can therefore attribute any differences in student outcomes on either side of the cutoff to the effect of having being deemed eligible.

As noted above, not all eligible students end up participating in G&T programs due to factors such as a parent’s decision to opt out. Similarly, some students who do not initially qualify later become eligible through an appeals process that allows parents to submit an alternative standardized test score or through additional evaluations conducted in 6th grade. As a result, we use standard statistical techniques to account for the fact that the cutoff our regression discontinuity analysis exploits is “fuzzy” rather than sharp. This allows us to provide evidence on the effects of actual participation in the G&T program, not simply eligibility for it.

Before looking at student outcomes, we first used the same method to confirm that participation in the district’s standard G&T programs led to measurable differences in students’ educational experiences. Clearly, it did. The average achievement of the peers in G&T students’ classrooms were between 0.25 and 0.33 of a standard deviation higher in each core academic subject. Participation in the G&T program also increased the number of advanced courses in which students enrolled in 6th and 7th grade. We found no evidence, however, that the teachers to whom students in the G&T program were assigned were any more effective, as measured by their impact on student test scores.

Did these improvements in peer characteristics and curricular rigor translate into improved outcomes? Our results indicate that they did not (see Figure 2). Our estimates of the effects of G&T participation for barely eligible students are close to zero in all five subjects and are sufficiently precise to allow us to rule out with 90 percent confidence effects as small as 0.04 standard deviations (sd) in math, 0.07 sd in reading, 0.12 sd in language, 0.10 sd in social studies, and 0.19 sd in science. We also looked at the impact of G&T participation for specific student subgroups defined by gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and whether the students had been classified as gifted in elementary school. We found little evidence of differential impacts for students in any of these groups.

The Effects of G&T Magnet Programs

Why does the G&T program in LUSD not yield benefits for students on the margin of eligibility? One reason could be that the qualification boundary is set so low that such students are not able to take advantage of the programs’ purported benefits. Our second analysis, which uses experimental research methods to study the effects of enrollment in the district’s G&T magnet programs, is intended to shed light on this concern.

LUSD has 41 middle schools, of which 8 have G&T magnet programs, and 2 of these are oversubscribed. As a result, the district uses lotteries to determine which students will be admitted as 6th graders. Our analysis compares the performance of students who win the lottery and attend one of the G&T magnet programs to those who lose the lottery and either attend a neighborhood G&T program in the district, a magnet school based on a different specialty, or a charter school. Because the lottery is random, any differences in outcomes between lottery winners and losers can be attributed to the effect of enrolling in the G&T magnet program rather than one of these alternatives. Moreover, the results of this analysis will apply to the entire population of students who chose to apply.

Our lottery analysis is based on the sample of LUSD 5th-grade students determined to be eligible for G&T programs in 2007–08 who applied for admission to one of the two middle schools with an oversubscribed G&T magnet program. This group includes 542 students, 394 of whom were offered admission and 148 of whom were not. We find no statistically significant differences in the observed characteristics of lottery winners and losers, suggesting that the lotteries were in fact conducted in a random way.

The students in the lottery differ both academically and demographically from the students who were included in the regression discontinuity study. Not only do the lottery students have higher test scores than students at the eligibility cutoff, but their test scores exceed those of the average G&T student in the district. Lottery participants are also less likely to be on subsidized lunch, and less likely to be minority.

Of the 542 lottery participants, only 440 students, including 331 winners (84 percent) and 109 losers (74 percent), remain in LUSD by 7th grade. Fortunately, the observed characteristics of lottery winners and losers who remain in the district continue to be very similar. Even so, when analyzing the data we control for students’ demographic characteristics and prior achievement, and use weights designed to make the final sample comparable in terms of its observed characteristics to the set of students that initially applied for the lottery.

One disadvantage of this second study is that the lottery losers have a range of alternative experiences and most participate in standard G&T programs, so the comparison group’s educational experience is less clear than it was in the regression discontinuity analysis. Nonetheless, our data confirm that students admitted to the G&T magnet schools with lotteries seem to have experienced large improvements in their educational environment. Winning the lottery increased the average achievement of students’ classroom peers by as much as a full standard deviation in some subjects. And in contrast to the G&T program as a whole, students admitted by lottery to G&T magnet program were assigned to more effective teachers.

Turning to student outcomes, however, our results provide little evidence that attending a G&T magnet program leads to improvements in student achievement (see Figure 3). The one exception is science test scores, for which we estimate a positive effect of 0.28 standard deviations. Due to the relatively small sample sizes, all of the effects are imprecisely estimated and do not allow us to definitively rule out reasonably large positive effects. Even so, the estimated effects for math, reading, and social studies are negative, and the estimated effect for language is effectively zero.

Discussion

It is difficult to understand why we find little evidence that G&T programs positively affect achievement. A common concern with studies of high-achieving students is that the available achievement measures may not be well suited to discern improvements for this group. This would be particularly worrisome if we were using a state accountability exam targeted toward low-achieving students, but it is less of an issue with the Stanford Achievement Tests. Indeed, we found little evidence of students performing near the maximum levels on these tests in either the regression discontinuity or lottery samples. Although it is possible that the additional course material taught in G&T classes is poorly aligned with topics covered in the achievement test, research documenting the benefits of being placed with higher-ability peers suggests that we should see improvements, even if that were the case.

The effect of being placed in a higher-ability classroom may not necessarily be positive, however, especially for a marginal G&T student. In particular, the drop in ranking relative to one’s peers may have a negative effect: a marginal G&T student is likely to go from being near the top of the regular class to being near the bottom of the G&T class. Even students in the middle of the G&T distribution are likely to experience a loss of ranking in the magnet G&T schools as compared to their neighborhood schools. It may be that students are demoralized by the drop in their relative rankings or that teachers provide more resources to students at the top of the class.

Substantial evidence from educational psychology indicates that students who are placed in higher-achieving groups can suffer psychological harm. A commonly used measure is a student’s “self-concept,” how a student perceives her abilities relative to an objective measure such as achievement. A 1995 study by Herbert Marsh and colleagues compared G&T students to observably similar students in mixed G&T and non-G&T classes and found that G&T students show declines in their math and reading self-concept. More recent research has documented lower self-concept and greater test anxiety among gifted students in ability-segregated classrooms.

Although we do not have direct evidence on student confidence, we can make use of student course grades and rank within the class to probe for evidence consistent with this kind of effect. We evaluate the impact of G&T program enrollment in the regression discontinuity study and of attending a G&T magnet in the lottery analysis. In both cases, we find clear reductions in student grades. For the regression discontinuity sample, grades fall by a statistically significant 4 points out of 100 (3 points changes a grade from a B+ to a B, for example) in math and by 2 to 3 points in other subjects, although these effects are not statistically significant for 7th grade. For the lottery analysis, the grade reductions are even more dramatic, with drops of 7 points in math, 8 in science, and 4 in social studies.

It is also useful to consider how students’ rankings within their peer groups differ by treatment status, as this provides a direct measure of how a student may perceive his position in the overall distribution of student ability. We assume that students mostly compare themselves to their schoolmates who take the same courses in the same grade. Thus, we rank students within each school, grade, and course by their final course grades and then convert these rankings to percentiles. The rankings based on 7th-grade courses exhibit notable drops when students cross the G&T eligibility threshold. Controlling for race, gender, economic disadvantage, LEP (Limited English Proficiency), and prior gifted status, marginal G&T students have a relative rank in 7th grade that is 13 to 21 percentiles lower than similar students who were not admitted. Attending a premier G&T magnet in 7th grade generates a nearly 30 percentile ranking drop in all four of the courses examined.

In short, the necessary conditions are clearly met for a drop in relative ranking to play a role in offsetting the expected positive impact of more rigorous courses, more effective teachers, and higher-achieving peers. The possibility that G&T students are subject to such a mechanism suggests potential constraints on the benefits of programs that provide more similar peers and an increase in traditional education inputs.

One should not conclude from the lack of achievement results, however, that the G&T programs should be scuttled. Our analysis occurs in a district with a large number of relatively high-quality magnet programs, and thus the alternatives to the G&T programs may be strong. There may also be benefits that we are not able to capture, such as impacts on SAT scores, graduation rates, and college attendance. Further, our study examines a G&T program in one district. Certainly, districts vary in the approaches they take to educating gifted students, so it may be that similar studies of programs in other districts would yield different results. Nonetheless, this study does raise questions about the efficacy of G&T programs and the traditional model of ability-segregated classrooms.

Sa Bui is a doctoral candidate in economics at the University of Houston, where Steven Craig is professor of economics and Scott Imberman is assistant professor of economics.

In “Accountability’s End?“, Petrilli divides accountability supporters into four distinct groups, which I found accurate. His categories also make it a lot easier to explain why teachers have so much trouble explaining that we are not against all accountability, so much as we have seen the idea of accountability misused for political reasons. We also have ongoing experience with its unintended consequences.

The truth is that while many teachers disagree strongly with some of the groups described in Petrilli’s article, we are in agreement with others. Opinions among teachers vary, so I won’t claim to speak for all of us, but here are my reactions to each group as Petrilli describes them.

The Tough Lovers: This group wants to make sure that teachers are not unduly shielded from a tough economy and that only hard, competent workers stay on school payrolls. Personally, I don’t mind. I’ve never had a problem with being expected to do a good job – few teachers I’ve ever met have a problem with that. Then again, I have a smart and fair-minded principal who isn’t likely to bully me over some comment I’ve made at a faculty meeting. Not all teachers are so lucky. More so than in the private sector, teachers let go for poor performance – or perceived poor performance – will likely have their careers permanently destroyed. It would be nice to see increased “tough-love” in HR departments balanced out with options for good teachers who get stuck in tough situations.

The World is Flatters: This group supports things like STEM and the Common Core standards as a means to make American education more cohesive and keep us competitive with other countries. I have no major disagreements with this group, and have yet to hear from a teacher who does.

The Tight-Loosers: This group favors results-based accountability as a means to cut back on traditional regulation. On paper, the idea of using some type of end results as a means of giving teachers more autonomy sounds great. For example, I’d love English teachers to be able to read more novels instead of giving expensive, time-consuming, relatively useless bi-weekly assessments. At the same time, teachers get uneasy about the “tight-looser” camp because we’ve seen firsthand that standardized tests don’t tell us everything accountability hawks say they do. Plus, increased emphasis on test results has yet to be matched with more autonomy in most public schools – instead they are the justification for things like replacing novels with bi-weekly assessments. For now, I’d describe the way it plays out as the “tight-tighter” approach.

The Poverty Warriors: This group claims that test-based accountability will keep schools and teachers from shortchanging poor, minority students. It is generally arguments from this group – however well intentioned – that frustrate me the most. Teachers at low-income schools often choose to work there in spite of problems known to impact student achievement. The “poverty warrior” rhetoric has recast these teachers as lazy, racist conspirators against poor kids. It is disingenuous and unfair to suggest that non-teachers in clean, well-decorated offices with all the copy paper they could ever ask for somehow care more about poor kids than teachers who get up at 5AM and break up hallway fights and work with these kids every day.

Teachers have also seen how many accountability measures – even well-meaning ones – have unintended consequences that undermine their stated goals. When we bring this up, however, even if we are really only arguing with one of the four groups above, we get slapped with the label of being against everything all four groups stand for, and thus treated as lazy, against what’s best for children, unrealistic about what kids need to know, and un-caring.

If we had those four characteristics, why, exactly, would we have chosen this profession?

While I don’t agree with every statement in Petrilli’s article, I still hope a lot of people read it. It is definitely a starting point for a more thoughtful discussion of this issue.

-Roxanna Elden

Roxanna Elden is a National Board Certified Teacher in Miami, and the author of See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers.